Vintage Car Shooting

If you look at my website you easily might ask yourself “what is actually the main focus here”? I can openly admit – I don’t know yet! But then again – I don’t care 😉 I currently simply enjoy doing all kinds of different things, trying out different techniques, facing different challenges and to just see what all I can accomplish with my limited photography knowledge the means I have at hand.

When I published my first website a couple of months age I sent an personal e-mail to everybody I knew and actually had their e-mail address in my posession. Luck had it that one of my friends responded in saying that he really adores what I’m doing and if I would ever want to shoot vintage cars he would have a great opportunity for me www.rhyfallclassic.ch . I didn’t take long to say YES?

And here I am with the results of my first ever car shoot. For those who are interested let me tell you a little bit about how I did it, what the challenges were and what key learnings I took away from it.

How did I go about the shoot

I actually just went head over into this adventure. I screend google for car shots I liked and some simple tutorials. The best tutorial I found was this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0zXd9-4VJJc . I went to www.lynda.com and bought the full turorial knowing full well that I would never be able to do anything close to this. But I have to say that whenever I do something for the first time I try to set my goals very high and try to learn from some of the best tutors around. Thanks to the internet all that knowledge is at your fingertip!

So I packed all equipment I had and headed for the shoot. The equipment used was the following: Canon EOS7D, Canon 50mm 1.2, Canon 15-85mm 3.5 – 5.6, Canon 10 – 22mm 3.5 – 5.6, two striplights 25 x 180cm, a black background cloth, a few small flash lights and my tripod.

Challenges

The first challenge was that my friend offers space for vitage cars to collectors. So there were easily 30 cars around to choose from. With only a few hours to spend in a freezing cold storage room we focused on two cars to start, knowing full well that trying to do more would lead to not having anything usable at the end. The next challenge was the limited space. With a room height of just about 10 -11 ft and expensive vintage cars parked all around you one does not have much space to move around or set the light in ways one would prefer. But you don’t want to disappoint so you just get started and try to do the best with the situation at hand 😉

Key Learnings

There are many learnings I took from this shoot. Here are a few that might help you as well:

Get quick wins. Don’t try to do the most difficult shots at first (I lost 1 hour on trying to do the first shoot and failed miserably)
When doing high gloss surface shoots, don’t ever use those additional light formers (don’t know the English name for them) you mount on the front of your striplight to direct your light. Their reflections look ugly on the surface
Don’t try to do too much. Concentrate on a couple cars and a few shooting angles. Come back for more another time – if you can that is!
Shooting cars is mighty difficult, so don’t be disappointed that the yield of usable pictures is only 3 – 5% at the most – especially as a beginner
Keep having fun even if things are challenging at times
and the last one – everybody who loves photography should try to shoot cars once in their career as a photographer – even if you are only an hobbyist like me!

The cars