BikeCam | Photographs, Photographers and Photography

The best street snapper tool.

Ask a photographer what’s in his kit bag, the gadget he simply cannot live without, and you will be regaled with tales of exotic lenses, funky folding tripods, strange exposure measurement devices, bunches of filters and so on. Not a one of them materially improves photo opportunities for the street snapper. No, the best tool for the street snapper does not reside in his gadget bag. Among the attributes of this tool are:

It’s as fast as you like
It increases your range by a factor of four
It expands your area of coverage sixteen times
You can take it anywhere, and ….
…. choose it right and there’s little fear of material loss.

That tool, of course, is the bicycle.

First, let’s have a reality check. I have friends with more money than sense who think nothing of blowing thousands of dollars (thousands!) on a push bike. Carbon fiber this, titanium that, forged by Italian artisans and cooled in Alpine goat cheese, these high tech toys are masterpieces of the engineer’s art. The Leica M9 of the cycling world and about as likely to help you win the Tour de France as the M9’s owner is to take a good picture. For our purposes, snapping street pictures, they are not only useless (the bike and the M9), the chances are that you will be walking home once your Rolls Royce on two wheels is pinched and recycled quicker than you can say “Duh!”. $5k for a bike and $10k for the M9 is not my idea of a relaxed outing.

So the criteria for BikeCam are simple:

It must be throwaway cheap. If you are going to worry about theft when you park it it’s the wrong bike.
It must be bought well used and preferably with some rust, dents and wear and tear showing. See above bullet.
It should have a comfortable, broad saddle that you sit on rather than one which has you questioning your gender every time you mount up. BikeCam is for riding, not posing.
When you track down your used steed, immediately change the ridiculous knobbly, off road tires for cheap, smooth road tires. The knobblies are like urban SUVs – poor ride, noisy, redundant and unstable.
It helps to swap the brake pads for the softest kind there is, to obviate squealing. BikeCam is stealthy. Toe in the pads so that their leading edges are slightly closer to the rim than the trailing ones to further cut noise. Do it the other way and you will get squealing and juddering.
Forget about choosing between alloy and steel frames. At this price level you get what’s available on CraigsList or at the local Goodwill store.
Get the cheapest, most colorful lock cable that you can find. Mine cost $9. Don’t fool yourself that your cable will confer any significant security whether it costs $9 or $90. The determined thief will steal your fancy bike (cable cutters take all of five seconds to deploy and operate) and, given two bikes, the Italian $10k masterpiece with the fancy lock and your $50 street fighter with rust and dents, which do you think he will choose? We are talking deterrence, not security, here.
If the wheels don’t run true when you test it – evidenced by oscillating pressure feedback when you work the brakes – thank your lucky stars. Do as I did on my last BikeCam purchase, use this to knock the price down another $20 and apply some of the savings to a $5 spoke wrench. Look up the web and spend 10 minutes per wheel getting them to run true. Nothing could be simpler and your brakes will work better than 90% of all other riders’.
Avoid bikes with sprung front or rear suspension. Poor physics, these increase pedal effort and are just one more thing to go wrong.
Gears are your choice but if you get a geared bike make sure the gears say ‘Shimano’ on them. That’s the Toyota of bike gears, meaning they start in the morning.
Do your own tune up. You’re going to pay some drop out with tattoos and a drug habit to oil the chain for $150?
Whatever you do, never buy a new bike from WalMart. You will be returning it in a week.

The author has two steeds which respect these buying criteria.

BikeCam1 came from a bike rental shop which was replacing last year’s models – a great place to shop, for not only will the bikes come with all the scratches and bruises you need, they will also have been regularly maintained and are ready to ride. BikeCam1 sports a heavy steel frame, nice Shimano twist grip shifters, came with a comfy saddle and no one is going to steal it. Add to its cosmetically challenged woes that it comes from an era when it was fashionable to paint frames with matt finish instead of gloss enamel, and you can be sure that no self respecting thief will go within a million miles of the thing. All in cost $40, this mountain bike is a steel frame Giant made in Korea and I have put hundreds of happy miles on it with no problems.

When it comes to BikeCam2, I went completely over the top with my spending. It’s a light-as-a-feather alloy frame Raleigh (yes, the British Raleigh from Beijing), came with wheels so out of true that the brakes barely worked and included one of those Blitzkrieg front lights which the Luftwaffe would have killed for back in 1940 when they were trying to hit something in London at night. Appropriately enough the seller was a German exchange student at Stanford. The light alone is worth more than I paid for the bike, a princely sum of $50 after the obligatory $20 discount for the wobbly wheels, the latter gorgeous Weinemann German alloys, like on my old BMW motorbike with its spoked wheels. A few minutes with a spoke wrench had them running so true that I challenge you to measure more than 2 thou runout at the rim – which is less than the misalignment of the glass screen to alloy frame on my iPad. I left the corrosion in place to make sure that no one would look twice at my steed. This one came with a very tall 22″ frame, making it even less pinchable (thieves generally seem to market to the short and fat, or so I tell myself) and when I replaced the silly off road tires with a couple of Korean Kendas from Amazon my all-in investment, including a $9 cable from Walgreens, blew the roof off at $110, meaning about the price of three useless filters in your gadget bag.

BikeCam1 and BikeCam2 can frequently be found on any one of a number of municipal transit systems which look favorably on bike toting passengers and rather than going on any more about it, how about some snaps facilitated by these wonderful photographic tools which so greatly expand scope and opportunity for any street snapper?