For the second car pic, I'd also consider gelling the flashes to get closer to the background color temperature. It'll help hide that you've artificially lit the car.
For the second car pic, I'd also consider gelling the flashes to get closer to the background color temperature. It'll help hide that you've artificially lit the car.
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
I think the first one is more interesting--but I think you need a tiny bit more light on the logo on the grill.
Originally Posted by peety3
I agree. :-)
Thanks for all your feedback. These are all things I will consider when I try this again. I really think having a 4th light will help, 3 seemed like just enough, but not enough, if you know what I mean.
As for the color temperature, what do you think if I just altered the color of the background? I didn't match up the color because I wanted the car to pop out at you.
Light it right, and the car will pop out at you.
This is a criticism, but I want it to come across very lightly, so keep that in mind: this sort of mismatched color temperature has a "snapshot" look to it. We all know that you can't get this shot with a camera in full-auto (i.e. a snapshot), but it has that type of feel to it.
I'd shoot the background structure in K white balance, starting from 4200 and working your way down until it looks good/right. I'd bet it won't look white until 2600 or 2800K. I'd come "back" about 400K for your car, so perhaps 3200K. Set your WB for that, and gel for that (i.e. 3/4CTO). That'll leave the background a little warmer, but not so drastically different than the subject.
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
Honestly, you don't need anything more than 1 light, a tripod, and decent photo-editing software to get great results. However, you need to take several pictures, move the light, and combine the pics in post. Take this shot for example:
I set up 3 lights for the original shot (one light firing in each window in the living room). However, once I saw the picture on my computer, I realized that the doorway leading to the kitchen was completely black and drew the eye's attention. So I set up my tripod again, made sure it was in the same location, and set up 1 flash firing through the kitchen window. In post, I simply aligned the doorways (there wasn't much alignment to do because I had fortunately set up the camera in almost exactly the same place) and used the "Lighten" blending mode in Photoshop. If I hadn't told you this was a composite, I doubt you ever would have known. ;-)
Using this technique you could take 10 shots lighting the car from all sorts of angles with a single strobe. What's nice about this method is that you can control just how strong each flash is by simply adjusting the opacity of each layer, thereby drawing the viewer's attention to whatever you wish.
The first thing I. noticed is that you need to pick up a bubble level the car is at a slight angle horizontally and its.very noticable that could be fixed by cropping but you cut the car so close to the edge I don't if you could even do that
Good luck next time
Rember keep the lines horizontally level
Keep on shooting
Can you help me light it right? I am not a professional by any means. Working on a intro to digital photography class and what I've learned from reading on the net. What are some suggestions for improvements? Anything other than the color temperature suggestion?
I understand the leveling and degrees thing now. I guess it just slipped my mind, or it was so dark and I had so many other things to worry about that I didn't notice. But thanks for pointing it out. I will remember that for next time.
I think you did light it right - the car has some nice sizzle to it.
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
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