Gary Bischoff shoot

Last year when I was working on my Bike Geeks portrait project, I ran into a guy in Durango who helped me at an inopportune time. I had flatted while on a road ride out in the country. I had an extra tube but the stem was too short for my aero rim. I sucked it up and started the long walk back to town. About a mile into my walk home, this guy shouts out and walks down his driveway towards the road. He asked me if I needed a hand and I explained my situation. He introduced himself as Gary, said that he could probably help and took back up to his garage where he was working. I stepped into his garage to find about 10 mountain bikes, a few motorcycles and a couple road bikes. He wasn't kidding that he might be able to help. It turned that he is a pro downhill racer and was sponsored by Intense and Maxxis. After chatting for a bit and fixing my flat, I approached him about being a subject for my Bike Geeks project. He was game and we scheduled a little shoot.

Gary is a super nice guy and really pasionate about riding. Even though he is a downhiller, he loves any kind of riding. He's pretty happy as long as he is on a bike. He mentioned something about cycling being a drug to him. I went off of that for my portrait of him. I came up with the idea of him "injecting" his bike in his vein like an addict would do with heroin.

In order to illustrate the idea of Gary "injecting" his bike into his veins, I had an oversized syringe connected to his downhill bike with a tube. The syringe is actually used to bleed air bubble from hydraulic  disc brake lines. The tube and syrringe were both filled with bright green dish soap. The dish soap was good because it had little air bubbles in the tube which gave it a bit more definition. I applied a little baby oil on his skin to make it shine a bit more. In retrospect, I wish I would have sprayed him with water or glycerine so he appeared more sweaty.

I made a lighting diagram using a cool freeware called the Online Lighting Diagram Creator. Sorry for my rudimentary mountain bike, but you get the picture.

The main light that lit most of the scene was a strobe boomed over and slightly behind Gary. I used a large softbox to disperse the light over the whole scene. I then placed a strobe with medium softbox resting on the ground pointed at Gary's face. This filled in the shadows from the overhead strobe. There was a strobe on a stand pointed at the bike hanging in the background. The dish soap in the tube was pretty bright but I thought needed a little more pop. Yes, I could describe some really fancy Photoshop technique that I executed for the desired effect. In reality, using a strobe fired from behind Gary to highlight the tube worked pretty darn good. 

Let me go off on a tangent. Photoshop is cool...no its REALLY cool. But we can't forget that you can do small simple things in front of the camera that are super easy, take 5 minutes and achieve the same results as 30 minutes of PS work. 

I did do a little photoshop work by adding a high pass filter for some increased contrast. A bit of dodging and burning to enhance the highlights and shadows. 

Well, that's it. Getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere turned out to be a cool opportunity for a fun photo!