1/27/15 4:15 AM

My wife and I just returned from our annual week and a bit of cycling in the Victorian Alps. We stay in the same town all week, as there are seven or eight big climbs nearby, ride a mountain or two each morning, and sloth around in the afternoon recovering and watching the Australian Open Tennis and the Tour Down Under on TV. We finish the week by riding the annual Audax alpine randonnee, which has been going for about 30 years, and has expanded from less than a dozen riders when we first rode it in the 1980s to about 2000 starters now over the various distances. The event even has its own permanent web site: https://www.alpineclassic.com.au/public/index.php

Here are some photos from our rides during the week:

Tawonga Gap in the cool of the early morning. The road climbs to near the high voltage transmission tower that can be seen on the skyline through the gap in the trees.


CRB Hill, the steepest part of the long climb up Mt Hotham. This section is 16-18% gradient for about 1¼km.


Descending Mt Hotham. There are a few short steep ascents to wake your legs up on the way down.


Some photo stitching on the descent of Mt Buffalo, showing the cyclist both entering and exiting the hairpin.


And for something completely different, we spent a day riding the pleasantly flat rail trails along some of the valleys.

1/27/15 2:14 PM

I like that photo-stitching idea. I'm going to have to try it.

Have to set up the camera on a tripod with a wide angle lens. And then let it shoot continuously at 8 fps, you should be able to get a nice smooth sequence...

Sandiway

1/27/15 2:51 PM

Shot two and three make me want to go up! ;)

1/27/15 9:00 PM

For most photo stitching I find that handheld is fine - the photo above was stitched from two handheld images, and this one is from three handheld images: http://www.users.on.net/~njpayne/bikestuff/Switzerland/SanBernardinoPass.jpg .

About the only time I use a tripod is if I'm creating a virtual tour using 360 degree panoramas, and there I mount the camera on a bracket that puts the optical centre of the lens directly over the rotational axis of the tripod, so that I don't get any parallax between near and far objects as the camera is panned. Example of a virtual tour here: http://www.users.on.net/~njpayne/house/2013_08_10/virtualtour.html - hold the mouse button down and drag left or right to rotate each panorama left or right, click on any of the white dots in a panorama to jump to another panorama shot from that viewpoint.

I use Kolor Software's Autopano for stitching, which is very nice, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but it's fairly expensive. Free alternatives are Microsoft ICE for Windows ( http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/ ), or Hugin, which is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac ( http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ ). For virtual tours I use Kolor's Panotour, also available for multiple platforms.

1/27/15 9:47 PM

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virtual tour using 360 degree panoramas,

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1/28/15 2:28 PM

For photo stitching try Microsoft ICE. It's a free, standalone program, and although it requires JPG images and won't do Raw, it does a really good job. If you keep the angle fairly wide, you can hand pan with lots of overlap, and if you keep the horizon fairly even, it will stitch well, and you can then crop vertically to neaten the edges.

I've don a bunch of these, with dozens of shots stitched well. You can also make beautiful rectilinear wide shots with a shifting lens on a tripod.

Here's one from Ushuwaia, Argentina. Many shots stitched for this adding up to about 7 times the width of a single shot, and it was a little odd at the edges, but in the original, one could read the name and port of call on the blue freighter.

https://app.box.com/s/ripi04wn2n4ve6rfgkcl5gq4w3ggrwlg

1/29/15 12:33 PM

Nice shot. On my trip, all of the National Geographic photogs were drooling over the passengers' cameras with the auto panorama feature.

1/29/15 1:58 PM

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For photo stitching try Microsoft ICE.

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1/29/15 2:10 PM

But that is one honkin' pie plate on the red bike...

1/29/15 2:43 PM

Sandiway, the link is to a very highly downsampled scan, because the original was 44 megapixels wide, and even in JPG form it came to about 150 megabytes. The curvature is from the sloppy hand-held panning off a ship, not from the program. It is virtually impossible to do a rotating panorama that wide without significant distortion, and you will see, for example, that the water line is quite odd, owing to the way the stitching program handles it.

No doubt there are better programs, as there are better ways of doing this, but I was quite pleased with how well this free program worked for ordinary use. On pans of only a few frames, the results are quite neat. It's a bit dodgy to do, say, a row of brick buildings, but for ordinary purposes, it's pretty good.

1/31/15 12:04 AM

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But that is one honkin' pie plate on the red bike...

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1/31/15 1:47 PM

Yikes, I never even heard of a 36, let alone a 42.

But I entirely agree about the gears. On my road bike I've been riding a 12-27 11 speed with a compact 50/34. That should be enough to handle to ride in Mallorca I'm doing, which has a ton of climbing in the early part but mostly around 6%. But I just ordered a 12-29, for exactly the reason you describe.

