Robots Are Taking Pictures of Motorcycle Helmets

Before anyone misunderstands the title, this isn’t a story about drones flying down the highway trying to catch speeding motorcyclists, although the way technology is going these days…

No, this story is about what I learned today: The pictures and videos you see of motorcycle helmets (and likely of motorcycles themselves) aren’t taken by a man or woman behind a camera, rather, they’re taken by highly-flexible robot camera systems that more closely resemble a sci-fi scene than any photograpy studio I’ve ever been to.

Check it out.

The camera is a called the Bolt by Motion Control. It can go from standstill to high speed motion and back in a fraction of a second. It can also travel 5 meters (16.4 feet) per second and from ground level to nearly 12 feet tall.

All of this range of motion, speed, and advanced technology can let Motion Control’s Bolt literally follow a moving object in high speed detail, whether it’s a coin in a coin toss, the bubbly coming out of a bursting bottle of champagne, or a remote control car on a track.

This is all so different then the very manual, very hands on, motorcycle contortionists photo shoot we did many years ago. We literally had to drop the models into position, run out of the frame, and have our photographer snap as many pictures as he could in as little time as possible.

At the time, our shoot felt like it so fluid and really captured the human body’s range of motion. Looking back, while our shoot was the first of it’s kind, mixing the performing arts with motorcycling just wasn’t a thing anyone else had done before, it feels stagnant in light of what we could have captured with one of these cameras.

If you want to see what the end result of the Bolt camera system being used to shoot motorcycle helmets, check out the wild pictures in our Ruroc Atlas 2.0 motorcycle helmet review.

As much as I’m a fan of keeping things simple, maybe technology isn’t so bad, and we need to get rid of how things used to be and what we used to have, to make room for something new. Maybe it’s okay to admit that progress is actually kind of cool.