Picture(s) of your bike camera setup

Some folks have shared their bike set-up for mapping with their camera(s). There doesn’t seem to be just one thread. It may be nice to have one pinned to encourage everyone to share a pic or four. It’ll make it easy for folks to scroll through for ideas.

For it’s, KISS and low(ish) tech, just 2 old garmin virbs, one facing forward and one on the tube to the right. I may do another to the left at some point. There’s just enough room to put it right behind the right facing one.

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Usually I have mounted my Drift HD Ghost on my Santos under my handlebar bag so nobody is noticing it:

With a 360 camera I’m still figuring out what the best setup is. Maybe on top of my helmet:
IMG_3439s

On my recumbent it is easier:
IMG_3471

I can even adjust the monopod to a length of 1,65m:

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This is my current setup for photo mapping. Previously, I mounted the camera on my helmet, then the handlebar. Waiting for my Insta360 One.

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On my bicycle (a Brompton), I mount the camera to the head tube. It is a rather low position, but this way the camera don’t pan as I move the handlebar.

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I’ve posted some details of my setup at aharvey's Diary | My Bicycle setup for Mapillary | OpenStreetMap

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Nice setup Andrew. The LG360 actually does have some kind of built in gyro, it happened to me several times that the cam flipped sideways by accident (mounting screws were not tight) but luckily the images were not wasted, the horizon always stayed level!

Hey you’re right! I just tested this out and it does a pretty good job of keeping the horizon level when it’s still.

This is great, but at the same time annoying that the vector they use to adjust isn’t kept in the EXIF, as I mask out the area below the camera which should use the vector for the pole, not the vector for gravity. This explains why when going round bends my masking sometimes misses, I always thought it was the pole moving but it sounds like it might be this.

Surely the accelerations in a bike would mess it up a little?

Yes, accelerations could mess it up. I have also noticed it does not work good when there is too much vibration/flex in the pole, the horizon looks like a wave :wink:

Finally tried mapping 360 on my (motor) bike. This is my setup:

And this is one short (17 photos) sequence that I managed to get done so far:

My thoughts: It took a lot more time and effort after shooting the photos. First, stitch photos in batches of 200 (app crashes when I added somewhere less than 1000). Then, use the mapillary tools to add date-time, gps from gpx file with time-offset, remove duplicates, and interpolate direction. Then, use Hugin to fix horizon (never perfect, sometimes crazy), drag front view to centre of image, and crop me and my bike out. Only then ready to upload. Then, of course, I usually go through each and every one of my uploads to at least unblur, and this process takes more effort than non-360 because you have to pan to scan for the blue blur areas.

For bicycle mapping, I have a lighter bucket helmet that could be used. I tried mounting the camera on selfie stick on bike’s handlebar just to get it above my windshield but it wobbles too much, stands out more than just the camera on top of helmet, and of course I’ll end up with just over 180° of view.

Anyways, I am fairly happy with the result, but the process is not sustainable, especially the part where I use Hugin processing 1 photo at a time… Now I see myself only doing short 360 sequences and only for most nice places. For most roads, my normal wide-angle action cam will do more efficiently overall.

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Too bad to hear that the Insta360 one needs such a tedious post processing.
I have figured out that for my “conventional” bicycle I will mount the LG360 cam on my monopod and then stick it onto a back pack, about 0,5m above my head. This way I can easily park my bicycle and walk around while continue shooting photos, like here: Mapillary Almost always the horizon will stay level so I don’t need to delete nor post process them. Stitching is already done in the camera. I also don’t blur myself out, just wearing a cap is enough :wink:

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I do the same thing with my Ricoh Theta S. Works like a charm. With a long selfiestick (such as the Yunteng 188) the whole thing fits in a back pack and does not weigh much.

Here’s my setup.

I have three camera mounts now, one from the front of the handlebars, and two from the bar ends.
My GPS sits just above the front camera (though I have a mount on the stem as well as the out-front mount, because I have noticed a significant signal loss when the GPS is right above the running camera).

Here’s a close-up of one of the bar end mounts. It’s taken a few iterations to get to this stage, and these aren’t field-tested yet. The previous version stuck out about 3" on a mirror mount, and that vibrated a lot. These are basically two rotating GoPro-style mounts (joined at the circular part in the middle), and a wedge to solidly bolt it into the handlebar. This provides three axes of motion to adjust the camera to be level at any angle of the circle. I have been shooting at ±60° from forward rather than 90° to avoid too much motion blur.

And one picture with the camera mounted.

These are all the pieces. The bolt, two black wedges, and the cylindrical bolt are from Mirrcyle mirrors (Amazon page). The Specialized disk and the piece above it are modified bar end plugs (the plastic disk is cut down). The silver ring is a brake washer to offset the GoPro mount from the bar end plug.

Hopefully these mounts work well and don’t vibrate. Here’s a sequence using the previous setup. When I manually process the pictures, I offset the three sequences by 0.1 seconds so they’re not in the same position.

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A good idea.
There is not enough overlap.

Here is a picture of my latest setup:
IMG_3706_s

Sequence: Mapillary
(it is funny to see that most images taken with a regular camera don’t show the pyramid here!)

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I used a handlebar mount for smartphones:

and another for the Yiaomi Yi action camera:

.

In both cases, I got lots of blurred images on bumpy roads mainly due to the shock absorption by the mount. These mounts protect the camera from hard shocks but make it swing/vibrate for a second or two, blurring pictures captured at this moment.

I finally tried a 40 years old outdoor camera mount:


With this setup, I get sharp pictures even on tracks with bad surface like here. I feared that the mount would not stay fixed on the handlebar but up to now it stayed well fixed even during long rides.

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