Your Bike in the Frame

Mike Bodnar provides some hints and tips for taking better pics of your motorcycle…

 

Pretty much perfection (Image: Facebook Marketplace)

I have to declare up front that I am not a professional photographer. A keen amateur, yes, and I’ve been taking pictures for over sixty years, a few of them even award-winning, but professional? No.

So, what I’m sharing with you today is purely based on my experience; it is not the Definitive Guide to Taking Perfect Motorcycle Images. That said, I hope you get something from it.

I also need to be upfront and apologise to anyone whose motorcycle photo I've copied from Facebook Marketplace, Trade Me, or other sales sites. I use them here only to illustrate, not to offend.

An article like this could run into tens of pages, if not hundreds - it could easily be book-length - so I’m going to keep it simple by splitting the subject into just four key segments: Composition, Background, Lighting - and, for the enthusiasts - a little bit about Editing.

Composition

This is quite simply about how you want your bike to look. Motorcycles, by their shape, beg to be shot in landscape rather than portrait mode. So, if you’re using your phone and want to take an image of your bike side-on, hold the phone sideways, not straight up and down. Unless – and there is an exception – you want to capture your bike in a three-quarter profile shot. 

Image from Trade Me. Too much grass
in the foreground, too much foliage behind,
and the succulent plant looks like it's growing
out of the bike...

Try and get all of the motorcycle in the frame. Take note that on many bikes it’s the mirrors that are the highest point of the bike, so try and keep them in shot. Likewise, cutting off the wheels at the bottom will result in a flat-tyre look, so avoid this also.

Consider how much of the frame the bike takes up. If you’re standing too far back you will almost certainly have space in the foreground, off to each side, and above, so take some time to position the bike without including any wasted space. I have seen so many images of motorcycles where a third, sometimes half of the image is taken up with road surface in the foreground. If that happens, you can always crop it out (see Editing later).

The exception to this is where you want a photo of your bike in a particular landscape, showing, for example, that you’ve been to the coast, or a mountain-top, or somewhere with an alpine view. In that case you’re showing the context of the ride, rather than just the bike, and that’s fine. Add it to your travel blog and watch the likes roll in.

No distractions...

If you’re going to shoot it portrait because you want to capture, say, more of the front of the bike, position yourself in front of it, but still slightly off to one side, so that we can see some detail down the side of the machine. See sample pic (left).

And finally from a composition point of view - and if your knees will take it - get down to the bike’s level rather than taking the photo from your usual eye-level. Looking down on your machine from head-height will make it look smaller, so if you can get down on one knee, or even pull up a chair if it’s available, go for it. If you’re really athletic and want a unique view, lie on the ground and take the photo looking up!

(PS: On the other hand, you might want to drag the stepladder out from the garage and stand on that for a higher angle shot. Don't be afraid to experiment!)

Background

Background is too busy. Image from Trade Me

Motorcycles can be visually complex, especially where they don’t have fairings, and most of our bike don’t these days. So it's advisable to avoid ‘busy’ backgrounds, such as picket fences, vegetation, a cluttered garage, or anything that compromises the look of the bike.

If you were engaging a professional photographer with a studio, they would likely pose your machine against an infinity backdrop – basically a sheet of material or even paper – that covers the floor and curves up behind the bike, giving a pure and uninterrupted background with no lines or distractions. The bike is the star of the show, and nothing else matters. The infinity background ensures your eye won't be carried off somewhere else.

Studio shoot: out of reach for most of us.
Image: Neve Studios

Most of us can’t afford a professional studio, so we need to find backgrounds that are at least plain. 

You could always simply hang up a bed sheet behind the bike - perhaps on the good old Kiwi washing line, or pinned to the carport roof beam. 

A rendered concrete wall is another option, as long as it’s painted in a neutral colour. If your bike is blue and the wall is orange, it’s probably not going to work.

Cheaper option: find a neutral background.
(Image: Trade Me)

You can - if you want to be more of a pro photographer and if space allows - position your bike a long way from a busy background so that when you take the photo the bike is in focus and the background slightly blurred. If you’re using a proper camera rather than a phone, and you have a zoom lens, try positioning the bike away from the background, and then position yourself further away from the bike. Zoom in and take the shot. That way you stand a good chance of the background being even more out of focus, and even if it’s a slightly busy one it won’t matter as much. Pro photographers call this sort of out-of-focus background 'bokeh.'

And lastly, your concrete driveway might be exactly the background you're looking for - but you'll need to get the stepladder out and shoot from a high angle.

