I always wanted to do a Halloween picture of an orange car. The colour was already a tough requirement, so I had no specific brand or model in mind, as long as it’s orange. Initially, I thought about a typical Halloween props like pumpkins (a lot of pumpkins), spider webs and stuff, but decided to go against it and tweak my idea a bit. Now it was “a moody shot with clouds, full moon and stuff, still orange”. It supposed to be all about the car with a little Halloween twist, rather than pumpkin-orange-madness.
There are different approaches to automotive photography, but I love strobing cars in the natural environment. I knew this is what I have to do this time. Even before I managed to take any photos, I already had a background image prepared, and prettty good idea how the car has to be positioned and where the light should be. Now I need to take some pics… simple, right? :)
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Preparing the Pictures
This particular photoshoot has been taken with my favourite lens – Sigma 50mm F1.4 DG HSM Art Lens for Canon, and I always use it with Marumi DHG Super Circular Polarising 77mm Filter. All light was done with Godox AD600Pro Outdoor Flash and the standard dish. It is good enough for the majority of use cases, especially outdoor. I bought it about a year ago to replace my old and heavy Elinchrom Ranger series. My back and shoulders thanked me for switching to lighter and more versatile gear.
Because this was not a commercial photography job, I could get away with a couple of things like a smaller output file. I took all the photos using Canon EOS 5DS R. The 50Mpix camera is excellent, but the files are massive. They provide an enormous amount of details and allow for cropping, but at the same time, working in full resolution takes much longer, and the final PSD very often is heavier than 3GB. My final photo was postprocessed in lower resolution, around 3000px wide (still big enough!).
I took a bunch of different photos, but at the end, I picked five which were used to put together the composite with all the light I need – top, front, rear wheel, front wheel, spoiler. You can see all the raw pictures on the right.
Scroll down to the video how these layers were put together.
The set of photos used to create the final composite of the car
This is was my starting point – a composite picture of the car with all light layers correctly masked and aligned.
Postprocessing Workflow Video
This is the video from postprocessing of the Halloween Huracan. Three and half hours of work, squeezed into a 10 minutes. Putting together the layers, fitting the car into the new backplate, postprocessing and a lot of adjustments, and even drawing from scratch a new windshield and with reflections. It’s all there. Enjoy!
Please, note that this is not a tutorial. If you happened to like cars and was wondering how much effort goes into a picture like that, you can learn a little bit more here. If you are into photography, I’m sure you will find something useful too.
Scroll down if you want to see the final image
The Final Image – Halloween Huracan
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Honestly i’am not good at reading but your blog is really easy to understand, thanks for sharing…