CW Racing Photo shoot
Bushmill’s CCTV Engineer Coyles Wright sounded me out a few months ago about doing a few Photographs of the new Race Team that he was putting together to contest the Irish Motorcycle racing championships. All the pieces of the jigsaw fell in to place and a date was set to do the shoot.
The evening before the shoot (last night) Coyles sent me a text message panicking about the heavy Snow that was falling up his part of the Country but we agreed to go ahead with the shoot and luckily the next morning (today) dawned without a major fall of Snow. With the forecast for a bright afternoon I was confident the shoot would go ahead as planned.
Coyles choice of location for the shoot was the famous ‘Dark Trees’ near Armoy which have been Photographed my numerous Photographers over the years. I immediately started thinking about the location and whether to try and shoot it all available ambient light or to introduce some flash light to the Photographs and whether or not everyday traffic would be an issue. If using flash I knew I would need to be able to hide the flashes and light stands so that they did not intrude in to the scene.
Coyles assured me it was a quiet Road with very little traffic, but on the day we were constantly having to push the bikes to one side to allow the free flow of traffic. I initially fired off a few frames using just the available light, but I soon realised that it was not illuminating both race bikes and riders evenly which was then my cue to extend the light stands and power up the Nikon SB800 flashes.
1/250th f5.6 AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED
The addition of some artificial flash light and a tighter composition made for a much stronger image.
Because these images were shot specifically for a press release to be sent to the Biking press I knew that a ‘mugshot’ of each racer would also be required.
Coyles Wright
Michael McKinley
Below is a lighting diagram explaining how these images were created.
