Building a selfie stick for cars.

that is cool

I love the work you did on this, the finished product is really slick looking. My first thought reading the title was about a camera mount someone made for their Lemons car, obviously a lot less polished:

http://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/viewtopic.php?pid=169812#p169812

but theirs does allow a very cool angle of on-track video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zt7-XF89Hyg

I linked to this thread, and decided to update it with some new gratuitous shots. If I was building it again, I'd go with a larger diameter CF tube to maximize stiffness. At this point in time, I don't recall why I chose the diameter I did - probably a tradeoff with cost or because I could find the matching ID/OD pairs I wanted. I'm thinking of adding a secondary pair of guy wires to cut down on lateral wobbles as well. Travis has used the rig for a number of clients, although because it needs two people (photographer plus a compliant driver) he doesn't use it for all shoots. He's also done some magazine shots where the owners got twitchy about suction cups on the car.

I may not have mentioned this, but the car is rolling slowly on a slope on all of these. The engine is off to cut down on vibrations. Hmm, I wonder how it would work with the EV?

Shot in a parking garage on the second level, which gave us some interesting light. This was yet another shoot for Koni.

The "two mini" shot we did was duplicated with a couple of Miatas and it turned out fantastic. This was a commissioned shoot for a private individual, who gave FM permission to use them. You can see we had the rig fairly high for this angle. 

Following shot. See how the brake caliper is sharp but the wheels are blurred? That's the sort of thing you can't do in Photoshop with a single photo, because part of the caliper would have been hidden. The combination of a sharp car plus the motion blur is what makes a rig shot work.

And of course, the cover of GRM.

Every bit of this is fantastic, wow. Thanks for sharing, Keith! Fantastic work by Travis, most certainly. He should be quite proud.

Any chance he'd share what the shutter speeds were? I'm guessing relatively slow, since the car is not moving quickly? Like 1/2 second?

I will begrudgingly admit that's the best photo I've ever seen of a soul red Miata.

Did you guys consider building a triangle out of airfoil shaped CF?  I'd have looked into it.  Round is a very flexible and there are many stronger CF shapes that are more aero too.

Travis says shutter speeds run 1-3 seconds. I think he often takes a static shot as well so he's got a super-sharp copy of the car, just in case. He also uses a circular polarizer to drop the overall light level a bit and dial out harsh glares off the bodywork. We often shoot during the golden hour but that's just being a good photog :)

I didn't consider any alternate shapes. It was definitely an experimental evolution. I'm not sure how Travis' suction cup mounts would have worked with alternate tubing shapes - the round shape gives maximum flexibility there. One of the things he's going to do next time he uses it is use three mounts instead of two to see how that affects things. Actual aerodynamics aren't a factor, since this is only used at a literal waking pace. Travis is usually walking beside the car and triggering the shutter with an iPad.

Travis doesn't do a huge amount of outside work these days because we hired him at FM and we keep him very busy :)

Whole lotta talent at FM, I'm just sayin'...

I might need to build one of these. Our remote operated rig works good but requires a second car and driver plus a camera operator. 
I can see tons of shot opportunities opening up with one of these.