Photography in the Fast Lane

Life and photography are going well here in sunny Spain (I can't complain about the weather either!!!) and although winter is traditionally a quiet time of year here, I have been doing a variety of different photo jobs to keep me interested! One of them was a commercial first for me - motorbike photography.

I have done a little bit of this sort of thing privately before, and some commercial work with rally cars but a commercial shoot at a motorcycle race track was a new experience and one that I loved. Covering a track day run by Dienza Events for a high end UK-based corporate client, I spent the whole day shooting people with a huge variety of experience on motorbikes - from high-speed knees-on-the-ground stuff to beginners working with instructors.

The event was held at the Circuito de Cartagena, here in Murcia, and the participants were out for a fun day and to take home some great shots to remind them of it!

Some of them began the day with far more motorbike experience than others and they were testing my panning skills right from the get-go: The aim of these shots is to get plenty of background and wheel spin to show speed, whilst keeping the bike and rider pin sharp. Achieved by panning the camera with the bike and shooting at around 0.5 to 1.0 sec, depending on the speed of the corner.

Meanwhile I was also getting shots of the less experienced riders working with Dienza Instructors - some of them trying a motorbike for the very first time; plus shooting some little detail shots and close-ups of the bikes in the sun. Enzo and his team had a wide variety of bikes available - from 125cc starter bikes, 400's and up to superbike territory. By the end of the day, and thanks to some fantastic instruction and expertise from the Dienza boys, even those who had never ridden a bike before were going round the track like racers! I tried to get plenty of variety in the shots for them; a bit of knees down action while they played "get up close to the photog!" ( the trick to these shots is a fast lens and a brave heart as you crouch on the inside of the apex of the corner, as close as you can get!! ), plus some wider establishing pictures - after all this wasn't just any old track day, they were in Spain in glorious weather whilst the UK was shrouded in November grey.

The corporate motorcycle racers weren't the only ones on a learning curve through the day - I found that all my techniques improved with practise through the day, and I am looking forward to my next day with Dienza to keep improving my pictures. I should also mention that I learned a valuable lesson - running in gravel traps whilst carrying cameras is pretty tricky!!




Ready for their evening meal, I prepared a DVD slideshow complete with music courtesy of incompetech.com for the participants to watch, and everybody got a copy of the DVD to play at home, with files to print the pictures. See below for a shortened version of the video...