Hot car - Cool Shot

South Shore Snapshots

Skippy

South Shore Snapshots wrote:

Hi there,

The lighting on the car is not as good as the actual building behind it,
which makes my eye go straight to the building and not the car.

Car really could do with more light. Starbursts on the lights look good.

.... Skippy
.

K Cuv

cool man

heres some car pics i took the other day as well
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=126118

mercphoto

Skippy wrote:

The lighting on the car is not as good as the actual building behind it,
which makes my eye go straight to the building and not the car.

I agree. This is much more of a shot of a building that happens to have a few cars around it, rather than a shot of a car that happens to have a building behind it. The car is lost. In the least, some fill-flash on the car is in order.

South Shore Snapshots

mercphoto wrote:

I agree. This is much more of a shot of a building that happens to have a few cars around it, rather than a shot of a car that happens to have a building behind it. The car is lost. In the least, some fill-flash on the car is in order.

Thanks for taking note. Fill flash not an option here as this is a timed exposure taken at 10 PM or whatever it was. Actually for this shot, I did a semi-hdr of three timed exposures. As for the background, I couldn't agree more, but since it's not my dealership, I couldn't exactly move the obstructing vehicles. Next time out, I'm going to try harder for an uncluttered background - brick wall, empty street, etc.

South Shore Snapshots

K Cuv wrote:

cool man

heres some car pics i took the other day as well
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=126118

Thanks for sharing. I've never seen a car like that, but I bet it's pretty fast. Of your three poses, number one best fits my eye, but for the pole immediately behind it. As I said in my own posts, the darn background just gets in the way sometimes.

moose135

South Shore Snapshots wrote:

Fill flash not an option here as this is a timed exposure taken at 10 PM or whatever it was.

Sure you can...this was a 101 second exposure of the "dark side" of the aircraft (away from the ramp lights) at 11pm. I used my Speedlite hand-held - popped the shutter with a remote then (staying out of the frame) walked along the side of the aircraft and fired the flash several times.

mercphoto

moose135 wrote:

Sure you can...this was a 101 second exposure of the "dark side" of the aircraft (away from the ramp lights) at 11pm. I used my Speedlite hand-held - popped the shutter with a remote then (staying out of the frame) walked along the side of the aircraft and fired the flash several times.

Excellent pic and a great example of what I was trying to get at. Even just a single pop of the flash would have helped the main subject car a great deal, even on a timed exposure! And that would have illuminated the main subject car.

So imagine this, the original photo, with the main car properly lit, all the other background cars still dark, against a properly lit building.

South Shore Snapshots

Thanks for the critique guys. I see now what you're getting at with the flash. I do not have, nor like to use, any flash (other than a little on-board fill flash from time to time) so that's why this idea never crossed my mind. That said, I don't even know if I can fire the pop-up flash while engaging in a timed exposure? In any event, I went out again today - daytime - and gave it another go. Found a really nice, high-contrast, wall to use as a backdrop. Tried a few other approaches as well, but haven't gotten around to tweaking them yet.

Went for the dramatic look here; processed using Dynamic Photo.

Jack'll do

If you use Photoshop it's quite easy to fix this problem. Here are two examples using slightly different layers and masks in CS3. Hope you don't mind my taking the liberty to tweak your image. If you want more explicit directions let me know and I'll post them.





Oh and by the way... next time don't park it on my lawn!!

mercphoto

Jack'll do wrote:

If you use Photoshop it's quite easy to fix this problem.

Well.... its easy to do what you did, but it really doesn't result in a pleasing looking image, IMHO. The car in the original photo is just too dark to reclaim anything and have it look good. This is a situation with way too much dynamic range in it for a single capture. Either take two photos, once exposed for the building, the other for the car, and merge them. Or use external lighting to illuminate the car in a single capture. This is too much to "fix" in Photoshop.