Superbike Photography: Capturing The Beauty And Speed
Superbike Photography: Capturing The Beauty And Speed – Man is ready to collect pictures of his exploits. From the time of cavemen to their wall art to oil paintings to camera obscura to film to today with our digital cameras, we have an innate desire to create physical expressions of our memories, and when we now use phones I keep important photos. This need to capture moments and try to relive them later, rather than our wallets, seems to be undergoing a previously unseen level of growth.
Unfortunately, most of these images are captured quickly without putting much – or any – thought into the process and how to make the image as visually pleasing as possible. They are just frozen fragments of time. But they can be so much more.
Superbike Photography: Capturing The Beauty And Speed
If you’re one of those people who spends almost as much time looking at photos as reading text in publications, you might want to try your hand at taking photos as well. You can actually start doing this with almost any DSLR you might own. Who knows, you might find a new hobby to go along with your love of riding. After all these years, I have no regrets carrying cameras thousands of miles on my back, in tank bags or panniers. It was worth the effort.
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Finally, before we move on to photography tips, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that shooting work often requires multiple passes back and forth with the camera. Remind your riders to do it safely, even if it means pulling out a quarter mile or more off the road. Believe it or not, the most dangerous thing we do as motoring journalists is making a U-turn on a two-lane road. Visibility is limited, and the road is often quite narrow, making turning on larger bikes a challenge. Stay safe out there. (Another option is to hang out in a corner on a popular street and shoot everyone who comes.)
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a reason professional photographers spend a small fortune on camera gear, and you can run up a $10,000-plus bill in the blink of an eye. Still, and for the camera enthusiast, you don’t have to have the latest and greatest gear or the biggest sensor to take great photos. For example, during six of my seven years in MO, I was using an 8.2 megapixel camera. (My iPhone had 50% more megapixels for years.) Many of the photos used in this article were shot with a camera that was 13 years old when I retired it last fall.
My beloved Canon 1D Mark II N, battered and battered after 13 years of hard use and ready for retirement. The battery also had to be held in place with gaffer’s tape for the past six months while I waited for Canon to release the camera I had chosen to replace it with.
So, what do you need for action photography? If you’re taking shots of your bike sitting in scenic spots, any digital camera will do. Capturing action is what challenges your camera’s capabilities. First, fast autofocus is essential. Being able to move the focus point around the frame would be a plus as it allows you to be creative with your framing. Although I started shooting s with a camera that could only shoot six frames per second, eight to ten FPS is a very common starting point in cameras today.
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Sensor size is another feature to consider. Both full frame and cropped sensor cameras have their strengths and weaknesses, but for someone starting out in motorsports photography, a 1.6 cropped sensor will give you a longer reach with your lenses. They generally have the advantage of being less expensive than full frame cameras.
420 mm, 1/800 @ f/6.3. Lest you think you need an expensive camera to shoot motorsports, this photo by Eric Bostrom was shot in 2006 with a Canon 20D and a rented 300mm lens and a 1.4x adapter.
And now up to megapixels. Yes, having more megapixels allows you to crop your images further. However, as I learned when I jumped from the Canon R5’s 8.2 mp to 45 mp, having more resolution also meant more detail showing up the flaws in my technique. Then again, when the photos are sharp, they are amazing. Personally, I think anything from 12-20 mp is fine for most uses. In fact, I know many pro action photographers who are using 20 mp with the results I aspire to.
Finally, the question of DSLR or mirrorless. With a DSLR, you’re actually looking through the lens, thanks to a mirror that moves out of the way while capturing the photo. Mirrorless cameras have sensors that are exposed to light when turned on, and the photographer has an electronic viewfinder for framing while shooting. Viewfinder lag is one of the biggest problems facing mirrorless cameras, and naturally, more expensive cameras tend to have less lag. While mirrorless is certainly the future of digital photography, camera manufacturers are currently making the best DSLRs ever. So, there is nothing wrong with using a DSLR.
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70 mm, 1/500 @ f/5.6. This type of photo can be captured with any point-and-shoot camera – even a smartphone (though image quality may be compromised).
These are the basics, but we can get into the weeds discussing mechanical vs. electronic shutter (and it’s rolling shutter effect) or the best camera for shooting in low light or RAW vs. jpeg. If you get into photography, you’ll get there eventually. Believe me.
In my photography kit, I have three zoom lenses: 24-70mm, 70-200mm, and 100-500mm. However, most of my photos are taken with the 70-200mm, which is perfect for standing on the side of the road to capture passing bicycles. Being able to step back from your subject makes it easier to pan because you don’t have to turn your body as far or as fast as the bike in front of you. For head-on shots, a longer lens allows you to compress the background, giving it a more graphic look. Also, longer lenses have a shallower depth of field to blur areas of the frame that aren’t particularly in focus – something I do quite a bit in beauty shots.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many uses for wide focal lengths. While I usually use a wide lens for more scenic, landscape shots that involve being parked in a spectacular location, a wide lens can also be used for action. It is quite difficult to achieve. When the bike is shown large in the frame, you have to be very close to it, and when it is small in the frame, the slightest mistake with your pan can reduce the sharpness of the bike significantly. Also, it’s fun to be able to distort the subject by placing it too close to the lens and letting out the tendency to zoom out.
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150 mm, 1/1000 @ f/5.0. There is enough blur in the front tire to give a sense of motion. The way the double yellow frames give the rider a sense of speed.
Using a super-telephoto lens also brings its own set of challenges, the biggest of which is that, at the long end of the zoom range, tracking the subject can be a challenge. So if you see professional photographers at the race track, you’ll see them supporting their big mirror on a monopod. For my purposes, I tend to use 200-300mm the most with my longest lens, saving the really long millimeters for special situations.
When shooting with long lenses I lean heavily on technical tools like monopods and image stabilization. The ability to minimize false lens movement cannot be understated, especially in pan shots.
70 mm, 1/800 @ f/4.5. It’s as wide as my favorite lens, but it’s still long enough to magnify the bike in the frame, keep me a safe distance from the bike, and still give some spatial context.
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Although we still call it photography, it is actually a misnomer. As photographers, we are actually dealing with different slices of time in our exposures. The higher the shutter speed, the shorter the amount of time represented within the image and, therefore, the greater the appearance of stillness. Manipulation of appearance is where photographic skill comes into play. With enough light, you can shoot everything at 1/2000 of a second and get consistently sharp images of s. Unfortunately, they will be very boring. Everything will appear as if it is static, and the greatest attraction of motorcycling, it’s mobility, will be abandoned. So, the trick – and the fun – of shooting bikes is in managing stillness and movement