
I recently did a shoot for a Ferrari dealership in Umhlanga. The brief was to photograph the dealership rather than the vehicles themselves (pity), but the idea was still to show off the cars in a small way. My idea was to shoot in the late afternoon as the light ebbed away, leaving a lovely glow in the sky while the street lights and the interior lights of the dealership would cast a wonderful light over the front of the building and onto the cars themselves.


And the hour came...without the light. The one thing you cannot, cannot, cannot do is panic in front of a client. Remain calm and get creative. In this case I had already had fair warning as to the weather so I had a rabbit stuffed in the hat just in case. I started off by shooting down the street with the dealership to the right of the frame. A simple two image stitch panoramic gave depth to the frame so that it looked like a good long empty road leading the eye towards the vehicular candy. This was taken in drizzle mind you, so I did saturate colours a touch in post. I still wasn't thrilled though.
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A panoramic shot of the street with a red Ferrari in the foreground - anybody spot something odd between this and the first image? |
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The image before any cleanup and without the multiple strobe captures |
Miraculously there was hardly any movement between the frames despite a gusting wind (you can see the movement in the palm tree...oh and how I wanted to be environmentally unfriendly towards that compositional nightmare of a palm). Popping the images into Photoshop I was then able to layer them and pull out the lit areas that I wanted from each capture. Although I love clouds, and actually enjoy working in overcast situations, this particular shoot didn't shout out to be shot under a moody layer of cloud as below.
So the final image also had a sky comped in from a shot I took in the Eastern Cape back in 2010. Ultimately I am quite happy about the final result. the client eventually chose to crop (see below) the final image quite dramatically, which is going to run at the top of a page in an up-market glossy magazine and probably for web use and additional advertising at a later stage.
In hind site, now knowing what the client wanted (we had some miscommunication as to the brief) I would have cropped in tighter on the actual shoot, but at the time this really didn't seem to make sense. There are bits that bothered me all the way through. The bushes in the foreground obscure the cars inside, no matter how you move the cars about, and I really learned to dislike the lone palm tree. The brief, as I thought, was to create an eye-catching image of the dealership so that people would recognize the site if they passed by after having seen the image. Layering multiple captures was my technical solution to the less than perfect conditions.
Great Creative Photography Emil, Takes more than a camera, I see:)
ReplyDeleteYour work is amazing. You play with lighting and are so successful. Look forward to following your blog.
ReplyDeleteOldtimer student, Be a, St. Lucia