In this How-To you will learn how to shoot a complete motorbike with no less than 8 light shapers & lamps.
The lighting setup started with the main light: a 30x180 cm Softbox (1) behind a diffuser. This light illuminated the entire side of the motorcycle and shaped the metallic areas particularly advantageously.
All other lights “only” set accents or brightened up particularly dark areas:
The two Softboxes (2) and (3) guaranteed a proper separation of the saddle, the tank and the handlebars from the background.
Another Softbox measuring 90x120 cm (5) and the white cardboard in front added reflections to the otherwise too dark front section of the engine.
The Para 88 (4) on the right as well as the P70 normal reflectors equipped with narrow grids (6) and (7) primarily illuminated the black areas of the tires and emphasized their profile. The Litepipe P (8) in the back fulfilled the same task.
Not visible in the BTS shot: a Ringflash surrounding the lens subtly brightened up the deep, dark areas of the engine.
All these lights illuminated the ground in a very boring way. I therefore decided to take a separate shot of the floor. For this I "painted" the floor with light by walking around the motorcycle with a LED light illuminating the floor ("light painting"). To do this, the camera was set to a long shutter speed.
This is a lot of lights and a lot of photographic work. The benefit on the other hand is only a minimum of post-production!
I used a medium format camera with a focal length of 120 mm. The aperture was f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/125 s at ISO 100.
