A Guide to Bicycle Photography
Photography can be easy or complicated depending on what you want to get out of it and how fussy you are about the results. This blog post will get into some basics on photography and how that might apply to taking photographs of bicycle infrastructure and the people using it… Hopefully it inspires others to start taking better photographs of the good things happening out there…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/30s ISO: 2000
A blurred rider is a common way to evoke a sense of movement in a still photo. Above is a good example of someone riding a bicycle across the frame and appearing blurred by virtue of the slow shutter speed (1/30s). There are other settings in this example that could have been better. The ISO value (2000) is not typical for such a shot on a bright day but I got away with it… The pink building provides a simple but interesting backdrop, making the blurred rider stand out as the clear subject. Maybe if it had been planned and not opportune, I wouldn’t have had the shadow of the pole in the way, but with some imagination… He could be crossing a finish line…
This post is a bit of a departure from my normal posts, but the header for my website says streets, bicycles, photography, so this one will focus more on the photography, explore some technical and creative aspects of taking photos, and share some photos I like or that can demonstrate a point. I don’t normally include the details of the gear or settings I use as it’s not the typical focus of this blog, but for this one, I’ll make an exception as it might help with understanding... If this post helps others take good photographs, that would be great. The more good photographs we have of people riding bicycles, the better… This photo below does a good job of compressing the scene a bit with a longer focal length, bringing the downtown buildings and mountains a little closer in the frame than they appear in real life and adding interest by virtue of the fact it’s not how you see with your own eyes…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 55-200mm F3.5-4.8 Lens Focal Length: 86mm Aperture: F7.1 Shutter Speed: 1/1250s ISO: 320
The Exposure Triangle and Creative Effects
I’m trying to keep this somewhat simple, but it’s hard to avoid getting into the details… On a good day, you could set the camera to full auto with face tracking and come away with a decent photo. However, making your own decisions on a few things instead of leaving it up to the camera means you know what you're getting, and it’s not a pleasant surprise if the camera made the right choices.
The exposure triangle is one of the most basic principles in photography, and the triangle includes aperture, shutter speed, and sensor sensitivity (ISO). If you change any one setting, you will change the exposure of the image to be brighter or darker. However, these controls have other creative uses that have to be considered too, and ultimately, if you want to achieve specific things with your photos, one or all need to be set carefully. This image below is exposing for the bright parts of the image and intentionally underexposing the shadows to kind of frame the guys in the light… It might have been better a split second later if they were both lit up… This could be achieved in camera playing with various settings if you have time, but can also be done easily after the fact with post-processing…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/450s ISO: 125
Most cameras will have a manual mode that allows you to set everything independently. They will also have modes that allow you to set one or all elements of the exposure triangle to auto, or a range in which the camera can pick from. The figure below outlines some key variables I have available to me and how they can be used. With respect to equipment, I have a Fujifilm X-T5 and three lenses I use with it providing focal lengths from 8m to 140mm. I also have a Fujifilm X100VI which has the same sensor and functionality with a fixed 23mm lens and I have this purely because it’s small and easier to take with me if travelling light. Note that focal length is affected by sensor size so this isn’t comparable to say lenses for a full frame sensor system. It’s easy to work out equivalency, but no need to get into it here.
I use Fujifilm cameras as they provide tactile dials to control aperture, shutter speed, and ISO without having to dive into menus or use the screen, and I can change my settings while the camera is switched off, but everything here is applicable no matter what camera you use. The Fujifilm cameras provide a nice balance of size, affordability, and image quality, but the tactile controls are the primary selling point for me.
Now that’s a lot of numbers, variables and notes so let’s break it down one by one… If not interested in the technical stuff, you can skip to the photos at the end…
Aperture and Depth of Field: Aperture is a way of describing the size of opening at the end of the lens. It’s described in F stops, with the lower the number meaning the larger the opening. In terms of the exposure triangle, the size of this opening determines the amount of light that hits the sensor, and hence exposure. Aperture also impacts the depth of field in the image, or in layman’s terms, the amount of the scene that is in focus, which you might want to adjust for creative reasons, like a portrait with a blurred background, or in my case, a person riding a bicycle with a blurred background… A lower F stop creates a shallower depth of field, but this is not the only setting that affects depth of field…
Shutter Speed and Motion Blur: Shutter speed is the length of time that the shutter is held open for, expressed as fractions of a second, unless you keep it open for longer than a second… The duration of exposure or in other words, how long light is projected onto the sensor, affects exposure in that way. This setting is the main tool to freeze or blur motion if someone is riding (or walking or driving) through a scene. If something is moving sufficiently fast during the time the shutter is open, it will appear as a blur in the image...
