Choosing a camera for that tour...

Snap! Photography and Cycling.

Taking photographs to record a great days cycling, the passing of the countryside on a grand tour,
stupid pics of your friends doing stupid things or even pics of the remains of your bike after some
blind motorist has pulled out in front of you mean that cameras and bikes are often found together.
The thing is that cycling photo's may seem simple, but require special thought as to what camera to
use - let me explain.

A few years back I was cycling along a canal tow path when I felt like a bit of music (Led Zep if
you're wondering) so leaving my rather nice "Walkman" in the front bag I wired myself for sound...
The result was a horrible warbling which only stopped when I did. The "Walkman", which could
stand jogging, was being shaken to death in my frontbag. Putting it on my hip solved the problem.
This shows what a savage beating a camera will have to endure if it is carried on the bike rather than
on your body. On another occasion I found myself at the top of the Tormalet, nearly 7000 feet,
heavy mist and near freezing temperatures. I took a few rather poor pictures then hurtled off down
the mountainside, fifteen minutes later I arrived at the bottom, 4000 feet below having hit 50 mph,
and a couple of potholes on the way down. It was blazing sunshine, temperature in the high twenties
and of course dry. Amazingly the camera survived to record the scene.. It's this combination of
terrible vibration and big pressure, temperature and humidity changes that makes the frontbag of a
bike about the most hostile environment any camera can endure. So with this in mind you need to
decide what you want your camera to do. 

Basically if you want holiday snaps to remind you of what happened then you can't do better than a
disposable camera. They cost little more than a film, are so simple there's nothing to break, and if
they do give up the ghost they're not a great loss. Very cheap compacts on the other hand always
seem to let in light, or the flash breaks, or something else goes wrong - don't bother. 

If you like to take more adventurous photo's then a modern 35mm compact is a good move. Carry it
on your body if you can and be prepared for it to fail. As I've said it's a hard life for a camera, and a
compact, often with autofocus, zoom and flash, is quite a complicated item relying on a lot of
electronics, and electronics don't like getting shaken about or being damp. My wife uses an
Olympus Mju Zoom and I'm very impressed with it. It's very small and light, well made,
"weatherproof" (whatever that means...) and has a useful zoom range of 35-90 mm. It's kept going
through a couple of tours which would put it top of my list for this reason alone. I carry a Minox
compact, 35 mm, the size of a packet of cigarettes and has a 35mm lens better than anything other
than a top SLR's, it takes amazing pictures. It has also proved itself over many tours to be well nigh
indestructible. It is the lightest smallest 35 mm camera in the world, but is a fiddle to use, no
autofocus, no flash, auto shutter only - you need to set aperture manually, so it is a bit specialist for
snaps. It also costs as much as a decent SLR, but if you want a compact that fits in a shirt pocket and
will produce slides sharp enough to be blown up to A4 size then you haven't much choice.

If you are seriously into photography, and especially if you intend to have pictures published then a
good SLR (single lens reflex) is the only answer. The choice of superb zooms and top quality fixed
focal length lenses give the photographer huge scope. The down side is that they are heavy and
bulky so you need to carry them in a front bag. Modern SLR's are also massively complicated,
packed with electronics and every widget imaginable. This makes them vulnerable, and very
expensive to repair. My personal choice is to go back in time to the clockwork era. Quality SLR's
from 15 to 20 years ago are much tougher than their modern equivalent. They rely on batteries only
for metering and their clockwork is much less susceptible to humidity/vibration and temperature
change. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that second hand they're plentiful and cheap so if the worst
does happen it won't break the bank. The most suitable of the crop are the compact SLR's that began
to appear in the 1970's. Olympus started the ball rolling with their OM1, a gorgeous little camera,
dwarfed by today's electronic marvels, and yet built to professional standards in a tough brass case.
It's a delight to use, obviously manual only, but soon this ceases to be a problem, and often you find
yourself using the meter as a guide only due to lighting conditions - something that makes you
wonder how many "automatic" wonders expose correctly. It's one quirk is that the shutter speeds are
located round the lens throat, something you either love or hate, but can get used to. A couple of
years later Pentax responded with the MX, almost a copy, but with conventional controls and a full
information viewfinder. It is even smaller than an OM1, obviously as a marketing point, but the
difference is undetectable. Both are very common second hand and fetch about 130 pounds in
Britain for an example in new condition - I wouldn't use anything else and my own choice was an
MX I bought new 18 years ago and which has never needed so much as a service despite a very hard
life. Nick Crane, of "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", and "Bikes up Killimanjaru" fame said an
MX was the only camera he'd ever found that survived in a frontbag.

So the choice is wide, consider what you want your camera to do and choose accordingly, just don't
expect it to last forever...

©Geoff Husband