Car Photos

So for me, one of the biggest obstacles with photography is myself. I have neat ideas for shots, things I really want to photograph but always come up with an excuse for why they don't come to pass. The reason can be anything as complex as I don't have a large studio, I don't have strobes or I don't have models. The truth is, that if it is important enough to you, you will make it happen. No one is going to just call out of the blue and ask you if you like photography and want to shoot for them. So recently I tackled this obstacle and did a car shoot.

A friend I work with owns a 2012 Camaro ZL1. Now I don't know a ton about cars but I know what looks cool and what sounds impressive and this thing looks cool and has over 600 hp. So we agreed to do a shoot and we met up in downtown St. Louis near the Riverfront. There were a couple of challenges for this shoot. 1) We started shooting around 10:30 in the morning which made for almost overhead sunshine. 2) Shooting a car meant a lot of reflective surfaces and also meant I would be getting a portrait of myself in the car's paint. In the end, I opted for a lot of multiple exposures and HDR type shots.

We started under an overpass where a friend of the car owner had previously taken some shots and he liked the background. We tried a couple of different looks and angles but the wide range of light made it tough. Even this was HDR.

In post I decided to get kind of creative and make a hyper-real image.

 After the overpass we moved on to an empty lot near some old abandoned warehouses and a powerplant I started to also look at taking some detail shots as well. This guy has put a lot of time an money into upgrading and modifying his car so I figured why not showcase it.

The same pic just some more touches added in photoshop.

I also climbed onto the roof of my SUV to get this one, it helped take care of the glare.

We then moved to another abandoned area that had some cargo bays and some good shade. This was near a casino downtown and several times the security guard drove by. We were by no means on their property but apparently they saw us on their security cameras. Finally he got out of the car to check out what we were doing. Once he saw the engine on the car he had to go and get some of the other guys from the security office and bring them by for a look.

To wrap up, we went back to the overpass and wanted to get a shot of the custom designed trunk. The limited edition badge was pretty cool. This is a compilation image and you can see where I will need to make sure the specular highlights continuous and clean.

All in all, I am pretty happy with my first car shoot, especially considering it was outdoors at mid-day. I am hoping to get some more shots of the car on an infinity wall but we will have to see how that pans outs. The important thing is that I made the connection and got the motivation to make it happen. Here's hoping that this leads to more motivation and adding more to the portfolio.