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!

POSTSCRIPT UPDATE!

Since I wrote this article, Google's Gemini AI generator has suddenly risen to great prominence, and has been promoting how much it can help turn photos into masterpieces in a matter of seconds. 

Believe me, it can, and it can make a very ordinary image of your motorcycle into a work of art. Try it and see for yourself. 

What will help achieve something remarkable is to make your prompt - that is, what you tell the AI to do to your image - as clear as possible. 

Before, and...

For example, here's a before and after example of my bike. I asked Gemini to make the background look like a stormy sky, with clouds lit from behind by lightning. I asked it to also put some pools of water around the bike, with wisps of steam rising here and there. It took less than a minute, and I love the outcome. 

At the moment Google Gemini Flash 2.5 is free, and maybe it will stay that way, I don't know. But the point is it costs nothing to play with it, and you can tell it to refine your images as many times as you like until you're happy. Let me know in the comments how you get on.

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

Pictures in an Exhibition

Just for a change I thought I'd post some of my favourite photos taken over the last few years. 

To be clear, I'm not a photographer, just an amateur interested in snapping occasionally, so I hope you'll forgive any breach of photographic etiquette in these images. I do try and compose pics when opportunity allows - rule of thirds and all that - and I unashamedly crop and enhance for best effect in post-production where necessary; I believe that apps such as Snapseed and Photoshop are there to be used, so why not? These are in no particular order, just randomly thrown together. Anyway, enjoy. 

Windows, Chester, England. Our eye is drawn through the ancient stone work in the foreground by the arches behind and on into the foliage. I liked the greens and browns too.
  

Fence, Chevrière, France. Some days the light just isn't right for photography, so instead of just the landscape I chose to have some fence and flora in the foreground. I enhanced the structure slightly in Snapseed too to give it more depth and drama. 

My home town of Liverpool, England. Taken from the Mersey ferry. Again the light was dull with little contrast so I enhanced the structure of the image. It's still a bit flat but I'm pleased with the overall panorama of the waterfront. 

The Atomium, Brussels. Sod's law that the day I was there the sky was grey. I did take some wide shots of this iconic 1950s structure, but I prefer this tighter shot which I think emphasises the stunning architecture and construction - and draws your attention away from the weather! 

Fiddler's Ferry yacht marina, Merseyside, England. 

Finally some light! And sometimes, when you've got light you don't need anything else.

Here's one from Wellington, New Zealand. 

This 'fern ball' dangles mid-air behind the central library. I shot this through some foliage and stone sculptures to frame the ball itself, which also hid the wires that support it, making it seem to float in mid-air. 

Meanwhile, in the USA... This is a pic of the Grand Canyon taken in 2012. Everyone else there was taking photos of the sunlight playing on the canyon walls, including my mate Shaun. I suggested to him that taking one almost directly into the sun would be a better shot so he handed me his camera and said, 'You take it then'. I did, and these are the mystical layers that resulted. He now claims ownership of the image!!

I also turned it into a poster, which I occasionally do with images that I feel bear some extra exposure...

Such as this 2011 one of Fox Glacier on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. 

I was almost lying on my stomach to get the reflection in the glacial pool but it was worth it. I think so anyway! 

And sometimes you really have to try hard to compose a picture so that modern life doesn't intervene and spoil it. Before Game of Thrones there was Cruas, on the Rhône in France, a medieval town extremely well-preserved and just begging to be photographed. However, it is bordered by a nuclear power plant to one side, a modern town in front, and a quarry on the other side, so getting this shot involved traipsing around until I could get a view that could have been taken 500 years ago. 

I know, I could have just cropped it, but well...

Meanwhile, in a park in England a few 

autumns ago... this squirrel looks like it's 

ready for a fight, with fists curled in anticipation!

(And yes, I added a vignette so that attention is drawn fully to the subject)

Here's one taken just in the next county, but back in December 1972. Shot on 35mm slide film, I was taken by the trees framing the sunset and wanted to capture the moment. Recently I converted the slide to digital format and discovered it wasn't as good as I'd remembered. I've done what I can in Photoshop but it remains more of a notion than an achievement. 

Unless you believe in heaven maybe!

And now for something completely different: some sand forms. Taken on one day at Otaki Beach in New Zealand, I couldn't stop snapping at the way the wind, waves and wildlife had sculpted the sand. 

I realised later that I'd created a series, so I collated the images into a format which leant itself to hanging on the wall. 

Surprisingly, these aren't black and white images, they are actually in colour - it's just that the sand is a sort of monochrome. 

The feather 'wave' at the top is my favourite, just because it really does look like one of those gigantic waves that surfers from all over the world travel to Portugal to ride.

But also I like that all these images came from within just a few metres of each other - the variety of opportunities on the beach that day was amazing.

As we all know, some photos are circumstantial, and often turn out to be more interesting for it. Candid photography is one of my favourites. Sadly, today you're likely to be accosted for being a pervert if you try and take pictures of people without their knowledge, even in what's legally a public space. But anyway, back in 2005 I happened to be in a small pub in Ireland. A few of the locals were so riveted on the TV behind the bar they didn't even see me, but I like the outcome. I just call this 'Watching the Game'.

