My First Bike Shoot C&C Please!

Vicelord John

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These are some photos of my buddy's bike which I was shooting just for his website (he builds choppers.)

I'm overall pretty happy with the way they turned out because I'm not exactly experienced. I shot with a D100 for about 2 months and have had my D90 which I shot these with for a week now.

Other than the fact I picked a bad background that was the same color as the tank on the bike, how else can you pick these apart?

thanks!

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i am glad you noticed the background problem, other then that they look good.

next time pick a time of day with warmer light.

i prefer the second one since the bottom left of the image has the rear wheel nicely shown. the first one can benefit from the same angle, ie: wheel in bottom right corner.

there's more that can be said, but i'll leave that for the others.
 
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so you think mechanically they are ok?

I can always work on my post production skills which are much lacking.

I don't understand (n00b) about the warmer light though. I was out about 1 hour prior to sunset with the sun at my back. Most of these were shot with my 50mm 1.8 with a UV filter. Maybe I should have not used the filter???
 
All seem sharp to me. Good job.

I think when you look at many car or motorcycle ads you quickly see that they keep that background in a uniform color. That already helps to separate the subject from the background.

Obviously it was very tough to make this work with this kind of background color. It could be corrected though in PP - but that's gonna be a lot of work (chrome reflections, wheels...)...

Light is too harsh. Overcast would have been awesome. Maybe you can re-shoot in an alley during the day so you have more diffused light available as I think it would be quite a big job to drag enough diffusers to the scene...

In the last shot I would have placed both bikes next to each other facing into the same direction. One could interpret your composition left bike -> past, right bike -> future but I would have put them next to each other. Then move the one bike that's further away from the camera a bit forward (rolling forward for a couple of feet).
That just popped in my head.

Good stuff!

P.S. I think the second last image is really nice!
 
I don't understand (n00b) about the warmer light though. I was out about 1 hour prior to sunset with the sun at my back. Most of these were shot with my 50mm 1.8 with a UV filter. Maybe I should have not used the filter???

that's a bright sunset hour! next time underexpose a bit and for these shots use a warming filter in pp.
a uv filter you can always keep on.

also if you have the opportunity to borrow or rent a wide angle lens, go for it, you won't regret that with your next bike shoot.
 
they all look a little over exposed to me but only by like 1 third of a stop.

number 3 would make a sick lookin hdr though
 
old school bobber
fill flash would help to
 
the lighting actually is very harsh.. you should using another time, for example: early morning and late evening..

then, it will bring some depth to your subject
 
These pictures are very sharp which is great. I really like the composition in the last shot..... however I may have staggard the bike a little more and used a little more depth of field to high light the closer bike.
As everyone said the light is really harsh and creating some hard shadows. Typically if you encounter such harsh shadows you really want to use a fill flash to cut the shadows down.. In regards to close-up shots you may also want to use a fill flash to brighten up the chrome in the shadowy areas. You definitely want to choose a better time to shot metalic materials like cars and bikes.
 
When is a good time? I thought just before sunset was good.
 
you were there at the right time vicelord john.
it just turned out to be very bright time none the less,
i guess that's how it is in your area at that time.

i did put a warming filter on (40%) and also adjusted levels to make it darker


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:)
 
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