The plan was simple.
Put me in the back seat of a car. Put Nid on his motorbike. Get both of us going the exact same speed, side by side, on a real road with real traffic. And then, somewhere in the middle of all that, take a perfectly sharp photo.
Simple. Lol.
I should back up...
I'm a nature photographer. Mountains, wildlife, night skies. That's where almost all my time goes. But every once in a while, a friend shows up with an idea that has nothing to do with any of that, and I can't say no.
Nid is one of those friends.
Climber. Photographer. A man with a long track record of entertaining our stupid ideas. He was there for the climber under the Milky Way, so he knows exactly how we operate. When we decide we want a shot, we push until it exists.
He's also big into bikes. Not bicycles. Motorbikes.
The first time we shot together was right after he got this one. We took it out on a winding road outside Boulder and made some pictures of him leaning through the curves. That shoot is kind of how we became friends in the first place. I still love that frame.
That same day, I had just learned about ICM, intentional camera movement, and I wanted to try a panning shot. Slow shutter, track the bike as it goes by, and if you get it right, he stays sharp while everything behind him melts into streaks.
We tried. A lot. Him riding past, me swinging the camera from the side of the road, over and over.
We got some results. Not the best. A few keepers, and a whole lot of blur in all the wrong places.
Then Nid came to me with an idea.
Do the panning shot again. But this time, put the Flatirons behind him.
And not from the side of the road. We'd already had some luck with that. It felt a little too easy.
From another moving vehicle.
Here's why that's both genius and slightly insane. When you pan from the roadside, you're swinging the camera to follow the bike, and every bit of wobble in that swing shows up in the frame. But if I'm in a car going the exact same speed as him, he's basically standing still relative to me. I don't swing anything. I just hold still. The world does the moving. The road and the background tear past in long streaks, and he stays locked and sharp right in the middle of it.
Motion blur, subject separation, all of that goodness. In camera.
On paper, it's elegant.
In practice, it means a motorbike riding right alongside a car, on a public road, at speed.
We were in.
So we started planning. Where. When. How.
We needed a road with the Flatirons sitting in the background, long and straight enough to make a few passes, quiet enough that we weren't going to be in anyone's way. We went out scouting and found a few good ones.
But every scouting day was a blue sky day. And with the wildfires burning across Colorado, the air was thick with haze. The Flatirons were a faint grey outline. Some days you could barely tell they were there.
And that was a real problem, because this shot had almost no wiggle room. The shutter speed had to be slow enough to blur the world, but not so slow that two vehicles bouncing down a road would turn Nid into mush. The aperture had to keep him sharp. Those numbers were locked. Which meant the only thing left that could change was the light, and the light had to land in a very specific window and stay there long enough for us to make it work.
Hazy, flat, blue sky evenings were not that.
We started quietly wondering if this shot was even possible.
And then the clock started ticking.
Nid was moving to New York.
No second weekend. No waiting for better conditions. No coming back next season. Whatever day we picked was going to be the day.
We picked one. Just to go try. See what happens.
It rained all morning. Then all afternoon.
By the time we left, it had mostly stopped, but the sky was still a solid lid of cloud. Grey, heavy, nothing. I was already mentally preparing for another trip to Greysville.
Then the sun started coming down.
The clouds began catching color. Orange, then pink, glowing at the edges. God rays cut down across the foothills. The haze was gone, rinsed out by a full day of rain, and the Flatirons stood out sharp and dark against all of it.
It was beautiful. Far more than we could have hoped for.
Now we just had to not waste it.
Here's the sketchy part.
The composition only worked from one angle. Nid had to ride right alongside the car, on my side, parallel to my window. On a road that other people were also driving on.
So we built a system.
Nid had a radio running through his helmet. I was in the back seat with the camera and a radio. And Kidus was driving.
If you've read the climbing story, you know Kidus. He's the one who got me up and down a sketchy cliff in Boulder Canyon in the dark. Turns out I trust him with my life in cars too.
Kidus was our eyes on the road. Watching traffic in front, behind, and coming the other way, and calling it.
Clear. Bring him in.
Nid closes the gap. Pulls up next to my window. Kidus nudges our speed until the two of us lock together. For a few seconds, it feels like he's just floating there beside the car while everything else rushes past.
I hold my breath. Hold still. Fire.
Car coming. Bug out.
Nid drops back. We reset. Do it again.
The first couple of passes were a mess. Speeds not quite matched. Him too far back, then too close. Traffic cutting us off right as things lined up. Frames that were almost there, which in this game means not there at all.
But every pass, we got a little tighter. The calls got shorter. The timing got cleaner. And the light just kept getting better.
Then one pass, everything clicked.
Road clear. Speeds locked. Nid right where he needed to be. The Flatirons behind him, the sky on fire, the road tearing past underneath.
I checked the back of the camera.
Sharp. Exposed right. Everything streaking except him.
That was it. The exact shot Nid had pictured, sitting right there on the screen.
We made it with a little bit of planning, a lot of doubt, a full day of rain, three radios, and exactly one evening to get it done.
Nid lives in New York now. I'm not sure I'd plan a shot like this on a busy road again anytime soon. But I'm really glad we did it once.
This is still one of my favorite pictures of him on his bike.
Tied with the first one, of course. That one is how we became friends.
This one is how we said goodbye.
