Twenty-five years ago, I had an idea. I had been shooting cars for Super Stock Magazine for a year or two. The Chi-Town Hustler crew had just built a new funny car, and I was going to shoot it for the mag. While I would shoot plenty of pics in a safe and nicely lit parking lot, I wanted to try to get one pic with the Chicago skyline in the background. And I wanted the engine running and flames coming out of the editors. Well, I talked the guys into dragging the car down to the peninsula on which the Chicago Planetarium is built, and unloaded it on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about the streetlights, and had no idea what color temp they were. (Turns out they were close to fluorescent green, only greener.) I brought my two strobes and plenty of wiring. I had a fairly powerful Honeywell potato masher, and I set that up to light the side of the car. I used a small Rollei flash and mounted it closer to illuminate the front of the car. I shot Ektachrome 120 in a Mamiyaflex C2, and bracketed from f11 at 1/30th, all the way to f4 at 1/15th. (Didn't own a flash meter at the time.) Well, I pretty much overestimated the power of those flashes outside at night, and the only good exposures were at f4. But the green cast from the street lights was awful at the longer exposures, and shorter exposures were underexposed. So my best shots were almost decent exposures but lacking DOF and way too green. In those days, they couldn't be fixed.
This morning I had a go at fixing one of them in PhotoShop. Unfortunately, my scanner sucks (a flatbed Epson 3200), so the shot that was probably soft to begin with is softer yet. But I did fix the color and exposure. It's now almost what I had in mind a quarter century ago. The Chi-Town guys will get a kick out of it. BTW, Pat Minick, who is sitting in the car in the pic, offered to shoot out the street lights with his sidearm that night. I declined, figuring I needed the light, even if it was green. http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=12827153&size=lg Paul -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
