Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts

Lotus Car Photography - Another Before & After


It's not easy finding locations for car photos. Magical photographers seem to be able to see gorgeous shots in the most mundane settings, but when I roll around my fairly scrubby brown town, I just don't see those images pop to mind.

I suppose it's learning to see or know what will work in post, or to take the Winslow Homer approach to the art, and find the beauty in the mundane. I keep those thoughts in mind when out looking for locations, and feel damn lucky when an obvious one appears.

...like this historic bridge at Bartley Ranch, Reno, on an overcast Sunday afternoon. Dramatic in its structure, but not in the lighting (soft light is great for flattering portraits, but maybe not so much for gritty automotive subjects?), I thought I'd give it a go anyway.  Here's the original photo:

Original photo straight out of the camera

Now to the fun parts.

I had a ton of chromic abberation all around the backlit subjects - the bridge, car, and even the trees. Chromic Abberation is a halo effect in a strong color like blue, magenta, or green, that makes the subject a bit weird and pulsey, and just generally makes your photo look bad.

Lightroom has a nice tool for reducing chromic abberation, but because I was combining bits of photos with varying exposure levels together, I still had a bit of work to do with cleaning up the weirdness here and there.

Coming out of Lightroom with basic edits - looks pretty good
The trickiest parts were removing the background trash - reflective stakes, bits of green metal gate, a road, barrier, and cars. It amazes me how much ugly junk is put *everywhere* around us, even in "natural" settings like this one. It's not surprisingy that most settings where you can get a sportscar are littered with so much crap. Thank goodness for the band aid, clone, and mask tools in Photoshop!

I did my favorite Soft Light tints and highlights on the Lotus, color corrected the greeny-yellow headlight, sharpened up some edges, burned the background a bit to make the car stand out more, some color adjustment layers, and re-cropped for a more pleasing composition.  Still not perfect, but I feel like I'm improving!

The final photo with all the retouching in the background, pushing and pulling, and color work.
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Lotus Photography Comps and Fiddles

I've been working more on my automotive photography, studying the masters like Ryan Jouhari, and Retutpro on Youtube.

I would say "it's complicated," and it is, but it's also fun. I don't know what it is about car photos that are more fulfilling to me than fashion - maybe it's the ability to pump the clarity up to stupid levels and still have it look amazing. Just like fashion, though, you can easily over-do the editing, so I have to find that balance.

Here are a couple recent edits. I went back through my Lightroom archive for photos I thought I could do better on. Most of my previous photos need to come up in the shadows *so* much, and are way too yellow (not purposefully, though, like the "vintage" one below).


Before is on the left (after Lightroom edits). After is on the right. Here's the out-of-camera:


Yikes.

For this one I cleaned up the background a lot, enlarged and straightened the car, picked out the highlights and darkened the glass with a Soft Light layer, and did some colorwork for that vintagy feel (along with some knicks, scratches, and splotches for an old-photo look). Here's the final:


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Second experiment, using many of the same techniques. Starting off with this photo after Lightroom edits:


Then cleaning up the background to remove the power poles, fence, red curb, road dirt, and all those construction stakes. I also used the Soft Light layer to darken the glass and pick out the highlights on the body and wheel. This makes a surprisingly big difference:


Last bit - colorwork with a Color Dodge layer in brown, and the tiniest bit of cross processing with a Curves adjustment layer. I had some hotspots from my Lightroom edit I went back to fix. Here's the final:


Getting there...
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Cars & Coffee - February 8, 2015

A few photos from the event today. I played with colored gradient filters to give a little artistic drama to a couple of these - just trying some new things.
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Cars & Coffee - January 18, 2015

It was a massive turnout for our local Cars & Coffee group this past weekend. I credit the weather, which was gorgeous.  Here are a few pics:

THE Mitsubishi Evo X by @Evoenvy on IG

Greg's Lotus Elise, now supercharged and carrying Exige badging. We're calling it the "Elige."
Best Subaru re-badging ever.
Jim's early 1950s Jaguar XK 120 vintage race car (he really races it too)
A different Jim's Ariel Atom. This thing has snow Trax on the back, and he drove it on the street to get to the car meet. Mental.
...and now we know who The Stig is...a pancake-loving millionaire madman.
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Cars & Coffee - December 7, 2014

We have a small local Cars & Coffee club that meets every 1st and 3rd Sunday of the month. It's nothing like Irvine or even San Francisco, in their enormity, but we have a decent turnout, especially when the weather's nice.

Most of the cars are new. The oldest we usually get is an '80s MR2, but for this one I invited my new friend and vintage Jaguar racer Jim to bring is freshly restored E-Type out.  Here are a few photos from the day:



British Racing Green
The gleaming glory of a English V12.
Jim's Jag and my Lotus having a chat
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Car Photography in Verdi - Scion FRS and Lotus Evora


A few of the lads in the Cars & Coffee group are into photography. One of them, Dylan, asked me to cruise over the Verdi to take advantage of the fall color. I took my camera too, and we took turns snapping photos on the idyllic bridges and in front of brightly colored bushes.

Scion FRS


Dylan's FRS is a thing of great beauty. It's easy to look down on the FRS/BRZ cars at the moment because they talk the talk but don't walk the walk - they look like super speedy race cars on the outside, but leave much to be desired on the inside. All show, no go.

Unless you're a petrolhead and tweak the noodles out of your FRS, adding a turbo (or two) and all kinds of other gubbins to turn that weak but shiny toy into a freaking beast.  Which is exactly what Dylan did.

Scion FRS

I had a hard time photographing Dylan's black n' shiny car, as it reflected absolutely everything. A friend on Instagram recommended polarized filters to knock the reflections back, but I haven't tried it out yet. You can see the mad reflections of the bridge on the photo above.

My car, on the other hand, is weirdly lovely to photography. It's shiny, but it's metallic grey (called "carbon grey" officially), so it doesn't reflect nearly as much as a black car. Here are my snaps from the day. I opted for barn doors and industrial fencing at sundown:

Lotus Evora Carbon Grey

Lotus Evora

Again with the heightening and brightening in Lightroom, which I maybe did a little *too* much of on the last picture, but I'm still learning. :-)
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Photos From the 2014 West Coast Lotus Meet













My favorite time of year, and right in my backyard, 2014's West Coast Lotus Meet was a long-weekend's worth of driving, showing, making friends, looking good, and games.

I went to most of the events, and even won the Funkhana with my partner (we both had grey Evoras, but his was the S). I was disappointed when the autocross was cancelled, as I've (still) never done it and think I could be good at it, but there is autocross here locally, all the time, I just need to get out of bed to go to it early in the morning. :-)

Had some fun with photography at this event, and fiddled a lot in Lightroom to bring up and push back certain areas. Tahoe is high altitude and fierce when it comes to light, with strong shadows and a lot of them. Here's a before and after showing the work I did on the photo of the black Elise above:
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