Photo of the Week: Timothy Burkhart

I chose this photo because of the alternate angle and the lighting. The fisheye from above accentuates the pipe as a potential danger in the situation and you can tell how close he actually came to hitting it. The lighting is optimal and was achieved using only two flashes. Sometimes the key to a successful photograph is just finding an unusual angle.

“This photo is of one of good friends from here in Chicago, Ryan Wayne, doing a tight wall ride in Joliet, IL Ryan is someone that I ride with probably more than anyone else here in Chicago and we have been friends for a bit; despite that it seems like we don’t really shoot too many photos together, but recently we have been trying to be a bit more productive with our sessions.

We shot this photo on a little late night street session in downtown Joliet, IL riding with Anthony Loconte and Chris Zidek. Joliet is about an hour southwest of Chicago and is pretty much only known for it’s county jail and also the casino that is in the center of the whole town. It has a bit of a industrial era small town feel and is fairly deserted at night, which lets you pretty much ride whatever you want. We found this tight little wallride set up almost right out of the car, it wasn’t a super crazy set up, but was fun enough to play on. It was in a parking garage with really low ceilings and to make matters worse, on this particular wall there was a huge pipe hanging from the ceiling. Wallriding was a bit of a squeeze to say the least.

I set up two speedlights for the shot; I’ve been trying to dial back flash shooting lately and be more creative with one or two flashes opposed to using all three that I own for everything. I tried to shoot this with a 50mm while positioned lower to the ground first and get a more formal non distorted flattened out image, but it just looked too bland on this set up and didn’t really accentuate the low ceilings and the pipe hanging down. I threw on my 16mm fisheye and tried to workout a different angle, and had the idea I wanted to be above Ryan. I grabbed a garbage can that we found in the garage to give me a more bird’s eye perspective of the set up and I was wedged up against the ceiling while shooting. I positioned one flash at 1/2 power just out of frame on the bottom left of the image laying on the ground angled up at Ryan..pretty much right under him, then I had another on a tripod to the top left of the frame at full power to light the rest of the scene. It took a few attempts to get Ryan under the pipe without clipping his head, but after that we got a shot that we were both psyched on.

Nikon D800
Zenitar 16mm f/2.8
1/250
f/8
ISO 800
Nikon sb-28
Nikon sb-800
2 Godox Propac PB820 Battery Packs
AlienBees Cyber Syncs
Post processing done in Photoshop CS6”

See more of Timothy’s work here.

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