I got tired of traveling to these fantastic hang gliding competitions and then getting so wrapped up in competing and performance...and coming home with no pictures of my adventures. I tried tethering a camera to my harness but I could never whip it out in time to get the shot I wanted before having to let go and regain control. And then I was so vain and disappointed that I didn't have myself in those great pics.

I wanted a wing-tip camera pointed back at me to get me in the shot with some great scenery behind me. But I didn't want a bulky camera that I had to counter-balance on the other wing. I also didn't want something that took too much performance away from my flights as I know I'd blame sinking out on the camera! I also didn't like the idea of running a shutter cable to the control frame or fiddle with a wireless, infra-red remote that may or may not work.

There had to be a betters solution. About a year ago now, I did some searching thru specs of digital cameras looking for a little digital camera that had an intervolmeter usually only found in high-end cameras or as a separate device attached to SLR cameras. In a nut-shell an intervolmeter takes pictures at a given interval - hands-free!

I couldn't find anything...I even went to the pain of CALLING Nikon - on the phone! And tried to TALK to a sales specialist to see if any of their cameras did this. After a LONG wait on the phone, they said no - maybe on their high-end Digital SLR cameras (but that was another division....

I ended up lucking out and buying a Nikon Coolpix S9 6MPix camera...I remember it having some movie-making feature on it that I figure may do the trick and get me about 20 minutes of recording on a 2GB memory card. But low-and-behold, dug way deep in the menu system was "Interval Shooting". BINGO! That was exactly what I was after....it amazes me that it's not on their specs nor would their "Sales Specialist" know anything about it.

So all I did was get a spare 2' piece of strait scrap batten, flatten out the ends (90 degrees to each end), screw about a foot of double sided velcro on one end and find a compatible screw to go through the other end into the tri-pod mount on the camera. I velcro it around the leading edge (I can do this after I'm completely set up) and let the camera stick out of my outboard inspection zipper on my Moyes Litespeed S (Wills Wing don't have zippers out there....shame, shame!)

I turn the camera so it's skinny to the wind and you can barely see it! So I even fly with it in a competition...even at the 2007 Worlds where I got a few weird looks from the performance-hungry top-dogs.

I bought the camera new for around $200. The current Nikon model is now the Nikon S210 and I think is $169Cdn and is an 8MP camera. I also see that Ben Dunn is doing the same with a Canon S70 camera now as well...but I think his mount is a bit overkill!

A fellow-club member of mine, Bob Bonner is also doing it with his WW Sport2 as its outboard sprogs are exposed at the tips and he has a simple hose clamp that goes around the sprog and through to the camera (no batten like me)...it's an even better solution than what I have (but my battens are inside of course).

So for under $200, you can have beautiful hassle free pictures. Just take the first picture before you launch and see what you end up with. The camera is mounted upside down so you do have to rotate the images when you're done...no biggie. I even blew up my best pic to a 20"x30" poster and it looks FANTASTIC.

You can see some of the pics here:
2007 Worlds
Ontario Flying
and my favourite picture that made it into the 2009 USHPA calendar

I'll be traveling to Ecuador next week for the 2008 Canoa Open so be sure to check out the Canoa Image Gallery on this site for some more pics.