There’s a great added benefit to looking after your car, keeping that paint in the best condition with some careful detailing. Not only does it keep a 13 year old car looking fresh, but it also creates great effects after a burst of rain. That wax suspends the water as nicely formed drops above the paint surface, somehow holding them in place.
If you have a soft top roof, using a product like Autoglym’s Soft Top Care kit will do the same for that fabric too.
Why am I telling you this? Simple, this morning after a little rain in the night I was presented with exactly this formation of water drops on my car. I grabbed my 5D, 24-70 2.8 and a couple of cheap-as-chips macro tubes to get some shots before the sun rose too high and the sparkle was lost.
The good old Mk1 Canon 24-70 f/2.8 is still a strong piece of glass, with great bokeh, although you can still see the 8-blade aperture shape on this shots.
As for car care products, on this car I’ve used the Autoglym soft top kit on the roof, for the paintwork it’s been hand polished with Menzerna P085RD and waxed with Poorboys Natty Paste Blue. Now to get out and drive it rather than snapping the close ups….
The Friday of a Grand Prix weekend always offers the best mix for photographers. You have the most track time to play with, but without the need to be paying too much attention to the live results. This goes for both MotoGP and F1, where the Saturday is a much more serious affair and if you’re at the track as a fan it’s a day where you need to be paying attention to the actual performances and not just watching the action through your camera’s viewfinder.
Today was pretty damn perfect at Silverstone. The conditions were very warm with literally no wind. The centre of the circuit was far more open than usual, allowing photo opportunities at the loop and on the infield section of the Becketts complex. Then to top it off, home hero Cal Crutchlow put his LCR Honda at the top of the timesheets followed by Valentino Rossi in 2nd place. It’s like you’re reading the perfect recipe for a British GP weekend.
Here’s a very quick set of shots from today, with a mix of locations. You’ve got The Loop, Becketts, Luffield and the Pit Straight.
Shot on a mix of Canon EOS 5D Mk iii, Canon EOS 7D Mk ii, Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS ii, Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 and a 1.4x Extender Mk III.
Whilst my main type of photography tends to concentrate on cars, bikes and racing, I’m always looking for side projects in other types of photography. On the weekend I joined a few photographers at a studio in Stratford for a morning shoot with model Ria.
I took the chance to compare three different lenses while there, starting off with the excellent but heavy 70-200 f/2.8 IS ii, then moving to the 24-105 STM and finishing up with the 85mm f/1.8 USM
Canon 5D Mkiii with 70-200 f/2.8 IS iiCanon 5D Mkiii with 24-105 STMCanon 5D Mkiii with 85mm f/1.8
The studio session was courtesy of Gabriel Niti’s meetup group on meetup.com.
Our model for the day was Ria Fantastic, who you can find for bookings on Purple Port.
This shot from the 911UK meet on Wednesday is as much about that sky as it is about the classic 993. To me this is how it looked when i was there, but it’ll come as no surprise that the original shot from the camera liked somewhat lacklustre in comparison. Your options for lighting are somewhat limited to the single Speedlite on the camera when at an event like this, which is where the importance of shooting RAW comes in.
When i took the shot I knew that the sky would overexpose, but so long as i had that under control and didn’t blow out the highlights, the details would be captured in that RAW data. Why is this important? How can you get to that data and show the image that you’re own eyes saw? Say hello to Lightroom, the photographer’s best friend.
Here’s the original. From my first view the plan for the edit was clear; make the basic adjustments to the whole image exposure, then select the sky and apply a separate set of adjustments to it. First to the core adjustments. My normal tweaks are too drop highlights, bump shadow detail, lighten the whites, darken the blacks and add a smidge of clarity. If exposure and saturating need increasing this is when I’ll do that.
Now we have the lower half of the image looking how we wanted, but that sky……..let’s fix it.
Select the brush tool and make sure the masked area is indicated. Carefully select the whole sky, using your scroll wheel on the mouse to increase and reduce the brush size when you need to get those tighter spots between the tips of the trees.
The brush tool icon
Click this to view the selection mask
The sky selected shown with he red mask, plus the filter settings on the right hand panel.
Now that we have the area select it’s time to make the adjustments. We want to change three things here. (1) reduce the exposure, (2) reduce the highlights to reveal the cloud details (3) increase the saturation so that blue sky isn’t lost.
And there you have it. From flat to punchy in just a handful of easy steps.
There are other ways to do this, both in Lightroom and Photoshop. In Lightroom rather than using the brush selector you could apply a graduated filter instead. The reason i haven’t here is because that would catch the tree tops and applied the filter to those too. That’s what I did originally and you can see that image in my post from yesterday. You’ll see how the filter has caught the top of the large tree in the centre of the sky.
The other way in Photoshop is to create a duplicate later, so that you have 2 copies of the image on separate layers. You then adjust one to expose the foreground correctly, expose the second to get that moody sky and then apply a layer mask and selection to combine the best bits of both layers to get the final composite image.
Hopefully that’s useful you some of you and will help you to look at some images you’ve taken and see how you can create something more powerful with just a little work.
Afternoon all! I thought you’d like to see a few shots from yesterday evening’s 911UK meet in Cobham Surrey. This was a last minute affair for me as I got a message earlier in the day from a mate asking if I wanted to come along to see and see what turns up.
As it happens some pretty special machinery was on show, not all from the Porsche stable either. There was a great mix of modern models, modern classics and some vintage 911s too.
This rather new 991.2 GT3 4.0 arrived and looked as if this was probably one of its first ever journeys, looking exceptionally showroom fresh.
I managed to get my 986 Boxster S cleaned up and she didn’t look out of place at all, even as the cheapest car there.
The vintage models put on a strong display, including this 53 year old 356 C Coupe. A great example of one of the classic models that has seen huge value appreciation of the past 10 years. This one in particular has see it’s value quadruple since the current owner bought it 17 years ago.
The two non-Porsche standouts were this Ferrari F12 Berlinetta and a brand spanking new McLaren 720S. At a time when most car companies are developing their cars with the mechanical parts hidden from view, the 720S is a welcome change. From the back end almost everything in on show through the mesh between the exhausts and behind that rear diffuser.
Here’s a quick gallery of the shots from last night.
davidcanephotography.wordpress.com 