Behind The Scenes - BMWS1000RR Calendar Shoot

In shooting for the various calendar titles we provide images for, we get to visit a number of dealers and have made many friends amongst the staff. The guys at Wollaston Motors in Northampton have been extremely helpful to us over the years and were particularly so when we arrived to shoot the gorgeous BMW S1000RR superbike.

This is a hugely exciting bike, both aesthetically and technically, and we were very pleased to get the opportunity to shoot it. We found a location in front of one of their roller shutter doors that was in shade caused by the bright sunlight. While it is often nice to get sun on a bike to bring out the colours sometimes the complexity of the structure and panels mean that the bike casts lots of shadows on itself and all the detail is lost.

So we put it in deep shade. This then enabled us to control the lighting. It would have been great to have some big studio lights there but we were on a budget and also didn’t have the time to do a large setup. Not knowing what we were going to find when we got to the location all we had with us was two cheap Chinese flashguns which we could fire off-camera using wireless triggers.

We put one on the ground camera left and slightly angled it up at the bike to light most of the side, almost like a fill light. The other was held by my trusty VAL (Voice Activated Lightstand) high on camera right angled down to light up the front of the fairing. This light acted like the key light much as you would light the face in a portrait.

I set the camera exposure initially without any flash and took a test shot so I could check that the ambient light level had been dropped to what I wanted. You can play with this exposure (without flash) until you get the ambient (ie background) light level how you want it. Then you introduce the flash. We got it pretty much spot on with the manual flash power settings with the first shot and just did a couple more slightly tweaking the power levels on each unit. The shot was taken lying on the ground and the whole shoot took maybe ten minutes.

Post production was limited to cropping and some minor tidying up of damaged cladding in the background. No more than 15 minutes total processing on the computer.

Cool lighting doesn’t take lots of sophisticated equipment or hours of shooting and post production time.

Big thanks to Wollaston Motors for letting us play.

If you would like images like these taking for you please contact us.

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