Mounting the Beast

Last Thursday I was out a the track with my gear and took a series of shots of Alan Troup getting into his car. The Canon 40D on it's max burst rate was actually too fast as I was only able to use a couple of the images. Not the images didn't turn out. Quite the contrary. They were great but froze the movement in to close of sequences to use in a multi-exposure composition shot.

The trick to this image is to isolate each photo of the driver and inset it into the base file set behind the previous driver yet on top of the background layer which includes the car. By the way, it helps to keep the camera in the same location. 

I want to thank Alan for the access to him and his car for my photography. Yes we are a sponsor of his race team thanks are still due. You are a true friend Alan!

BLOG NOTE: Tomorrow we head off to Portland OR fro a week and I am looking forward to getting many GB of images. If the posts are a little sporadic, I hope you understand.

Take care for now... Doug

No Studio... No Problem

Not too many photographers have their own commercial photography studio to work with, let alone one large enough for automobile shoots.

A couple of people have asked me where I was able to shoot the 57 car of race driver Alan Troup. Well... Here is the little secret. I went to the race garage, we opened the door and pushed the car out onto the gravel/grass and shot away. The exact process I described in a post titled Race Day Results and you can check it out if you want.

Before and After

So the secret is that there is no secret. No studio... Nada! Would I have gotten a better result if shot in controlled lighting? For sure, but I like to think of the reflection of trees in the windshield as a bit of authenticity. It gives it that visually tactile look.

There you go... Mystery solved

Later... Doug

Race Day Results

A couple of weeks ago I was over at my buddy's race garage and we pulled out the car to take some pictures of for his autograph card. We were far from a studio arrangement so I knew lighting was going to be an issue. My set-up was a pair of 580EX II flashes with my remote on the camera and using my 16-35 f/2.8L glass on the Canon 400D. I took a number of shots from each position knowing the reflection and light was not going to be even or perfect in any of the shots.

Once in post I only had to use the windshield and hood from one other image and the rest was just touch-up. BTW I only have Elements on my PowerBook G4 for on the road so I was stuck with limited abilities for masking and filters. There are work around' for most of Elements deficiencies but it is still not CS3 by a long shot.

Working in a Photoshop environment can get fairly myopic in that you are working at the pixel level at times and you just don't realize the final outcome always. When I got home I opened the image in CS3 and with very little tweaking, a slight amount of Unsharp Masking on the car itself the 8x10 print was spectacular.

Till tomorrow dudes and dudets!

Doug