Many years back, when my friend and talented photographer, Nick Keating, told me about his dad Brian and how he works on old vintage motorcycles for a living, I was instantly intrigued and knew I had to see it first hand at some point. With a constant influx of client deadlines, projects, and edits keeping me quite busy, I finally made up my mind this past fall to put aside work for a weekend and rejuvenate the artistic juices and shoot a personal project with Brian. As a lover of cafe racers, I was instantly drawn to Nick’s Triumph when I arrived, but the more I poked around, the more I realized there were some serious bikes in the fleet. I won’t lie and say I know a ton about vintage bikes, so it was a huge learning experience with Brian, hearing about some of the history of his bikes, how he attained them, and how his life had brought him to where he is now.

I spent two days up at their house in NH with the first day of shooting with Brian as he worked on one of his current bikes as well as shooting B-roll of the impressive fleet in his collection. Day 2 was spent shooting interviews and braving the chilled fall day with some rolling shots in the nearby backroads. I’ve never done any steadicam shots out in the open at speed, and I must say it was a daunting task with the wind tossing the camera around as I was in the bed of the pickup truck! The biggest challenge of this edit was cutting down 30 minutes of really interesting interview footage for the video, I hate leaving great stories out of the video but it would have easily been a 20 minute piece.

Thanks again to Brian for taking the time to show me a glimpse into his world, and thanks to Nick for making it all come together…and for driving the truck for the rolling shots! Shooting this mini-documentary was a real treat for me and I hope I get a chance to do more personal projects like this again.

The original working title for this project was Restauro (Italian for ‘restoration’) since at first I thought Brian restored old bikes to their original state. But upon arrival at his house I quickly learned that he no longer restores bikes, yet preserves them in their current state. Preservare is the italian word for ‘preserve’.

Words and the beautifully shot video by Lucent Productions.