Some more pics from the amazing motorcycle shoot! Below you will find ‘How we did it’. Check it out and give us your feedback!

How we did it:

I packed all of my gear into my tail bag, and we started riding the country side here in Lancaster, PA. The images seen above where all shot with my Nikon D700 70-200mm f/2.8.

• Step 1: Find a good spot! We wanted a sharp corner with some ‘Lancaster County’ scenery in the background. The corner had to be banked and elevated so that we could get some depth to our background. We first ran into a couple problems where a lot of good corners were cut into the land and had large embankments on either side. This really limited our view.
• Step 2: Meter the bike in the corner. To start I had Steve stop in the middle of the curve while I measured for the correct exposure. Going into the shoot I thought I would set my camera in shutter priority mode (my logic was I was going to need to pick a shutter speed to give me the correct motion blur and let the camera pick my aperture). However, I found that my camera’s meter even with exposure compensation was not hitting the exposure I wanted. So I set my camera in manual mode.
• Step 3: Pick a Speed (shutter and bike): First we tried about 10mph with a shutter speed of 1/250. We wanted the sense of motion in these shots, nobody wants to see a frozen motorcyle on the road. Cycle riders love the feel of hitting a hard corner, so we wanted these pics to give that feel. After a couple passes at the previous settings I decided to make an adjustment. I didn’t want to slow down my shutter speed too far, because I would be panning, but I wanted a sense of motion. So I asked Steve to increase his speed to 20mph and dropped my shutter speed to 1/125. Perfect! Pics 3 and 4 above are shot in a straight away with the idea of showing the scenery around. It was great working with Steve as he’s a MSF certified rider coach.
• Step 4: Shot away! We were all set, we had a good location, our exposure set and our speed determined. It was time to shoot. Panning is a technique used by any sports photographer looking to show movement in an image with a moving object, while mainting the sharpness of the object. There are two keys to nailing a panning shot: (1) Speed and (2) Distance.
  • (1) Speed: To keep your subject sharp you have to pivot your camera at the same rate as your subject is traveling. If this doesn’t come natural for you, you’ll need to really practice this step. A tip that might help is pick a spot on your subject to focus your attention to and track it. For exapmle, set your focal point on your camera to the waist of the rider. As the rider enters the curve lock your focus and keep that focal point on the riders waist all the way through the curve.
  • (2) Distance: This is important to mainting a sharp rider. There are several advantages to shooting these shots on a curve; distance is one of them. By setting yourself at the focal point of the curve, this means you are equal disant from the start of the curve, the middle, and the end of the curve. This ensures your focal lenth will remain fixed, allowing you to shoot in burst mode through the curve.
• Step 5: Stand around and ‘chimp’ at your amazing shots!

The next set of images where a fun test I put together. I decided to try shooting while I was riding. Now before all of you motorcycle paranoid people get worked up, keep reading. My concept for this part of shooting was to give an on the road perspective. For the first try, I learned some things that I will change for next time, but was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Positives:

• I liked the perspective.
• I was concerned with vibrations, but I didn’t have any issue with that (since I shot at 1/1000).

What I would change:

• Shutter speed: I would like to try this again with a slower shutter speed to produce more of a motion blur. This however may result in some vibration issues, but it’s worth a try.
• Swap cameras: I had my D300 mounted with my 17-55mm f/2.8. Next time I would put my D700 with the 50mm f/1.4. Reason is the D300 doesn’t support as high of a frame rate when shooting in RAW as in JPEG. I shot these on bike shots in JPEG. I wish I had them in RAW.

You can see my bike setup below. I had my D300 17-55mm f/2.8 mounted to a Manfrotto tripod head and super clamp. This was then secured to the frame of my bike. I also had a safety cable attached which you can’t see. Initially I had my pocket wizard mounted to the hot shoe, and a pre-trigger cable connected to the camera. Then I mounted another pocket wizard to the handle bars of my bike, so I could access the trigger button from my left hand, without having to take my hand off of the clutch. Where I ran into a problem was that once I sat on the bike, the pocket wizard wouldn’t fire. I then realized all of my tests where in my garage and the signal had the ability to bounce off of the ceiling, but once I sat on my bike in the middle of an open road, there was no line of sight between the pocket wizards. So to compensate, I ran my pre-trigger cable to a pocket wizard in my pocket which had a line of sight with the pocket wizard by the clutch!

I hope this was a helpful post to someone. I had a lot of fun on this shoot. I defintely love the shots I took while off my bike, better than the ones on my bike, but I see some potential for on bike shots with a little tweaking. I’ll leave you with one more of my favorites from the day. If you have any questions or found this post cool, fun, or interesting let us know! Leave a comment below!