If you want a moving rider to be sharp, increase shutter speed, especially if they are passing across your frame. If you want them to be blurred, reduce the shutter speed. Like that first photo in this post, I find 1/30s works pretty well for someone riding a bike across the frame. It’s different if they’re riding away or toward you.
If you want to blur someone in daylight, the problem is you’ll let too much light in by slowing the shutter speed. You’ll need a way to reduce the light coming in, which is done with an ND (Neutral Density) filter, essentially sunglasses for your camera. In that first photo, I had a variable ND filter and had it set too dark, and the camera bumped the ISO up to make it brighter. That was the mistake, but again, it turned out okay…
Sensor Sensitivity (ISO): This setting was more important when people were using film, as the film had a set sensitivity or reaction to light. With digital cameras today, I pretty much leave this on auto, and it can compensate for most shutter speed or aperture decisions without destroying the image. If it goes too high though, the image can lose detail, but you can also set a limit on how high it will go. If everything is set manually, the ISO value will affect how light or dark an image is. Creatively, images typically appear cleaner and more detailed at lower values and more grainy and some might say film-like at higher values, albeit the loss of detail at very high values is usually undesirable.
Depth of Field, Focus Point, and Focal Length
Aperture is not the only thing that affects depth of field. The chosen focal length and where you focus also have a role to play…
Starting with a wide shot: Let’s assume we have the focal length of the lens set at 16mm, a wide shot that should get all of my subject in the frame if 3m away. At the widest aperture I have of F2.8, the person, their bike, and immediate surroundings will all be in focus, but any distance objects will be out of focus. If we reduce the size of aperture to F5.6, almost everything will be in focus, apart from any object immediately in front of the camera. While depth of field is infinite, focus isn’t achieved until 1.29m in front of the camera. This reduces to 0.57m if we reduce the aperture further to F11…
Zooming In: If we zoom in to a 35mm focal length which would give us a closer view of the rider, and set aperture back to F2.8, we reduce depth of field considerably from the previous example, to the point, if we’re focussed on the persons face, we’ll get that all in focus, but maybe their front or rear tire, or a kid on the front or back of a cargo bike might be out of focus. We would need to reduce aperture closer to F11 to increase depth of field enough to make sure we got everyone in focus. You could also say that setting the aperture to a higher number also provides a greater margin of error if you (or the camera) misses precise focus…
Focusing further away: The focal length of the lens is one factor in determining depth of field, but the focus distance is another. If we move the focus point from 3m to someone say 6m away, you can see depth of field increases relative to the example above. If we keep the lens at 35mm, the depth of field at F2.8 increases from 0.84m above to 3.58m. Reducing the size of the aperture means pretty much the whole scene will be in focus. So the lesson here is it’s easier to get the scene in focus if the subject is further away… Or maybe better stated in reverse… If you focus on something close, depth of field will reduce…
Let’s zoom in again: The most I can zoom in with my lenses is to a 140mm focal length, so keeping the focal point the same as above (6m), when we increase focal length to 140mm, the depth of field will reduce again. It’s important to note that long focal lengths, relatively close focus points (6m is quite close for 140mm), and larger apertures (smaller F numbers) are a great recipe for creating dramatic shots with very blurry backgrounds and foregrounds, but it can create challenges for getting the rider entirely in focus… and worth noting that expensive large aperture lenses are often desired due to that shallow depth of field effect they give, but you can still achieve very shallow depth of field with long focal lengths and moderate aperture values…
In summary:
If we increase the F stop number or increase the distance to focus point, we increase the depth of field and the amount of the scene that is in focus.
If we reduce the F stop number or focus on something very close we will reduce the depth of field and less of the scene will be in focus.
