Photographing Cars

08 Jun Photographing Cars

After my last post I have wanted to photograph some more cars and refine my lighting and techniques. I have sourced another convertible, a friend who is willing for me to practice on his car.  Before I do this I needed to scout some locations as well as refine my techniques.

One thing that I have learnt is to start with what you have, so while I wait to get this second car organised I thought I would practice on my own to refine the lighting of the car.  In this post I am going to break the shoot down and show you how I am lighting the car.  The first thing that I get is an exposure for the background and from there build the lighting on the car, below is a shot that forms my background without any lighting on the car itself the exposure is around 1/60 sec @ f8 to under expose the background slightly.

   

The next part of the image I work on getting right is the side of the car, to light this I used and Alien Bee 1600 in a medium soft box that is almost sitting on the ground. I have pulled the power down so that it was not too bright as I want to use the other lights to contour the shape of the car.

Image showing the lighting on the side of the car

The next light, also and Alien Bee 1600 in a soft box, boomed over the bonnet as shown below. I have circled the lit area in the following photos as the lighting is quite subtle.

light from a boomed softbox over the front of the car.

To bring out the wheels I added two more Alien Bees with honeycomb grids on them, I placed them low down so that the light fell on the Mag Wheels.

The lighting for the wheels

Finally two more soft boxes were used, one over the interior of the car and one over the rear to bring out some subtle details.

The effect of the light on over the rear of the car

The effect of the light on the interior.

 And finally all lights together produced the final image. This is shown below after some adjustments in Adobe Lightroom.