This 1946 Mercury coupe is the same car I used for my self portrait shot last week. I composed the image with the car coming at the viewer as if it were rolling out of the frame. Since one of my criteria for this shoot was to accent the reflections in the cars I really liked the way the reflection of the other cars showed up in the door on this car.
I processed this image using Topaz Adjust and Aperture 3 to intensify the color of he car and sky.
At the NSRA Streetrod Nationals you will see many creative uses for vintage engines. This Buick Dyna Flash Fireball Eight is one such engine. It was installed in a Reo roadster which made it a very unique combination. The car itself was a faint pastel green and the engine was this fantastic deep jade green with white lettering. I wanted to capture the paint job on the engine because it was as finely detailed as the overall car. All the raised lettering that was stamped into the spark plug cover really caught my eye because it had all been perfectly hand painted.
Once again I am trying to show how by taking an entirely different approach to a subject, that I have been photographing for over 40 years, I was able to come up with a unique image that I hope will resonate not only with car people but with anyone who appreciates streamline influenced art deco design.
I chose to frame it diagonally to move the viewer’s eye through the frame from left to right. I used Aperture 3 and NIK HDR EFex Pro to saturate and intensify the color in the image.
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.
One of the difficulties inherent in shooting night scenes is the large dynamic range needed to capture the scene. The artificial light in the image is usually much brighter than the surrounding areas. When this occurs the highlights are blown out which is almost always in the street lights. This image is one such situation. I shot this image using a five shot bracket series from +2 through -2 stops. Even at that range the centers of the lights are blown out in this image.
My studies of my images at night have led me to adopt a wider range of exposures to offset this undesired effect. My current practice is to go as many as five stops underexposed if I encounter scenes that have large ares of manmade lighting such as this one. I watch my histogram very closely and underexpose until I see the right hand side move completely away from the end of the histogram. I have discovered that by doing that I can subdue the blow outs that occur in the lights themselves.
I merged the five exposures in NIK HDR Efex Pro and then used the default setting as my base to tone map it. I then tweaked the sliders until it was where I liked it and finally returned it to Photoshop CS5 to sharpen it using the unsharp mask tool.
Compositionally I framed the shot with the sunset in the right hand third of the frame in order to balance it with the waterfront on the left. The sky counterbalances the architecture and the complimentary colors of the deep blue sky and the orange waterfront create a harmonious whole.
My point in sharing this image is to show you that the conventional practice of using an automatic bracket set to shoot the scene is not always going to give you control of the entire dynamic range. By using the histogram as a tool to analyze the images in your HDR shoots you can take control and prevent blown highlights such as the street lights in this image.
Today’s image is once again from the Great Basin along US 50. In this image I was trying to capture the vastness of the Great Basin as well as the clouds that had been gathering all day. As I rode along US 50 this particular day I was treated to seeing a thunderstorm develop. During the day I watched as a large mass of clouds in the southern sky coalesced into a thunderstorm. As the day went on I noticed how every cloud in the sky moved over to become part of the storm. It was fascinating to see that even small clouds that were miles away from the main body would quickly move toward the growing mass until by the end of the day the entire sky had become part of the storm.
Compositionally I used the large boulder in the foreground as a way to bring the viewer into the scene. The triangles formed by the foreground element and the sloping terrain on the left side help to direct the viewer’s eyes down the highway and into the Great Basin while the clouds themselves frame the distant horizon. I used Topaz Adjust to process this image before applying some final tweaks in Aperture 3.
