Pics of Your Bike at Night

[Calliway]

Since I am sitting in bed sick with the flu and an ear infection I figure I will put a few tips on how to take good pictures of your bike at night.

First it comes down to the camera you have. You dont need to have a fancy expenisve camera but a regular 35mm camera wont do what I am going to explain. If you are using a film camera you will need a SLR camera.

If you ahve a digital camera like I will believe most of you have then as long as it has some adjustablilty you can take great shots at night.

Make sure you have a little tripod with you for stability reasons. Your picture will be very blurry without a tripod especially if you dont have image stabilization on your camera.

The first thing you need to do is find an area that you really like and want to capture your picture. The bike, as beautiful as it is, is only part of the picture.

For the pictures you are going to turn off your flash so some sort of external light sourse is needed if it is really dark. That source can be a highway light. You don't need much more and that highway light is sodium so it gives that cool orange glow to everything. You want that light to be on the bike and not your back ground.

Flashes work if you want to get an instant on the camera but the flash tends to bounce back off the paint and give you hot spots and only light up the area that they hit. So to counteract that you will turn off the flash and open the shutter for a longer period of time. That will let the light in instead of a big bang of light.

So how do you turn the flash off? Most cameras will have a button that will allow you to cycle through the different flash settings, one of those settings will be the off setting. Turn it off.

The other setting you are looking for is the "night" settings. You may have a night portrait or a night scenery setting as on the Panasonic cameras (like mine). I think Olympus cameras call it Starry Night. This night settings keep the shutter open longer. On SLR cameras there is a switch that allows you to manually set the shutter time but since the invent of the digital cameras they have made is user friendly by taking away the numbers and giving them fancy names.

So find your spot
Park your bike under some lighting
Set up your tripod
Set your camera ont he night setting
Turn off the flash

Now you should have a timer on your camera. They usually have a 2second or a 10s delay. Set it to either one. Push the button and let the camera do the rest.

You use the delay so that the camera will have stopped moving before the picture is taken. Using these settings if any light source moves it will leave streaks. So if a car goes buy the tail lights will streak across your picture, the sodium lighting will create a glow.

See attached example.


I took that picture with the settings I described above. You can get real lcool results. If you look in the "Inspire Me" thread you can see the bike pics with the red tracers.

I hope this helps. I know that there are more experienced photographers out there but these are my tips for easy night time pics.