I usually shoot a handful of auto shows every year with the FLU.org “2011 Fiat FreakOut” show being one of them.
These guys are really passionate about Fiats and Italian cars in general.
They asked me to shoot their member’s cars in from on the Parthenon at Centennial Park in Nashville, TN.
I shot the cars with with two AlienBee 800’s with a couple of umbrellas. I was going to use soft boxes, but I didn’t have a lot of time to do set-up and break down due to the large number of cars that I was going to have to shoot.
You can see, in the first two images, how I have the lights positioned. It was about 10:00am CST, so I have plenty of light coming from the east. I really could have gotten away with using one light to light the side of the car, but I decided to go with two so I would have an even spread of light… and I brought the darn things with me, so I might as well use them! :)
In this second image… you can see the Parthenon and the area in front of it that we had to work with. We had about 75 yards from where we were set up and the front right corner of the building. I had a few concerns when they first showed me where we would be shooting and what they wanted. But I knew we would be able to work through them.
I was shooting with my D700 and 24-70mm 2.8 lens, so getting the whole building in the picture wasn’t a big deal. However, I wouldn’t have been able to get this shot with the D7000 because of the cropped sensor. Gotta love the FX sensor! Another concern, I had was finding a flat area to shoot. We got really lucky as there was about a 12 foot area that seemed to flatten out towards the sidewalk where we were set up. You can kinda make this out in the second set-up picture if you look just in front of the lights.
As you can see in one of the final images… the car is light up nicely and the background really pops. I started the lighting process by metering a well lit shot of the Parthenon.
The image was shot about an hour later… check out the shadows.
Once I had that reading, I was able to adjust the AlienBees by adjusting the power through the “Cyber Commander.” You can’t beat this set-up for the money. I shot the images in RAW so I would have full control over as much data in the image for post processing.
I only sharpened the image a bit and added some color saturation as well as a slight vignette in Lightroom 3.
Updated:
How could I forget to put a new 500 in the blog. Cool little car!
The image was shot at:
Thanks to the awesome folks over at FLU.org for having us out again this year! Feel free to comment if you have any questions or suggestions.
I hope you enjoy… John
Follow me on Facebook or onTwitter.
Nice work at the FIAT FreakOut John. You are a very talented photographer.