When taking a motorcycle picture it is important to consider the background as well as the foreground. The background of a photo places the subject of your photo into a context which can help define the emotion you are trying to convey. Here is an example from my Bikes Blues and BBQ gallery.

West Coast Choppers

The girl standing at the entrance to the bar really sets the mood of this shot.

Another way of thinking about the background is in terms of contrast. You either want the background of your photo to match perfectly or you want it to mismatch in the extreme. For instance if you’re taking a photo of a very tough looking bike you want an equally tough looking background. If you’re taking a photo of a very high-end custom bike you want the background to be equally high-end—maybe a mansion, or a yacht club for instance.

What you do not want to do is put a very expensive custom bike in the drive of a “nice” house or a tough looking bike in a not so tough background. When the background is not up to the same standard as the bike they clash. As I learned from Robin Williams’ book “The Non-designer’s Design Book” you never want to use two different design elements that are similar. For instance you never want to use two similar script style fonts in the same print project. If you are going to use two different fonts they need to be from totally different families or they clash. The same is true when thinking about the foreground and background in your  photo.

So if you foreground and background don’t match they need to be extremely different. Placing a tough stripped down bobber for instance in a very expensive setting can work because they are extremely different and giving you the contrast, or we could put a very expensive custom bike in a very trashy setting and it would work, because the difference is extreme and you have contrast. The key here is the difference needs to be extreme, you can’t go half way. This can be a very effective way to bring some interest into the photo and make an emotional impact as well.

Three other ways of thinking about contrast and background are color, texture and sharpness. When you’re shooting a bike make sure your background is sufficiently different in color that the bike will stand out against it. Having a dark colored bike in front of a dark colored background is not as good as having a light colored bike in front of a dark background or visa versa.

Color Contrast

Also a rough textured background can make the high polished chrome and paint pop.

Texture Contrast

And finally a bike that is in sharp focus while the background is blurred works well. It causes the bike to standout against the background.

Using Blur in the background to create contrast

Let me know some of your thoughts on background.

I’m going to lump a few things together in this secret but they all have to do with giving your photo a sense of balance.

The first thing on my list to give your photo a sense of balance would be symmetry. I know this is not a motorcycle picture but it was at a motorcycle rally—Bikes, Blues and Hot Rods. Does that count? If you can split your photograph in half and get the same on both sides you will have a beautifully balanced photograph. But motorcycles don’t lend themselves to this kind of balance as well as cars, so what do  we do?

Symmetry

The other thing that can give your photo a sense of balance is a repeating pattern or element to your photo. Repetition is a key element of design. Checkout Robin Williams book, The Non-designer’s Design Book for other elements of design that can actually help you with your photography as well.

Repetition

You can also think of balance like a teeter-totter. If you have a strong visual element on one side of the photo you need another on the other side to balance things out. Here is an example where the girl on the right is balanced out by the orange cone on the left.

Balance

Remember what we are trying to do is create a sense of harmony in the photo. But this rule can be broken, just like all the other composition rules. Here is a good example of where harmony was not my goal and I intentionally tried to create unbalance in the photo.

Unbalanced

The point is you need to know the rules if you’re going to break them. By knowing the rules you can better decide how to get the emotion you are going for by breaking them. The photo below already has a lot of tension in it with the motion blur, but we could add to that tension by cropping the photo in an unbalanced way.

Balanced

Unbalanced

Give it a try with your photos and see how the emotion of the photo changes.

By Tim Wemple © 2010
www.BikeRallyPhotography.com
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A good photograph is knowing where to stand. – Ansel Adams

A lot of times when we take a motorcycle pictures or any picture for that matter we just put the camera up to our eye and click away.  Ansel Adams said though, “A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.” If you want to be a good photographer it is going to require a little thought before pushing the button. We’ve learned now that we have to get down low first and then position the subject in our photo and one way of positioning the subject is to put it on the intersecting lines in the Rule of Thirds. But there is another way. It’s called “filling the frame.” You still want to keep the Rule of Thirds in mind, but in this method you want to get rid of all the distractions and really hone in on your subject. You simply fill the frame with whatever you are taking a picture of and leave out the rest. Simple, right? Yes, but we seldom do it. All it really requires though is a little thought and movement before pushing the button. You have to get close to fill the frame or zoom in.

