Sometimes things don’t quite go to plan . . .
During the European Press Introduction for the Kawasaki Z650, we headed down to the South of Spain for some ‘guaranteed’ winter sun. The time allocated for us to shoot the press kit images, on location, saw the heavens open and rainfall of almost biblical proportions, so with no alternative, we had to find a solution.
The ‘fix’ came in the shape of our own mini studio – in a deserted supermarket car park.
We had been expecting sun and had only two Profoto B1’s and a few light modifiers at our disposal. I had planned to use these as fill lights but, using the dismal external conditions to our advantage we created our own small studio.
As you can see from the image below the external ambient light was horrible – flat and grey and with thunderstorms of varying sizes making frequent appearances, conditions were far from ideal.
By over-exposing the ambient light, (minimal and flat as it was), any detail in the outside was not recorded and this allowed just enough of the light we had on the inside to fill the darkest shadows created by using the flashes.
With such dark surroundings and the camera mounted on the trusty manfrotto tripod, I was able to use relatively low powered flash and long (for me) shutter speeds to get the desired effect.
For the main shots, one head was set to bounce light from the ceiling and one to create some shape and contours, particularly the sculpted tank area.
As our shooting time diminished, I decided to create one image using the good old ‘zoom’ technique, and with an exposure time of 1.6 seconds, with the bike centred in the frame, the zoom was activated giving an image that is not to everyone’s taste, but which brings something slightly different to a portfolio
Words: James Wright 2017
Images: © Double Red
Not for publication