Using motion, light and bike tricks in photography

Like many people in the Corridor, I took my new-found free time at home as a cue to buy a new bike.

My partner also bought a new bike and it is both of our first time since childhood owning brand-new bikes. We're both pretty excited about them — so it was only a matter of time before I used them for a shutter in place photo.

I've been thinking about a few ideas for photos for a while, but between wanting to stay at home for the photo and a minor knee injury I am going with some very simple ideas that can be built upon, especially with more time and space to execute them.

This is another look at motion and light — this time featuring bikes.

A pretty common way to show motion on a bike would be to select a slow shutter speed such as 1/30th of a second or so for a casual riding speed and to stand in place and photograph a passing rider panning the camera with the motion of the bike. If you nail it just right you get the rider more or less frozen in time and a blur of whatever background and foreground you have.

This is great and fun to do — but I wanted to go for something else since I was just using the driveway and relying on my partner's willingness to give me a hand.

I have always liked the motion of light in a time exposure, whether it be a car traveling a winding road through hills, dense traffic on the freeway, embers from a fire (as I previously showed in shutter in place) or even just a person with a flashlight or headlamp walking through the frame of a landscape photo.

For no reason other than that, I wanted to try it with the bike and then my partner and I made up the rest as we went.

These photos could certainly be stronger and I may make another attempt at something similar on a ride away from the house (maybe somewhere a bit more scenic), but these are what I got the other evening and I'm happy with them for now.

A streak blur of lights on a passing bike is seen as the bike passes from right to left through the frame. For this photograph, I looped a short line of decorative string lights around the frame of the bike while also using a headlight and taillight on the bike. This is made with a 15 second shutter speed on a tripod but you can certainly play around and vary it quite a bit depending on your subject matter. (Andy Abeyta/The Gazette)

For something different I took the same string lights and put them in the spokes of the bike's front wheel and photographed the wheel spinning with a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second. The different lines you see that stop and start represent the distance traveled of each individual bulb over the duration of time. (Andy Abeyta/The Gazette)

Another photo of the spinning bike wheel also at 1/15th of a second, this time without the lights and using a headlamp to light up the spokes and show the motion of the spokes and lines of reflection on them. (Andy Abeyta/The Gazette)

For another view, I photographed the shadow of my bike while riding. I took the photo at 1/30th of a second to show the blur of the road surface while still trying to have some frozen motion in the rest of the photo. This is a photo I've made a number of times on a skateboard (it looks especially good in the daylight or at dusk if there are leaves on the road of sidewalk) but thought I'd try real quick on the bike. I like how it came out for something simple, focusing just on shapes. I can't necessarily say I recommend riding with one hand while you take photos — but I've tried worse ideas. For any photographers (or employers of mine) wondering, I did this one with my personally owned camera that is ready to retire anyway. (Andy Abeyta/The Gazette)