On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Paul Stenquist <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
Well, all your tweaking made it a pretty damned good shot after all. Not the sharpest ever, but the colours and the car look great - especially with those flames coming out of the pipes. I never thought I'd ever say this, but that's a hell of a great looking Mustang II. ;-) cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- 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.
