Photographing Bicycles

I am by no means a photographer, but for now I am very pleased with my results. For years when I completed a bike the method was to look outside, try to determine whether or not the light was good, and then find the best place to lean the bike for pictures. I would search for the best tree, wall, fence, train tracks, or any other number of things that a bike could be leaned against, and then I would take several dozen photos–hoping that a few were good enough to put online. Once the photos were on the computer I was always disappointed by the result. I had worked weeks on a bike that was gorgeous in person, but whatever it was leaned against was not exactly complimenting the frame. A couple weeks ago while looking through some NAHBS galleries and admiring the lighting and clean studio backdrops that the bikes were photographed in front of, I decided that I wanted to learn to take similar photos of my completed bikes. After several hours of research on studio photography and many YouTube clips I made a short list of the items I had to buy:

• Lighting-  I bought the cheapest soft box continuous light kit I could find.  The kit included three soft box light and stands for about $150.
• Backdrop- I found my backdrop from B&H photo for about $60.  It is a very large seamless piece of black paper 9 ft wide and about 30 ft long.  As simple as it gets!
• Camera- I already had a camera so I didn’t need to buy one.  I have the Nikon Coolpix P7000 shown here,  although it is a compact camera it has most of the adjustability as a high end DSLR.

In addition to the bright overhead lights in my shop I used two soft box lights positioned on stands pointed slightly downward at the bike from both sides.  I did everything I could to keep the black paper clean but even walking around with socks I couldn’t help but track some dirt onto the backdrop.

Any guesses to how it is standing up?