Ferrari F355 studio collab' with behind the scenes
Discussion
This collaboration photography between Andrew Whyte and I all started a few months ago; The first time we headed out to shoot a car we decided to test the murky waters of lightpainting a Ferrari 348 rigshot in a car park with no artificial lighting, just as a concept. A few weeks pass and we're at it again, this time stepping it up to a zero ambient, lightpainted Porsche 911 3.2 rigshot with a ridiculous exposure time, right slap-bang in the middle of the very dark New Forest - See the Porsche write-up here
So here we are again, where do we take this now? As Andrew is in the concept stage of his carbon-rig build, we should probably try it out but I've just moved to London and so a night session would see me awake for 24hrs+. We needed somewhere easy to get to for the both of us but it also needed to be dark. A quick call to Ed at Flowimages in Bristol and we've confirmed a day with them at their amazing studio in Bristol. All we need now is an idea - We've done the rigshot with the longest exposure that we're aware of, so how about the shortest distance travelled, plus it would be in a studio which neither of us have seen before.
Other than my bladder there are very few things that get me out of bed at 5am. But as the alarm goes off I'm up in a dash because today, I get to photograph and drive my favourite supercar of all time, again.
Teaser:
On any sidestreet at 6am.
A quick hop across town to pick up the car and then onto the M4 to meet Andrew at the Services.
By the time we reached Bristol Andrew's A1 was showing decent fuel economy whereas I was getting better GPM (grins per mile)
The car was cleaned down before being pointed through the doors..
The agenda for the day was to get a couple of safe photos with the studio lighting and then get creative - first up is the rear 3/4..
To create this image it must have taken at least 2 hours of experimenting with the lighting, plus longer than is healthy cleaning motorsport debris off the front of Mr Whyte's 50mm - yup, he shoots drift events on prime lenses :/
I still wasn't very happy with the lighting, but we had more photos to take and more stuff to experiment with. It was then onto a front 3/4 shot. We tried lighting with the studio lights but I couldn't quite get it as I wanted. And so out came one of the many lightpainting tools that we had at our disposal. First up was a small flouro light supplied by the studio:
Andrew got jiggy with it but as it was 'bare' the light was spilling too much onto the walls and white moveable ceiling creating distracting reflections. Andrew tried to solve this by flagging the light with some black lighting foil - a heat resistant material for helping to control studio lights. This stopped the lightspill but the foil itself was now reflecting in the paint of the car. Time then for one of Andrew's home-made tools. The only issue with it is that it's really very bright and so the first attempt was an over-exposed mess. A bit of creative thinking led us to try shorter exposure times which worked a treat aside from leaving us with lots of frames to combine in photoshop; the upside is you have a lot to choose from!
Dean's final image is 46 layers
We tried the car's brake lights first but they didn't give the right effect...
...so in the end settled for Ed getting red
That ain't working
Final outcome:
After this was in the bag it was time to get whacky with this idea that Andrew had come up with. The full concept was to create an image that gave the effect of driving through a city at night. Despite the confined studio space, Andrew theorised that the lighting control should make this easier to achieve than in the wild battling against multiple light sources and directions. To overcome the minimal distance that the car would move - much less than one full rotation of its wheels - the lightpainting would have to take place much more slowly which meant adjusting the aperture from the f/9 that's standard for his lightsource right the way up to f/18. The lens was Andrew's Sigma 20mm prime mounted on my D3 and like his 50mm used for the statics earlier, the first shot revealed it needed a reet good clean.
A couple of attempts showed there was potential in the technique but the background light trails weren't looking right. At this point we (ie Andrew and his anal ways) were trying to produce the shot in one take so the trails were being drawn in by hand. With time running out we had a try using stands to support the background lights and the effect looked a lot more convincing, as it should with the trails corresponding exactly with the trajectory of the car. Unfortunately, as far as the single exposure was concerned, Andrew ballsed up the car lightpainting (his words) on the first attempt and settled for the compromise of composited exposures in order to pick his daughter up on time - apparently the first time he's ever been in a hurry to get to his mother in law's. The final result, shown as a work in progress mobile-phone pic is a composite of just two frames and could have been done in one if we'd had the luxury of more time.
10 KitKat crunchies would do this to you too
After Andrew had left I begged and pleaded with Ed if I could stay on for 30 mins and do a straight-on shot of the rear. Straight on from the rear has to be the best angle for the F355, right? I didn't want to take long so I used the default lighting that they have in the studio, using various shutter speeds and 2 white reflectors we managed this:
If you have 3 mins spare the following link is a timelapse that runs through the day from start to finish at a frequency of 15secs, including shuffling the car around on the dollys just before the one-minute mark and the build of the rig shot towards the end
STUDIO TIMELAPSE - The first couple of secs is ruined by youtube
After this, it was time to head back to London and return the car it's rightful owner
One day I hope to be in the position to own one of these, and in this combo too, drool...
We'd both like to say a HUGE thanks to the owner of the car, Al at http://www.makeandmodel.co.uk and Ed at http:www.flowimages.com, without their help none of this would have happened. We had an absolutely brilliant day full of KitKat chunky's, mugs of tea and lots of learning. We'd both thoroughly recommend Flow for any studio needs, it's superb.
So here we are again, where do we take this now? As Andrew is in the concept stage of his carbon-rig build, we should probably try it out but I've just moved to London and so a night session would see me awake for 24hrs+. We needed somewhere easy to get to for the both of us but it also needed to be dark. A quick call to Ed at Flowimages in Bristol and we've confirmed a day with them at their amazing studio in Bristol. All we need now is an idea - We've done the rigshot with the longest exposure that we're aware of, so how about the shortest distance travelled, plus it would be in a studio which neither of us have seen before.
