Welcome back to Pro Photo Insights, as you would have seen from the video, that’s of the location. I wanted to do a short video showing how some of these peculiar angles are produce on these car shots. I’ve been ask by few people, you know, how much they like to what they seen with the training videos, but you know, when are we going to see some car photography. And recently I’ve been busy for a while, but obviously it takes a lot of time to set stuff up like that. and I just had got a run to it and also I’m planning quite in a fairly big project to produce a DVD on some car photography and that will be out very shortly, so. In the mean time, I thought well I’ll do this little bit of video, we’ll set something up very, very quickly. It’s not gonna win an award, I’m afraid but it’s just to show you how the camera can be rig on some of these shots to get some these dynamic angles. So you obviously seen the video of me placing the camera on the car on the rigging. I used the 400D camera, not my 1Ds. Main reason for that is that the 400D is a lot, lot lighter than the 1Ds, and also it doesn’t cost quite as much money if it falls off. Not that I’ve had touch wood, not that I had any camera fall off the riggings so far. But it’s mainly just in the weight, it’s, it’s less in weighty. This particular rig was a very simple rig set up, similar rigs I set up, you may well see, one on the, one of the trailer video early on, I wanna set up Pro Photo Insights where we did a car with, probably, it’s been about 12 foot rigging pole on the car. Now also when you put a camera on the end of that, you got a lot more wobble, so. The lighter the camera the better really. So that’s the one reason for using the 400D. So I’m just gonna show you some of the retouching on this one now, and show you perhaps some of the settings use on the actual camera itself. Alright, so the camera set up is as follows, as I’ve already mentioned I used the Canon 400D for this shot, not the 1Ds Mk II, mainly due to the weight issue. It’s a light much, much lighter camera and also it’s a lot cheaper to replace should it to decide to go rolling down the road pass the car, which as I said, touch wood, never happened so far. The, it’s an APS size sensor, so the 15-30 mil lens is equivalent to about 24-50 if you're working sort of 35 millimeter terms. So the wider end of, approximately 24 millimeters, so a quite a wide angle shot. The exposure was an 8th of second at F16, and the exposure. We need enough exposure to get obviously some of the blurring in that we need. But it all depends really on A – the lighting conditions, B – how even the road is that we’re shooting on. So it’s always a bit of a compromise of how fast the shutter speed. Mostly the shots are done at walking pace, some of it are anyway, normally try and do them at dusk so we get a bit of nice bit of light, ambient light in the shots, rather shooting sort of the middle of the day. If you do… conditions, then we can use a neutral density filter over the lens, just to knock the exposure back a bit. Or even a polarizer, a polarizer will give you a minus 1 and two thirds, I think it is, around that. So we can slow the shutter speed right down. So, that is very much for now depends on the conditions that will have you. Shot on camera raw, a hundred ASA, manually focus and we’ve used those Pocket Wizard, if you saw the making of the black and white video DVD I did, we used a Pocket Wizard for those in that, those shots to fire the remote flashes. Well they can also be used also to refire the camera remotely. And those are so much reliable way I know of firing a camera remotely, so, I used those, they’re not cheap, but they’re reliable and that is quite important in the business to make sure your camera works fine. You could, if you walk in pace, you could perhaps walk along with a handheld trigger wired up to the camera. There’s no reason why you can't do that, and actually trip over it, but again I used the Pocket Wizard coz I got them. The clamps and stuff I used for the rig, the poles are aluminum and they’re connected and tightened together with some, some, some tougher clamps. I’m not sure if this are the names of the clamps, but they’re, they’re a bit like you would use to put on a house pipe, but a lot bigger. Sorry, I can't be descripting that, I’m not really up together with these bits and pieces, but they’re widely available. So the pole is clamp together, the camera is actually put on, I used this thing called Manfrotto Variable Friction Arm, which is, and the model number is 244, if you’re interested in that. This will enable me to use to put a flash, or camera on to this arm, it ties up at virtually any angle. It’s a very versatile piece of kit. And it enables me to basically set the boom up on the car, and that is also fairly rigid and if you haven’t set it up in quite the exact angle that you want this Manfrotto Variable Friction Arm can come in to its own, because it means you can probably get the camera into the angle that you want by just, obviously, loosening the, the friction, friction arm there and maneuvering the camera where you need it. So it enables me to be that more, little bit more flexible and gives me options. The clamps we used are the Manfrotto Super Clamps and basically the suction pads are used, I believe in the glass business for, you know, picking up large sheet of glass and they got all the vacuum, you saw me pumping the little vacuum pump there and they’re fairly strong the minute, as long as your surface is flat and it’s clean, such as glass or flat body work, they will, they will stay