My Starting Point
My base settings on a typical day are aperture F5.6, shutter speed 1/500s, and auto ISO (Up to 3,200) that gives me a pretty good starting point. If it’s extra bright, then the shutter speed may increase to 1/1000 or more, if it’s darker then I may reduce shutter speed to 1/250s without introducing much motion blur.
Other Equipment
Other important equipment worthy of mention has been my Brompton bicycle, specifically with the Wotancraft Pilot camera bag mounted on the front, a combination I can take almost anywhere, whether riding from the door, taking it in the car, on a train, or a plane… And whilst out riding, I can quickly access my camera if something interesting appears in front of me. Here’s a photo from Ottawa of that setup. In this photograph, aperture was set to F2 to focus on the bike and blur the background, so ISO is low and shutter speed is high to expose it properly… Note that the back of the bike isn’t entirely in focus as I was focused on the front of the bike and depth of field was very low due to close focus and large aperture…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F2.0 Shutter Speed: 1/4000s ISO: 125
Bike: Brompton C Line Urban 2 Speed Camera Bag: Wotancraft Pilot Brompton Edition
Lets Look at Some Photos
This is getting on a bit, and I haven’t spoken to things such as composition, metering modes, autofocus, the use of jpeg v raw images, and post-processing to name a few other important things. Those might be topics for another post sometime. The point of a photo, though, is to capture attention, maybe just through composition, an interesting subject, maybe to tell a story, or in some way convey a message to its audience. Here are some photos from the last few years that help convey some of the topics covered above…
Long Lens: One of my favourite images, the long focal length compresses the image so we can see a lot of what’s going on all the way from foreground to background. We can see it’s a local street bikeway, and we can see the hill rising in the distance, the seven people biking add interest and demonstrate that such bike facilities can attract a high number of riders, even where there is a steep hill. The guy in the bright red jacket was a happy addition as he rode through the frame as I had my back turned to him and because he’s far in advance of the focus point he’s blurred relative to the others. Pretty typical aperture value and shutter speed is good enough to freeze motion for people riding away from camera, and there’s not a ton of bright light so the camera raised the ISO value to expose properly...
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 50-140mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 129mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/200s ISO: 2000
Weather: Nobody rides in bad weather they say… Fewer maybe, but a photo is a great way of demonstrating that people of course do ride in bad weather… They say good light is everything in a photo, but I really like this photo and the light is pretty flat… I like how this one shows the rider waiting his turn, maybe contemplating his bike ride in the snow as he looks down the protected bike lane, the snow frozen in motion in the air. It’s early morning, and not that bright, so I opened up the aperture a bit to F4, but I wanted lots of the snow in focus too, so I couldn’t open it all the way to F2. Normally, I could reduce shutter speed to reduce the ISO and, in theory, get a sharper image, but the goal was to freeze the snow, and I figured a faster shutter speed was needed…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F4 Shutter Speed: 1/500s ISO: 3200
Interesting people: I love this photo and the story it tells… The old guy on the bike being passed by the younger guy with zero effort on the electric scooter. It says something about the success of electric micromobility… Pretty normal camera settings… It’s a bright day and the relatively high shutter speed freezes the action of people crossing the frame…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-E4 & XF 27mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 27mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/1000s ISO: 250
Interesting messages: Not an amazing photo by any means, the people biking are very slightly blurred, and it would have been better if they’d been either sharper or more blurred. But the message makes this one interesting. Even back in April 2024, I thought there was an interesting message here, with the store America Today closed for business, perhaps it says something about the real America today…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F8 Shutter Speed: 1/160s ISO: 125
Double Exposure: This one needs a tripod set up so that most of the objects remain sharp while the people and the car are from two different frames. I thought this would be an interesting way to demonstrate the problems of walk with traffic signal phasing and the potential for conflict. Of course you probably wouldn’t wait too long to capture actual conflict of some form in just a single frame…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-E4 & XF 55-200mm F3.5-4.8 Lens Focal Length: 55mm Aperture: F7.1 Shutter Speed: 1/160s ISO: 400