Other than my bladder there are very few things that get me out of bed at 5am. But as the alarm goes off I'm up in a dash because today, I get to photograph and drive my favourite supercar of all time, again.
Teaser:
On any sidestreet at 6am.
A quick hop across town to pick up the car and then onto the M4 to meet Andrew at the Services.
By the time we reached Bristol Andrew's A1 was showing decent fuel economy whereas I was getting better GPM (grins per mile)
The car was cleaned down before being pointed through the doors..
The agenda for the day was to get a couple of safe photos with the studio lighting and then get creative - first up is the rear 3/4..
To create this image it must have taken at least 2 hours of experimenting with the lighting, plus longer than is healthy cleaning motorsport debris off the front of Mr Whyte's 50mm - yup, he shoots drift events on prime lenses :/
I still wasn't very happy with the lighting, but we had more photos to take and more stuff to experiment with. It was then onto a front 3/4 shot. We tried lighting with the studio lights but I couldn't quite get it as I wanted. And so out came one of the many lightpainting tools that we had at our disposal. First up was a small flouro light supplied by the studio:
Andrew got jiggy with it but as it was 'bare' the light was spilling too much onto the walls and white moveable ceiling creating distracting reflections. Andrew tried to solve this by flagging the light with some black lighting foil - a heat resistant material for helping to control studio lights. This stopped the lightspill but the foil itself was now reflecting in the paint of the car. Time then for one of Andrew's home-made tools. The only issue with it is that it's really very bright and so the first attempt was an over-exposed mess. A bit of creative thinking led us to try shorter exposure times which worked a treat aside from leaving us with lots of frames to combine in photoshop; the upside is you have a lot to choose from!
Dean's final image is 46 layers
We tried the car's brake lights first but they didn't give the right effect...
...so in the end settled for Ed getting red
That ain't working
Final outcome:
After this was in the bag it was time to get whacky with this idea that Andrew had come up with. The full concept was to create an image that gave the effect of driving through a city at night. Despite the confined studio space, Andrew theorised that the lighting control should make this easier to achieve than in the wild battling against multiple light sources and directions. To overcome the minimal distance that the car would move - much less than one full rotation of its wheels - the lightpainting would have to take place much more slowly which meant adjusting the aperture from the f/9 that's standard for his lightsource right the way up to f/18. The lens was Andrew's Sigma 20mm prime mounted on my D3 and like his 50mm used for the statics earlier, the first shot revealed it needed a reet good clean.
A couple of attempts showed there was potential in the technique but the background light trails weren't looking right. At this point we (ie Andrew and his anal ways) were trying to produce the shot in one take so the trails were being drawn in by hand. With time running out we had a try using stands to support the background lights and the effect looked a lot more convincing, as it should with the trails corresponding exactly with the trajectory of the car. Unfortunately, as far as the single exposure was concerned, Andrew ballsed up the car lightpainting (his words) on the first attempt and settled for the compromise of composited exposures in order to pick his daughter up on time - apparently the first time he's ever been in a hurry to get to his mother in law's. The final result, shown as a work in progress mobile-phone pic is a composite of just two frames and could have been done in one if we'd had the luxury of more time.
10 KitKat crunchies would do this to you too
After Andrew had left I begged and pleaded with Ed if I could stay on for 30 mins and do a straight-on shot of the rear. Straight on from the rear has to be the best angle for the F355, right? I didn't want to take long so I used the default lighting that they have in the studio, using various shutter speeds and 2 white reflectors we managed this:
If you have 3 mins spare the following link is a timelapse that runs through the day from start to finish at a frequency of 15secs, including shuffling the car around on the dollys just before the one-minute mark and the build of the rig shot towards the end
STUDIO TIMELAPSE - The first couple of secs is ruined by youtube
After this, it was time to head back to London and return the car it's rightful owner
One day I hope to be in the position to own one of these, and in this combo too, drool...
We'd both like to say a HUGE thanks to the owner of the car, Al at http://www.makeandmodel.co.uk and Ed at http:www.flowimages.com, without their help none of this would have happened. We had an absolutely brilliant day full of KitKat chunky's, mugs of tea and lots of learning. We'd both thoroughly recommend Flow for any studio needs, it's superb.
Edited by //dean on Monday 28th March 08:55
Something both Dean and I forgot about when putting together the write up (above) was the stop motion that built throughout the day on my D300.
Ignore the first 5 seconds where youtube keeps screwing up the compression, if you have 3 mins spare this runs through the day from start to finish at a frequency of 15secs, including shuffling the car around on the dollys just before the one-minute mark and the build of the rig shot towards the end
Studio timelapse - remember, the first couple of secs is ruined by youtube
Ignore the first 5 seconds where youtube keeps screwing up the compression, if you have 3 mins spare this runs through the day from start to finish at a frequency of 15secs, including shuffling the car around on the dollys just before the one-minute mark and the build of the rig shot towards the end
Studio timelapse - remember, the first couple of secs is ruined by youtube
AndWhyNot said:
Something both Dean and I forgot about when putting together the write up (above) was the stop motion that built throughout the day on my D300.
Studio timelapse - remember, the first couple of secs is ruined by youtube
Ah yes, I'll add the link to it now.Studio timelapse - remember, the first couple of secs is ruined by youtube
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