Creative car photography

They have great lines and colours so cars make a really interesting and emotive subject matter for photography, so on top of my full time job as a professional photographer covering, weddings, press and events I have been documenting the growing years of our youngest son in a personal photographic project, pairing him with cars through time with the overall objective of presenting him with a book chronicling this journey of his development along side that of the motor car. As of January 2017 there have been 21 cars as I have been doing this for six years since he was 4 years old, when he reaches eighteen in eight years time it should make a pretty interesting record of how he and the cars will have changed over time.

When I first began this journey six years ago the photographs were taken outside my house and often in a bit of a hurry, but as time has passed I have tried to make more effort, so we go to a location in or around Milton Keynes and create photographs that not only show the growth of our son, but also tell a story.

My wife works in the motor industry so getting hold of new cars on a regular basis is not a problem, and this particular car the Skoda Octavia VRs 220PS Estate looked magnificent in Race Green, we called it Kermit Green, making it stand out against the urban decay backdrop of this shoot. Skoda's philosophy is 'forward thinking' and I thought that the juxtaposition of the derelict petrol station and a young boy yearning to being able drive such a modern and eco friendly car in the future made for good story telling.

I wanted the final shot to have a grungy finish in the editing process and you can see below before and after examples, the test image on the left is shot just with natural light and standard editing.

The final image on the right was created using an off camera Canon 600 EX RT flash to camera right, this flash which was fired wirelessly by a Canon ST E3 remote trigger, and you can see that this adding of artificial light is what gives the lines of the car their clarity and definition and makes the paintwork sparkle and stand out from the background. The final high dynamic range effect was created by editing the camera RAW image using Adobe Lightroom, I applied settings that darkened the highlights such as in the sky, and brightened the shadows and colour of the car to really make it pop.

Camera Canon 5D MK3 with Canon 24-70mm 2.8L MK2 lens and Canon 600 EX RT flash, 1/125th sec at f6.3 ISO 100