Before photography became my career, before the briefs, budgets, lighting plans and production schedules, I was just trying to make things that looked cool. In 2015 I'd recently moved to England with a Pentax K3, a zoom lens and probably far more confidence than my ability justified. I wasn't really making money from photography yet — although I'm fairly certain I was telling everyone that I was a professional photographer who just happened to be working as a chef on the side.
I desperately wanted to build a portfolio, so I started searching London for interesting people making interesting things. Eventually I found Untitled Motorcycles. I called them. Someone actually answered. After what I remember being a fairly disastrous first conversation, I somehow managed to convince Adam from Untitled Motorcycles to let me spend an entire week in their workshop documenting them building custom motorcycles.
No strobes. No ND filters. Broken autofocus. Very little understanding of cinematography.
Just a camera and an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm. Every morning for a week I'd turn up and photograph whatever was happening. On the final day we took a couple of the motorcycles out around London and spent the day riding and making photographs. Looking back at the footage now, I can see everything I didn't know.
But I can also see something I sometimes miss. There were no clients to please, no deliverables, no campaign objectives and no question of whether something was commercially useful. I just made things because I thought they looked cool. And somehow, amongst all of the mistakes, I made photographs that I'm still proud of today.
Maybe good work isn't always about knowing exactly what you're doing. Sometimes you just need to want it badly enough to show up.
Field Journal Ep.17 — Untitled Motorcycles. Thanks for watching. #Photography #CommercialPhotography #MotorcyclePhotography #DocumentaryPhotography #PhotographyJourney #Photographer #BehindTheScenes #LondonPhotography #CustomMotorcycles #Filmmaking #FieldJournal #CreativeProcess #PhotographyStory