Photography and Cycling
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Virtually all of the photos on my Web site are done on Kodacolor 400. My 35 mm outfit at the shop is a Nikon 2020 with a Vivitar 90 mm f2.5 macro lens (which I'm not all that thrilled with, 'cause I sometimes get too much lens flare.) I use a Sunpak 433 flash with a remote cord, and bounce the light off of a white ceiling. Bouncing the flash off a wide area, like a ceiling, produces nice smooth lighting with no sharp shadows. For close up stuff, I like to stop the lens down to f11 or so for good depth of focus. Depth of focus is greatly reduced in close-up photography, so small lens openings are a must. Unfortunately, small lens openings requre LOTS of light or fast film or both.
I have a 9 foot roll of white "seamless" background paper (available at any decent camera shop), and use that for the background of the pix for the commercial pages--(my commercial pages have a white background.)
For many of the images on the informational pages, I use corrugated cardboard from bicycle boxes as a background, because it is close to the beige color of the backgrounds on my informational pages.
I get 4x6 prints made by a drugstore photolab, and scan the prints. I'd like to get a film scanner so I could eliminate that step, but they're too expensive for me at present. (I'd really like to get one that would take 120 film so I could use my medium-format cameras more...)
I do extensive tinkering with Adobe Photoshop, and usually remove the backgrounds completely, making the images into transparent .gifs.
The reason I care what color the backgrounds are in the original photographs is so that reflections on shiny parts will look correct.
I recently set up a sort of photo studio in a corner of the shop cellar, with a 9 foot seamless background. Some of my newer pix of whole bikes were done with this setup, using an Arca Swiss 4 X 5 view camera, Schneider Symmar 210 f5.6, and Norman/Ascor studio flash equipment...on 4 x 5 Polaroid! Some examples of this are my
I'm not entirely happy with the lighting on these. I use 3 flash heads, 2 of them back near the camera, separated by maybe 10 feet (the camera's probably 12-15 feet from the bike) and a third above the bike, shining on the background paper. I think it would be better if I could get the main flash heads farther apart, but I don't have room. It would probably be better if I used real film...also if I could stop down farther than f11...the spokes aren't properly delineated.
I'll probably try shooting some 400 speed real film, which should let me use f22...but processing 4 x 5 is such a hassle, and I don't have any good way to scan it without making prints first. I could print it if I cleaned up my darkroom...but I've really fallen out of love with darkroom work.
I have a length of 2 x 4 attached to the rafters above by a pivot at its middle. I've got a bunch of bolts running crossways through the 2 x 4, and the bolts provide attachment points for loops of fishing leader that hook under the brake levers and saddle to support the bike. (Actually, since I moved this rig to the shop, I couldn't find my leader, and am temporariliy using old brake cables...fortunately, Photoshop can easily obliterate the wires.) The pivoting 2 x 4 allows me to rotate the bike to photograph it at different angles without having to move the camera and lightstands.