Lighting

It may come as a surprise – when, as fair-weather motorcyclists, we usually choose sunny days to go for a ride – that cloudy, ‘flat-light’ days make for better motorcycle images. This is because there are no harsh shadows, no areas of contrasting bright and dark, and the details of the bike can be seen more clearly.

Harsh light, along with bike too tight in the frame.
Michael could try harder.

So while you might be tempted to take the ultimate image of your pride and joy when the sun’s shining, think twice.

A pro photographer would, in such circumstances, perhaps shoot the shaded side of the bike, but use a light reflector – a circular sheet of white (and on the reverse side, foil) material which can ‘bounce’ sunlight onto the bike to help even-out the lighting. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have one – you can use anything large and white, like a sheet, or a big piece of white card. As long as it bounces the sunlight it should work.

Multiple things wrong here
(apologies to owner!):bottom half of picture
irrelevant (and photographer's shadow
in shot),bike too small in the frame
with cluttered background, and wasted
space showing the driveway and paddock...

And speaking of sunshine, watch for your own shadow in shot! I have seen so many photos taken by owners of their bikes on a gorgeous sunny day, only for their own shadow to drape across the bike like a dark wraith. This is another good reason for getting down on one knee for the shot.

Alternatively, if you can find somewhere shaded, use that, but not – and I can’t emphasise this enough – not where the shade is comprised of multiple tree branches, or a fence of railings. What you need is smooth, even shade, the sort you’d get under a carport with a semi-opaque roof.

The time of day you choose is important also, especially if the sun is actually shining and you want to use it. There’s a time that photographers call ‘the golden hour,’ which is not long after dawn, and, at the other end of the day, just before sunset. At both times the sun is low in the sky, and your bike’s paintwork will glow accordingly. Especially towards sunset, you might need to move the bike around a bit until you get the sunset reflected in the paintwork. It can be physically strenuous, but worth it.

Golden hour

If the sun has just set, but there’s still light in the sky, consider illuminating your bike a bit using a torch, and maybe turning on your bike’s headlamp to add some extra interest. If you want to get really professional, use some lighting behind the bike, or even under it, to help augment the scene. There are plenty of usb-chargeable lights available online for this sort of thing, and they’re not expensive. Experimenting with lighting is both fun and rewarding - try it!

Editing

Finally, what can we do to enhance our images after we’ve shot them? Or make some of our older shots - perhaps of bikes we no longer own - better? The answer is: plenty, but let’s start with the simplest: cropping.

Cropping is just re-framing the image to exclude superfluous space around the bike. Most phone cameras come equipped with cropping capability, so if you have inadvertently included way too much foreground, simply crop it out and save the new image. 

This is the photo from earlier in the article, cropped and with
the background blurred. It literally took about 10 minutes,
and now all our attention is focused on the bike.

You really don’t have to spend any money on fancy editing software like Lightroom or Photoshop – there are many free apps you can download that are easy to use. If you use Google Photos to store your images, for example, simply opening any of the pics will present you with multiple editing options, from changing the brightness, contrast and shadows, to increasing the warmth, making the image ‘pop,’ or adding a vignette round the edges. And of course, you can crop away to your heart’s content.

Of the options in Google Photos for example, I mostly use the cropping, brightness, saturation, warmth, and – frequently – vignette tools. The vignette in particular adds a faint black halo around the edge of the image, which helps emphasise the importance of what is in the centre of the frame – in this case, your motorcycle.

I urge you to play with these tools and see what they can do for your images. You can always undo something if you don’t like it.

As I mentioned at the start, a subject like this could easily run to the length of a book, but even if you consider just the basics of composition, background, and lighting, you can easily turn your snapshots into artworks. And don't forget, with digital photography, take as many images as you like till you get it right - it doesn't cost anything!

 If you want to see some of my images – none of them of motorbikes! – visit my Flickr portfolio here: Mike Bodnar | Flickr

Flight of (not-so) Fancy

Mike Bodnar rues his inability to travel in style, but discovers other hidden benefits to long-haul flying...

I recently returned from a month on the other side of the world. 

Well of course you didn't know; I didn't want to make a fuss. Or face abuse for adding to the world's climate woes. Because I didn't go by bicycle, or kayak, and I didn't walk. Train? Tchah! None of those are options when you live in Aotearoa/New Zealand and need to get to the UK, formerly known as Great Britain.

I flew. Obviously not personally - I don't wear tights and a cape - but circumstances dictated that I get there quickly, get some things done, and get back again. 

