Roof Rider product photography - bike roof racks made from recycled plastics.

Some projects land in your inbox and you just know they’re going to be a good shoot. Roof Rider was one of those.

Roof Rider make bike racks, but not the kind you’ve seen strapped to a hundred hatchbacks over the years. These are made from recycled plastics, use a vacuum cup system to attach to any car without a single drill hole, and they’re genuinely beautifully designed. A product with a strong environmental story and real visual character. For a product photographer, that’s a pretty good brief to be handed.

The brief

The team at Roof Rider needed a suite of product images for their new website. Clean, crisp white background shots that showed off the racks clearly and gave the brand a sharp, professional look across the site. Simple, but done well.

We talked through how they wanted things to feel and worked from there into decisions about lighting and composition.

In the studio

All three racks came into the studio: the Uno, the Duo, and the Volt, their e-bike version. The challenge with a product like this is that it’s predominantly dark and angular against a white background, which can easily look flat if the lighting isn’t right. The goal was to keep the background clean and pure while still giving the racks enough depth and dimension to show the quality of the materials and the detail in the design.

I shot these in my studio above my garage in Porthcawl, using a mix of bare-bulb lighting and reflector setups to achieve that separation and bring out the texture in the recycled plastic. That texture is actually one of the most interesting things about the product. No two racks look identical, which is a lovely detail to highlight visually.

Why it matters

White background product photography looks simple, but getting it right takes care. Too much light and you lose the detail. Too little and the background goes grey. Roof Rider is a young brand and these images needed to earn trust quickly, so getting that balance right really mattered.

If you’re launching or scaling a product and need studio product photography that tells the right story, I’d love to hear about it. You can get in touch here.