On the Road with Nikon

Sandro is a larger-than-life advertising photographer whose work I’d been admiring for years. One day a producer I had been working with for years contacted me to ask if I’d like to produce a job for Sandro. They thought the job would be right up my alley — I have a big background in motorsport having been a motorcycle racer in my youth.
I said yeah, let’s do it. I could see the whole picture and knew exactly what we were getting into and I felt I knew how to make it all happen.
We had a decent budget, but I knew that since we were going to create our own motorcycle race, there would be many details to cover — to get the shots and keep everyone safe.
Nikon was introducing their new DSLR professional camera with a higher light sensitivity than previous sensors had. The objective was to showcase how little noise the files had in low light. It was Sandro’s idea to capture something that moves very fast and to capture it in lowlight with a fast Sutter speed and high ISO setting.
His idea was to capture a Moto GP type motorcycle in the moment when a rider leans over to make a corner. In this case, he wanted to have sparks come off the rider’s knee protector. This would be the primary shot. We also wanted to get six other shots to make it a story about racing. We did it all with style.
It was my job to secure a raceway, anywhere in the USA, secure a group of professional motorcycle riders and all support crew, as well medics with an ambulance on the track each day. The motorcycles and riding gear could have no sponsor’s logos, so I had all of the bikes repainted for the shoot as well order custom riding gear for each of the riders, head to toe.
Rain tires were secured, since we knew we’d be shooting in the wet. We needed a tire changing team to manage all of this, just like in a real race. We had backup motorcycles (painted, of course) in case a rider went down — which happened once during a morning warmup. That was the real deal. The rider was fine and jumped right back onto the backup bike. The clients and agency had never experienced anything like that before and were concerned! I assured them all was good, but reminded them that motorcycle racing is dangerous.
After extensive research across the country we choose Brainerd Raceway in Northern Minnesota. We assembled about 30-40 people total, photo crew, Moto team and support, agency and client, and we shot for about 5 days in between downpours from the sky! We had our low light, for sure.
The client for Nikon was ecstatic with the results, Sandro was walking on clouds, the account exec from the agency was happy their client was super happy . . .
Everyone involved was proud and pleased to be part of this exciting project.