Kaelin’s Custom Cycles Hot Rod shop truck is a cool little vehicle with lots of character.
Tag: Hot Rod
Sam’s 1952 International Harvester COE Rat Wrecker
A short article about a 1952 International Harvester COE Rat Wrecker being built by Sam Humston in Louisville, Kentucky
Exploring and Building Presets In Topaz B&W Effects and NIK Analog Pro Plugins
This post looks at using Topaz Software with various NIK Software to create your own plugin presets for HDR photography.
Sam’s Volvo Build
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This photo of my friend Sam was taken when he was building a Volvo streetrod in 2013. Sam is an incredibly talented car builder with several cars to his name. He usually chooses cars that other folks ignore for one reason or another. His past projects include a Ford Anglia, Nash Rambler, 53 Willys Hardtop, 60 Ford Falcon and a 60s Studebaker Lark. His reputation for sound construction has people lining up to buy his creations even before they are finished. Sam likes them “loud and nasty” and he usually manages to stuff a V-8 into these small cars.
Sam’s passion is chassis engineering and he likes to work with unibody cars. This Volvo was the latest one to roll out his shop door and like all most of his previous builds it was sold in a matter of days. I always enjoy a visit to his garage because I never know what he’s going to tackle next. The night I shot this image he was totally engrossed in what he was working on and that gave me a chance to shoot without his knowing what I was shooting.
This image is a black and white conversion of a color HDR image that I converted using Aperture 3. All adjustments were done with the tools in Aperture 3 which is still my favorite image editing software. I entered it last night in the Louisville Photographic Society monthly competition for “People Working” and it took First Prize.
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I am including the color HDR version that I used to show the difference that the two processes have on the same image. This image is from a three frame bracket set of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures that I merged using NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 and completed in Aperture 3.
Click on the image to enlarge it in a separate window.
Click on the image to enlarge it in a separate window.
I’ll finish this post with another color HDR image that I processed as a black and white using a preset in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 that I adjusted to my taste. One thing to notice is the way that HDR allowed me to expose for the shadows in the garage and also expose another frame that allowed the fence and the outdoors to render in the final 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.
