| Car Photography for Dummies - Page 2 |
| Written by Richard Truesdell | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 17 June 2008 14:11 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Page 2 of 2
This is the shot that many think separates the pros from the amateurs but in reality it's quite simple. The problem is that if you're doing it on a public road, you'll be running the risk of a moving violation for not being belted in. If you're trying this for the first time, I suggest a big, open parking lot on a Sunday. This shot was taken from an open sunroof (with the roof closed as much as possible so if the driver should have to stop short I won't be ejected out Goldfinger-style), with a golf course and a lake in the background. The key here is to be sure the cars maintain the same relative speed (in this case 25 miles per hour) using a slow shutter speed to get an element of blur on the road and on the fence in the background, all while avoiding shadows thrown by the camera car. Sounds simple, right? The exposure? Just about 1/80th of a second at f 7.1. If I had it to do over again and wasn't so pressed for time I'd have also shot for 1/45th second at f 8. Still a strong shot, framed for a possible cover with lots of room for the art director to use his own magic. 
Once I knew I had the shot I wanted, we drove to a local In-N-Out Burgers to grab this shot. By this point it was 7:45 p.m. and I knew that the exterior lights would be on, but it wouldn't be so dark that it would cause a burn in the image. This comes with practice and having a feel for things - since I've done this dozens of times. At this site, because I had used the location so many times, we only took about 10 shots. 
I tried a few different positions for the car relative to the building and settled on this angle, then cropped the image a bit when I edited the images. Here the exposure was set at 1/15th of a second at f 7.1 so that the car and the building would both be sharp and in focus. If I had gotten farther back, used a longer lens (300 mm vs. the 52 mm I used) with a wider aperture, and moved the car away from the building, I could have kept the car sharp but blurred the building. But as soon as I looked at the shot on the camera's LCD display, I was happy with the overall result. 
Normally I would have stayed at this site shooting until there was no light left but I wanted to return to the bridge as one of the residents in the development told us the street lights went on at 8:15. As it was already 8 p.m. at this point and the bridge was 10 minutes away, we packed up and headed back. We got there at 8:15 but the lights hadn't yet triggered. Thinking that they were on some sort of photocell, we took a number of shots until they finally came on at 8:25 and we grabbed this shot using an exposure of a half-second at f 6.3. As I had no real good shots of the car from the rear, I was glad I grabbed this shot when I did. 
At 8:30 p.m. we were losing the light rapidly; in fact in the time we turned the car around we lost most of the light leaking over the horizon, which was replaced by illumination from the lights on the other side of the bridge. It took some time to get the car positioned with respect to the lights behind it and once I was happy with the composition, I was looking at some very long exposures, in this case, 5 seconds at f 8. Because my tripod wouldn't go low enough to get the low angle I wanted, we scouted the site and found a sandbag to steady the camera (necessity being the mother of invention). I worked this image a bit in my image editor, Nikon Capture NX as all images were shot in Nikon RAW so I could enhance the image post-production. Overall, I was satisfied with the final result. When I filled my 4 gig card it was 8:45 p.m. and I called it a night. Start-to-finish we spent 2 hours 30 minutes shooting the car, taking 150 individual images. I went home, cooked and ate my dinner, then sorted through the images and by midnight I had 30 images for submission to my editor. Needless to say, I had no trouble falling asleep. For more information on photographing your car and submitting it to editors, check out these previous blogs:
Joomla components by Compojoom
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||