1973 Yamaha XS650 | Studio Photography | BTS

Every signature series created by Tom at Purpose Built Moto gets more extravagant and detailed. The latest bike does not disappoint. This Yamaha XS650 dubbed (by myself) chrome dog was one of the hardest things I've had to photograph. With this bike being a signature series, I had to make sure that the photos reflected the quality of this bike. For the first time in a long time, a photographic studio was booked in Burleigh called studio One76.

I had never photographed anything chrome like this before and tried to research through the University of Youtube. Unfortunately, this yielded no solid results. Luckily I was going to be photographing four bikes in the studio, allowing me enough time to dial in the lighting.

For the shoot, I used my Sony A7iii with the Sony 70-200mm lens and chucked on a Polarising filter (which helps a lot with reflections just have to adjust accordingly with lighting). For lighting, I had 2 Goddox flashes and some 60cm soft-boxes.

Due to the bike being chrome, there were a few elements I had to watch. The first is making sure the reflections do not have any objects or people in the background. To stop this, I used a polarizing filter. The polarizing filters are for reducing reflections and increasing saturation. As someone who prefers to spend more time getting it right in-camera than on the computer afterwards, this would assist my style. I also used my 70-200mm lens to get back as far as I could and moved the bike for each shot to adjust for elements in the reflections.

Although the studio floor had a few marks, even more by the time we finished constantly moving around the bikes. The photos came out great, have a look at the gallery below, or check out the full build bio on the Purpose Built Moto website.