Interesting backgrounds: Something from the recent Europe trip which is easier in some places than others is just to use the buildings in the city to add interest to your photos. It’s also a pretty good story when a city choses to put protected bike lanes by their fanciest and most important buildings. It’s a bright day here and I want to freeze the person riding by, so a high shutter speed works well to both expose in bright light and freeze action. The bike lane is the point of focus, about 12m away, but the parliament building is still in focus far into the background…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/1000s ISO: 200
Epic Backgrounds: If you don’t live in a European city, maybe a Rocky Mountain provides an alternative backdrop. The lesson here is that if there is an epic building or epic backdrop of some form and people riding by, get the camera out… You’ll probably get an interesting photo…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F8 Shutter Speed: 1/320s ISO: 125
Framing things: Statying in the Rocky’s… Here’s another one of those amazing mountains viewed through an arm rest of a bench which helps frame the scene and maybe add a bit of interest. Look for things to shoot through that can add depth and interest to a photo…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F8 Shutter Speed: 1/60s ISO: 125
Simple compositions: Simple compositions are useful, especially to use as say stock photography of sorts. While it is clear that this is SkyTrain in BC, there’s no other location specific details and it could be used to represent any story about SkyTrain in the Lower Mainland. This is a bright morning, aperture is at F2.8 which allowed a higher shutter speed that helps freeze the SkyTrain. The negative space (the blank sky) at the top could useful if placing text over this image for whatever reason…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 16-55mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 55mm Aperture: F2.8 Shutter Speed: 1/1800s ISO: 250
Wide shots: Need to get the entire intersection and two approaches in shot whilst standing right at the corner? That’s what the ultra wide lens is for, showing a lot of the intersection and route options. Consider the field of view something like the 0.5 lens on the iPhone, just of much higher quality. If the camera isn’t perfectly level here, building lines will be all over the place… I can’t recall, but I might have straightened them after the fact here. Nothing special about camera settings, but I switched this series of photos to black and white as the light wasn’t too interesting…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 8mm F3.5 Lens Focal Length: 8mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/125s ISO: 125
Scene setting: You may want to set the scene for some more focused shots. Not always easy on the street, but this example of the Stanley Park Sea Wall is taken across the bay and perhaps gives some idea of the scale and how busy it gets before framing things tighter. It doesn’t show anything with respect to infrastructure, just a lot of people walking and riding. there’s nothing special with the settings, but playing with black and white exposures and the grain settings to try and create a more classic film look just for fun…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/320s ISO: 125
Detail shots: We should talk a lot more about TWSI’s than we do in Canada. The rest of the world figured them out a long time ago, and for some reason we have a reluctance to add them as extensively as is needed to make our streets more accessible. This photo could have benefited from a larger depth of field as the back of the frame is starting to get out of focus, but if we need to talk about TWSI’s shots like this can make it pretty clear what we’re talking about…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 16-55mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 55mm Aperture: F2.8 Shutter Speed: 1/1800s ISO: 250
Get high: Whether on a bridge or high up in a building, shooting down can give a new perspective. This shot of Whyte Avenue in Edmonton was taken from my 8th floor hotel room when I woke up to the snow covered road… This is a scramble crosswalk, but you wouldn’t know from this perspective in the snow…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 50-140mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 102mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/150s ISO: 1250
Capture demand: It’s great to get photos with lots of people riding, especially when it’s outside of the Netherlands. This one is Montreal… Building out your bike network works… Pretty typical settings…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/350s ISO: 125
Shooting static scenes at night: When there isn’t much light, given the option to adjust all settings, the camera will push ISO as far as it can. In this case, I had ISO limited to 3200, I also opened up the aperture to F2 and let the camera pick the shutter speed. As nothing was moving in the scene the slow shutter speed was fine…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F2 Shutter Speed: 1/15s ISO: 3200
Night scenes with movement: Unlike above, this example has some people riding towards us. I’m using a wide aperture of F2 and focussed far enough away that most is in focus. The camera, like above has pushed ISO to 3200, but i’ve set the shutter speed to 1/250s to avoid motion blur. This resulted in a really dark image initially… But with some tweaks after the fact to exposure, shadows and some noise reduction, it’s looking pretty good…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F2 Shutter Speed: 1/250s ISO: 3200
