BSA chop

Too much rats n' fighters posted on this blog today? Okay okay.... Here's the BSA and Shovelhead from Albert.

more fighters

This is the well-known CBX-Inox from Otto Nijs. It has loads of cool gadgets, like LCD rear-view mirror and magneto switches. Shot this bike in 2006.

more resent photo's are these of a alloy fireblade, owned by a policeman... really! Wide-angles, good weather, a industrial location and a wonderful streetfighter are top-ingredients for a fantastic photoshoot.

Streetmonsters magazine

Tres cool, the "Illogical Progression" ratbike, which I've shot back in 2005 at the Rat & Survivalshow in England, is now published in a French magazine named Streetmonsters. Check out their Streetmonsters website

Streetmonsters magazine from France

The "Illogical Progression", as featured in Streetmonsters now. A Suzuki RF900 based survivalfighter... Isn't this the most wicked bike ever made on the planet?!

Me, back in 2006, shooting Rob's wicked bike. The good old rat-days!

Another bike I shot at the Rat-&Survivalweekend of 2006, "Kanalratte", dressed with dead animals and everything!

Ratbikes, survivalbikes, choppers... Whatever? It can all be mixed up in one bike! A cool feature-worthy chopper from UK.

Ratbikes

you might have noticed that I'm crazy about true ratbikes. Although -to my opinion- the whole ratbikescene is going downhill, with each year less and less extreme n' agressive rats... Standard Japanese bikes with just a layer of can-sprayed black and some skulls and toys here- and there, seems to be the standard nowadays in ratland, too pity. I like to see extreme modifications; mechanical and fysical, let the angle grinder spin! We've seen so many raw creations before, dieselbikes, radical junk-rats, car-engined rats and so on! I'll add some pics of them on this blog one day...

Well, these two matt-black ones I've shot at the Rat & Survivalshow were absolutely stunning examples of good ratbikes! They're featured in 100% biker, by the way!

Paul's ratfighter






Boon's survivalbike with loooong swingarm :-)

And a year before, 2007, I did this shoot of another killer-rat from Boon. Look at the crazy wheely he did!!!

Bigtwin march

We did some shots of Don's Shovelhead inside an old building inVlissingen. Also the surroundings were pretty good and some shots were done outside too. Some portraits of hime were done with strobe-gear.










Also a feature of Richard 'The Chop' is featured this month and we're pretty excited about it! His Hot-Rod XS chop is the coolest one around...





And the third one this month is this "Eagle Skull" Fatboy. The weather wasn't that well this day, but thanks to the 50mm pancake, the shots turned out pretty well.

Harley Heritage Special

I'm not a fan of original Harleys and so I would not much shoot them. But last weekend I did this Heritage Special, on which the owner spend six years building it! You don't see it, what's so super special about it? Don't you? I have to kill you if I would tell you, but I let you know at the time this killer-project is featured in Bigtwin magazine... I'll keep you informed...

Project Honda

While welding the exhaust, the welding machine set fire!! Damn. But the bike is getting there :-)

Shovelheads from the east...

...the east of Holland to be exactly! This cool Shovel was shot at a scrapheap in Almelo.






and this retro bobber was immortalized at the Enschede Harbour.

Jan's Honda's

I remember that I started taking snapshots with a point n' shoot camera, a Canon compact. With a little luck the pics were pretty allright. One of my first ever photoshoots was this retro '70's chopper of Jan alias 'Geronimo' which I did with an ancient Practica film camera with an old 50mm 'pancake' glass. Y'know, it didn't had Auto-focus, auto-lightning and that sort of 'modern' gadgets. It took an age per foto to make and half of them was out of focus... But it was big fun and also a good learn-school.


About a year later, 2007, Jan finished another Honda chopper, and again I visited him for a shoot. It was the 1st shoot for Bigtwin magazine




It didn't took long before this greasehead finished another dead cool chopper, better, lower, louder and rougher than anything he'd done before. This time he arranged a professional model girl for the shoot. The bike ended up as poster in Bigtwin magazine!

Project Honda

You might have noticed my ratbike ‘Gonzo’ in a previous blogpost. Well, Gonzo is officially dead now! It stood in my backgarden for a while without being ridden. The electric looming was total crap because of the countless ‘bypasses’ in the wires and also the engine started to leak. The lights didn’t work properly anymore and one time, the horn suddenly started to sound continuously in the middle of the night! really!!
So it was time to do something with it: Bring it to the scrapheap? No. As Gonzo always brought me whereever I wanted to go and also was considered an ‘Icon’ in the world of ratbikes, it deserved a second life. But not as a matt-black monster!

We’re rebuilding it into a sort of (cafe)racer now. Bennie, my father, again helps me with the work. In his garage it’s like the OCC soap on the telly; we’re always arguing about the design... Bennie wants something practical and I want something radical. The result will be something in-between. But we have loads of fun, and that what it’s about.

This is were we are now with the Honda racer. Still looks like a heap of crap, isn’t it? But if you look through your ‘designer-glasses’, you might see what it will look like in a few months...

