My friends at www.rhyfallclassic.ch recently had their spring event with an outing and a photo shoot. Based on my first vintage car shooting with them I was asked to come and do the photo shooting at this event. My daughter who is a gifted youg photographer joined in and together we had a great time with these wonderful vintage cars!
How did we go about it
Basically we built on the experiance of the first shooting and added some great knowledge from the folks over at www.kelbytraining.com . Check out the courses by Tim Wallace – they are awesome! If you follow his great tips you are certain to get some nice shots. We realize we are still working on beginners level and with sub-par lighting equipment, but our friends and we are so happy with the results – and that isall that counts for us and for our friends at www.rhyfallclassics.com.
At this point we like to thank Scott Kelby and his team as well as Tim Wallace for the wealth of great information provided at a more than fair price. We are delighted!
Challenges
The challenges this time were: location and time! The location was a quite narrow passage in an industrial building where the cars could drive in on one side and drive out on the other. So there was no possibility to work with any decent background nor was there any good daylight available. Postprocessing (mainly in Lightroom 4.3) was the answer. What a wonderful program! All we had in terms of time was a mere 2 hours for ten cars. It was the first beautiful spring day of the year and our friends wanted to go for a ride – shooting to them was a nice thing on the side 😉
Key Learnings
There were again many learnings we took from this shoot. Here are a few that might help you as well:
- If you have multiple cars to shoot: get installed with one car, find out the best way to set up the light, find the best camera settings, get all the cables out of the way and be ready for hectic times while the cars are coming through.
- Get quick wins. Every vintage car owner is proud of his “baby”. Making sure that you can produce one or two shots that you can show to them while they wait to move their car out of the bay again gets them on your side.
- Concentrate on a few standard shots and don’t try to be too creative when there is a line of car owners waiting for their turn.
- Be flexible. Changing car colors (from white to black to red to silver ….) are a killer for your preparation. While white reflects a lot of light, black just sucks it up! So be prepared to change your settings and your lights on the fly!
- Keep having fun even if things are challenging and pretty hectic at times. If you don’t enjoy it you can as well just leave it!
- And the last learning is the same as with the first vintage car shooting – everybody who loves photography should try to shoot cars once in their career as a photographer – even if you are only a hobbyist like my daughter and me!
The cars
- Volkswagen Beetle white
- Maserati Merak black
- Aston Martin DB7 black
- Mercedes 190 SL red
- Alfa Romeo Guilia yellow
- Triumph TR3 red
- VW Porsche 914 red
- AC Cobra silver
- Mercedes 190 SL silver
- Corvette 1966 white
See also my Vintage Car Shooting blog post!
Thanks much for your interest and now enjoy the pictures!