Headed out last night (eventually) with TP member and fellow Rugbian Lewis Craik after trying to fix something up for a few weeks where we could shoot one or both of our cars..
I've never shot cars other than quick snaps, so doing a staged car shoot was exciting, even if my mind had gone a bit blank as to what I was going to do.
Instead of trying to overcomplicate the composition with two cars, we opted to photograph Lewis' lovely MX5, a car that was also notably cleaner than my Volvo!
The idea was to use long exposures (20-30 seconds with the camera set at f/8 and ISO 100), with the help of an ND4 filter to allow us to pump plenty of flash into the the car and then piece individual shots together (over a background exposure of Rugby cement works) to combine area of evenly-lit paintwork.
Typically, I bit off more than I could chew by trying to merge 15 different exposures into one final image; some shots had too much light, others not enough, and invariably, I'd tried to get clever with different white balances, which only added to the difficulty of merging shots in Photoshop. Anyway, we live and learn and it's taught me A) not to run before I can walk, and B) a bit more thought beforehand can massively alter the amount of work to be done after the shoot.
Although I'm not really happy with the final result, it's a point from which I can work and learn from…
*Nikon D2x
*Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8
*ISO 100
*Nikon SB-700 fired manually (set to 1/4th power)
*Exposures were f/8 @ 20-30s with an ND4 filter
*Processed in Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom 3
No comments:
Post a Comment