Your bike
The machine in your own garage: how to photograph it, and how each style of bike looks as art.
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There's a gap between liking motorbike art and liking art of a motorbike. A poster of somebody else's machine is decoration. The one in your garage, with the mark on the tank and the cans you fitted yourself, is a portrait. These pages cover both halves of getting there: taking a photograph that's worth making art from, and what good art of your kind of bike actually looks like.
The eight styles, in one line each
The Paint Shop works from one photo and gives you a choice of eight looks. Garage Oil is a classic oil painting with warm light and visible brushwork. Cafe Ink is a flowing ink line drawing on warm cream paper. Blueprint is white technical line art on cyanotype blue. Race Poster is a vintage art-deco race poster in bold flat colour. Garage Noir is dramatic silver-gelatin black and white. Pop Print uses screen-print halftones and electric colour blocks. Watercolour has loose washes, pigment blooms and the white of the paper showing through. Speed Sketch is charcoal with motion lines, the machine on the move.
Getting a photo worth using
A phone camera will do. What makes the difference is the two minutes before you press the button. Stand off the front wheel at about 45 degrees and crouch to knee height. Pick soft daylight, an overcast day is easiest, and roll the bike in front of something plain like a wall or a hedge. Keep both wheels fully in the frame with a little space around them, because a wheel that is cut off cannot be put back. The photo guide goes through each step. If the picture is already right as it is, you can print the photo unchanged instead.
The short answers
How to photograph your bike
To photograph your motorbike well enough to print, you need three things right: the angle, the light, and the background.
The reading, in order
- How to photograph your bike
- Motorbike art, and what makes it good
- Art by bike style
- Cafe racer
- Scrambler
- Bobber
- Chopper
- Cruiser
- Tourer
- Adventure
- Sportbike
- Dirt bike
- Classic
What these pages keep concluding
Read the style pages end to end and the same thing keeps happening. Every one of them describes a shape, and then describes a specific machine that wears the shape slightly wrong, which is the bit worth having on a wall. That's what the Paint Shop is for: one photograph of one bike, made into art, not filtered, so the aftermarket exhaust and the dent stay in. The preview costs nothing and carries a watermark, so you can decide whether it worked before any money changes hands.
And after that
The stage that follows this one is the gift: Buying for someone who rides, when they already own every tool and two pairs of gloves.
Written by Craig Fearn, Throttlefolio. Last updated .
Keep reading
- The gift
Buying for someone who rides, when they already own every tool and two pairs of gloves.
- How to Photograph Your Motorbike for a Print-Worthy Shot
To photograph your motorbike well enough to print, you need three things right: the angle, the light, and the background. A phone camera is plenty - t…