Harley Davidson’s King of the Baggers

Motorsports Cinematography for Harley-Davidson’s Push The Limit Series

I first started shoot for Harley Davidson at Laguna Seca in the spring of 2021, before most people knew what King of the Baggers would become. Joe Carlino brought me on to document those early test sessions, and I spent those days shooting behind-the-scenes footage on my RED Gemini and flying aerials with a DJI Inspire 2 over a closed track. At the time, the whole idea of race-tuned baggers still felt like an experiment. Nobody knew it would turn into one of the most talked-about classes in American motorcycle racing. The team was operating out of a rented Penske truck.

Since then, the series has taken me all over the country. Wisconsin, Arizona, New Jersey, Georgia, Ohio, California. Different tracks, different light, different weather, same assignment: be standing in the right spot when it matters.

That’s what keeps me coming back to motorsports work. There are no second chances. You can’t ask a rider to give you another lap, and you can’t reset the action. You either get the shot or you don’t.

Because of that, a huge part of the job is anticipating where the action will happen before it happens. The bikes only come around so many times each race. Between laps I’m usually jumping into a golf cart and racing to a different corner of the track, trying to get set before the pack comes back around. You’re constantly doing the math in your head: lap times, how long it takes to cross the infield, whether the light is better on corner entry or exit, whether the pass you’re hoping for is going to happen here or two turns later.

The other challenge is focus, in both senses of the word. You’re picking out one rider in a pack of nearly identical bikes, finding the right number plate at speed, and holding critical focus on a machine that closes on you faster than seems reasonable. There are a hundred small ways to miss a shot like that, and a long wait until the next lap if you do.

Throughout all of it, I worked closely alongside Harley-Davidson’s video team as they produced same-day race content while also building the larger season-long story that became Push The Limit. I have a tremendous amount of respect for that crew. Cutting recap content the same day, every race weekend, while keeping track of a documentary narrative that won’t be finished for months, is an enormous amount of work, and they make it look routine.

Projects like this are why I love documentary and motorsports filmmaking. You spend years with a program, you watch it grow from a quiet test day at Laguna Seca into a factory racing effort with a national following, and your footage becomes part of how that story gets remembered. That’s the job, and I feel lucky every time it’s mine.

I run The Bureau Media, a San Jose-based video production company. I work with brands, agencies, and teams across Silicon Valley and beyond on documentary, commercial, and motorsports video projects. If you’ve got a story that needs someone willing to chase it around a racetrack, get in touch.

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