Winter Fat Biking in Bay Of Quinte

Mar 11, 2015 by Danny in Portrait

As I’ve stated before, I don’t mind winter at all (OK, I may complain about the extreme cold) and as far as I’m concerned if it’s going to be winter, there might as well be snow and I might as well enjoy playing in it! So when a friend offered to loan me his fat bike I was more than happy to take him up on it and go for a ride in the snow.

If you don’t know what a fat bike is, it’s basically a regular mountain bike with really big tires. They’ve become a big hit with mountain bike riders, especially for riding in the winter or on sand or in other conditions that a regular bike doesn’t work very well. Plus they’re a ton of fun to ride! However in the snow, you still need a fairly well packed trail to ride so I headed to a local conservation area where I knew the trail was packed by foot, snowshoe, and ski traffic. The conditions were great, although the warm weather was starting to take its toll on the trail. Anyway, after a great ride, I headed back to the car and grabbed my photo gear to try a selfie. I’m a photographer, I couldn’t help myself.

I don’t take a lot of selfies. Probably because when I do, it involves orchestrating an entire photo shoot with myself as the photographer, gaffer, assistant, lighting guy, and model. Plus I don’t like being in front of the camera very much :-). But I had a vision and I had to give it a try, so I packed the gear I needed in my backpack and headed back down the trail to a location that I had scouted earlier.

I wanted to keep things pretty basic since I didn’t want to carry too much gear and I needed quick setup. However, as you might imagine trying to take your own picture while riding a bike past your camera presents a few of challenges: 1) How to frame the shot 2) How to set exposure and 3) How to trigger the camera.

To solve the first two problems, I made use of my cameras Wi-Fi support and an app on my phone. This way I was able to view the live view from the camera and trigger the shutter on my phone. From there it was just a matter of a little leg work to adjust the camera and flash settings until I found something that worked. The hardest thing to deal with was that I had to put my camera on a tripod, so I was not able to move around and change angles from shot to shot. Once I found something where I was in the frame, I locked everything in and just went with it. I would have liked to try a few different things, but it is still snowy and relatively cold out!

Although I could have used my phone to trigger the shutter remotely, it was not an ideal solution because of its size and the difficulty of trying to push touch the screen, wearing gloves, the screen locking etc. Also a standard IR remote wouldn’t work because it would have to be pointed at the camera as I rode by. So instead I used my flash triggers (which can also be used to fire the camera via RF) which are pretty compact and I was able to tape the transmitter to the handlebar where I could trigger it with my thumb as I rode by. Have I ever told you how much I love gaffer tape?

At this point, I had all the technical aspects taken care of. Next was getting the timing of the shot down, which is hard enough when you’re actually behind the camera! To solve this problem, I laid a little branch in the snow to mark where I had to hit the shutter button as I rode by. But as you can imagine it took me a few tries to get the timing just right.

All in all, I had great fun and much more success with my biking selfie than I had last time! Although oddly enough, just as I was packing up my gear I was once again charged by barking dogs… three actually (none on a leash)… and one was quite large (and aggressive looking) and gave me quite a scare as it approached in full stride. It also had no interest in listening to it’s owner as it circled and charged me five or six times. Luckily I had the bike to put between us and keep it back, although on it’s first approach it was able to get behind me and take a lunge at me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Put your dogs on a leash for everyone’s safety.

But riding that fat bike was fun!