The good thing about automotive photography is that you can shoot it with fewer lights. See this for example:


Dodge Challenger [Anamorphic Widescreen] by budrowilson, on Flickr

The car was my assistant's. We used his Nikon D7000 and three of my flashes to capture the image. The camera was tripod mounted, in manual mode, manually focused, with all settings locked in place. Then we simply moved the flashes around for each shot (3 total). Then we used Photoshop's "Lighten" blending mode to pull the lighted areas from each image into one final image. Even though we used three flashes, we could have just as easily shot it with one.

The cool thing about shooting this way is that your lights can all be varied in brightness after the fact simply by adjusting the opacity of each layer in PS. If the light on the background is a bit too bright, you can always lower the opacity of the background light layer to lessen its intensity.

For the above shot, I didn't really want to light his car. His car was deep black color. I wanted to preserve that look. So instead of lighting the car, I lit around the car and let the sky reflect off the top of it (giving the front of the car some detail and life). I wish we had modified the flash in some way so that the light underneath the middle of the car didn't look the way it did. I would have preferred the light to be more even and less inverted pyramid-shaped.