18,780 Kms . 108 Days . 4 Bikes . Only India

The Great Indian Roadtrip was a celebration of the lifestyle of biking in India. It was a trendsetter in it's own right. The main aims of the trip being to unite the online xBhp.com ( xBhp means ‘x’ amount of braking horse power ) fraternity in India, to prove that India is one of the best by-road travel destinations in the world, to motivate people to explore the world away from there 9-9 jobs and most importantly to actually give back something to everyone in form of pictures, videos and travelogues. This trip was not limited to the riders, but had the major objective of connecting as many Indians as possible.

Canon partnered with xBhp as its Imaging Equipments Sponsor. It provided xBhp with its entry level DSLRs and lenses which proved to be fantastic and a boon to capture India's vast beauty as we traveled for a 108 days.

The biggest difference between this trip and the previous pan India roadtrips was the technology used in it to deliver the maximum possible content to the audience on the internet and offline media. Technology was not only used in the devices that we were using but also was present in the bikes that were used in the trip.

Many things could go wrong in a trip as big as this, specially when we had the hardware listed below to lug around for 20,000 odd kilometers through all kinds of terrains across India.

Still Cameras : Two Canon 350D SLRs ( 8 MP ), One Canon 300D SLR ( 6.1 MP )

Lenses : Three Canon 18-55mm lenses, One Canon 15mm Fisheye lens, One Canon 70-200mm L US lens, One Canon 75-300mm US lens and One Tamron 70-300mm lens

Camcorders : One Canon MiniDV camcorder MVX330i and One Sony MiniDV Camcorder DCR HC40E

Removable Media : 20 Mini DV cassettes, 6 x 512 MB CF cards and a 1 GB CF card, One Kingston Data Traveler 1GB USB Drive

Phones : Four Nokia N70s

Clicking Pictures

Seriously. I do not have even one decent picture of myself as a child. Only those stupid studio photographs. And now mobile phone imaging capabilities are ready to give the best camcorders a run for their money. But the kind of task we were out to do we would settle only for the best equipment ( or that we could afford to risk hanging down our necks on the road and at those speeds ).

I had been using a Canon 300D for a year before the trip was conceived and I wanted the latest ones for this dream ride. Canon decided to put faith in us and loaded us with enough ammunition to start acting like a pro. None of us had professional photography experience but yes our creative juices could more than rival those expert clickers getting hefty salaries.

Out we went with two Canon 350Ds and a Canon 300D. Those are not exactly top of the line cameras but the results produced were good enough for us amateurs.

Besides that heavy duty stuff we also had compact firepower – the Nokia N70 with its 2 MP camera for those candid shots ( we didn’t click any, swear. ) The Nokia N70 also doubled up as an emergency video recorder in times of dire need ( like the open ventilation window of the bathroom in which my esteemed fellow rider would be bathing, ahem, no I am straight ).

The camcorders were also used but not to the extent that we would have liked to. Handling the still photography department was a big enough job for any of us taking the videography as fulltime on the trip. But anyways we still ended up with 25 odd hours of video and almost 30,000 high res photos.

The lenses were costlier than the cameras themselves. The 15mm Canon fisheye was fantastic in low light situations while the telephoto ( 200 mm ) enabled us to capture objects far in the distance.

The most manhandled equipment in the trip ( after the bikes ) were the cameras.

At Pangong Lake, 14,000 feet.

To the World's Highest Motorable Road : Khardung-la

Bunny in a naughty mood with the Camera

Shooting in Sonamarg

In Kargil with the third eye

Doing some Macro Photography

In Kovalam

In Pelling, Sikkim shooting from precarious perches

In Gangtok, Sikkim

Some shooting equipment

Backing up those precious photos

Considering our aim of doing extensive photography and videos on the trip I had considered the very real thread of a hard disk crash and dumping those heavy JPEGs from the Canon SLRs’ CF cards. The first answer was to carry as many CF cards as possible but we knew that too wouldn’t be the answer considering the shutterbugs we were. Some days we used to click in excess of a thousand photographs with hope of getting that perfect shot by filtering the bad one’s off the laptop’s hard disk later in a hotel room. The first answer was to use iPods as backup devices, but would not have been a wise choice considering the amount of manipulations, uploading and sharing we required to do every night after intense 8 hours+ riding. We finally picked up external hard disks for backup and they worked flawlessly through the entire trip.

None of the fancy softwares were used for backing up. Every night we used to backup all the photos categorized under names of the photographer into two different hard disks. These photos would be the only evidence that we would have later on to show to our grand children that these men had the teeth ( and the balls ) to go around India in such a grand fashion once upon a time when broadband internet meant downloading at 5 kbps.