But let me get one thing straight from the start: I don't like flying. Not because I'm terrified of the aircraft falling out of the sky (I am), or because the carbon footprint of a long-haul flight is damaging to the increasingly-fragile global ecosystem (I know it is, but I refuse to paddle 24,000 miles); No, it's because I can't afford to travel Business Class.

No, seriously, I can't. Not even so-called Premium Economy (which is like like travelling economy but with a marginally less surly attitude from the flight attendants).

Heading for third class check-in

In the end, this is what we pay for when flying internationally: acknowledgement of our social status, with treatment befitting. The more we pay, the nicer we are treated; the less we fork out, the more bottom-feeders we are. The clue is in the tiers: First Class, Business Class, Premium Economy, and - sad wah-wah trumpet FX here - Economy. It's simply, and literally, a class system. Yes, it all ends in tiers. Thank you, I'm here all week.

So, why did I have to go? In a nutshell, we have a property in Surrey that we couldn't sell two years ago due to an incredibly brief and inept tenure by a now-forgotten Tory prime minister called Liz Truss, who within her less-than 50-days in power, managed to crash the British economy. Mortgages suddenly became almost non-existent, lending criteria were tightened, and the property market tanked, taking our chances of selling with it. Instead we had to rent the property out.

Okay, this might seem like a First World Problem, but the truth is, having moved back to New Zealand, we can't afford to buy a property here until our house in England sells. So not only were we paying a mortgage over there, we were forking out for rent here in NZ as well. Something had to be done.

Our property was let without too much trouble, but now the UK tenancy was coming to an end, and it was patently obvious from photos and reports that the tenants had neglected the place for the full twenty months they'd been there. It was not in saleable condition. I needed to go over and fix it up.

Peace of mind

Yes, I can hear you! You're wondering why didn't we just engage tradespeople in England to do the required painting and decorating, the gardening, the general tidying and fixing of things. Because, after some research, it was obviously going to be cheaper for me to go and do it than to pay for workers over there. There's also that intangible: peace of mind - the comfort in knowing a job's been done and done well.

So I got online looking for the cheapest possible flights. If you've ever done this, you'll know how disheartening it can be. Firstly, the nearer you are to when you want to travel, the more expensive the flights are. This is called dynamic pricing (or surge pricing, or demand-based pricing), and is based on a combination of demand and/or desperation. It is basically blackmail. 'Oh, you want to travel next week sir? That'll be twice or three times as much as if you'd booked two months ago. Thank you. Ka-ching!'

Luckily, I did book about two months in advance. Another important thing to consider is how flexible you can be with your travel dates. The more set-in-concrete your plans are, the more it's likely to cost. Some flight search sites show you useful calendars indicating when the cheapest flight options are (I used Webjet, but please note I am not endorsing them as the only or even preferred one).

Then comes the airline you choose. As soon as you go for one of the majors - Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific, Singapore, Emirates, and so forth (this of course depends where you're flying from/to) - you're paying a premium. I was looking for cheapest, not best or award-winning.

I make no apologies...

And, crucially, I also wanted to avoid travelling via the United States. This was because I have posted anti-Trump memes on social media, and I didn't want to be held by ICE, or turned away during a transit stopover just because I might have offended The Orange One. My options were becoming increasingly limited, especially since I didn't want to spend 56 hours getting to the UK. Oh yes, you can find cheap flights, as long as you're prepared to camp out at three or more airports during lengthy stopovers en route.

But all was not lost. I found what I believed to be a reasonably-priced option with a Chinese airline I'd never heard of: Hainan. For the equivalent of £980 return (approx. NZ$2180) - third class of course - I could fly over, be there for a month, and fly back. 

I was tempted, but first I needed to research what other travellers thought of Hainan Airlines. One man said the service was appalling, and he was allowed just one beer on a 10-hour flight, because, as he was told, 'otherwise you might be drunk.' Others said the food was terrible, and that everything came with rice. This didn't put me off particularly; it was a Chinese airline after all, but one alcoholic drink in 10 hours was something of a worry. But others said it was fine, and nearly everyone rated it five stars for cleanliness. There's nothing quite like knowing your plane is spotless as it plunges to earth.

No, not real; just my imagination on fire...

Despite having never heard of the airline, and fearing their planes would be refurbished Tiger Moths, I booked. I also updated my last will and testament, and sent a Photoshopped image of a Chinese plane on fire to friends and family, just to manage their expectations (see pic).

