Spinning Instructor

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of taking part in a spinning class.

About 12 to 15 of you gather in a small room, you choose a static exercise bike and a stern looking spinning instructor walks in. The Instructor is in charge of the tempo and the music and he or she barks out instructions to ease or to crank up the resistance.

The deafening soundtrack coming out of the speakers will ruin your musical tastes, especially if you have chosen a bike near the speaker, a real rookie error.

Sounds like fun? Well in the middle of a Danish winter that is as close as you are going to get to the real thing of going out on your bike and staying fit over the winter.

Chris Froome multiple Grand Tour cyclist once had a job as a spinning instructor and he described it as the worst job ever!

CONCEPT

I took up spinning in the winter months to try and keep fit for the summer cycling season, apart from ruining my taste in music, it did keep me fit.

I had a great spinning instructor in John who I thought had a great face with a really determinded look, I thought he would amke a great subject to photograph so after a bit of persuasion he agreed to let me take some portrait's of him.

GEAR

I obviously knew the location, no daylight, lots of flourescent tubes for light, pretty nasty….so the only option was to take a lot of lights with me and I had a deadline, 45mins to setup, shoot and break the set. This was the only time slot available between sessions. So all the Broncolor lights came with me.

Lighting wise, I wanted to introduce some flare with a light coming into the lens, something you would normally want to avoid. My usual favourite light; a deep 80cm gridded Octabox to light the model with. The light I used for flare was the most difficult to set up as I didn’t want to shoot on a tripod, I like to move around my subjects which makes positoning a light to flare into the lens difficult. If you fix the camera position on a tripod you can fix the light in position as well.

I shoot with my favourite camera as always my trusted Nikon D800 with a variety of lens.

CONCLUSION

Overall I was pretty happy with the end result some subtle cross processing effect in Photoshop and some high pass sharpening helped to get the look I wanted.

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