The cycling camera, more

Alan at Ecovelo has pulled me into an interesting discussion on cycling photography.

The more you cycle, the more you see. Eventually, Egrets happen. Then you need to get off the bike and take a photo. Ideally, for such a moment, you would like to have handy a Nikon D3 with an arsenal of telephoto lenses. Such a setup would weigh more than your bike. So that leaves the ocean of nearly identical "consumer" compact cameras, all of which have tiny sensors crammed with too many megapixels, tiny controls, and byzantine menus. Each year we get more megapixels and lower photo quality because the tiny sensors can't handle al those pixels. Somebody (not me) needs to talk to the camera companies about this cynical tradeoff.

These 2 egrets showed up last May in the middle of the Tour of the Unknown Coast (that's Rich Lesnick manning his compact camera in front of my compact camera). We took a longish break from the ride; which seemed to annoy clusters of type A riders who sped past us. But it's a sin not to stop for Egrets. Come to Humboldt County and see these gorgeous creatures for yourself. They turn up often when you cycle near coastal water around here.

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And here's what is left of them after blowing up the photo I took with my wife's "credit card" Sony:

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And this is what they would have looked like if we had had a D3 and a fast 500 millimeter lens:

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That tells you all you need to know about the quandry of the serious bicycle photographer. We're out there in the real world seeing great stuff every day. How do we get the great shot AND have the great ride?
And how do we fit more features into increasingly smaller "easy-to use" cameras? Where is the photo equivalent of the iphone?