Tag: black and white

Big Eye

Stutz Bearcat at Keeneland

This image is from my trip to Keeneland’s 2012 Concours de’Elegance last Saturday. I am fascinated by the size and detail of the early automobiles I see at these events such as this headlight on a Stutz Bearcat. According to the owner this car is one of only three known to still exist.

Due to the size of the crowd it was nearly impossible to photograph the cars without someone stepping into the shot so I decided to shoot details of the cars instead. I was able to keep the crowd out of these shots because I moved in close to the cars and got down low in front of them. Sometimes I was even laying on the ground to get an angle that allowed for an interesting composition; the people around me must have thought I was having a stroke when they saw an old man prostrate on the ground. At any rate it helped to keep them out of my camera’s line of sight.

I first processed this image in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 as an HDR from a single image and then saved it back into Aperture 3. I then took it into NIK Silver Efex Pro where I converted it to black and white. I made a few adjustment while in there and then back to Aperture 3 for my final processing. There were some branches intruding on the left side that I cloned out using the retouch feature in Aperture 3. I then made a few contrast adjustments and some minor sharpening before saving the image.

Whiskey Ridge Roadster

I found this track style roadster last year at the NSRA Streetrod Nationals in Louisville, Kentucky. I really liked the way this car was built and it’s racing style but I didn’t want to just shoot it from a standing position. I got this angle by laying down in the grass beside the car and shooting upward. I saw this composition in my viewfinder and knew immediately that I was onto something.

Back in my studio I decided to use NIK HDR Efex Pro to process the image. As I was going through the presets it occurred to me that this image was a good candidate for black and white. The preset I settled on caused some haloing around the cockpit of the roadster which I thought really fit with the image. After a few minor tweaks to the contrast I returned the image to Aperture 3 for final output as you see it here.

The composition uses circles to unify the image and adheres to the rule of thirds. The texture and position of the tire creates foreground interest while the perspective of the roadster draws your eye into and through the image into infinity.