Lighting a Black Car at Night w/ Multiple Strobes

jhelms

I have an opportunity to shoot several nice vehicles this weekend and just wanted to fish around some ideas for lighting them.

I'll be using a D200 with various lenses and have access to at least 2 SB flashes and possibly a third SB800 as well as some cheap Impact starter studio-type lights with umbrellas (but will need 'power' for those).

The most important car is black (but I'll also be shooting red, silver, and white cars at the same time as well as a lime green Viper).

I had a few thoughts on the methods to use when shooting them individually:

1) Try to cradle the car with CLS/Wirelessly triggered speedlights; if I'm taking the pic from the drivers' side front 3/4 angle then I'd have a speedlight on my left (pass side front) and then 2 to my right pointed down the drivers side of the car.

2) Another option would be a long shutter exposure using multiple hand fired strobes around the car; OR long shutter exposure using a strong flashlight to paint and expose the car.

With the group shots, I'm thinking the only way we'll get even exposure is to do a long shutter exposure while walking around with the strobes popping them off at various angles towards the vehicles...

Any tips with other settings to help these stand out?

Village Idiot

The weekends over, but if you're trying to light a car, you don't light the car.

Says vague lighting master...



Cars are reflective. Black is one of the worst. You have to light the surroundings. If you point a speed light at a car and fire, you're going to get a point of light from the reflection of the strobe firing and then you're going to get a little light on that area of the car from the reflection of the ground, walls, ceiling, or whatever the light from the speed light falls on and reflects off of the surface of the car.

If you google setup shots for auto photography that involves lighting, you'll see most pros use large white boards, white walls, white sheets, etc and bounce light off of those. If you turn the strobes 180 degrees to fire away from the car at a strategically placed whiteboard, the reflection of the lit up white board in the car.

Then you have to figure out where to place them to get the exposure you want and the accents you want. If you place a black car in an igloo and light the igloo, you can get a white car.

The long exposure idea works the same way. If you walk around a car and fire the flash 100 times at a side of the car that's visible to the camera, you'll see 100 little reflections from the flash head and you're probably not going to get the desired effect.

That's why speed lights can suck for this work. They don't always have the power you need unless you start getting creative and trying things like a long exposure and popping off a speed light with a mini soft box on it, multiple times and only firing it on the lines where you want to be accentuated.

There's all kinds of tricks, you just have to get creative and experiment.

Here's a great example of what not to do. There's two flashes with umbrellas at almost 45 degree angle on the sides and one bare flash back lighting. If you look, the black frame is "properly" exposed. The paint on the gas tank and fairings make it look like nothings there. The specular highlights that you see on the paint are from the angle of the flashes and how they reflect back to the camera's lens. If it wasn't for the ceiling and walls providing a bit of bounced light, it would have looked even worse.

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jhelms

Cool - had a chance to experiment a little bit this weekend and the main shoot was postponed (so that all the cars will be there).

Noticed the bright reflections in a few of my test shots and toned them down a bit by diffusing the strobe and turning down the power, but will definitely use the white reflectors.

Cygnus Studios

One of the best ways that I have found was lighting the background and shooting a long exposure. A simple black or dark grey background works best. It will give a halo look which can give an interesting effect when done properly.
Or you can light the car from above. This will give you far less reflections and will give the look of painting with light.

jhelms

Cygnus Studios wrote:

One of the best ways that I have found was lighting the background and shooting a long exposure. A simple black or dark grey background works best. It will give a halo look which can give an interesting effect when done properly.
Or you can light the car from above. This will give you far less reflections and will give the look of painting with light.

Cool, those are good ideas.

We're shooting for this weekend now - I did a few test shots last night at a local dealership; it was COLD!!

Did a few long shutter speed shots and can definitely tell what everyone is saying about the reflective-ness....

I didn't like how my pics of the dark cars turned out but some of the other ones were ok.

Definitely want/need to go back with a wet parking lot.












What do ya'll think about using some Grad ND filters (upside down) to darken up the lower portion of the frame and allow me to use some longer shutter speeds to bring a little bit of color and maybe some stars in the sky instead of just plain flat black?

divamum

I freely admit this is only because I saw a film which used this as an example (I'm taking a lighting class and they ran the Dean Collins lighting instructional video last week)

He used a car to demonstrate how strongly they generate specular highlights, but in demonstrating that, also showed some ways of controlling them.

1. Shoot THROUGH a large, diffused source - I believe they had some kind of dedicated, purpose-made diffuser, but I'll bet you could shoot through a cheap white sheet and get a similar effect. The trick was to keep the actual source of light (strobe) some distance from the diffuser which was as close to the car as possible (hanging above it!), and it essentially turned it into a HUGE softbox. Presto! Minimised highlights/reflections.

2. Keep the light source MOVING during a longer shutter shot. As I understand it, this in effect makes the camera think the light source is bigger, thus more diffused, thus fewer reflections/highlights. They demonstrated it by moving a studio strobe on a boom behind the large diffuser (see above) in large circles, but I"m sure there are plenty of ways to mickey-mouse the same effect simply by keeping the source moving

Again, I hasten to add that i have NOT tried this myself (!) but it was fresh in the mind so when I saw your thread figured I'd throw it out there. Pretty cool stuff, actually

moose135

jhelms wrote:

What do ya'll think about using some Grad ND filters (upside down) to darken up the lower portion of the frame and allow me to use some longer shutter speeds to bring a little bit of color and maybe some stars in the sky instead of just plain flat black?

The timing may be tricky, especially if you are shooting a number of cars, but can you schedule to shoot right around/after sunset, so the sky is dark, but not black yet?

Llywellyn

This idea from Strobist always stuck with me as being particularly brilliant. One speedlight and a softbox:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtMQtAz250c

The photographer talks a little about it here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157600235846395/

pathfinder

I saw that video previously, Kerry, and always thought it was a great way of simulating a very, very large softbox.