Twisting Asphalt - A SoCal Ducati Motorcycle Blog

Man it’s good to be home. That’s got to be my overriding thought for the weekend. During the past forty eight hours I’ve continually found myself thinking about how getting away sometimes is the only way to remind yourself how much you really enjoy something or in this case, somewhere. Not so much because I dislike other parts of the country, but rather because I truly enjoy the LA experience. It’s a sick satisfaction I know, but flying in to LAX I actually was happy to see traffic on the 405. Somehow that said something to me.

Of course coming home is nice, but having a free weekend to enjoy is much more exciting. Yesterday I once again woke up way to early and ended up hitting the road around 6:15 AM. Normally I’d be annoyed about the lack of sleep, but being out on the road that early turned out to be just glorious. Seldom in LA do you get the PCH all to yourself but yesterday it just opened up when I hit the Santa Monica grade and stayed that way until I hit Las Floras Canyon. Between the early morning light, the cool ocean breeze, the vibrant sea smells and the lack of traffic, there was just to much good karma going around to ignore.

Las Floras Early In The Morning

Sitting here now - about twenty four hours later - I’m still smiling about the ride. After ten straight days of working this weekend was well worth the wait. And yesterday in particular was just one of those magical days when you remember why you enjoy riding. One of those days when you hit the apex of every corner and everything feels supremely planted all the whole way through and when you get on the gas the bike just speaks to you as it stands up and rockets away.

After shooting up Las Floras, I made my way up and over the mountains on Piuma and Saddlepeak. From there I hit Las Virgines and took Mullhulland all the way back to The Rockstore. Because I had hit the road so early in the morning the parking lot was basically all beemers once again. Man those guys ride early! Of course by the time I left a good portion of the sportbike crowd had showed up and filled in the gaps.

Inside The Rockstore

When I arrived I’m sure half the parking lot thought I was from Mars because I had a Twenty20 Helmet Camera hanging off my lid. As some of y0u might recall several months back Jason Green and the rest of the gang over at Twenty20 had offered me a helmet camera to review and put through its paces. Unfortunately life kinda got in the way over the past several months (bikes issues, travel, etc.) but thankfully because this weekend was so easy going I finally was able to take the camera out for a spin.

I’ve uploaded four Quicktime movies from the day. They’re all in a Quicktime 7 H.264 format so they should be scalable for a host of different viewing applications (ie. phones, cpu’s, etc. - At least that’s what I’ve read ). If you have an older version of Quicktime you’ll need to download the new freeware Quicktime 7 player.

Initial Impressions

Now that all those tech specs are out of the way, riding with a helmet camera was quite the experience. It made the day both more enjoyable and less relaxing to be perfectly honest. I found it very exciting to be out riding my favorite roads and attempting to capture the experience. On the other hand riding with the knowledge that the ride was getting recorded and with the extra weight - mostly from camera record deck in a fanny pack around my waist - was a bit omnipresent at times. There were definately moments when I found myself riding with a newfound zeal because I was more focused on the filming. On the other hand when I completely forgot that there was a camera rolling and just hit the road and enjoyed the moment I totally forgot that there was anything around my waist or on my helmet. I have to say that it was pretty sweet to be eating breakfast at The Rockstore and reviewing my ride out.

So would I do it again? Most definately. I’m not sure it’ll be an every weekened experience but it certainly takes the ability to document the ride to a whole new level and that’s pretty cool. It does take a bit of effort to set it all up and get the ride recorded - one day I’m sure that they’ll be smaller cameras to record to and perhaps even wireless cameras - but for now the Twenty20 Camera system worked very well and I was more than happy with the results.

The Hard Part

To be perfectly honest, as you’ll see from the short flicks below, I’ve got a ways to go with helmet camera filming. It makes perfect sense to me now, but I went into this with what can only be described as a general misconception that you just stick the camera on your helmet and hit record. Unfortunately it’s not quite that easy. I had a number of missteps along the way before I finally started to feel like I was getting my act together.

First and foremost since I was in a rush to hit the road I didn’t spend nearly enough time making sure that I had the Twenty20 velcro in the right place on my helmet. I’ve uploaded Mullhulland Highway - North of The Rockstore because I think it speaks volumes about why you need to take your time making sure that you’ve got the camera seat in an appropriate postion.

At the start of the day I had placed the velro at the very top of my helmet on the flattest part of the top of lid. As it turns out it seems that I spend a great deal of time looking below the horizon line at the road surface. So what I ended up recording was basically thirty minutes of road footage (cut down for the purposes of the QT flick).

Seeing as how that didn’t really work that well, I moved the camera to the side of my helmet - just below the air ducts - for Piuma Canyon - Part 1 & Piuma Canyon - Part 2. While that worked out much better, it still didn’t aimed high enough.

