I have decided to redo all my bike pics. I have taken pics of my collection as the bikes are finished as a group and individually. My question to the board is - Would you rather see the studio shot or a shot with a more natural background??

Keep it warm had it done right . Perfect GT, perfect photography. I cant find his original thread but he reposted some of the pics in this thread.
check it
http://www.vintagebmx.com/cgi-bin/ultimate...t=024827#000002

Dan W Rockford IL

get a bunch of hot naked chicks to model with them...but dont post the pics here......trust me.

Tom, those really are stunning pics that are way beyond the average white-background studio setup. Would you mind sharing some of your secrets with us as to the setup conditions the studio used?

Personally, I am most curious about:

the color-fade backdrop (was there a digital trick, or just a painted backdrop to show the color fade)

the lighting, espcially for the close-up shots.

was it a film camera or digital?

The studio obviously has experience shooting objects rather than people.

Thanks guys, I never even saw this thread.

The pics I had taken were done professionally. The company - Stage 3 Productions - here in the Detroit area does high-end photography for the big three. He's right by my place of employment, so I figured I'd ask. I had fully expected him to say no, but he was really excited about it. He had never photographed a bike before.

So on the photo shoot day, I drove there with my bikes, he told me to just drive inside the building!!??!! I did, and WOW! It was huge inside!

To give you an idea of just HOW BIG, this is the actual studio we shot the bikes in.

That big overhead light was 60 x 15 I think. It was massive and he lowered it down just above the bikes. Then he set up all sorts of hot lights poijting in different directions to get the "indirect" light. He had huge pieces of white board, and gray board proped up to give the chrome 'depth'.

The camera he used was a CanonEOS-1Ds Mark II. He said it was roughly $10K for the camera (a little over a year ago). He mounted the camera and these huge lenses to a floating pole and he got the pics by positioning the pole, sighting it in, then clicking remotely.

Each picture was 100mb!!! But he reduced the size and gave me all the shots in 25mb size as well as further-reduced size so I could manage them on my home PC.

He took about 150-200 pictures in total, but our agreement stated that I could select 25 total pics and have them put on a CD-ROM.

He spent eight hours on a Saturday photographing 4 of my bikes. The total charge was $460.00

I was totally impressed with how serious he took it and his meticulous process made for great results.

I plan to use his services again when I have at least four new bikes for him to shoot. Thanks again for the kind words.

It sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider the hundreds of thousands he had into his studio space and lighting, I think you got a deal. Some commercial photographers I know won't work for less than 200/hour. I think you got a deal.

February and March are the low months for most portrait photographers, and they typically work for less than a commercial photographer. Find one with a decent studio before the senior/wedding season, and you'll probably get a good deal.

That's dirt-cheap, especially for that quality. I just spend half that for pics of my 2 kids, which took about 30 minutes of their time, and I only went home with 3 images.

I might have to cross on the ferry and drive over there someday this summer.

Thanks for sharing the info.

My studio bike shots were done at a local photographers studio. He doesn't normally do industrial work but rather everyday portraits. But he was hip to my ideas because he's also into old bikes. I took 6 bikes and we basically did a budget shoot with no changes between each bike ie; one set-up, one lighting formation and one angle. He did them all in an hour or so, charged me $100 and I walked out with a disc of pictures.

Muxster does fantastic work, Randy's are great as well.

I was never out to findone with "the ultimate setup"...like Randy I started going to portrait studios, and none of them really seemed interested.

How I stumbled upon Stage 3 was by giving up on portrait studios and doing a web search on "product photography". Stage 3 came up and, like I mentioned, it was first on my search results because it was closest to my work - 0.6 miles.

I never even knew something like that existed in the Detroit area. They have NO SIGN on their building.

So I kinda lucked into finding them.