One very important piece of advice that I’ve taken during my career as a photographer is to shoot what you love, even if you’re not getting paid for it. It’s called personal work and if you create something interesting it could lead to opportunities down the road for paid work. Such was the case with a recent editorial shoot I did for Long Island Pulse magazine back in April. The creative crew at Pulse was interested in running a photo essay of professionals and executives who ride motorcycles and asked me if I’d be interested in shooting it. “Are you serious? Of course!” was my reply. The art director said that he immediately thought of me for this shoot because he remembered a photo from my portfolio of my friend Tom riding his custom motorcycle over the Robert Moses Bridge on Long Island. I was very excited to shoot this assignment for the magazine based on that first shoot with Tom and Jared mostly because I was able to photograph a different style of person riding their motorcycle (doctors, lawyer, artist, real estate, photographer and custom pool designer). Also because since I was basically given full creative freedom (thank you!) I was able to experiment a bit during the shoot.
One example of my experimentation during this shoot was while photographing the riding photos. To get these photos, my assistant Dan was driving my truck while I was sitting in the far back area with the rear window rolled down. I was more or less hanging out the rear window in order to get some of the photos that I wanted. The road along Ocean Parkway that runs the south shore of Long Island isn’t exactly perfectly smooth either. So while we are driving at approximately 30-45 mph, depending on where we were on the parkway, the difficulty level increased a bit too. So, here I am, crammed into the back area of my truck, bumping up and down the parkway, and shooting with a shutter speed of around 1/15 – 1/30 to get the motion blur in the background. This wasn’t an easy task and required A LOT of shooting. I was lucky to get a few sharp frames from these. I honestly would have preferred to shoot the riding photos on a less traveled road where we could have drove much slower, which in turn would have made my life a lot easier. It is what it is.
A part of this assignment that made it a really good time and more interesting was traveling along the north shore of Long Island along Sound Avenue. Although eastern Long Island is pretty much farms, quiet towns, and more farms with the occasional shopping center, there are plenty of great locations to shoot at. The photo in the tear sheet below was created along Sound Avenue at Southold Beach. Chris (left) suggested that we check it out and see if there was anything we could get from that spot. I’m always open to suggestions, especially from people who know the area much better than I do, so we checked it out. This location worked perfectly, with the exception of high winds coming over the water, thanks to a very simple and minimalist feel to the portraits that I was able to create there. The photo below was shot with the Phase One and lit with the Elinchrom Ranger through a 69″ Elinchrom Octa.
Sometimes your client won’t always pick your particular favorite photos, which is fine, to each his own. With that in mind, below are a few of my favorites from the Motorcycle Diaries shoots.
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