As it happened, I needn't have worried. Everything went according to plan, even smoothly, although the hours spent in transit in China - along with having to fill in visa forms and be processed by immigration (yes, even for transit), was a pain. Because one of the big downsides of some cheap air travel is stopovers and layovers. 

China immigration. Image: Global Times

Hainan Airlines fly from New Zealand to London Heathrow with two stops en route; the first is at their hub on the island of Haikou (for a few hours), followed by an internal flight to Changsha in mainland China (another few hours' stop). At Haikou we all had to collect our baggage and check it in again before continuing - another pain. But this is the price you pay for booking cheap tickets - you have to put up with some inconvenience.

But there was an upside: it turned out there were about forty or fifty of us who were either New Zealanders or Brits, travelling the whole way to London, so naturally we gravitated together at the check-in queues. Two or three of this cohort had done the trip before, so their knowledge and experience was much appreciated, as the airline itself told us very little about what was going on. And even when I was given information, it turned out to be wrong.

The flight from Haikou to Changsha was internal, so it was, technically, a domestic flight, even though it was part of the international journey I'd booked. So, after checking in I was told to go round the corner to the domestic departure gate and security screening area, which I did, only to be turned away and told to go to international departures because I was travelling to London. Off upstairs I trundled, to international departures, only to be turned away again and be told to go back downstairs to domestic. It was turning into a game of Chinese Checkins, only I was losing.

Haikou Meilan International, Terminal 2 Departures. It was a seething mass of humanity when I was there

I found an airport official, a young lady who listened politely and carefully to my dilemma, checked my boarding pass, then engaged Google translate on her phone to tell me to go to international departures. I still had at least three hours before departure so I wasn't losing my cool yet. I equally politely told her phone my story again, and she said I was to follow her. I followed, relieved at last that I was in official hands.

But no. After being given more incorrect information at two other counters, we finally ended up at the first class check-in, and my hopes soared as I thought maybe that she was going to arrange an upgrade by way of compensation for all the messing about. Alas no. It was just that the first class check-in guy wasn't doing anything, and seemed like a prime target. He told us to go to where I was first sent: Domestic Departures. This time though I had my Chinese escort, and she smoothed my passage through the gate with no problems at all.

I had learned three ways of saying 'thank you' in Chinese, one basic, one more polite, and one that is used only in circumstances of extreme gratitude. This was the one I used now, giving an awkward bow at the same time. 'Fēicháng gǎnxiè nín,' I said, haltingly. I don't know which of us blushed more, but she smiled, hopefully understanding what I'd said. On the other hand, I might have just intimated that I'd like to go home and meet her sister, so I figured I should beat a retreat through security as quickly as possible.

The train to London; my only first class experience

Fast forward, and a month later, having successfully achieved all I wanted to do in England, I headed back to Heathrow, firstly taking a train from Liverpool to London Euston. This turned out to be the highlight of my trip, partly because I treated myself to a first class ticket, and secondly - because the journey was delayed by an hour and twenty minutes - I received a full refund on the fare. Score! So that was the journey, plus lunch with wine(s), for free. Not complaining, and I still made it to Heathrow with two hours to spare.

So then I was back on Hainan Airlines doing the reverse journey. Once again there was a cohort of about forty English and Kiwis, and once again some of them (I can say 'us' now that I'd done the journey one way at least), were able to provide valuable knowledge of what to expect. But a bonus for me was making the acquaintance of a thirty-something hipster from England called Jack. We hared a row of seats from London to China, then were split up for the remaining flights, but at Changsha and Haikou we also shared the endurance of waiting in airports in the early hours of the morning, with nothing open and the temperature at 31 degrees Celsius. We'd have killed for a cold lager.

Jack was headed to New Zealand for a campervan holiday (in winter, I know!), so I did what I could to help him plan his journey, and to manage his expectations. And no, at no stage did I shout 'Hi Jack!' during the flight.

With Jack at 2.30 in the morning, at Haikou,
looking far happier than we should be

I enjoyed his company though, and I'm always pleased to help anyone who's visiting Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I'm not going to review the airline particularly, they're all much of a muchness unless you're flying business or first class. Ultimately, in third class it really is just a test of endurance, especially on long-haul flights of eleven hours or more. They should include it in Iron Man challenges: running, cycling, and sitting on a plane for 12 hours.

Travelling via China was a bit of a mission, but at least I didn't get arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for having anti-Trump memes on my phone. It was worth the journey to avoid that. Oh, and they did give me more than one beer, so 'Fēicháng gǎnxiè nín' Hainan Airlines!