Strobist: A white bedsheet anchored to the ceiling on one side and drawn across the room to a pair of light stands provides large diffusion panel over the subject. A second black bedsheet created a simple background on which to place the bike. Two medium softboxes with an AB1600 and AB800 placed above the sheet and fired down provide the light. You might ask why use the softboxes if the sheet is diffusing the light? Double diffusion baby. Start spreading it out and softening it up and you get even better looking highlights on that shiny bike surface. Finally a small SB-80DX slaved and fired through a grid added just a slight highlight to the bike seat to keep it from fading in the blackness. A healthy dose of Photoshop was needed to hide the fact that my makeshift studio is ever slightly too small for something as big as a bike. Took out any distracting background elements and evened out the blackness to make everything nice and clean.

The baby seats on bikes here are mounted right behind the handlebars. Most of them have little windshields for the baby, too. Caught this one after visiting the Anne Frank House. Not a moment later, a mom came whizzing by with her baby riding shotgun.

I was originally trying to capture the hoisting beams and slight foward tilt that many houses in Amsterdam have. Like the hoist in old-school American barns, the hoists on the house were (and still are) used to move furniture and large items in and out of the houses. Apparently the stairs are built narrow, steep, and winding to save space. (Houses used to be taxed based on width, hence the narrow profiles.) Anyway, the forward tilt allows the goods to be hoisted in without banging against the facade.