Motorcycle Shoot

tony
January 22, 2017
landscape / New Zealand / Portraits

Looking into the setting sun makes flare and contrast a problem but gives a dramatic shadow as a compositional element and shows the road winding nicely into the distance.

Heading home on a breakfast run on the BMW R1200GS last week we came across some lovely curves of road lined by golden grass. This looked beautiful in the morning sun but it got me thinking of how it might look backlit by the setting sun so we headed back later in the week for a motorcycle shoot around sunset. Using the PhotoPills app to confirm sunset time and direction let us plan our arrival at the correct time and with a reasonable idea of what to expect from the light. It seemed to take ages for the last of the sun to sink so we did some shots into the setting sun and some on bike portraits before using fill flash after the sunset.

Portrait session while waiting for the sun to set.

Edin working the subject and looking for different angles. We just need to find some more photogenic talent!

Quite nice balanced lighting as the suns sets.

Lighting like this can be a challenge due to the range of brightness levels so we chose to use the Nikon D810 for the broad dynamic range to give as much flexibility in post-processing as possible. We stuck with taking a single lens, the Nikon 24-120mm f4 VR which covered the framing options and meant we could fit all the camera gear in a small bag which fitted easily in the BMW Vario Top Case when extended to its full depth. It was an interesting shoot as I had clear ideas of what I wanted to achieve visually but had to hand this all over to Edin after discussing it because I needed to ride the bike. Not a bad problem to have to repeatedly ride those curves! As always with sunset shots it pays to look behind your back as great colours happen as the Earth’s shadow rises into the evening sky so at the end we turned around and did some shots in the opposite direction.

Dragging shutter and fill-flash gives more of a feeling of speed.

Lovely colours opposite to the sunset. Mount Tarawera in the background. The previous photos all taken at the final corner visible in this shot.

As expected the files out of the camera didn’t look like much but I had the information I needed to process up some files that achieved what I had envisaged. RAW files were processed in Lightroom CC then into Photoshop CC with Nik Viveza and Color Efex Pro4 and Macphun Luminar. Sharpening was done with Photokit Sharpener 2 and jpg files output with JPEG Mini which does an amazing job of minimising file size while maintaining quality. The aim was to try and capture the feeling we had had when riding that road with the curves winding up the hill between the golden verges and I think we managed that. If only on a personal level it was a fun shoot and the photos are a lovely reminder of the ride and the shoot.

Thanks to Edin for being a great photographer and pillion rider. To ride a road like that is a great experience and like most great experiences is even more precious when shared.