brasherphoto/blog: Superbike Showdown

A friend of mine has been bugging me for a while (sorry Ben) for some pics of his CBR1000RR. So while I was doing that, I thought may as well make a day of it and bring all the boys bike over for a Photoshoot.

All the Big 4 1000’s are there, a real Superbike showdown and a lone blue Kwaka 600.

4636cc’s of Japans finest in under 3 hours, I had my hands full.

The contenders of the Superbike battle are;

Ben: CBR1000 “LITRE”

Luke: ZX10R “Wheelie King”

Kirky: GSXR1000 “600’s are weak”

Tommo: R1 “The Yellowbird”

Proudly Supported by Vukie in “Blue diamond”

Finding a location was a stroke of luck, after a bit of a drive around what I thought was a closed industrial estate (the place was packed) we come across a small substation with a semi interesting background, time to get shooting.

I set up my trusty poor mans lighting setup consisting of a single 2 strobe setup, A SB600 camera left at full power (thanks Tommo) triggered by PT04 Radio Transmitter and a Sigma DG500 camera right full power triggered by Optical Slave.

As it was full sun, I had to really use every bit of power from the strobes, both were set to full power with the sigma zoomed to 70mm for a bit more punch. The placement of the strobes was really close to the subject so to not lose any power.

The whole point was to overpower the sun and give a nice dark moody sky, the old “sunny 16 rule” was tried first (1/125 @ f16 iso100) it gave a pretty good starting point, dropped it down to f11 and I was in business.

The good thing about doing a bit of a production line of bikes was the lighting setup barely changed at all, just move the bike in, snap away and move it away, rinse and repeat. 5 bikes in a bit over 2 hours was a good effort, time for some rolling shots.

My main man Steve hopped in my Ute (jealous of the power) and I layed in the tray, Ben followed in his red rocket and I snapped away, using the age old rule of speed relating to shutter time, we were going approx 35-40kph so I used a shutter of between 1/60^th and 1/3

0^th to get the shots I wanted. After a quick u-turn I explained to Ben we are going to have to act this one out a bit and I got him to tuck down like he was doing mach 10, the sad truth is his bike nearly overheated from going so slow.