Chris Benny Lights A Fire To Shoot A Dirt Bike

Chris Writes:

I was given the task to shoot this shot for the cover of Australasian Dirt Bike Magazine.
As the sun began to go down, we set up 3 580ex's and a single AlienBee 800.
2 580's to cameras right, a single 580 to the left and the Alienbee as a backlight.
We set the back of the berm on fire and got shooting.
As we were shooting for a cover it was tricky. Composition wise, it goes against every rule, but the client wanted the rider up close, with enough room for copy top and bottom.
There was a little work done in post as you can see in the video. I brought the riders leg to the forward position for a more aggressive look, cleaned up the background and added some more fire. It was also requested by the client for warm saturated dirt.

Shot details:

Canon 1Ds III
24-70L
1/250th @ f/9.0 - ISO100


ADB Behind The Scenes from Chris Benny on Vimeo.

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Lee Morris is a professional photographer based in Charleston SC, and is the co-owner of Fstoppers.com

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2 Comments

I particularly appreciate this shoot because I have been working on a photograph very similar to this. I did not think to light a hill on fire though ha! Hopefully I will get my shoot done in the next couple weeks and share the video....this stuff is not easy at all and I really appreciate the photoshop segment of this....Great stuff Chris! I want to see more; your port is sick

Dude patrick.... you're gonna need explosions! ahaha yeah right, you almost got pinched without a hill of fire! :)