Then as I got more serious about imaging the kit grows and grows. This is just some of what I can cart around to a gig now. The soft boxes and lights, several stands, strobes and a Dolly are still in the car.
If I'm shooting bikes for a mag I still carry the D800, lenses, flash and portable kit in a backpack
But that's all a bit too much to carry for social rides and stuff that's only going online - sooo I just bought a Canon G5 X.
It had the things I wanted - view finder, manual control, F1.8 lens and is very compact - pocket size (if you have a big pocket.)
It's a lovely feeling, tactile thing. The touch screen is good - controls are good, all pretty intuitive - I got it fully worked out with just a cursory flick through the manual.
It's not that much bigger than a Go Pro:
So far I'm very happy with it too. Tried it out last night - rode down to the Bayside and not having to carry the weight of the full kit was great. Just the lightweight tripod and the tiny camera was like nothing at all.
I also shoot a lot of bikes and vehicles for sale in dealerships.
So I used the G5 X today to see how it coped.
It struggled a bit with auto white balance , but got a reasonable result with balancing manually. They are only half this size online.
EDIT: Over the last few months I've been using both cameras to shoot in the showroom. The big Nikon on a dolly for full width shots and the Canon for close ups and details. It saves changing settings on either, and the Canon gets a better result shooting the dashboards etc hand held.
The G5 X burst mode works well for capturing moving targets - even motorcycles at moderate pace.
Low light and high ISO is pretty noisy on auto. Slow it down, dial back the ISO and use a tripod and it's surprisingly good.
There's no 4K video - but it does 50fps in 1080 - I mainly produce 720 for You Tubes so it didn't bother me not being that high res. There in no external mic input either, so that could put some off, but the inbuilt works well enough that I use it to record interviews for transcribing or publishing as is.
The Canon G5X seems like a pretty good solution for a portable camera that takes a good shot and is motorcycle friendly.