The Story Behind the Photo
July 2022: Bicycles, Tricycles, or Unicycles
JOY RIDE by Wendy Mahaney
JoJoyy
The story behind the bicycle photos I submitted for July's assignment begins about a year ago. I am not sure if you know this but I am actually the person who suggested bicycles as an assignment. It was sort of a joint effort between Michelle Ray and myself. We each came up with a few ideas to submit and the bicycles idea was accepted and expanded into Bicycles, Tricycles or Unicycles.
My initial idea for the image would have been to park a bicycle in front of a flower shop, have flowers filling the basket and flowers surrounding it as well. I suspected though that it may end up being too much about the flowers and not enough about the bike so I scaled it back a bit.
Since we label our images with our names and either 1 or 2, I hadn't given much thought to what I would name it until you asked me. I think I like "Joy Ride" for a name as flowers always bring me joy. I added the little sparkling dragonfly at the last minute for a little extra pizazz. There is also a story behind the bicycle itself too. It belongs to a friend of a friend. I mentioned to a co-worker that I had a bicycle assignment coming up for photo club and that I would really like to photograph a ladies bike with a basket so I could fill it with flowers. She offered to check around with her many friends to see if someone had one. The next day she gave me the name and number of a wonderful lady named Britta. I contacted her and the next thing I knew, I was at her house picking up the bike for a weekend. After I saw the bike, I went to the store to pick out just the right flowers.
I used my new Canon EOS R6 camera with my 24 - 105mm L Series lens at 45mm. I set it on ISO 100 with an aperture of f5.6 at 1/60th of a second. I waited until the tail end of the golden hour because I wanted a slightly longer exposure to hopefully pick up the rich colors. I also used my husband's shop lights, (two LED lights raised slightly above ground) to create a little more drama with shadows and highlights. It's an HDR image made of 3 photos in which one was exposed correctly, one over and one under exposed and then eventually merged together. The photo was taken on my back patio where I have several pots of flowers growing - I might have mentioned that I love flowers.
I used Photoshop to merge the images and to make some fairly minor adjustments to light and color balance. I cropped the image but only slightly to give it good balance.
I hope you enjoyed my "Story behind the Photo" and thanks again to leadership for choosing my image.