Packing camera gear on the motorcycle.


I mentioned in Motojournalism Book Two that having quick access to your camera gear is key. You're gonna miss a ton of great photos if it's a hassle to get your camera out.


Gus from Florida sent me a few shots of his tankbag setup. He's found a great way of keeping things safe and organized using the padded dividers of an old camera bag:

"I bought a wolfman tank bag, gutted one of my lowepro camera bags and used it's dividers to turn the wolfman bag into a motorcycle-camera-bag. The bottom is padded the same as a typical camera bag is, so all I needed was the padded dividers. It worked great during our last trip where we rode from Miami to West Virginia."






Looks like it works great! One more thing you can do is attach the shoulder strap from the camera bag onto the D rings of the tankbag to make it easier to carry when you're walking around.

Here's a shot of my setup on the road: Same Wolfman Explorer bag, works perfectly on the KLR650. 
I keep a sweater or scarf underneath the camera and lenses. I have the Nikkor 28mm 2.8 on the Nikon body, and the 85mm 1.8 Nikkor and 11-16 2.8 Tokina are kept in the LowePro slip-lock cases.
Way out West-1310261

Exposure Compensation - Show the camera who's boss!





Cameras have a light meter that measures the amount of light coming into the camera. When you’re shooting in aperture mode you decide how wide the lens opens and by using the light meter, the camera automatically determines how long the exposure needs to be. Similarly in shutter speed mode you choose how long the exposure time is and the camera automatically determines how wide the lens needs to be open.

Light meters are very sophisticated today, and most of the time they’ll get you a good exposure. Essentially, the meter will average the brightness of all the objects it sees, so that the bright tones will be captured and the dark tones will be captured and all the other tones will be in the middle.

But the light meter can’t know what you are taking a photo of. When we come across a photo situation that’s supposed to be very bright or very dark, the meter will look at the scene and try to average the exposure to give to a medium grey tone. Blech...

When this happens, we have to wrestle control away from the camera and show it who’s boss!