Filling the Frame

This filling the frame goes for bikes, cars, people, you name it. I recently was at my son’s graduation and my mom and daughter wanted me to take a picture of them. The first thing I did was point the camera at them and shoot. I didn’t move closer, I didn’t get down a little lower than them, I didn’t do any of the things I’m telling you to do. I wasn’t in the professional mind-set. I was just documenting they were both there. Then I said to myself, “What are you doing?”  Here I am telling you guys how to take better photos and I just violate my top three rules. So I told them to get back together and I would try it again. I squated down a little, moved in close, to which they both protested your to close, and filled the frame. They just kept insisting your to close, but when I showed them the difference between the two shots they both agreed the second was  much better. The moral of the story is think a little and move a little, that is the fifth secret to better photos.

The other choice you have is to crop the image. Here is an example of a photo that does a fairly good job at putting the subject on one of the Rule of Third lines. But what if we wanted to crop this image so we filled the frame?

Rule of Thirds

You would get something that looked like this. Each photo has its own feel, its own emotion. The one above is a more joyous photo with all the saturated colors that are included in it. The one below more elegant and  glamorous I would say. It’s to bad I couldn’t have gotten her attention before taking the shot. I would have loved to have had her looking at me. But the reality is I was running down the street trying to get this one and it was all I got.

Just remember it is all about what emotion you are trying to capture with your photo as to how you might decide to crop it.

When taking a photo of a bike it is often difficult to get the whole bike in the picture without getting a lot of other stuff above and below it. This can be solved by using a wide angle lens, but you can also position yourself at a angle to the bike and fill the frame.

Filling the Frame

All the distractions are gone in this photo and the frame is filled with nothing but your subject.

By Tim Wemple © 2010
www.BikeRallyPhotography.com
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Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. – Ansel Adams

It’s my goal, at least in these initial secrets to better motorcycle pictures, to give you them in order of their ability to transform your photos. Keeping your perspective low, using the Rule of Thirds and knowing your subject will make a huge difference in your photography. This next secret though you may not think is all that  importance when compared to the other three. But I’m ranking it fourth because I believe it is a secret that can really make a difference in your photos as well as have some very practical implications.

The third secret to better photos is to take more photos—hundreds, even thousands at your next outing. More when it comes to photography is always better than less. If you don’t follow this secret the other three wont help you. In fact nothing I will tell you after this will be of much use because it really does take a lot of photos to get one great one no matter what you know.

I’m calling all these composition rules secrets, but in reality all of them are pretty well known. I just give them a little bit of a different slant because I’m primarily talking about motorcycles pictures at this point. But this one secret I’m telling you now truly is a secret or at least as close as I will probably come to a secret.

I think amateur photographers sometimes think that because a professional has had some training, or uses expensive gear, or has a crew of people, or for whatever reason, they just go out and nearly every shot they take is a keeper. This is however far from the truth. I’ve taken thousands of photos over the last few years and really only have a hand-full I would call great photos. Photography in many ways is a numbers game. When you see a professionals portfolio, or work in a gallery, it represents thousands and thousands of photos that have been taken over probably many years. Scott Kelby in his book “The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 3” says if you were to go out on a photo shoot and take 240 pictures and you got one great photo you would be doing good. He says, “A lot of folk are surprised (actually shocked) to learn that even most pros would be happy to come away with one really great shot from that 240.”

So what are the practical implications of this? Number one I think is don’t get discouraged if you go out and take several hundred photos and you only have one or two good ones. Even the pros have this kind of success rate. Number two obviously is to take a lot of photos. But not only that if you’re doing a shoot for someone make sure you don’t rely on just one location, have two, three or even four places lined up. I’ve found many times what I thought would be a great place to shoot just didn’t work for one reason or another, while another did. So plan on your percentages being low and take a lot of pictures from every angle you can, with every lens you have or can borrow or rent, in every location you can.

Photographer: Tim Wemple

Photographer: Tim Wemple

These two photos that I wanted to promote my website took 195 shots to get. That really is a pretty good ratio. My fellow photographer Don Leow and I started out though at another location I thought would work. It didn’t and if I hadn’t planned on going to two locations that day we wouldn’t have gotten any usable photos.  So if you’re going out to do a photo shoot I recommend always having at least, at the bare minimum, two places to take your photos.  At Daytona I took over a thousand photographs and really feel I only have four or five great shots. That’s just the reality of this business. What you find is being a photographer is kind of like panning for gold. You have to look through a lot of fools gold to find the real deal. I hope as we go through these secrets that you will be training your eye not only to take good photos, but to spot them too. A lot of what you will be doing is looking through mediocre photos at best looking for good ones and that is often were the real artistry comes into play. You have to know and be able to pick out good photos.

