Motorcyclist with his motorbike, strobist style

Thursday 11 April 2019, 21:12 by Elja Trum | 5,028 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

I will soon be publishing a book about portrait photography. For it, I wanted to take one more photo where the portrait was not just about the person, but where the surroundings also played a part. A photo of a motorcyclist with his motorbike seemed like a great subject to me.

Through a Facebook group for motorcyclists, I got in touch with Dennis. He was happy to model for me with his beautiful Yamaha V-Max. I had a garage in mind as the background for the photo and, luckily, he knew someone who was willing to make his garage available for a few hours.

Motorcyclist Dennis with his V-Max, in daylight
A garage in daylight is not necessarily the most attractive setting for taking a photo. Above you can see a test shot using only the available light.

That is not particularly special. Luckily, I had already decided that I wanted to work with separate flashguns, strobist style. A few flashguns, softboxes and colour filters make it look much more interesting.

Motorcyclist Dennis with his V-Max, using flash

Setup

I placed one flashgun in a large octabox and used it to light the motorbike. It is positioned to the left of the motorbike, and I fitted the octabox with a grid to direct the light more towards the motorbike rather than spreading it too widely.

I used a second flashgun to light Dennis. This flashgun is positioned just to the left of the camera and was also fitted with a grid on a softbox.

I placed a third flashgun behind the motorbike. As you can see, I put a red colour filter over it to make it more interesting than plain white light.

Unfortunately, my flashguns had run out by then, otherwise I would also have placed a flashgun with a blue filter behind the glass door on the left of the photo. Or at least tried.

The shoot was very much a matter of trying things out. Of course, the motorbike and Dennis had to be positioned well in relation to each other and to the garage. As the garage was also still quite full of motorbikes, I did not have much more space than this.

I also tried the lighting in several different ways. I wanted both the motorbike and Dennis to be clearly visible and well lit.

Motorcyclist Dennis with his V-Max, the result

Post-processing

A successful photo can be made even better with some post-processing. As you can see, the original image still differs quite a lot from the final result.

I started in Lightroom. Here I added vignetting, darkened the tools in the background, added some extra brightness to Dennis's clothes and his motorbike, increased the contrast and so on.

I then continued in Photoshop. Using the NIK ColorEffect plug-in, I gave the photo a rougher look. I made the colours slightly less saturated and so on.

In the end, I was already quite happy with the image, but I became increasingly annoyed by the tight crop of the photo. I was already standing with my back against a motorbike in the garage, so I could not move any further back at the time.

Luckily, Photoshop has an excellent option for adding missing parts of an image to your photo using 'content-aware fill'. Combined with some old-fashioned cloning, I framed the photo a little wider than it actually was.

Finally, I used 'dodging and burning' to make the edges and background a little darker, producing this final result.

Personally, I am pleased with the result and it has certainly made me want to do more. I will have to plan another shoot like this soon.

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