Photographer / Videographer

Innovative Approach to Capturing Washington DC Beauty Shots

We have been working in the Washington, DC metro area for many years and are always looking for an edge in obtaining beauty shots of monuments and government buildings. The problem is in most locations you need to obtain a tripod permit from the Park Service or Capitol Police. The option to use drones in the DC metro area is absolutely forbidden and even if you tried most drones with their restricted software cannot even take off.

I decided to try to mount our Ronin camera rig on a bike, which seemed like a discrete, low-key way of obtaining beauty shots. I found you can ride or walk the bike allowing you to move from shot to shot quickly and giving you various levels of control. I worked with the bike mount and Ronin settings for more than a week testing and retesting it on our gravel dirt road. The bike mount I made somewhat dampens vibrations from riding over stone or cobble stone covered roads and pathways but I plan on adding more modifications to our mount to reduce those types of vibration even more. I thought if I could get it to work reasonably well on a dirt road, I should have few problems with it on city streets and sidewalks.

At the end of the DC tracking shots video you will see video from a GoPro camera mounted on the bike pointed at the Ronin setup. I wanted to watch how the Ronin set up reacts to the bumpy ride. Watching the beauty shots it’s startling to see how well the gimbal works to stabilize the camera keeping it centered on the subject I’m filming.

My gimbal settings were set to as much stiffing as the motors would take without vibrating. I adjusted smooth track on all axis close to zero, I found in my trial runs that smooth track would over compensate for small sudden turns I made on the bike which made the image jumpy at times.