Occasionally I like to get up close and personal with a macro lens. 

This is a koru - an emerging fern frond - often used as a symbol of New Zealand, which is why I took it.

I like the depth of field; there is nothing to distract from the emergence of new growth and life.

While this wee chap obligingly posed for his photoshoot on a canal-side flower in France in 2013...

...along with his friend the praying mantis, who obviously objected to having his likeness taken.

But if we're going to talk about personal, take a look at this monochrome study. 

Zara was a life-drawing model and happy to indulge my whim for what I hoped would be a stark outline photo. It didn't work because I had too much reflected light on the subject, but it works in a different way I think. Moody, erotic, yet tasteful.

Returning outside, and here we are back in France. This is one of my favourite most recent images, taken just last week in the city of Troyes. I like it because of the subdued lighting, and the way everything - the lamps, the curve of the buildings, the tables - leads the eye towards the mid-lower right of frame where the alley curves away into mystery, guarded only by a young man in a Covid mask checking his mobile.

I took this with my Nikon D50 - an oldie but a goodie. With no tripod I had to lean the camera against a convenient drainpipe to keep it steady.

Poignantly I think it captures the age of the virus. Normally an alley such as this would be bustling, with people sitting outside its restaurants and bars enjoying themselves, but France is taking Covid very seriously, and it looks like people are staying at home.

People can make or break an image, and I think the lack of them in the one above is testimony to that. 

But this next one works (IMHO) because the crowds have suddenly parted on what would normally be an extremely busy central Liverpool street to give me a perfect view of this street performer, seemingly sitting on nothing at all.

The image is helped enormously by the position of the sun which, with the performer's shadow, emphasises that he's 'sitting' there with no visible means of support. It makes me smile.

As does this one from Innsbruck in Austria. 

I love the way the bike has become almost fluid; drunk and unable to support itself it leans against its companion.

In a way, because there is nothing in the image other than bikes, it becomes almost anthropomorphic. 

Or maybe I'm the one that's had too much to drink!

My in-laws used to live in a lovely rural area just outside the village of Chatte in France, in the Rhône-Alpes region. Adjacent to their main house was an old barn, and one day as the sun was fairly low in the sky I went with my camera to investigate it.

I liked the way the light streamed inside (illuminating an old and unfinished kit car at the rear that my father-in-law had started many years previously), but I liked even more the view from inside looking out. The wagon's wheel dominates the image but our eye is drawn to the sunlight top left, while the shadows within the barn form their own vignette. I can still hear the lazy buzz of insects, and feel the warmth of the sun.

I know I said these images were random, so forgive me if we suddenly dash back to Liverpool, England.

It's a city built on its shipping and commerce (and yes, it has to be acknowledged, slave trading) but fell onto hard times in the 70s and 80s. Today its status as a major port is recovering, although its status as a tourist destination is perhaps more significant.

Down at the restored and imposing Albert Dock area one day, I snapped some images of a tall ship moored there, with the famous Liver Buildings in the background. I was aiming to capture Liverpool's early 20th century heritage, when - arguably - it was the most important port in the UK outside of London.

To add to the legacy feel I rendered it in monochrome.

(Legend has it that the two Liver Birds atop the building serve a purpose; the one in the picture facing the sea is looking for returning sailors, while the one on the other side looking inland is checking to see if the pubs are open!)

While in Merseyside, I took a photo of the industrial area of Rock Ferry, just because it is evocative of contemporary concerns about climate change etc. This image is heavily cropped and enhanced to emphasise the industry - in the original there was far more river in the foreground and the 'dark satanic mills' were in the distance.

As a gritty panorama it sends more of a message, and perhaps justifies today's options of filters and image manipulation. Or not - you can decide.

Finally, some arty and atmospheric shots, and at least one to make you go 'Awww'! 

The first is this spiral staircase from somewhere in Europe - I can't actually remember where - but I was taken by the hypnotic shell-like geometry.

Then there's this one, also a staircase, this time from one of the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (before the fire). 

Although slightly blurred, it captures the motion of our kids running down the steps, and it's the movement - and colour - that appeals to me.

Speaking of spirals, here's a shell on Ruakaka Beach, New Zealand, on a gorgeously calm late afternoon. 

I turned this into a canvas print which now hangs in our ensuite, complementing the colours of the décor.

This was another occasion when I found myself almost flat on my stomach to get the shot. I sometimes think that a prerequisite to being a photographer is to have a qualification in yoga!

What are we looking at here? The inside of the Large Hadron Collider? A journey through time and space? 

Nope, we're looking up through the transparent ceiling of a lift (elevator) in Brussels...

And finally, from this spring time, well, I don't need to say anything to explain do I?

Thanks for viewing. Feel free to share if you enjoyed the exhibition :-)

Cheers,

Mike