Posing on Motorcycle

Can anyone tell me some tips about posing on motorcycles? Some examples of

photos, some articles.. anything about this subject. Thank you.

Not sure that I have seen any books that talk about posing people on motorcycles. I would hang out at the nearest bookstore and look at motorcycle magazines to see how people were posed in them in both the ads and the articles.

Do it with the bike parked. Make sure you use the center stand, if it has one. Otherwise the model may fall off during the shoot.

Just a word of warning: I've collected now for more than a year samples to a folder called "bikes and babes" and I honestly have to say it is the worst genre I've ever come across. In 95% of cases it looks like the photog has been put to a room with a bike and a half nude girl and he really doesn't know what to shoot. So the girl takes an unnatural ridiculous pose and the bike gets cropped from here and there.<p>

A piece of advice: Google and go thru mags and select the photos you like and do those. If you don't know what you want it will be just like a described above. Plan beforehand!

I agree w/ Juha-- other than fishing magazines, motorcycle magazines tend to use some of the worst photographers.

 

Use all your comp rules w/ the bike and the model. Don't shoot the bike square, have it at a 10 to 40 degree angle to the lens. Try to have the light source as large as possible to avoid dots in the paint-- it's really reflective, and can give you horribley distracting reflections in it. Bouncing a strobe off a wall, or using a white wall as a bounce for the sun on an overcast day is nice.

 

Make sure the model creates diagonals w/ her legs and torso-- don't let her sit straight up.

Go to a few motorcycle dealers and pick up some brochures. Odds are they will have been produced by ad agencies for manufacturers. Decent budgets means better photographers than you might see in biker mags. However, don't discount the ads in the mags; They will be good for ideas. Much depends on the purpose of the photo. Portrait? Glamor? Product shot?

 

Lighting a bike to show it off is a lot like lighting a car. Large reflecting surfaces carefully placed.

If that is something you are interested in then it might be a good idea to build a "swipe file"

with a section just for car/bike posing. The old way to do this would be to pickup some

magazines that have those type of photos, clip them and put them in a book for ref. Seeing

as this is the day of digital, you could find photos and download them, put a page layout

together (I used photoshop), and print a page with 12-20 shots on a page and put them in a

book. Any time you see something new that you like, add it to your book. It serves for

studying posing, lighting, sets, accessories, and clothing. I read that somewhere and that is

what I did.