Bike Rack

I almost didn't shoot this picture.

I was walking down a Montreal street snapping pictures with my wife on a cloudy day in the fall of 2005 when my wife turned and said to me, “You’re not going to pass that picture up are you”?  She pointed to this bike rack on the side of the road, it was horribly lit, the wall was ugly and there was coffee cup lying on the ground. I thought to myself that it’s a really great composition and proceeded to shoot several variations of it and thanked my wife for pointing it out.

This picture is one that made me start to change my view on the pictures I shoot. In the days of film I would have kept on walking and looked for something less cluttered with better lighting. However I was really intrigued by the composition and when I got home I started playing with it in Photoshop. It took me many hours over several weeks to complete the picture but it’s one that I’m very proud of.

Photoshop Stuff

I created a total of 8 layers by cutting masks for the bike rack, the tire, the tire rim, the spokes, the chrome parts, the green fork, the cables coming off the handle bar and the brake handle.

The first major change was to get rid of the horrible background. Whenever I go out shooting I look for different things that I might use as a background like brick walls, fences and cloudy skies. I save them in a folder on my computer and seek them out for times like this.  I tried several different walls and settled on a black brick wall that I shot in Newport Rhode Island.

My next challenge was the bike rack; there was no direction of light which made it look flat rather than round and tubular. I achieved the roundness using the Bevel, Emboss and Contour tools in Photoshop which also enabled me to give a direction of light to the image. I used the same technique on the green fork to give it some shape and a direction of light. I worked on giving the bike rack some pizzazz by modifying the color and increasing the saturation.

The spokes on the wheel where very faint the only way to bring them out was to cut a mask for each and every one of them. I gave them more definition and contrast by making them a neutral grey. The other layers were just minor color and brightness changes.

There was a time where if the lighting wasn't perfect I wouldn't click the shutter, now I never pass up a great composition.

Thanks to my wife for pointing this one out to me.