After years of taking photos of motorcycles, I think I might finally be figuring out what my shot looks like.

It’s funny because I’ve photographed bikes from just about every angle over the years. Front three-quarter. Side-on. Rider coming towards the camera. Rider disappearing into the distance. Close-ups of engines, badges, wheels and all those little details that look great when you’re standing next to a bike with a camera in your hand.

But lately, I keep coming back to something much simpler.

I get across the other side of the road, drop the camera really low and take the shot from almost ground level.

And I bloody love the results.

---

There’s something about seeing a motorcycle from down there that just changes it.

The bike suddenly looks bigger. More imposing. And rather than looking like a photograph of a motorcycle, it starts to feel like something more

The road becomes part of the picture too.

You get the disappearing curve, the surface of the tarmac in the foreground and whatever happens to be around you filling in the rest of the frame. Sometimes it’s a great stretch of countryside. Sometimes it’s a hedge, but mostly for me it’s an industrial or old building.

If I’m honest, it’s not particularly interesting to most people. But somehow the low angle makes it work for me.

And that’s probably what I’ve enjoyed most about discovering this style. It wasn’t something I sat down and decided was going to become my thing.

I just kept taking the shots.

Then I started noticing that the photographs I liked most were often the ones where I’d propped my camera up at ground level.

---

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Maybe it’s simply that after years of photographing bikes, you start to stop looking at the motorcycle and start looking at the photograph.

• Where is the light?
• What’s happening behind the bike?
• Where does the road lead your eye?
• What happens if I move six feet over there?

And, perhaps most importantly, what happens if I get the camera down another foot?

The other thing I like about these shots is that they work really well online.

A strong motorcycle photograph needs to catch your eye pretty quickly when it appears amongst hundreds of other images on a website or social feed. The low viewpoint seems to give the bike that little bit more presence.

It makes you stop scrolling. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping!

I’m still experimenting with it, though. I don’t think I’ve found the shot yet. And perhaps that’s the fun of it.

Your photography style probably isn’t something you sit down and choose. It gradually appears after you’ve taken hundreds, or thousands, of photographs and started noticing the ones that make you think, Yeah… that’s the one.

For me, right now, that means getting across the road, getting the camera as low as I dare and waiting for the bike to hit the right spot in the frame.

If you see a bloke lying his iPhone at the side of the road, then running like mad back to the bike as the timer ticks down, there’s a good chance it’s me.

I’m probably just looking for my next signature shot.