My New Favorite Photography Accessory: The E-Bike
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Loading... - Olugbala Ngum
- 31 Aug 2022
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Away from the world, the city, and the light pollution, I stood in a green forest where the breeze couldn’t even penetrate the trees surrounding me. It was an area that only existed to me in my imagination after multiple times of poring over Google Maps and allowing my mind to wander.
Off in the distance, I could hear the low rumble of a slow-moving freight train struggling to climb up the hill that I had perched myself on. As it got closer, I could see the treeline in the distance interrupted by the heat haze cast off from its exhaust stacks. It was at this moment I could calculate my exposure, as I had a visual reference of its speed. And then I saw the locomotive break the vertical silhouette of the trees. It was, in a way, foreign to the landscape that surrounded it, like a metallic dinosaur crawling through some uninhabited land, miles away from civilization. It was an opportunity that I had only seen when I daydreamed but became possible all due to… a bike.
To be honest, this article didn’t start out being so much about bikes, but rather what it would take to reach distant areas of land to photograph trains. As a commercial photographer, I’ve been conditioned to see the only product that mattered being the images in the end, but the journey to getting them is just as important to me.
When this e-bike project started, I found myself going to every local bike store asking to learn about e-bikes and what their capabilities and shortcomings are. Between in-person and internet research, there was a lot to look at. However, my eye started gravitating towards the form being just as important as the function. Maybe it’s the side of me desiring aesthetics, or maybe it’s just the fact that I got really tired of seeing so many e-bikes with a big black box of a battery slapped onto them that just wore thin on me. Read More...
