Car rig shots

mercphoto

Not sure if this is the right forum category but here goes. Just bought a used www.automotiverigs.com and started playing with it. These are my first attempts and was a solo effort, so I actually had the engine running and driving the car, which is not ideal. But I like my results on day one already and I'm not sure why so many on the net are bashing this setup.

One thing I notice right away is my 40D and a 17mm lens is not quite wide enough. A wider lens would be helpful (anyone want to trade their 10-22 for my 17-40?). But given what I have I'm wondering what people think of the various angles, and if you had to crop part of the car which part is best to crop - front or back. Thanks.

All taken at 1s with 5-stops worth of ND filters. Perhaps my favorite, though the entire car is just barely in frame:


Lower angle permitted nearly all the car:


Chopping off the back:


is better than chopping the front?

PeterLyons

Nice work, Bill!

I like the ones best where you see the whole car in the frame. To my eyes, there's no good place to crop the vehicle, unless you're in tight on some particular detail.

Also, I wonder if you could get very nice results with much faster shutter speeds--say 1/15 or 1/30th. I think you'd still get very good blur on the moving wheels and on the background, and would likely have a higher rate of keepers. You must have to shoot an awful lot of frames to get good sharp ones at 1 second exposures!

All that said, I really like the pics. I'm going to have to check out that rig you're talking about.

ian408

Some cool stuff for sure. Are you cloning out the rig or shooting from something else?

mercphoto

ian408 wrote:

Some cool stuff for sure. Are you cloning out the rig or shooting from something else?

The rig attaches to the pinch rails of the frame so it is visible in the photo. Cloning is one way to remove it from the shot. But if the pavement is sufficiently blurred and reasonably uniform in color and detail then you can also mask away the rig with a soft mask, duplicate some asphalt and move it underneath, and get similar results with less work. I've found this doesn't always work well but when it does its nice. But that is the nice thing about this rig, the method it attaches means the rig is only visible on top of pavement and does not obstruct the car, so that makes cloning out the rig much easier.

As per shutter speeds you really need to be at 1/2 second or slower. 1/15 just would not cut it. The car is actually moving pretty slow (walking speeds) so you need long shutters. Drive much faster the rig won't stay steady. Its stays attached well enough, but the camera bobs around too much to get a usable shot.

Another way to rig a car is with suction cups attached to various body panels, multiple rods to a "cheese plate", and the camera mounted there. By the time you triangulate with three points, sometimes four or five, you get a very steady and stable rig that you can even drive with at normal speeds. However, as you can imagine, lots of Photoshop work to clean up.

ian408

Thanks Bill.

mercphoto

PeterLyons wrote:

Also, I wonder if you could get very nice results with much faster shutter speeds--say 1/15 or 1/30th. I think you'd still get very good blur on the moving wheels and on the background, and would likely have a higher rate of keepers. You must have to shoot an awful lot of frames to get good sharp ones at 1 second exposures!

You do throw a lot away, the keep-rate is very low. Its also a bit of work just in setup and tear-down. The session to get those shots was over an hour. Then there was the computer time, finding the keepers from the session, and then the Photoshopping. But its worth it in the end.

The fact you think that I could get sufficient wheel blur at 1/30th shutter speed tells me you think the car is moving rather fast in the photos when its really going about 3-4mph, and that tells me the shot is working as planned.

ziggy53

mercphoto wrote:

...

One thing I notice right away is my 40D and a 17mm lens is not quite wide enough. A wider lens would be helpful (anyone want to trade their 10-22 for my 17-40?). ...

Bill,

If you used a landscape panoramic head so that you could pan the lens at the "nodal" point, you could shoot this with your 17-40mm lens (at 17mm) in 2 shots and stitch the shots together. If you get both wheels in 1 shot then the second shot might not even have to be moving. (That would require a lot more work on the background of course.)

If you extend the boom arms you would also be able to use the same lens.

If you used a full-frame camera you would get the full FOV for the lens. Maybe you really need a 5D MKII.

mercphoto

ziggy53 wrote:

Bill,

If you used a landscape panoramic head so that you could pan the lens at the "nodal" point, you could shoot this with your 17-40mm lens (at 17mm) in 2 shots and stitch the shots together. If you get both wheels in 1 shot then the second shot might not even have to be moving. (That would require a lot more work on the background of course.)

If you extend the boom arms you would also be able to use the same lens.

If you used a full-frame camera you would get the full FOV for the lens. Maybe you really need a 5D MKII.

Yeah, I thought about panning and stitching, but as you said that is a lot of work. Especially in blending the backgrounds. But the big draw for this type of rig is how much Photoshopping work it saves you compared to other rigs (rig shots always require work, but this rig less than others), so it kinda defeats the purpose. I also considered a longer boom, but that brings in less stability.

I'm putting together a package where I can sell a session capturing these shots and do so at a low enough cost that people would actually be able to justify paying it. That requires having less to do on-site, but more importantly having much less to do in post-processing. Too much Photoshop work and you kill your hourly rate to the point you can't justify shooting someone's car anymore.

But, looks like I've worked out a lens swap to solve my problem.

mercphoto

mercphoto wrote:

The rig attaches to the pinch rails of the frame so it is visible in the photo. Cloning is one way to remove it from the shot. But if the pavement is sufficiently blurred and reasonably uniform in color and detail then you can also mask away the rig with a soft mask, duplicate some asphalt and move it underneath, and get similar results with less work. I've found this doesn't always work well but when it does its nice. But that is the nice thing about this rig, the method it attaches means the rig is only visible on top of pavement and does not obstruct the car, so that makes cloning out the rig much easier.

I completely forgot to mention some other PS work needed on these shots, and that is to remove reflections of the rig in the car itself. And on these shots, which I really only did a test of a new toy I've bought, I didn't go far enough into that. You can still see the rig a bit in the fender of some shots.