Behind the Scenes - Bike Build
This shoot came around last minute. Keon reached out to me looking to get some photos of his bike, but wanted to get them done before he started riding it. The original photographer he was going to work with fell through. We had never met, but a friend recommended me and when he asked I immediately had an idea of how I wanted to make it look so I said I’d be down to give it a go.
Finding the right location is alway important. With a last minute shoot I wanted a spot that I knew would work and not provide any unexpected hiccups. I’ve used this location before for other shoots, and am pretty familiar with it and know what it has to offer. The slight grunginess of the garage appeals to me and I knew that would be in contrast to the clean looking bike. Also considering it’s a parking garage I would have full control over the light as the ambient light was pretty dim.
Once getting there I set up the first hero shot. The idea was to have the light streaming in through a doorway and the bike sitting in the light. I started building this lighting set up from the back. I set my Elinchrom ELB 1200 with a high performance reflector outside the doorway and angled it towards the bike. I used this reflector and to create the defined shadow line of the doorway and make a divide between the light and the dark. Once this light was set we positioned the bike exactly where it needed to be and I went about lighting the bike itself.
I kept this pretty simple one key light from about 45 degrees off the front of the with a strip-box to create the highlights and a second strip-box from back to fill in shadows. On both these strip-boxes I used fabric grids to control the spread of light and to make sure it wasn’t hitting the floor or the ground where I didn’t want it to.
After we had this shot we moved on to shooting the details. I repositioned the bike to have a blank wall as I didn’t want anything distracting and got about shooting. I kept the light relatively simple for this shot. I shot with two lights both still with strip boxes. Using one key light to highlight the details on the bike and create a nice gradient on the frame, and a second light from the back to create a rim light. I subtly moved the lights slightly as I switched angles to make sure the light was still falling on the bike.
After shooting all the details I stepped back to shoot a behind the scenes shot of my light set up. On doing this I noticed one more angle that could make a good variation for the hero shot of the bike. My light set up was already pretty dialled from the detail shots so it was a matter of moving them back slightly so they weren’t in the images and adding a third background light to create a highlight on the front wheel. This third light had a reflector with a grid to create the highlight.
Normally when shooting I try and keep the editing as minimal as possible. My goal is to get the images as close as possible in camera. For these it was no different and the post processing with was relatively straight forward. A few slight changes to the exposure, and contrast, and some colour grading. The only somewhat major thing I did was remove the stand I used to hold the bike. This was my plan from the beginning though so it was pretty straightforward and only visible in a few shots.
Gear
Canon R5
Canon RF 24-105 F4
Canon RF 70-200 f4
Elinchrom ELB 1200
Elinchrom ELB 400 x2
1’x3’ stripbox with grids x2
Various stands and tripod
