Adrien Van Beveren HRC Shoot

Adrien was part of Yamaha for about 15 years or so and when they decided to finish the Dakar programme it was quite sad that he had no team to continue with. Fortunately he has become the part of the HRC rally team and I had the pleasure to shoot him. As he lives in Andorra that’s where I went to shoot with him. All we had was one day and we must have shot some portraits with the bike, without (in the “Studio”) and obviously some various action shots as well. 

Adrien fortunately had some spots to shoot at in mind and checked them before I arrived, so I did not scout anything and we just shot as much as we could. He even prepared more spots that we could ever use and we ended up to shoot at only one of them (just moving around, up and down the hill finding different spots) as it just takes some time when you want to do it properly, shoot it with the flashes and not to have it all the same. 

It was after a while when I shot with Z7ii instead of Z9. It was just because after updating the Z9 to 2.0 firmware the trigger for the flashes did not work properly as I did not update it, but luckily it was working with the Z7, so I used that. I shot everything with the HD200 Pro Jinbei flashes from phototools.cz - here is the link. That I used for couple of last shoots, when I needed to travel a lot and did not have space and time to carry around the big HD610. It has obviously much less power, but it is still enough even during the daytime and it is much easier to carry it around for the shoots like this, or during some event when you do not really have time to carry the big ones around. 

After some classic portraits where he was just standing next to the bike, we did a few that he was sitting on a ground and then we started to shoot some action. I was still not 100% happy as the landscape and everything was super cool, there was some good action stuff, but I was just looking for something “Special” to make the shooting different and even better. And then we saw couple of horses around and that was IT. Even though it was a bit random as they were running around and I could not plan it 100% properly I believe these shots made the difference and set the whole vine and feeling of the shoot. At very last we added some water splash shots where I got completely wet, but I was so excited that I did not mind that and it was definitely worth it. 

We got back a bit late and so we left the shooting of some portraits for the next morning. We went to his new house that is still being built and should have had plenty of room and some nice grey walls to shoot with. What a surprise it was when we arrive and it was full of people working there and whole place was packed with some construction’s material. I mean it was good for him that there was something moving and that the guys were working there, but not the best for us. So we ended up shooting in one super tiny, but dark room, where I sued the flashes trying to make the background as dark as possible and separate him from the “walls”. There was obviously some work to do afterwards in the postproduction to make it all black, but luckily the auto masking feature just work super well theses days, so it was not that difficult and time consuming thing to do.