How to take cycling pictures on your own

It’s been ABOUT TIME to make a blogpost about this because most of the questions that reach me via Instagram are about the following questions:

1. Who takes your pictures when you ride on your own?
   I pretty much ride (and also run or swim) on my own all the time because that means I’m more flexible – so I take most of the pictures on my feed on my own (except when I explicitly state it otherwise and name a photographer).
2. With what camera do you take your pictures?
   That definitely depends on what’s the background of my ride:
   – When I ride (or run) all alone and I want to snap a shot of me: GoPro Session 5.
   – When I ride with friends but it’s a hard ride and I want to get some #foreverbuttphotos: iPhone.
   – When I travel somewhere and have a scenic ride planned: Fuji X30 (I just hang it around my back and then shoot on the go)
   – When I actually do create content for someone or shoot professionally: Canon 5D Mark II.
3. How do your take your photos?
   With my GoPro it’s as simple as it is: the GoPro Session is really small so it fits basically all jacket pockets / jersey pockets / etc. I position the camera on whatever can be used as a tripod: a tree, a fence, a stone, whatever. I just usually try to find something that’s about my height because I don’t like photos when the camera is just on the ground. I then set my GoPro in video mode, start the video and run/bike past it one or two times. Then I pack the camera back in my bags and continue my ride. This procedure takes me a lot less time than you might think but I don’t usually stop within a hard training, most of the pictures you find are just pictures from easy endurance rides where I don’t really care about breaks. 😉
4. What apps do you use to edit your pictures?
   My all-time favorite app is the VSCO-app: I use it to recreate my Instagram feed because the app also has a 3x grid and that allows me to see if the pictures have the same tones as the other pictures and if the feed looks kinda even. For more precise editing I sometimes use the Spapseed-app as well.
5. What are your favorite filters?
   In the VSCO-app my favorite filters are the blue-ish filters and I mostly use the filters A5, A6, HB2, M5, but it really depends.
6. How do you manage that your feed has an ongoing color scheme?
   First of all: it doesn’t. 🙂 The colors change from season to season, from mood to mood, from creativity to uncreativity. Nevertheless I always try that the two pictures next to each other kinda have the same colors, I sometimes even try to make the lines go from one shot to another.
   I recreate my feed in the VSCO-app so it’s easy to see what the new picture will look like in the feed.

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So, here’s a step-by-step editing:

1. I connect my camera to my phone, open the GoPro-app, then open the video and grab a shot out of the video that I then safe to my camera roll.
2. I open the picture in the VSCO-app and then do the following steps:
   – cut into a square
   – chose a filter and edit the intensity of the filter
   – change brightness, contrast, sharpness and maybe the clarity
   – to add a bit more of the blue-ish tones I like to lower the temperature and add a bit of a shadow tint in blue
3. I safe the shot and see if I like the result in “my feed”

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Here are some before and after shots, all taken with my GoPro:

Beofre/After