Blendo offered me the opportunity for a photo shoot of my car today, and taught me some neat tricks to do with my camera to get different effects out of the lighting and shadows and how to utilize my camera's features a bit more. It was a pretty neat experience that I would like to do again some time.

We went to an industrial park and experimented with the Sodium (HP) and Mercury lighting in the area. Since it was dark, we were pretty limited to our locations, but I think it turned out well.

Here are most of the pics from my camera. Blendo has got some really good ones too.

 

Here is my 'first round' contribution. I will go through some of the other photos and maybe do some re-edits... I to wish we had more time and a couple better locations to do this. Was a spur of the moment kinda thing but I'm glad you had fun! I'm glad you learned a little from my ramblings on camera settings and how they relate to what the camera spits out.

I'd love to do this again with more people, cars, and areas sometime in the future.

Let me know if you want any high rez versions Paul.





I really like this next one.

 

Re-edit of the side shot to remove the foreground... to dark?



I totally forgot to do some nose-in shots from here... this one is really good Paul!



All it needs is a little tilt to the left to level out and clone out the motor home and its a winner!

 

Guys, those pictures are good but very underexposed, too dark. Also the white balance is pretty far off, which is easily fixable. I'll post up some night shots that I take to give you an idea. I see you are trying to only light up portions of the car instead of the whole thing, that can be easily done with spot lights set with a quick shutter speed as I have done. For my pictures, I had similar lighting conditions, but I wanted more control of it. Instead I used high power off camera flashes to control light and shadow, this can also be done with flood lights mounted on something. Anyway, I didn't mean to thread jack just giving you some pointers and showing what my shots look like. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.

 

Dude, if you have interesting lighting conditions for your car pics, by all means, post them up! This isn't for my car alone. That first one looks really sharp!

So, for your pics you used spotlights and other pro-type equipment I take it?

I was trying to go for stuff that you would find out there without the need to photochop or use other forms of external tweaking. Just going by the camera's features alone and taking advantage of what was available in the area and trying different lighting conditions. Under full moonlight would be rather interesting with an NFR car for example because of the different wavelengths that react with red. Using high pressure sodium lamps or even trying low pressure sodium lamps. (I don't know where there are any in numbers though.) And in the case of our experimentation, under both HP sodium (the yellow) and mercury lamps (the greenish white)

I also only have a 4 MP point & shoot and a flimsy/flamsy tripod. Blendo tought me how to take greater advantage of my camera's features rather than just setting it on "Auto" and let it go. In essence, this is my first time trying this stuff out since I got the camera in '04 or '05.

 

My equipment is far from professional. I have one wireless flash for my camera. It is just a regular flash that snaps onto the camera with a wireless trigger mounted on a tripod, that way I have better control of lighting. I can position the flash anywhere I want around the car and snap a picture. It is relatively cheap for that setup, if your camera has a hot shoe on top of it, you can do it too. Myself, I prefer a really well white balanced image, that gets rid of the effects of sodium lamps, but if thats the look you're going for by all means it looks go for it. As for the lighting, most of the pictures seem underexposed, this could have been fixed by using a slower shutter speed. Of course you wouldn't need to worry about motion blur because your camera was on a tripod. Also it seems that a few of your night shots a flash was used, this is evident by reflectors lit up on the car.

Here is an example with the flash in the picture.

 

A flash was used on some pics. Found that it brings other effects out (other than the reflectors) than just setting the shutter for a second or two.

My camera does not have a hotshoe for an external flash.

 

count me in if you do it again, I'm always up for photoshoots and playing with the camera!

best bet is to email me since I'm not on here that much anymore.

jhhennes@gmail.com