I did a very technical shoot for Stooge Cycles this week. I’ve worked with Andy on publicity for these bikes before, but the new range features more colour options, and we wanted to present a very clean image of the bikes to show off the differences in colours. This meant photographing the different bikes and frames from identical angles, which can be very difficult when the frames are suspended from stands on pieces of string!
Lighting shiny objects always provides a bit of a challenge too, and getting clean spectral highlights can be tricky. On some jobs in the past, I’ve faked nice reflections in photoshop, but that is incredibly time consuming, and never seems entirely convincing. So it’s best to take the time to get it right in camera. For this I suspended a 2 meter long strip box above the bikes to get a clean highlight on the crossbars, and I placed two 1 meter octaboxes on either side of the bike to fill in the shadows, light the wheels evenly and provide some nice highlighs on the downtubes and forks.
In post-production, very minor retouching was needed to make the bikes look their best, and to cut out the bikes so we could give Andy a range of background options.