Tackling the Darkness: Confidence

I was recently asked to shoot photos of my friend and his car. I know that my re-occuring theme in the last few blogs has been the thought of 'uncomfortable' feelings.

Having never shot photos of a car before, this was something I would be completely interested in.

When we approached the area we were going to shoot the subject and his car, it was COMPLETELY dark, with little to no ambient light.

One of my good friends and I had been talking about HDR images and the way they work. In a nutshell, you expose for highlights, darks, and mid-tones in three separate images. Then using Photoshop(or whatever platform of your choice) you essentially make one solid image, that captures all three elements at their fullest.

That's EXACTLY what I was able to do with this image.

To start I placed the car in a good position, along with the tripod. The key to this type of image is that the tripod should not move at all. It was also key that the car did not move at all either. Any slight movement would make merging the image in post production harder.

Step 1: Expose for the entire sky and all ambient light around.
- The exposure I set for this image is: f/5.6 at 30 sec.


Step 2: Expose for the anything around the car. For this shot I exposed for a vehicle driving by. The light off of the vehicle allowed for further exposure on the back side of the car, as well as adding a slight artistic feel to the photo with the stream of light in the background.

This exposure was set to: f/5.6 at 15 sec.


Step 3: expose for the Person in the photo. This is where your studio style lighting comes into play. I shot with an sb900 camera right through a white calumet 45" umbrella.

This exposure was set to: f/5.6 at 3 sec.


Step 4: Now that I have all three images, post production time. Here is the final result after some time spent at the computer merging the images carefully.

Its really that simple if you think about it. I suggest you try something like this! It was fun, and totally worth the time spent for one image.

Getting out of my comfort zone, and attacking a photo shoot with full confidence. Have fun with what you do, and NEVER let anyone tell you that you CANT do it. Cause you can.

Here in the future, what if i did this same photo with an entire Navy Warship? Hmmmmm....

What did you do Creative today?