on. So all in all, those bits and pieces, you can now obviously got a quite versatile bit of set up. For mounting the camera or as I said if you wanna put flashes on the pole or something, get this bit of kit come into their own. Okay so here’s our raw image, these are actually cropped, I’ve cropped the top of it a little bit just to, I just thought I added to the composition somewhat. And this is the finish picture, so, a bit of a difference there, bit more contrast. The first thing I did with this was, I’m just turn some of these layers off a second, is that I decided, until the shot. I want to shoot into the light and have mostly, most of the lighting on the front of the car for this shot. I just thought it would add something to the image, the idea in my mind of what I wanted. And on this actual shot, we didn’t get any flare, some of them we have this flash on the shot, so. First thing I did was, coz I really like the, the blurring on this shot, I decided to bring the, I haven’t have any flare in it, I decided to bring the flare across and add some flare into the shot again. Now some people might say, oh it’s distracting but I quite like it, so, that’s the reason I put it in. And this layer I used just to darken the top of the image, I’m just showing the mask of that one. In the white areas here is where the effects is taking place. Coz there’s quite a lot of light on top of the car and not as much at the bottom. Either way ran it would be, if it was like excessively bad, I didn’t feel it was really matter on this shot. I could have put a graduated filter on the camera, and just knock the top of the, top of the shot down a bit. But as I said, this is really done, you know, very quickly. Just to show you mainly the camera set up, so I wasn’t over worried. My next layer was the allow wheel there, and I just basically added a lot of contrast to that, rebrighten the wheel up and also draw your eye into that area of the shot. Another one for the actual tire, just to add a bit more, a bit more gloss to the tire there and clean it up a bit. Then to the other layer here on the road, just to bring out these highlights there, just painted that in selectively with a paintbrush tool. And then I did a black and white layer, and I’ll show you the settings for that. I used a infrared preset, no particular, doesn’t in for the infrared shot, but I have it to be, I went to the preset and this one work quite well, so. And that is set to 43 percent opacity rather than a hundred percent. And this just take some of the, some of the blue out of the car, I wanted to make a bit more graphic and less, less blue coming through this shot. Again it’s a personal preference and I let in 43 percent so I have some color coming through. This next one was again, if you see in the black and white video I did, you, I already show you all about gradient maps. I did a gradient map on this, this image going from black right through to a very cool desaturated blue right up to very warm, the higher, the highlight end of the image. And applied that to this shot, just took a little bit off the alloy wheel, so it didn’t affect the alloy wheel so much. And if I just turn that on and off, you just see the effects, especially on the floor here come through. So that was the gradient map on there, and it just adds a little bit warmth to the body work up here. This one I added some highlights to the alloy wheel and I did that by just, I just show you the mask there. I did that by purely just making a blank layer, I got a paint brush tool, I just get my, just change my mask to my pressure sensitive pen. Pick a white and I just go quite largely just to show you, just so you, just showing the effect. And just slightly painting over part of the image using quite a small paint brush tool and then did a blur, and a Gaussian, Gaussian blur, we can use motion blur, sometimes I used motion blur and just softened the lines there. Then I can change that to screen and just drop the opacity down and it just, it wanted just to add a few highlights here and there if you need just to bring out a bit of detail or attract your attention to certain areas, I just delete that one. So that’s how I produce that image, just adds a few little very subtle highlights here. I just turn that on and off for you, there. The, this one just darkens the area here, again, just a curve adjustment layer and a bit of contrast and basically just darkening this area of the image. And then finally I did a global curve adjustment, sorry, not global, it’s selected curve adjustment on the image, just to darken the certain edges and allowing the detail just to, all the attention to stay in the center of the frame. So that is basically it, and then finally just a quick sharpen, so. Very straight forward shot, it won't win any awards, there’s a lot of reflections here which I’m, if I’m shooting this for, properly shall we say, I would pick a better location and probably want with less reflection and I probably would have obviously taken more care of the lighting I won't have here. But, as I said, it’s mainly coz I want to show, show you one of the options for rigging a camera to the car and how that achieves, so. That is, that is it really, and as I said, keep an eye out, I am producing a DVD on some car photography where we’re be doing some more rigging shots and also some sort of comprehensive retouching on the cars. And if you’re interested on that sort of thing, it would be definitely worth, worth a lot of. Anyway, until next time, I’ll catch you soon. Cheers. Babye.
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