Last week I went to lunch with my good friend Tommy Bolton of Tombo Racing. He has been promising me "soul food" for some time now. He took me and "Country Boy" to lunch on NE 23rd Street to a cool little hole in the wall restaurant owned by a friend of his. It was jam-packed and I was the only white person in the place! It was fun and I felt very comfortable there. Tommy knew EVERYONE and is one of the funniest guys I know.
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Upon leaving he pointed out where the "brothers" gather on Sunday night with their motorcycles. It was just a small car wash on 23rd, right in the middle of the action. I said "let's shoot that new motorcycle you just completed there!" He agreed.
Sunday morning saw me in Tishomingo photographing a story for Ride Oklahoma magazine, and the wind forecast for that evening was 15-25 mph hour winds. I was not too optimistic about shooting that evening, since I needed to use a big soft box on the bike to control the specular highlights. But that evening the wind was not nearly as bad as forecast, although still around 10-12 mph - a problem when you have a 42" strip softbox mounted to a light stand. I often see these behind the scene photos of magazine shoots in California and New York, and they have these huge soft boxes, sun scrims, all kinds of things at their outdoor shoots and think "you just cannot do that in Oklahoma, ESPECIALLY in March!" All your equipment would soon end up in Kansas.
My solution on Sunday was to scrounge enough volunteers to hold the one softbox on the bike, and then use bare strobes for the rest of the shoot. In about 30 minutes we had drawn quite a crowd of bystanders. Rap music was playing, a couple of dozen tricked out motorcycles were parked around, about 100 people were milling about in the background, and I was again the only white person in about a 2 mile radius! That was OK however, they were all very friendly and we had quite a fun time at the shoot.