One-off tank, exhaust and seat (yes, it was a Mustang tank from a old Harley chopper!)






my father Bennie is looking happy with it :-)











some pics of how we made the tank. The underside is stock Honda, the rest is made ourselves, the filler cap is from Ducati

Lake Barock & Roll

Cool, I stumbled across the Lake Barock & Roll webzine from France with a story about my MZ DDiRtracker in issue #9. Really nice webzine!

Lake Barock & Roll issue 9


Last year, the MZ was shot by a German photographer at a really cool location in Germany for some German magazines and it appeared in a book named 'cafe racer' too. Underwhile I shoot some pics along...
Funny fact is that the MZ won the 3th price in the streetfighter (!) class at the Cologne Custombike Championship 2008 in Keulen, Germany. They didn't know how to label this weird bike, concidered it a classic racer, and then they'd put the little thing between those sky-high assed' turbo'd flashy German style streetfighters! Big fun!

Hans Prost, Dutch XS guru

One of the most fanatic gearheads I've met is this Hans Prost, the Yamaha XS guru from Holland. He recently dropped me a line about his new website www.xs650chopper.com with a lot of info about the coolest XS custombikes. Check that out!


Last summer I've shot this sweet XS cafe racer, the LynXS, one of Hans' wildest projects. Is this cool or what?






Another of his projects is this XS chopper, with soooo many cool little details that you can walk around it a hundred times without noticing them all.





To our surprise, the photoshoot made it to the cover of Bigtwin magazine too!

Rain, snow and hailstorms

Ow man, I hate the Dutch weather! Today we planned to shoot twoof the wildest XS choppers around. I left home with the best imagine weather; sunshine, warm and dry... But as soon as we started to shoot, the sky went dark and in no time the conditions were pretty poor. Then it started to rain, hail and we even had heavy snowfall. Damn! Well, we've to scedule a new shoot soon, as most of the photo's look pretty grim and grey... Studio stuff was used on location today.

Beer crate Buell

Another cool bike going worldwide in a 'zine this month. It's 100% shed-made and it has lack of off-the-shelves catalogue parts. Respect! The handshifter, grandma's dildo, is a detail that cannot be missed... Shot on a really dark rainy day, so mainly used primes. 2x speedlight plus umbrella's for suble highlights were used.

the bike-bug infection

It was about nine years ago when we went to a campground in South-England. Few days before we’d seen a dead-cool trike, based on a street’s lightpole (!) as chassis, but this bike named ‘Blitzkrieg’, a true English style BMW survivalbike was really the shit! I knew that this was the stuff I would like to build. Ever since I visited the annual Rat & Survivalshow in England where I spot other ‘icons’ like the well-known ‘Future Bike’, owned by the editor of 100% biker magazine.


When I came home from that particular holiday in England, years ago, I immediately started to spray my CM450 chop matt black. Then came my flat coloured ’75 Ironhead chop. But this, in my opinion, wasn’t extreme enough and what came next was this Bol d’or survivalbike in true British survivalstyle like the cool bikes above. Mad Max to the bone! My trailered rat was named Gonzo. Clink from BackStreetHeroes photographed it at the Rat-& Survivalshow 2006 in England, where it got the ‘Best Survivalbike’ trophee too! About a year later, the German photographer Sabine Welte shot the bike and it was published in magazines all around the world, and also in her great book ‘Extreme Bikes’. Some of my own pictures even made into Street Chopper magazine in USA! Unfortunately, Gonzo is sort of RIP, and now is being transformed into a sort of cafe-racer. A neat and clean bike with funfair-colours and everything... I’m getting old, huh?

Speedpan

I stumbled across the blog of Frank, the owner and creator of the Speedpan. I've shot this bike last year, look at the heat coming off the asphalt... The engine is a one-off, just like eeh... the rest of the bike! One of the best pieces of engineering I've seen... He owns some wild hot-rods http://madfrankiefoto.blogspot.com/

Another amazing piece of engineering is this Daihatsu Diesel, made by Sander... Coincidently he owns a hot-rod too! I shot this bike back in 2006, but it's still in my top ten of the coolest bikes I've seen!

First post!

Hi Folks! Here's the first post in my fresh new weblog. Last weekend I've shot this cool CB400N old skool chopper of Zoomy, the moderator of the hardtailmaniac messageboard. The bloke owns a Jukebox, and a pinball play too! It was freezing cold this weekend.







Some good news for Philip of DarkStarKustoms as his first bike which he'd built under the banner of DSK is now featured in BackStreetHeroes magazine (uk). It was in Bigtwin magazine (nl) before. Czech two stroke power!




This is another bike of DarkStarKustoms, the El Santo Diablo. Soon to be covered in DicE magazine (usa). Shot with two speedlights through/in umbrella's at the end of the day, while the sun was going down.




Got the new Bigtwin magazine in my mailbox, with a cool feature of three L&L Attackit Sportsters, I shot a few months ago. We did some cool nightshots at a fuel-station. check their site Two speedlights plus umbrella's were used. Without flashers, the subject was fully black (shade).

And another feature in Bigtwin and 100% biker this month of Harry's dead cool Triumph bobchop. Old skool is cool! Two speedlights plus umbrella's and a (too) high iso... it was pretty dark in there...