It was my birthday. My family gave me a panda plushie and a set of perfumes. Then I bought myself a second-hand camera. A GoPro 13 Black, £185, off a man who lives in Morden.
Buying used is not like me at all. I buy new. I do not haggle with strangers over things that might be broken. But I had wanted a small camera for a while and kept losing to the prices, and the odd part was that the older models were dear too, holding their value secondhand while I sat refreshing listings. The later model turned out to be the cheap one, because the range has moved past it and nobody wants last season’s flagship. So I paid less for newer.
Getting hold of it took two goes. The plan was to ride down to Morden on Saturday, which would have been a decent trip in itself, and then he was not available. It turned out he works near Liverpool Street, which is near my office, so we met on Monday morning before work instead. I checked it in about a minute. The real proof it was fine was that it paired with the GoPro app straight away. Quick transaction, no fuss. You can tell a fair amount from how someone hands a thing over, and I trusted him from that. It came with a bag and some handles and no memory card, but I had one of those already.
The mount was luck. My helmet is a Trek Rally WaveCel, the free replacement they send you after you break one, and it has a camera mount built into it. So the helmet that went down on a kerb in Ilford came back with a fitting for a camera I did not own yet.
First full ride with it was office to home, about fifty minutes. It is a bit heavy up there, and then it is not, because you stop noticing within a couple of miles. What did not stop was the other thing. I kept my head level. I stopped turning it sharply. I held a line I would not usually think about. There is a version of me who rides and does not care where he ends up, and now there is one who is quietly framing a shot.
The footage is very good, sharper than I expected. Then you send a clip on WhatsApp and it arrives grainy and ugly, all that detail squeezed down to nothing, and whoever is watching has no idea what they are looking at.
The reason I wanted it has little to do with cameras. I got tired of only seeing, reading and watching. Audiobooks on every ride, something playing in the corner of the screen while I do other things, scrolling on the walk to the station. All of it coming in. The blog was the first thing in years that went the other way, and this is me trying that again in a form I know nothing about.
Making is harder than taking in, which sounds obvious written down. Watching a thing happen costs you nothing. Doing it means you have to actually do it.
And I cannot edit video. Not badly, not at all. I have opened the editors, and that is about as far as I get. I sit there lost, with no idea where to start or what any of it is for, and close them again. I bought a camera anyway, which is roughly how I have learned most things.
What I have done is work through the settings, one at a time, to see what each of them does. The first thing I made was the ride home at super speed: fifty minutes from the office to my front door, squeezed into three. Everything I actually felt on that ride, the waiting at lights, the slow bits, the legs, is gone. What is left is a city going past very fast.
The other honest part is that I am not ready to put my face on the internet. That still scares me. So the plan is faceless: the road, the bars, the traffic. Rides, and no me.
I do not care about views. I am fairly certain almost nobody reads these posts either. My site’s top referrer is my own other domain redirecting to itself, and several of the rest were spam bots pretending to be visitors. It has not stopped me writing them.
So: no editing skills, no face, no audience, a camera on my head and a ride home. And the way I am going to learn to make videos is by watching a great many videos about how to make videos. Which is where I came in.
