I don’t do a lot of portraits. I prefer to shoot things that don’t move, like chairs and windows and such. But I wanted to try out some new lighting techniques I stole learned from a photography blog recently.
So I recruited my friend Rick and his trusty hawg, and headed down to Spanish Banks around dinner time the other night. The challenge with shooting intricate, reflective objects like motorcycles is to use a light source that can get into the dark corners of the bike without blasting too much light on the chrome and metallic paint. The solution is to use a large light source, which in my case was a big white sheet clipped to a backdrop stand. We bounced a light off it, added one on Rick and one in the background and shot frames as the sun set. And here’s the result:

I like this look, because the subject sort of glows against the background but doesn’t draw attention to the lighting itself. Plus it came out of the camera almost ready to publish. A little tweaking in Photoshop, and we’re done like dinner.