There’s no missing the Kawasaki ZZR1400 Performance Sport, it’s not really their style and this really is heavy industry. But the big Ninja one was a dream to shoot really; just wheel it out of the van, into its spot and click.
Bridge Motorcycles of Exeter had kindly lent me a couple of bikes to shoot for the Superbikes calendar and Exeter Chiefs had offered their stadium as a backdrop.
Being the beginning of February (2015) it was cold, very cold. In fact when I first arrived at the location it was snowing, just a little but enough to worry me. The light was subdued, verging on foggy but flat light is often malleable. The intended shot was always a rear angle, those Akrapovičs just begged attention and the calendar needed a range of angles. However each shot needs to ‘explain’ the whole bike pretty comprehensively but I think it’s hard not to get the drift with this bike.
This was a ‘lie on the f-f-f-freezing ground’ shoot but after the first couple of frames were dumped onto the Apple it was clear that the shot wasn’t going to cause too much pain. The main elements of the shot were a wall, a heating outlet and a stonking great bike really. I did the reverse shot at the time and have just for the sake of this post spent five minutes on the file in Lightroom. About all that was worked on with the final rear view was tidying up the wall and de-saturating the ground a little.
I love lighting shots with strobes and speedlights but sometimes all the light you need is there already. The final shot had very little work and was achieved really quickly, you know, before the snow came.
