I've been shooting cars with flash for more than thirty years, both night and day. It isn't a bad idea, but it can be tricky. I don't think it will help you achieve nice compositions in a crowded showroom, but it can work well as fill in daylight or as illumination at night.
I used flash for fill on this dreary day shot. It ended up edge-to-edge on the front page of the Times auto section. I was low enough to avoid reflection problems, and I used a diffuser on the flash. It has been shown here before. http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=14450338&size=lg I've used flash on numerous occasions to achieve motion blur effects at night, with a frozen central image. These are usually shot at /.8th of a second while panning: http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=3708948&size=lg And I've used it to achieve sharp pics at night as well. I pick a shutter speed and stop that will give me some background illumination without turning it into day, and I tilt the head of the flash up to avoid burning out the foreground. I usually burn in the foreground a bit as well. Could have cloned out the hotspot here but didn't bother since it's not all that distracting. http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=11498399&size=lg Paul On Oct 3, 2012, at 8:45 AM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > I have headed over to Canepa motors a few times to play with photographing > cars. There is a lot of pretty machinery there. Unfortunately, there isn't > much room and it's pretty much impossible to get a picture of a single car > isolated from the other cars on the floor. I had the thought that it might > be possible to do something to isolate a car from the background by using > strobes and taking advantage of the inverse square law, to light a car, and > put a lot less light on any other distracting cars in the background. > > I suspect that there are a lot of pitfalls to this technique, starting with > all of the things on most cars that are shiny. > > I've also considered using a strobe to shoot a car outside at night, for very > similar reasons. > > Does anyone have experience usign flashes to photograph cars? Can you give > me some good simple reasons why this is, if not a bad idea, at least a lot > more work than other possible techniques? > > LRC > > -- > Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est > > > > > > -- > 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. -- 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.
