Reflections & Punctuation

[Rocco]

I like the concept, location, props, and the lighting that's there. However, to me, it's missing something. In my opinion, it needed some light on the right side of the image. What kind of light? Well, either 1) a light shining down the road/alleyway to give separation, 2) a rim light on the back of the truck to match the rim on the driver's head (I think leaving the gridded light on him un-gridded but placed a little further back/behind the car might have done it), or 3) a touch of light in the cab of the truck, or a combination of all three.

I mean, there is a light above the truck (on the wall) that could have easily been the motivation behind illuminating a bit of the scene behind the truck. It wouldn't have even needed to be a lot of light; just a touch would have brought detail into the scene that added to the overall effect, yet not take away from the focus on the bride.

Sean.. thank you!
You're insight has always been valuable to me. I've improved drastically in the past year with off camera flash and I'm glad to count you among my most valuable resources. Of course it needed light on the right hand side! That's why the light on the wall looks so dead. Don't know how I missed that, but I'll definitely keep an eye on ambient light sources in my frame from here on out.

WOW - "out of the box" for sure. Really like it. Somehow the garden shots while executed well (eyeglass reflection not withstanding) don't seem to fit her. Clearly by her putting up w/ all this staging, I bet she really liked it.

She did. And best of all it made all of her friends and co-workers jealous. Who doesn't like making the people you care about jealous? ha.

The Speedlights on the headlights are brilliant... I would have never guessed!

Seriously! Turned out better than I had thought! Largely because I zoomed out both speedlights to 24mm. I had some lens flare to correct because of it, but I expected that.

Inspiring shot. The thought and creativity that went into it, plus the story telling aspect, makes me want to go out and try something similar. Sean's critiques as to how it could be different are also thought provoking...

Dude, do it. I wanna see.


Part of showing my thanks for him letting me use his truck was a B.A. pic of it for him. I have never done automotive photography before so I just took a people portrait approach. I knew I'd be wide, that I'd balance my lights against the exposure for the sky, and that I would draw attention to the front of the truck as if it were a face. Love how it turned out. He already has a poster sized print on order. Took this one while we were waiting for the bride to show up.



Anyone with more experience with these have some pointers for me? I wish I had turned on the headlights while taking this. That was added in post.

-Rocco

[Sean Setters]

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.