One more thought before leaving this subject. Why do you think that this information is not common knowledge and very nearly a secret? It’s because professional photographers don’t show their average photos to people, all we see are the great ones. I’ve heard it said, and truly believe it, that a photographer is always judged by their worst shot. If you want to be known as a good photographer make sure you keep your portfolio to your absolute best. When it comes to a portfolio less not more should be our motto. It can be hard, taking photos out is not what we like to do, but believe me it has to be done and every photographer needs to do it more, I know I do.

By Tim Wemple © 2010
www.BikeRallyPhotography.com
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In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice. - Ansel Adams

Number three on my list to better motorcycle pictures is ask yourself, “What is my subject?” I know it would seem if we were taking a picture we would know what our subject was but the truth is we often don’t. If you don’t have a clear answer to “What is the subject of this photo?” chances are you’re not going to get a very interesting picture. It’s not so much we don’t know what we’re taking a picture of, as it is we don’t think about how best to focus attention on it. The subject of the photo gets lost in all the clutter. So every time you push that shutter button ask yourself, what is it I’m taking a picture of and how can I best frame it or position it to make it become the focal point of the photo.

Here is an example of a photo I took at Daytona Bike Week that has a very clear subject.

Clear Subject

Even though there is a lot going on in this photo the girl’s eyes are clearly the subject of the photo. I did two things to enhance this and draw attention to her eyes. First I over saturated the colors of everything else in the photo but her eyes, giving a clear contrast in the photo between her eyes and everything else. (We’ll talk more later about how to focus attention with post processing techniques in later posts.) Before I did this her eyes kind of got lost in all the detail. Secondly I lined her up on one of the Rule of Thirds line which immediately draws your eyes to her.

Remember the best photos always have one subject and the more specific you can be about what you’re taking a picture of the better the photo. For instance just saying I’m going to take a picture of this bike is probably not going to result in a great photo.  Yes, you identified one subject, but you need to be more specific. What about the bike made you want to take a picture of it? When you can get very specific about what your subject is is when you can get the emotion as well.

It’s very much like writing. For example: “The dog went into its dog house.”  Very simple sentence that focuses on one thing, the dog. But there’s not much emotion in that sentence. So how do we give it emotion? By being more specific. ”The proud English Bull dog strutted into its emerald red dog house.” It’s still about one thing the dog, but there’s a feeling with the last sentence that wasn’t there with the first just by being more specific. When you can be more specific about what it is you’re trying to take a picture of the more detail oriented your thinking becomes. You start thinking about what would be the best angle to capture the subject, where should I place it in the photo, how should I position myself to get the best lighting etc.. When I say be more specific about your subject, what I’m really saying is think about the emotion you want to convey. You can see in the sentence about the dog I really wanted to convey the emotion of royalty and it’s reflected in my use of words like; pride, strutted and emerald red. That same principle applies to photos as well. When you start thinking about your subject and what emotion you want to convey you also start thinking about the context of your subject in more detail. When you do that you know you’re on your way to a great photo.

Also when I say the subject must be singular I’m not saying that every photo can have only one thing in it. What I am saying is that the “subject” must be singular, and that could mean many things would need to be in the photo, but they are all working together to get across what the photo is about or the feeling it is trying to convey.

Here is a photo I took at Bikes, Blues and BBQ in Fayetteville Arkansas with no clear subject as the one above. The subject really is the emotion it conveys by all the elements of the photo working together; the people strolling down the sidewalk, the bikes parked in front of the club, the people sitting on the curb, the lighting. All of it works together to convey one subject—a relaxing evening at Bikes, Blues and BBQ. Everything in the photo is relaxed and it becomes the subject of the photo. Now if I were to have had a sports bike screaming through the foreground of this photo the subject would have been different and all the elements would not have worked toward a relaxing evening.

Clear Subject

Photos can also be about things like color and texture. Here’s a photo with color as its subject.

Color is the subject of this photo.

Let me know your thoughts on this subject.

A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept. – Ansel Adams

This 2nd secret to taking better motorcycle pictures is one that  amateur photographers violate  on nearly every photo. Even professionals sometimes can be guilty of violating this rule. Don’t get me wrong rules are made to be broken, but you need to know what rule you are breaking and for what purpose.

The Rule of Thirds in its simplest form says never put the subject of your photo in the center. It seems so natural though when you’re looking through the view finder to put the subject in the center.  But in reality when you view that photo later your eye is not naturally drawn to the center. It is rather drawn to the intersection of lines which divide the photo into thirds. It would also seem that by putting the subject in the center you would have a greater sense of balance. But in reality it is just the opposite. So where should we put the subject of our photo?

