Custom Chopper

I had fun today photographing a really cool custom made chopper. It is actually a cross between a dirt bike, flat track racer, and a chopper. The owner is Monte Frank, AMA Pro factory supermoto racer, and built by Tony at www.tfabmetal.com. We were doing this shot for a national motorcycle publication.

Brought it into the studio yesterday and set things up. I started working on it last night but had brain fade. The pictures were just not turning out like I wanted. It was a very long day.

I slept on it and came back early and refreshed and came up with these two shots, plus lots of detail shots that help tell the story of the bike for the magazine. Next week we are doing a location shoot with the bike and some girls to give it a sense of "place" for the story.

This is certainly my idea of fun!

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Performance Cycle

My friends at Performance Cycle hired me to photograph their building for an industry award as one of the top 100 motorcycle dealers. I was glad to help. We planned the photograph for a nice fall evening. They emptied the parking light and I set up my lights inside and out. We needed a few extra lights outside to enhance the look of the building.

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After all the lights were set up, it was time to wait for just the right sunset. Closing time came and went and we still waited. Some of the employees couldn't figure why we were waiting so long, until well after sunset, but the I had worked with the owner many times before and he was very patient. After about 40 minutes of waiting the sky had darkened enough to be balanced with the interior lights and outside. I only had about 10 minutes to get the final exposures. In the end, the owner was extremely pleased with the shots.

A Little Roller Skating Fun

My daughter Emily is involved in a fast growing sport, womens roller derby. She has a blast at it and and they foster this image of rough, tough, ready to rumble girls on skates. She and I came up with this photo shoot concept to make it look like they were fighting. Amber, our makeup artist and the second girl pictured, created all the fake blood, bruises, cuts, etc. We had a fun time at this shoot and could barely get through it because we were laughing so hard!

Hooters

We recently completed a job to photograph several Hooters girls for their calendar contest. It was the dead of winter so we couldn't photograph outside, and their budget would only allow us to shoot in their restaurant or my studio. No budget for props or makeup artists.

Lindsay was unable to make our shoot at their restaurant so she came to my studio the next day for this quick shot. She was very inexperienced but after much coaxing and reassuring, I thought she did very well.

A Blue Tutu

Emily came up with the idea for this shoot in our studio. I had hoped to shoot all the bikes for this calendar on location, but the weather turned cold and the models were not too wild about shooting outdoors in skimpy outfits, so we decided to shoot indoors instead.

Again we had our makeup and hair artist Amber take care of getting Emily fixed up. My regular assistant Wayne Srotyer helped with the lighting. Click on the image below for a larger view.

Kaiser's Ice Cream

As part of the 2008 Performance Cycle calendar, we decided to photograph a beautifully restored 1926 Triumph motorcycle in front of one of OKC's retail icons, Kaiser's Ice Cream store. This building has been around for well over 50 years and is now run as a non-profit fundraising business by a local charity. To shoot at this location required permission from the charity board. I wanted to make an iconic photograph representing a classic time in Oklahoma history.

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This was our first time working with a new makeup artist and hair stylist, Amber. She has worked extensively in Hollywood and her experience shows. We set up the lights an hour before sunset, with strobes inside and 5 strobes outside. I wanted to blend ambient light with our own lighting for this shoot. Our models ran a bit late so we did not get as much ambient light as I would have liked but the customer was still very pleased with the photograph.

Performance Cycle 2008 Calendar

Sorry folks, I have been remiss in posting updates to my Intelephoto blog. Ride Oklahoma Magazine, one of my new ventures last year, has kept me quite busy instead. Not to mention a 3 week vacation to Australia, lots of photo shoots, the holidays, bla bla bla. You know what they say about excuses!



Last fall I spent quite a bit of time and energy putting together a 2008 calendar for Performance Cycle in Bethany, OK. The owner Gerald Tims has dozens of old motorcycles in his collection and we decided to put together a calendar of pretty girls and his old motorcycles. But instead of the "girl in a bikini on a bike" theme, I wanted to do something a bit more classy. Of course our goal is to highlight the bikes, and the girls are props to make the bike look even better. I will be posting pictures from the calendar over the next few weeks and explaining briefly how we came up with the concept and the photos. My daughter Emily Murray was instrumental in most of the photos and works with me as the designer for the magazine and creative director for many of our photo shoots.

The photo above was taken at Farmers Market in downtown OKC. I had scouted out the location the day before and invited Sharis Fajardo, the model, in for the shoot. Gerald sent an employee with the bike and we set up early in the morning for the shoot. We kept the lighting fairly simple on this one - just a single Nikon SB-800 fired into an umbrella to camera right, behind the bike The natural light was great so no need for extensive lighting. Just use what was available and enhance it just a bit. Someone asked me recently how many lights do I normally use for a photograph. My answer is "however many it takes". I have done shots with 10 lights and shots with one or no lights. I normally try to find and take advantage of existing light and then use my strobes to just enhance that light to create the mood I am looking for. I like how this turned out and Sharis is looking very good.