Yamaha R1

[firefitindivR]

Here are a few shots I took of a friends bike. any c&c would be great. I just really started getting into strobes and am playing around with various settings and what not. Any ideas on lighting position, underexposure of the background etc. would be great. btw all 3 shots were shot with 2 speedlights. Before you guys bash me, I know that the background may be a little distracting....

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Nice pics - super fast shutter to tame down the ambient background and setting the strobes to allow a larger (lower #) aperture and put the background out of focus may have helped the bike pop more in this pic.

 

[firefitindivR]

My camera and strobes sync up at 1/200. I used a hoya ND8 to use a larger aperture to soften the background a bit. I got it stopped down to F2.5 to underexpose the background 1.5 stop in broad daylight and exposed the bike with the strobes.

 

[jfrabat]

Have you considered using the invisible black backdrop technique? It may work nicely with this subject...

 

[Frequency]

WOW!!!
(it's face resembles angry bird )

Regards

 

[firefitindivR]

WOW!!!
(it's face resembles angry bird )

LOL actually now that you mentioned it it kinda does! I just checked out the link you put up and I think this technique would be pretty cool. I'll have to keep this in mind for the next shoot.

 

[fokker]

Nice bike, and the lighting used on it looks good. Did you use any modifiers? And were the lights on stands? As mentioned, instead of using the ND filter and wide aperture to blur the background, you could stop right down to like f/22, 1/200s ISO100 hopefully blocking almost all the ambient light, and then crank the power on the strobes to light the bike properly. The background is not my main criticism of these shots though, it is the fact that you are showing a fast road bike on grass, it just looks out of place. A bike like this should ALWAYS be photographed on tarmac of some sort.

 

[firefitindivR]

Thank you for the reply. Both lights were mounted on stands and I used an omni bounce with each. I tried a few shots with a 36" shoot through umbrella but the wind was not having it that day. I'm definetly going to have to agree with you on the bike placement. It was kind of an impromptu shoot with no really thought of backdrop etc. I kinda saw the bike and wanted to take a few pics... I plan on doing a similar shoot (planned this time) with two bikes in the near future and have acess to a old millatary runway. The runway and the air traffic control towers should make for an intersting setting to really bring out the "speed" of the bikes. I am going to try that black background technique and see how that goes also. As for lighting, is there anything i should change or do in particular? Thanks for all the info guys.

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Runways are great, if you have a track nearby thats great, even a silver garage door in the background will make a superbike pop. Don't exclude vastly open empty parking garages to help create a solo stealth image appearance.