A little over four years ago I was photographing motorbikes in this very space in Plymouth, Devon. Four days later in an Exeter sports centre, I dropped dead (briefly) following a cardiac arrest.
Clearly I recovered, it’s been a journey, if you wish to know more about it I wrote a post some time ago which you can read here.
Anyway.
There is an ideal infinitely large study that any photographer might like access to, ideally one with infinitely powerful lights to. In this we could all utilise the Inverse Square law and control our lighting well. Oh, and ideally the space would be black too. But, happily, we live in the real world and have to resolve these issues.
I aim for my photography to be all done in the camera rather than with the computer. So, one might ask how when a room is clearly quite white, can one hope for a wall to become black, or green, or red, or blue. That, friends is the power of lighting. It’s what I do.
Without the lights that I bring, if my camera is set correctly a click of the shutter will result in a black rectangle. This then is my starting point.
These shots were all taken using three strobes, quite powerful lights, and a selection of coloured gels. The biggest problem is controlling light spill. particularly on the back wall behind the bikes. Yes, there were jazz-hands on this shoot.
As ever Mike Grainger was a fabulous host at GT Motorcyles, yes we did swap notes about surviving adversity. And thanks as ever to Karin for her assistance.