Ride profile (scroll down):

http://www.mallorca312.com/recorrido_312

1/31/15 3:31 PM

I just put a new 12-30 [$40.00 PBK] on the Roubaix with the XTR/Pacenti Wheels. Nice of Spesdh to make two DR hangers for the Roubaix SL4s. ;)

The Sora 12-32 9 speed that came with the bike uses the longer hanger. There is a a lot of breathing room with the 12-30 even with a short cage Dura Ace DR.

So with a 34/50 and that 30 it is 30 gear inches I think. Should be good for the steeps, especially with the stiff bottom end...

2/1/15 10:04 AM

...but I'm not convinced. The issue is that you have to settle for either a narrow gearing range or huge gearing gaps. The relatively close ratio 1x setup I used on my 'cross bike for a while wasn't bad, but it was just a medium width road cassette (11-25) with a single ring. My 29er has an 11-36, 10 speed cassette and I really notice the gaps off-road, so I can only imagine how awkward it would feel on a road bike.

Obviously, individual preferences vary and if one needs wide gearing for whatever riding one is doing, having it is critical. On my own bikes, I've been biasing the whole gearing range toward the low end by reducing chainring sizes (Nick is way ahead of the curve on that). I find it frustrating that with the exception of Campy's 13-29, nobody is making reasonably wide range cassettes with a 13 tooth top cog, which helps to close up the gaps somewhat. I would rather go with a wider chainring range than a wider cassette. Who knows, perhaps someone will market a 30/50 setup one of these days.

2/1/15 8:10 PM

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The issue is that you have to settle for either a narrow gearing range or huge gearing gaps.

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2/1/15 11:10 PM

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Who knows, perhaps someone will market a 30/50 setup one of these days

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2/2/15 8:57 AM

...I'm now running a 24x39 with the aforementioned 11-25 cassette, which provides a pretty similar range to what your friend has. The crank was originally a 30x39x52 FSA Gossamer triple, but it now has a bashguard on the outside and the smaller inner ring. It shifts great with a SRAM XO front derailleur and Campy lever. In my experience, using MTB front derailleurs produces much better shifting with smaller ring road setups, as they're optimized for small rings. SRAM even makes multiple versions of their front derailleurs that are optimized for specific chainring combinations.

2/2/15 4:35 PM

I have road bikes with 5, 6 and 7-speed freewheels that have 13-15-17-20t cogs in them, and really can't find much to complain about even when riding at the limit.

I recognize the luxury of doing hard climbs on my Orbea with it's 12-25t 10-speed cassette, but not having those tight ratios seems like a minor quibble outside of actual racing.

I think that one can readily adapt to the demands of wider ratios by occasionally getting out of the saddle in order to maintain cadence before downshifting, at least that's what I tend to do. I set my bikes up with a relatively forward saddle positioning, so the "heave" to a standing position is pretty effortless.

I rode 2hrs this morning with a 7-speed, all-odd-numbers freewheel and didn't miss the tight ratios at all. In fact, I have often found that having to shift among any pairs of cogs with only 1-tooth difference can be downright annoying, but this is hilly riding that I'm talking about because here it is hilly almost everywhere along a ride.

2/2/15 8:07 PM

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not having those tight ratios seems like a minor quibble outside of actual racing

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2/2/15 11:07 PM

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I'm a bit mystified by all the recommendations you see for cassettes without the 16t and with 12-15% jumps (and greater) between cogs.

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2/3/15 6:33 AM

...individual preferences vary. I really like close ratio gearing and don't like big gaps. It doesn't surprise me that others don't feel the same way. Obviously, we should all use whatever we're comfortable with.

2/3/15 1:44 PM

"I think if you did a lot of riding on flat roads you would feel differently. If you're going to ride a few hours in the same gear you want the next one to be close if the wind picks up a little (head or tail wind)."

Yeah, I can dig it, especially since I also wouldn't want to wear out my ~two flatlands cogs too fast.

Here though, I like to have a stack of cogs that lets me stay in the big ring almost all of the time without having to stay in the fully-crossed big-big combo too much.

Not that big-big is any kind of problem after I've adjusted my chainline appropriately (can choose bb length with these older bikes!), and when using my narrower-than-eight-speed cogsets.

2/3/15 3:28 PM

>> I think if you did a lot of riding on flat roads you would feel differently. If you're going to ride a few hours in the same gear you want the next one to be close if the wind picks up a little (head or tail wind). <<

About the only time I ride even a few minutes in the same gear is on the computrainer, nothing is flat here for very long. FWIW, I don't mind gaps and in fact I love the 12-32 10 speed on my D2R2 bike. People talk about the magic 16, I don't know if my cassettes have a 16 or not without checking, and usually I don't even know what cog I'm on (except the small or large). As Brian says, it's all personal preference. But that doesn't mean we can't have endless discussions about it :)