Harley Davidson Photoshoot

Hey Guys,

A little while since I last wrote a blog post. So what’s been going on?

Well I launched a new website strictly for my wedding work, pushing that hard at the moment because I absolutely love shooting a wedding. It’s not my main focus but I really do enjoy shooting such a fun and joyous occasion. Secondly I’ve been shooting a lot more lifestyle work and that’s what I’m going to show you today and try to explain a little how I managed to get the shots.

First image of the series.

So below we have Rowan Haughey also known as Hawkeye Moto and we’ve developed a new but very cool friendship, mainly over his motorbike collection but none the less he’s a very cool chap. He’s actually building a BMW cafe racer for the Bike Shed London show currently so there will be a new series of images for when that’s completed.

The first image I wanted to create was this, It’s setting the scene for what’s to come and let’s you see all three core parts of the series straight away. The image is essential in order to tell the beginning of the story. Here we have a rider, a Harley Davidson and an old dusty dirt track. One thing I must be honest about is that I set the focus for the bike and really I should have kept the focus on Rowan but I still feel it’s a very strong image and is the perfect opener for the series.

I then wanted to cover my basis with a couple of portraits of Rowan, something that is crucial to get a good set of images. We were shooting under this ancient cool bridge called Devils Bridge It’s a very cool location and I believe that it was actually built by the Romans so it’s pretty old. The portraits are really striking and I’m really happy with the outcome. They looked great out of the camera and then came to life with a little edit. I try not to over edit images at all so it's more about a little tweak of colours or crush the blacks a little. I’m going to put all the images in a slide show at the bottom of this blog so you should be able to see everything then.

With portraits being my background I’ve never really concentrated on the tiny details of a shoot but more trying to tell the bigger picture. So I knew I had to go in closer and get some detailed shots of things like the logo of the bike and maybe Rowans rings. That’s exactly what I did, must admit it was slightly strange for me to be concentrating on things like rings but I did it. I’m fairly happy with the result. I will need to get better at this though. I will look at different ways of catching those tiny but important details that can take a series of images with just a few images bunched together to tell more of a story.

To finish off the story I know that I need a few images “in action” so to do this I wanted to get Rowan riding past me and I also had some smoke bombs so we played with that idea. Although I don’t know whether it was the camera or me but it’s very hard to shoot a moving motorcycle with a smoke bomb while using off camera flash. We got some great shot’s and while I’m happy with them and will use them for Instagram and my maybe in portrait portfolio. I didn’t feel they fitted the story as much as the shot of him flying past without the smoke bomb. Despite the fact that saying that I do think the shot that looks a little post apocalyptic and does really work well but I purposely de-saturated the image so it looks like the road has kicked up a load of dust.

There’s so much more I could talk to you about this shoot and how I came to get the shots and how I edited them. Out of interest would you guys be interested in a ‘how I edit my images’ kind of blog? It would take a lot to bring it together so I would want to know there’s some interest in it. Guys once again thank you very much for the support on my website and my socials. I do check to see how many read this and I’m always blown away from the continued high numbers and time everyone takes to read them. I’ve added all the images to the gallery below so you can see the whole shoot and would be great if you could drop me a message and let me know what you think.

Much love as always

Twist x

www.twistyimages.com

@twistyimages