During March 2010, I visited the “BORN IN THE USA” American Classic Car Show hosted by the Lincoln-Mercury Car Club Of Victoria . It was late in the day and completely overcast so therefore the light was diffuse, the skies grey and the shadows very very soft. In retrospect, this was ideal shooting conditions for highly polished objects of consumer art being lavished by highly obsessed owners (ie collectible classic cars).
Setup
I personally find highly customised cars quite boring and consequently, the majority of my shots were what I would call documentary snapshots - think wide angle, typical angles, people wandering aimlessly around the scene. I wanted something more creative so started experimenting with angles and details.
The biggest problem I found was getting a shot of the cars without obvious reflections, particularly the legs of people walking past. I waited for this shot for a minute or two kneeling beside the rear quarter panel of this awesome red "pimp-mobile".
Camera Setup
Canon 5D mk 2 at f/2.8 ISO100 1/640sec in aperture priority mode handheld.
Processing
The treatment I was looking for was a an old-fashioned black and white, highly vignetted "holga" look but with the car itself crisp, sharp and brilliant red. This processing was beyond Lightroom's Raw Processing capability and consequently some serious Photoshop heavy lifting was going to be needed.
Adobe Lightroom was used to do the basic processing of the photograph, first cropping it to make the car dominate the frame. A combination of Vibrance and very warm colour balance was used to bring out the deep red lustre of the paintwork. Thats it.
Once in Photoshop, a new duplicate layer was created and immediately converted to black and white, blurred with a gaussian blur then came the long process of removing the monochrome layer from car using a Layer Mask. One question I faced during this effort was 'Do I want the car in colour or just a spot colour effect highlighting only red?' Checking the processed version against the original, you can see that I chose to remove all colour including the green reflections from the wheel rims.
Finally there were some unwanted reflections still showing in the paintwork and these were removed using the Healing and Clone tools in Photoshop.
Improving the photo
I am actually pretty happy with the shot. Bearing in mind I am not a car "nut", the paintwork so obviously the star of the show and all I had to do was let it shine, so the speak. The shot was since posted on my Flickr feed and also submitted to several Flickr groups specialising in Lincoln collector cars. It has since become one of my most viewed shots.
Suggestions for improvements consequently revolve around reducing the time-consuming processing required to remove reflections. Specialist car photographers understand paint, reflections and dramatic angles and this is why they earn huge fees. My shot falls into the category of a "happy accident". Still ... I'll take that when I can.
