A Texan in Tibet - More and Moore Media

 

"Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing."
- Charles Kettering

I tried to convince myself that I didn't need to take a GoPro on this trip. I need to ride as lean and unburdened (but not by what has been) with equipment as possible. But one camera isn't much to carry, is it? The truth is GoPro cams are like Lay's Potato Chips and anyone who has a GoPro knows they can never just grab a camera and go. First, I have to decide which camera to grab. I bought a Hero3+ model cheap on eBay way back when the Hero4 came out in 2014 and people were dumping the "old" stuff. Then, I bought a Hero4 cheap from the same eBay seller a year later when the Hero5 came out. I'm not sure which one of us was the sucker in those deals, but GoPro is probably the real hero for getting people to ditch the old for the new. Apple anyone?

 

The only brand new current model (at the time) GoPro I ever acquired was the GoPro Hero4 Session, which is a tiny 1" cube form factor. I actually won that one in a writing/photo contest and although I never used it, I still have it. I picked up a year-old GoPro Max a few years ago and despite Moore's Law, it's still considered modern. The Max leverages two fisheye lenses on the camera body front and back to capture images and videos in a full 360° spherical format that allows the viewer to to zoom in/out on an image or play the video while scrolling with a mouse to see up/down and left/right fully around the camera's recording position. It's pretty amazing to me, and hopefully the videos and images I collect will do it justice. I uploaded a short trip around my front four acres that can be viewed here. If it doesn't play in 4k, click the YouTube settings wheel and adjust the playback quality to 2160/4k.

 

Now, GoPro is up to the Hero13, but I've decided to keep my old cameras and just take the Max on this trip. I've updated to the latest firmware and I really can't (or won't) justify the expense of buying new when I use them so infrequently. Now that I think about it, the cube is so small, it would be easy to take along also. Hello Lays! I have a helmet chin mount where it will fit nicely and capture my riding point of view.

 

Hero4 Session "the Cube"

 

 

 

 

With the camera debate settled, the epic footage I plan to collect will have to be transferred off the memory card and stored someplace, so it's a good thing SD memory prices have fallen through the floor. After cameras and storage, there's batteries, chargers, adapter cables, and mounting hardware to consider. It almost makes me long for the old days with a Kodak 110 Instamatic.

 

I'm told the Chinese can be unpredictable when it comes to censorship and imagery. Indeed, I can't even bring a map of Tibet that isn't labeled specifically China or  Tibet Autonomous Region. I'm told they have been known to go through riders' phones and cameras at the border inbound and outbound. Sounds cumbersome to me, but just in case, I will do my best to have all my imagery and footage uploaded to the cloud in case I'm instructed to delete it.