So on the next QT movie, Mullhulland Highway - South of The Rockstore, I ended up moving the velcro that holds the helmet camera on to your lid further back and giving the camera a bit of upward lift if you will. That certainly turned out much bettter and would be my starting point for future camera locations on the helmet.

My next hurdle was with the record deck. As I mentioned before I picked up an inexpensive Canon ZR80 and secured it inside a fanny pack around my waist. Even though I’m not particularly used to riding with extra weight around my midsection, it didn’t take very long to get acclimated to the sensation. The hard part as it turned out was the sensative nature of the camera. Because the input from the helmet camera sticks out a bit, I had to flip the camera around so that the fast forward, rewind, pause and stop buttons face the side of the fanny pack that rests against my back while riding. Perhaps it’s because I tend to slide around in the saddle or maybe I just hit the camera while snapping the fanny pack belt on, but three times I thought the deck was recording my ride when in fact it wasn’t. On future rides I’m going to have to devise some sort of way to pad the camera to try and prevent it from stopping itself from recording. That was a real pisser.

Camera Quality

After recording two hour long Mini-DV tapes I have to say that I’m fairly impressed with the quality of the Twenty20 Camera. For the price I think it works damn well in comparision to some of the other lipstick or helmet cameras that I’ve used in other applications. It’s not broadcast quality, but for documenting a motorcycle ride it’s pretty damn good. You’ll notice that as a one-chip camera it has some difficulty with transitions from heavily shadowed areas to bright light areas. You’d be hard pressed to find any cameras that deal with that perfectly. If you watch some of the footage I think it’s pretty obvious that where the camera really excels is during bright daylight when the sun is not aimed directly at the camera. During those stretches it looks pretty slick. Since all of these flicks are heavily encoded for the web you’ll have to take my word that the camera looks pretty good most of the time.

Bottom Line

While all four videos worked out and are completely watchable, unquestionably I think I’ve got to find a fixed position on the bike for future filming. I just move my head to much while riding to be effective camera platform . I also suspect that future holds a tank bag set up. That would make the camera cord run significiantly shorter and get the weight of the camera-as-record deck off my back, both of which would be good things. Ultimately as I mentioned above, I greatly enjoyed both the experience of trying to capture my ride and the time spent later reviewing it, both of which make using a helmet camera a very cool thing.

The Rest of the Ride

Even though I was recording the day with the helmet camera, I also found some time to stop and snap some stills with the trusty Canon SD-10 as you’ll see below. After leaving The Rockstore, I shot up Mullhulland to Encinel Canyon and then popped over to Decker Canyon until I hooked back up with Mullhulland. I’m sure that sounds confusing but when you’re there it makes sense, trust me

On Mullhulland Highway North of The Rockstore

A Straight Away on The Mullhulland Highway

Even though there were two earthquakes while I was out of town I was completely surprised to find that there wasn’t much debris on the asphalt. When I hit the coast line at the end of Mullhulland it just felt like there was way to much of the day left to head back down the PCH. So instead I flipped around and shot back up Mullhulland and hoped back on Decker Canyon. It felt like quiet sometime since I had ridden Decker and as it turned out it was just fantastic. If you’ve never experienced it, Decker starts off very slowly, with lots of soft swooping and tight corners, but about halfway down the hill it opens up and becomes a much faster chicane course of a road.

A Vista off of Decker Canyon

Decker Canyon Road

The newly paved Decker Canyon

At the end of Decker I hung a left on the PCH and did something I rarely do, stopped at the beach.

The Pacific Ocean Nearly Malibu, Ca

A Coastal shot

Another shot along the coast

After the beach break, I headed back up Las Virgines and found my way back to Stunt Road and took that over the hill. At the very top there were a ton of bicyclists hanging out. I have no idea if there was an event going on or not, but people were handing out water all along Stunt - all of which is perfectly cool in my book if the damn bicyclists would abide by the same friggin rules of the road as any other vehicle. I don’t mean to sound so evil, but just because a bicycle doesn’t have an engine doesn’t give some of these dudes the right own the road. Especially when they’re flying down a major decline in a beanie helmet and spandex. I highly doubt that some of these guys could stop in any decent amount of distance if they had a ‘moment of concern’. Not once, but twice at different points on stunt bicycle riders swung all the way from the outside of a corner to the yellow line right in front of me as I was just about to enter the corner. And I’m pretty sure they knew I was coming up on their six. It’s not hard to hear a sportbike on the top of a mountain with no other motorized traffic. End of Rant, I promise…

At the top of Stunt Road - Yet Another Road Closure

How many curvey roads are out there?

Early Morning on Las Floras Canyon

California beauty

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