It’s advice you’ll see over and over again, not just from photographers but from people in all walks of life: If you want to stand out from the crowd, do something different.
Now while I am not lauding this as the great photograph ever taken, but I like to think it’s a good example of “different”.
Michelle, owner of this particular drift project S14, was proud to have her car on a stand at Modified Nationals and asked me to take a photo. Unfortunately the car was indoors with no chance of moving it so I had to work with what I had.
At some point during the weekend, an image taken by David Hobby during the shoot out at last years Gulf Photo Plus popped into my head. The idea being to make the car look like a celebrity by surrounding it with ‘paparazzi’. Normally I work with manual flash and simple radio triggers but only having two with me meant I chose to use my 580EXII as an ETTL commander to trigger any available Canon flashes… of which I had only one! So the first challenge was to approach as many Canon toting photographers as possible, explain the idea, and get them in position. (Something I wouldn’t have done a year ago, but thanks to photography I’ve been gradually making my comfort zone larger.) There are even a few Nikonian friends in the final shot with flares from Canon flashes cloned over their non-firing strobes in post.
On the technical side, I had my 580EXII on camera running the show and providing fill flash at minus 1 stop. All the slave flashes we’re set as ETTL slaves in the same group and set to +1 flash exposure compensation to give a nice bright rim effect to separate the black car from the black curtain behind and to light the roof and bonnet.
What could I have done better? Looking back on the image now I can see I should have had more light on the nose and the door and a smaller aperture would have made better star bursts from the flashes and highlights. But all in all, as it was a spur of the moment shot, I’m pretty pleased, and I have learnt what to look out for if I ever do it again.
June 13, 2011 @ 10:50 am
Really good shot, the idea of getting all the other canon toting photographers in the image was inspired…
Congratulations 🙂
David.
June 13, 2011 @ 11:08 am
It was a brilliant idea Simon and great fun to be part of the shot.
Well done.
Poet.
June 14, 2011 @ 5:30 pm
Great blog Mr Pow 🙂 Glad my picture helped
June 28, 2011 @ 2:52 pm
A great idea and it was a pleasure to be part of the shoot. Been trying to keep the idea of ‘Do something different’ in mind when I go to race meetings to take photos, a tall order when you are behind a safety fence but it sometimes yields results.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/motorsportfanmedia/