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How to be a great car photographer
Finding a good location is the most difficult part of car photography. Everywhere you drive you must always be on the lookout for potential locations — good roads for tracking, great views. You must have a load of maps and road atlases covered in notes and marks. You must also take snapshots sometimes and keep a diary. Try to be meticulous about this and remind yourself of spots worth using in the future. Locations go through fashions. One minute it’s beaches, the next moorland or cities. In the past you can shoot without any planning — You can just turn up somewhere and take pictures. But nowadays you can’t do that. You should always make sure that you have the necessary permission to shoot somewhere in advance. The last thing you want is someone chasing you off their land, especially if you have the client with you. Keeping the car pristine is extremely vital; always carry sponges, buckets and chamois. Photoshop now gives us the flexibility to remove blemishes, but you still need to start out with a clean car. You also need to be very careful not to scratch the car. This isn’t such a huge problem with new cars, but when you’re shooting a classic thats someone’s pride and joy, it’s a different matter. Usually in an editorial car shoot, there will be no more than four people, the photographer, an assistant, the driver/owner and a journalist. Try to keep the number of people involved small, the more people you have, the more problems you face. The quality of light is crucial when you’re photographing a car. Some prefer to work at dusk, when the sun has set, because the sky becomes one huge light source and you get this wonderful seamless, reflective light that reveals the shape and subtleties of the car. It can make even the most boring car look wonderful. However it will also reveals the slightest blemishes — You can spot a tiny dent a mile away. When on editorial jobs you must get the shots no matter what, it doesn’t matter how bad the weather is or what time of day it is because usually you only have the car for that day then it has to go to someone else. You can’t assume there will be a great dusk, so it is best that you make sure that you get banker shots earlier in the day, then if conditions are good later, so much the better. A typical car shoot lasts from, say, 7am to 9.3Opm, you should take a series of different pictures — statics, action, interiors, details. The interiors and details are fiddly and take ages to set up — especially if you are working inside a cramped sports car. Panning shots are popular these days. To get the car sharp and the background blurred you need to be shooting at around 1/30sec. You can also experiment with speeds down to 1/4 sec. The hit rate is lower, but the results can look stunning. Tracking is another popular technique — this involves hanging out of a car window, then shooting a car that’s travelling alongside or behind you.
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The copyright for this content entitled "How to be a great car photographer" has been specified by the contributor as:
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This intel was contributed by Mike Chua
Mike Chua
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May, 2012
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