RUBY THE TRAIL DOG

joanne Matthews
Thursday 04 May 2017
1 Comment

Firstly, who are we? I’m Tom a mountain bike rider and photographer and this is my Hungarian Vizsla / side kick, Ruby or better known as Ruby The Trail Dog.

Sharing Ruby's adventures without compromising time on the trails has always been the ethos behind Ruby’s ever popular Instagram account. Originally, I was only able to share our adventures when out riding with a group where there could easily be a designated camera man.

As Ruby’s account grew in followers so did the pressure to share great content. This led to the purchase of a Nikon D750 which vastly improved the image quality.

Although the images were only being shared on Instagram, I have always worked with brands that have used the images beyond that, meaning they had to be taken in high resolution.

The Nikon had some very basic timer shot functionality, it would allow you to set a delay and then a burst of any number of shots after that timer had expired.

This opened my eyes to the world of auto capture photography, however, I found it to be a frustrating process with a huge amount of the photos being taken before or after any action. It was constant guess work of how long to set the delay for, and how many shots would cover us riding through the frame. 16GB cards were being filled very quickly and it was getting in the way of our adventures on the trails.

Whilst searching for a solution I came across the hähnel Captur along with the Captur Module Pro, and although my requirements seemed unconventional for a system that seemed to be well accepted in the wildlife photography community, I was confident that no matter what, it had to be a better solution than what I was relying on at the time.

Since then, the way I think about photography has changed, whilst there is a slight increase in equipment to carry I am able to spend much more time in the moment enjoying the outdoors.

I use the system solely in IR mode, where the 2 sensors are set up acros s the trail, they are so small and have a solid IR range which means they can be far enough apart across the trail to always be out of shot. Then I set it to either 1 or 2 seconds of burst shoot (depending on the composition) before Ruby and I ride through, this leads to a handful of pictures to process rather than a SD card full.

As you can see from the above video, I have now switched to a more compact Sony A6500 and was delighted to find out that I simply needed a low cost cable to move our hähnel system across to the Sony system.