Vulcan Death Grip In The Woods

Well, not really. Not even close; but when you have a bike with a model name like Vulcan, you just kind of go with whatever catchy, nerdy phrase you that comes to mind.

Anyway, down to the picure details:

A friend of mine has this bike that I always hear about yet never see because he never takes it out when I see him and whenever I'm over at his place his garage is always closed. So I started working on this Automotive project for myself, trying to build a portfolio to create a brochure from. I shoot him an email and he's up for letting me take some photos of the bike.

We head out early on a Sunday morning, get all the way to our destination, and I realized I broke the cardinal rule of portable flash. CHECK THE BATTERIES BEFORE YOU LEAVE! - No problem, I have spare AAs in my bag right? Wrong! Oh man... The entire purpose of this was to test mixing available light with flash in broad daylight. So I do what anyone in this situation would do: I switch gears into shooting nothing but available light and I save what little juice the batteries have (they weren't totally dead, just not recycling fast enough to beat out the power save mode on the flash) for when it realy counts.

We put the bike in a cleared area surrounded by woods and let the sunlight do it's 'thang while I did my 'thang. Came away with some nice shots like the one above and this one here:



You can see more photos of the bike as well as other automotive work I've done in the Automotive Gallery on DIGImmortalPhoto.com

I also did some shots of the owner on the bike. This is where I brought out the flash again and hoped for the best. I knew with failing batteries I would only get off a limited number of shots before I risked doing some kind of damage to either the batteries or the flash itself. So I worked quickly, or at least as quickly as the recycle time would allow, and got some nice photos for my friend to add to his photo albums.

Here's what a little mixing of available light and flash can do:


And here's a little HDR that I did:


I'm about to go from one extreme to another with my next entry. This one was motorcycles, the next will be fluffy things.

More soon!
-Rob