Motion Blur at Night: If you don’t have ND filters, it’s easiest to achieve motion blur of some sort after dark when the camera naturally wants to select a slower shutter speed to let more light in. This shot would have benefited from a slightly quicker shutter speed as the car lights are almost too blurred, but it makes for an interesting shot to see movement while this guys stands still waiting to cross… I think I kept the ISO low, set the aperture to get a lot in focus, to see what the camera would pick for shutter speed… Could have done many things differently but it almost worked…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F8 Shutter Speed: 1.6s ISO: 125
Shallow depth of field when focused close: The easiest way to achieve this with any camera is to focus on something really close and open up the aperture, ideally with someone riding just beyond… But at least make the thing in focus interesting or useful in telling a story in some way… Like say the importance of a bike valet that allows people to leave their bikes parked securely in the city centre… As you can see here, even at F5.6 (when I could have went to F2), the background is still well out of focus because i’m focused closely on the sign… There’s a balance between too much in or out of focus. In this case I still wanted to be able to see the person dropping their bike at the valet…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/105s ISO: 125
Shallow depth of field when focused far: This example is reversed from above, where I have the mugs out of focus in the foreground and the background in focus… Again, not using the largest aperture option here doesn’t overdo the out of focus effect… I think I let the camera choose shutter speed and ISO here, so it’s bumped them both in a direct to let more light in as the coffee shop was quite dark… And build complete bike networks…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/35s ISO: 800
Wide and low: Maybe we need to speak to autumnal maintenance needs, a wide low shot can be great to capture the rider as well as the leaves on the ground in this example at least… While the rider is moving away from camera, he’s still quite blurred, the super wide angle meaning he’s still to some degree crossing the frame relative to a longer focal length... Although depth of field increases with wide focal lengths, the focus seems to be off here a bit, maybe I moved the camera a bit while taking… But I still like the perspective…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 8mm F3.5 Lens Focal Length: 8mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/40s ISO: 125
Long and low: This shot along a multi-use path was taken at a long focal length and low down pushing the foreground of the pathway out of focus. Again, it’s different than you would typically see with your own eyes and therefore seems a bit more interesting. People were walking away from camera not moving too fast, I could have dropped the shutter speed to reduce ISO, I could have opened up the aperture to make the depth of field even less…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 55-200mm F3.5-4.8 Lens Focal Length: 200mm Aperture: F8 Shutter Speed: 1/300s ISO: 250
Symmetry: There can be something pleasing about a symmetrical shot, albeit, I maybe didn’t get this one 100% right… People riding to or away from camera can be frozen with much lower shutter speeds…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 & XF 35mm F2 Lens Focal Length: 35mm Aperture: F8 Shutter Speed: 1/180s ISO: 125
Silhouettes: If there’s strong backlight such as this dark ferry boarding area with people walking by the glass with bright sunlight coming through, it can make for dramatic shots. Equally, shop windows at night can do this well too... There likely was some intentional adjustments to highlights, overexposing them in this case to get this high contrast look…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/550s ISO: 125
Backlighting: If it’s snowing or raining and the sun somehow still comes out at the same time, or it’s dark and there’s lights of some sort lighting it up, get the camera out. This heavy rainstorm in the Netherlands was passing quickly and followed by the sun which lit up the raindrops from behind… High shutter speed to try and freeze the raindrops… Composition not amazing as I was hiding in a doorway as the sun came out…
Equipment: Fujifilm X100VI Focal Length: 23mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/950s ISO: 125
Reflections: Reflections can be a good way to show a different perspective, maybe a somewhat abstract one… Think I had the camera on full auto here, and this is cropped to remove the person actually riding the bike… There’s also some good negative space here…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-E4 & XF 16mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 16mm Aperture: F11 Shutter Speed: 1/55s ISO: 320
Unusual scenes: Finishing up with this shot I love as it almost looks like it’s two different photos stuck together… See how the motion blur changes from the centre of frame and closer to the edge… Also, it’s pretty dark in this tunnel and exposure is set for that, but all detail is blown out in the highlights at the end of the tunnel…
Equipment: Fujifilm X-E4 & XF 16mm F2.8 Lens Focal Length: 16mm Aperture: F5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/20s ISO: 1600
I hope that gives you a few ideas when you’re next out there with a camera capturing bicycle related scenes…
Happy shooting…