Well this weeks post is something a little different. I am indoors this time at a bicycle workshop in Brookvale where I have decided to shoot some high-end bikes for some product photography. Now some of you know I use to race road bikes and still love riding when time permits, so what better product to shoot. Seeing that the cycling has grown so much in Australia since I stopped racing it was easy to find some samples of bikes that got my heart racing.
But back to the photography. As I have just finished a fantastic lighting course at the Australian Centre of Photography, www.acp.org.au in Paddington lead by the experienced and funny man Geoff McGeachin. I recently purchased some light modifiers and stands to use my Nikon speedlights in and try out some of the newly gained skills. Now i have used flash outdoors with some success at events but shooting indoors and stationary objects should be easy… Well, light is a key and tricky. I was shooting with flash only so no modeling lights that you would normally find in studio tungsten mono-lights. But with some trial and error and creative thinking some great results can be achieved.
My buddy Jason Tsui , www.jasontsui.com joined me as well and we came up with some very pleasing compositions but definitely will be doing this again as we hit a few snags along the way. Space was the main issue as was size of backgrounds. I have been shooting some small objects up to recently and when you are then required to shoot larger you quickly need a space that will accommodate this, we have more ideas for next time to fix this. As for shooting this subject with the large studio lights, we had more than enough light with the softboxes designed for strobists which I purchased at Dragon Image. I will do a review of these products in the future after I have put them thru some more work and can give a thumbs up or thumbs down, check back for that.
As for the compositions, we discussed a bit as to what really catches your eye about a bike, is it the components, the engineering / design of the frame or just the colour scheme of the bike. Most of the lighting tried on the night was from side on to create a mood or shape to the bike. This proved a little difficult as the bike is so thin the light just wrapped around it and gave pretty even light if too high a flash power used. My preferred point of view was definitely side on, but maybe a future shoot will open up new ideas and I will find something better.
Well enough for now. The image above links to the gallery on my image archive, their promises to be more to come as I still have many creative ideas that need to be flushed out of the system so to say. Hope you enjoy them and please comments are very welcome. I am always looking for other photographers in the Sydney area to join up with or have join me to shoot anything, especially if it has any link to enjoying an outdoor lifestyle.
Thx Gil.