Motocross Performance Magazine Canadian Motocross news leader
After having the chance to share my return to Supercross for last week’s edition of Behind the Lens, I thought it would be cool this week to talk about something completely different than Supercross, and not even about motocross. While shooting racing is really cool, the jobs that help pay the bills are the commercial shoots, and I enjoy the change of pace from documenting an event, to creating specific images for a company.
Two years ago I had the opportunity to shoot with KTM, in the mountains of Austria, for their 1290 Super Adventure bike. So, what goes into doing a commercial shoot? First, we spent the day scouting locations. There are worse ways to spend a day than driving up and down winding alpine mountain roads in the Austrian Alps. I use an app that lets me log a photo to a GPS location so we can easily find the spot again once we’ve found the good ones.
After figuring out the best spots to shoot at, we then returned a few days later. KTM brings the bikes in one of their marketing vans, with a technician and a producer. We then work our way through the shot list, getting all the detailed shots first. Finally, after shooting all morning to get all the static images we need, it’s time for the fun stuff – the riding shots. We spend a couple of hours getting shots near where we started our day, the Loser Panoramastrasse – (yes, actually called Loser, look it up), before loading up to move to our second location. We arrive there just as the sun starts setting on the mountains and hurry to get the shots before darkness closes in. As the sun fades to black, we wrap on the day and end up with some great shots to end the day.
I’ll talk specifically about settings for two of my favourite shots from the day. The first shot is what’s called a tracking shot and is a staple of street bike photography. It involved me laying in the back of our van and having the bikes follow me through the tight, winding Austrian roads, as I shot with a slow shutter speed. That way, you get the bike sharp and the perception of motion through the rest of the shot. For this particular shot, I had the shutter speed at 1/100th of a second, with an aperature of F4.5, shot fairly wide at 19mm on my 16-35mm lens.
The second shot was one of the final shots of the day, as we got the bikes hitting this corner just as the last rays shone on the mountains behind them. Because the road was now in the shadows, I had my assistant/wife hold an off-camera flash to my left, pointed at the riders as they came past our position. This helped fill in the shadow side of their bodies, while the last rays of sun still provided some light on the right side of them. Technical specs for this shot were 1/1000th of a second shutter, F5 and iso500. Shot with a 24-70mm lens at 66mm.
This was definitely a fun shoot. We liked the spots so much that we returned a few weeks later to also use them for the launch of the 890 Duke model. There’s no shortage of amazing spots to shoot road bikes in Austria, that’s for sure.