If you draw two vertical lines evenly spaced across your photo (dividing it up into thirds) and then two horizontal lines (again dividing it into thirds) you get four areas in the photo where the lines intersect. These intersection points are the natural focal points of the photo. Also if you have strong line elements in your photo like a horizon, or edge of a building or wall, you may want to line them up with these horizontal or vertical lines as well.

Rule of Thirds

Here is an example of the Rule of Thirds with the lines on it to show you the intersecting points. When using the Rule of Thirds with a portrait always try to line-up one of their eyes with the intersecting point. I usually try to use the eye closest to me if their head is slightly turned.

Rule of Thirds

Rule of Thirds

Here is another example of the Rule of Thirds from my Bikes, Blues and BBQ collection. The face is obviously the focal point of this photo so I tried to line it up with one of the intersection points.

Rule of Thirds

Don’t forget you can sometimes crop an image and get your subject to fit with the Rule of Thirds. Few people crop their images, but it really can improve your photos—you just need to know what it is you are trying to accomplish with the crop. We’ll talk about this further in another secret to better motorcycle photography.

Now let me give you a slightly different twist on the Rule of Thirds. Motorcycles don’t always work well with the Rule of Thirds. If it is off in the far distance and you can place it on an intersecting point you should do it. The problem is we’re often to close and the bike pretty much fills the frame. If there is something of particular interest on the bike and you’re in really close by all means use the Rule of Thirds to decide where it should be in the photo. But there may not be an obvious focal point. So what do you do then?

What I like to do is step back far enough you can divide the photograph up into four equal parts and fill one of those parts with the bike. Just draw an imaginary line down the center of your photo vertically and one horizontally and then place the bike in one of the lower boxes. Unlike the Rule of Thirds I am not trying to place the focal point on an intersecting line but rather trying to fill one of the boxes with the bike. Remeber you want to fill it with the motorcycle. Also pay attention to the direction of the bike. You want to leave room in front of it. We will talk about lead room in another post.

By dividing the photo up into to four equal squares and then filling one of those squares with the bike you are essentially putting the gas tank of the bike on the intersecting point of the Rule of Thirds.

Always remember we’re trying to convey an emotion with our photographs. What emotion does the above photo convey to you? How would it have been different if the bike were in the center? By placing the motorcycle off center the photo becomes about something more than the bike, it has a feel to it.

The Rule of Thirds is just one ways you might try lining up the subject in your photo. We will discuss in later secrets things like filling the fame, lead room, what to do when you don’t have a plain backdrop like the photo above and when it is alright to break these rules.

Hope this helps. If you have anything to add to this please make a comment and maybe we can learn from each other.

If there was one piece of advice I could give to getting better motorcycle pictures it would have to be to get down low. There is nothing that will change your photos as dramatically as changing the view point of the shot. This secret applies to just about any photograph you take, but especially when it comes to motorcycles and hot rods. When you get down low the photograph automatically becomes more interesting. Why? Because we seldom see things from this angle. It can also give what you are taking a picture of a sense of power and dominance, which works great with motorcycles and custom cars. Remember we are trying to convey an emotion with our photography. When our photographs can convey a feeling, as well as show whatever it is we are taking a picture of is when we know we  have crossed over from just an average photographer to an artist.

This secret is not limited to just motorcycle photography. Taking pictures of people as well from a lower angle than eye level can make a dramatic difference in your photos as well. It can be a way of showing a man or woman is in a position of authority or power. I would say almost every photo you take should be taken from a different angle than eye level. If you try it I guarantee you will see it’s worth the effort to get down on one knee or if you’re taking a photo of a bike even laying on the ground. People may laugh, but when they see your photos the laughing will stop and you may have company on the ground at the next rally. Here are a few of my bike week photos that show how getting down low can change the whole feel of a photo.

I got this shot by literally placing my Canon 5D Mark II on the ground.

This is another shot where I placed the camera on the ground. Sometimes you just have to hope you got the shot because it is to low to look through the viewfinder.

Getting Down Low

If you’re opposed to laying on the ground you could try a product from Flipbac. It fits over a camera’s 3 inch LCD screen and reflects it so you can see your shot without getting on the ground. I use it with my Canon 5D Mark II in live mode, but it will also work on any point-and-shot with a  3 inch LCD screen. You can also use it to get shots from overhead. It does a great job of protecting the screen on the back of the camera as well.

Flipbac 3" Angle Viewfinder

By Tim Wemple © 2010
www.BikeRallyPhotography.com
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