One of the best ways to clean up a busy background at a car or motorcycle show is to use Adobe Photoshop’s Radial Blur command with the Zoom option checked. By applying blur to a duplicate layer you can first reduce the opacity of the “blur” layer to allow some of the image that’s below to show through and then use the Eraser tool with various levels of opacity set for its brush to selectively clear holes of various density in the blur layer so parts of the original show through more directly. Sounds complex until you try it; practice makes perfect. All images in are © 2012 Joe Farace All rights Reserved
Tickets to many drag race facilities include a pit pass allowing you to get close to the drivers and their cars. Make a friend and maybe you can get invited to the races as a member of the pit crew, which I was on this day, giving me closer access to the track. This position let me fill the frame with this drag bike doing a burnout. Because motorcycle racers don’t want to get their front tires wet by driving though the water pit, their riders walk the bike around the pit and back into it before doing a burnout. Knowing what a competitor will do before he or she does it helps you get the picture you want instead of being caught unawares.
When photographing motorcycles indoors you have the additional challenge of dealing with color balance issues. I typically start in Auto White Balance (AWB.) If that doesn’t look good on the LCD screen; I whip out my Kodak Grey Card—the flip side is white!—and do a custom white balance. With a minimum working distance of less than four inches, the Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm f/4.0 lets you work close to the subject. I was just inches away from this custom motorcycle at a Harley Davidson dealer when photographing it using an Olympus E-Volt 300 with the camera mounted on a Manfrotto tripod and an exposure of one-half second at f/20 at ISO 400,
Automobiles make great photographic subjects. Whether photographing a Ferrari Formula One car blasting off the banking at Indy or enjoying the quiet elegance of a vintage Packard Sport Phaeton parked on the manicured grass of the 18th Hole at Pebble Beach, cars and photography are a natural combination. And all the excitement that surrounds digital imaging can be found in the be-winged, be-skirted sport compact cars that use the latest automotive technology to extract 500 horsepower from a four-cylinder Honda engine. Get out your camera and lets make some pictures of these cars!
In warmer weather, on any given weekend there’s a car show or Concours d’Elegance happening somewhere. You will find information about these shows in newspapers, enthusiast publications, and the Internet. A growing phenomenon within America’s car culture is impromptu shows not associated with a special event or organization but occur on a regular basis at a local donut shop or burger joint. These gatherings are harder to find but make the effort because they are smaller in size and have a more relaxed environment where you can photograph the cars and get to know the owners. To find show, visit shops that cater to cool cars, such as tire and wheel stores, upholstery, or paint shops, in short anyplace where you see interesting cars parked outside. Ask about upcoming shows and locations, including those informal get togethers.
Tip: There isn’t always a car show scheduled so why not shoot your own car? The top photo of my old Mercedes 320 SLK ( my wife still misses that car) was made in a local park using a Casio EX-F1 and the camera’s 16×9 ratio capture mode. Exposure was 1/640 sec at f/8 and ISO 200 in Aperture Priority (Av) mode. It was temporarily parked between two “No Parking” signs, so I “temporarily” parked it, jumped out, and made a few exposures before jumping back in and motoring on.
Most digital point and shoot cameras have optical zoom lenses that allow you to vary their focal length and change the size of an image being captured on the imaging chip. In camera advertising, zoom lenses are often described by the ratio of their longest to shortest focal lengths. A zoom lens with focal lengths ranging from 100-400 mm can be described as a 4:1 or alternatively 4X zoom, a specification I dislike because it ignores the starting and ending focal lengths that I think are much more important that just the ratio.
Many digicams also offer a feature called digital zoom that is produced by cropping the captured image in-camera and then interpolating (making it physically larger) to emulate the camera’s maximum resolution. This process always produces a lower quality photograph than that what would normally be captured with an optical zoom lens because you are tossing away parts of the original’s image resolution.
Question: Was this classic car at top cropped or was it photographed using a digital zoom and does it even matter?
Answer: It was cropped from the original photograph—after the fact.
You can achieve the same effect as a digital zoom by cropping the original file with even the least expensive image-editing program. So what’s the big deal about digital zoom? It’s all about marketing not photography, so don’t be fooled when the manufacturer erroneously combines the ratios of both optical and digital zooms giving you double the amount of worthless information.
Exposure for the black E-type Jaguar (above) was 1/320 at f/11 and ISO 200, which is one and one-third stops less that the indicated “correct” exposure. ©201 Joe Farace
Light has four major qualities: color, quality, quantity, and direction. As photographers seeking to master the art of exposure, seeing that light is the key mastering the art of exposure
If there’s any secret to getting proper exposure, it’s learning how to see the light falling on your subject, especially the range of shadows and highlights that occur within the scene. This chiaroscuro, as the Italian Renaissance painters called it, is the use of effects representing contrasts of light to achieve a sense of three-dimensionality within a two dimensional frame. Learning to see light is not difficult but does take some practice. That practice should take the form of not only constantly making new images but also taking the time to analyze those photographs after you’ve created them.
One of the first tips that I give aspiring car photographers is that they should underexpose black cars to ender them as black and overexpose white ones, so they look white. When you think about this concept, it makes perfect sense: By forcing the exposure to middle gray tones, you’ll end up with a white car that looks gray or a black car that looks gray too.
I have a soft spot in my heart for Italian cars, including Fiats, and owned two different 850’s—coupe and spider—back in the late 1960’s. With Fiat’s re-entry into the US with the launch of its cute little Cinquecento (aka 500,) I wanted to share one of my favorite car photographs that I call “Dreaming of Fiats.”
On a Sunday every June, the Italian car clubs in Colorado gather at an annual show where there are lots of exotic, interesting, and beautiful cars are on display including Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lancias, Panteras, Maseratis, Alfa Romeos, and Fiats. I’ve had a love affair with Italian cars since the early ’70s when I purchased my 1969 Fiat 850 coupe (great car) and then a 1970 Fiat 850 Spyder (not so great and what people often think of when they think Fiat.
While at the Italian car show, this little red car captured my imagination but there was always a crowd gathered around it. When leaving the show, I took one last look and there was this kid—dressed all in black—standing in front of the car and I made the shot using a Leica Digilux II. . After I made the photograph I looked back again and the kid had left so I made a second exposure. At the moment of the second exposure I knew two things: I was going to combine both images on different layers in Adobe Photoshop and I was going to change the opacity on the “kid” layer so he showed through the car in a ghostly way.
Leica Digilux 2's ISO was set at 200, shutter sped 1/500th sec at f /7.1
I started the process by opening the photograph of the car without the kid and saved it as a Photoshop (PSD) file. Next, I created a duplicate layer (Layer>Duplicate Layer) so I had two identical images on top of one another and was ready for the next step. Since the background was so busy I applied Nik Color Efex Pro’s Old Photo: Black and White filter to it. I thought the effect was perfect because it makes it look like a diorama, which many people believe it is rather than a real outdoor car show.
Next, I used Photoshop’s Eraser tool and erased holes in the duplicate layer where the car was located. Tip: I usually turn off the other layers so I can only see the one that I’m erasing. Next, I dragged the file with the kid on top the PSD file, automatically creating another layer and made sure that the kid layer was the topmost layer. Using the Eraser tool, I erased everything but the kid from that new layer. Since I wanted the kid to be “ghostly,” I set the Layers palette’s Opacity control to 70% in the kid’s Layer’s palette.
Even though the car is really an Autobianchi Bianchina it has a Fiat engine, so I call this image “Dreaming of Fiats,” and feel that unlike most of my car photos that are just pretty pictures, this one tells a story. I know what my story for this photograph is? What’s yours?
