Yesterday I visited the garage which houses many of the cars that I’ve shot on assignment for an auction company. I stop by every now and then to check in and see how things are going and to have another look at the (unfortunately) dwindling selection. When I walked in, I saw they had a mint 1967 Shelby GT500 raised up so that they could get to the engine from the underside. Next to that was a 1982 Porsche 911 Turbo which was sidelined with multiple fuel leaks, among other things.
After talking with the mechanics for a while, I asked if I could take a shot or two of the cars. They didn’t mind at all, and since I had all my equipment in my car from a shoot earlier that day, I broke it all out and got to work!
I wasn’t going to be able to move any cars or surrounding objects since they were actively working on the cars, and I would not be able to change the lighting, which was terrible at best. The overhead fluorescent lights paired with the opaque skylights above the cars wreaked havoc on the reflections in their paint. I had my polarizer handy, which would definitely help (but not eliminate) some of the reflections. From there, I decided to use a method of underexposing for the scene and balancing it out with speedlights set close to the cars.
I walked around the Porsche many times, trying to keep a mental checklist of parts that I’d covered. I generally stuck with a shutter speed of 1/25 – 1/40 sec at f4, ISO 200 so that the camera would pick up as little ambient light as possible. I tried my best to use an umbrella to shelter the car from the overhead lights, but that did not work out very well.
As you can see in my post processing video below, I went through all the images and picked out the ones that I thought exposed a certain part of each vehicle the best. From there, I labeled them so I wouldn’t lose track and began the tedious task of masking off each part of the layer that I wanted. It was slow work, but it was a lot of fun to see a dark, sinister scene arising out of a shot that was originally brightly lit with harsh light.
Other than that and some sharpening, there really wasn’t much else done to the photos. I liked the color straight out of the camera, and the effect came out just as I’d hoped. Now that I see how successful this technique can be, I am excited to try it in more controlled conditions when I can move the cars around and control the light.
Hopefully I will be back at the garage on assignment soon with another great list of vehicles! Keep checking back for updates!
