Every once in a while comes a job that makes up for the… less exciting ones. A shoot I did a few weeks ago for Porsche is one of those.
Curious eyes look back at us. They seem ready to play.
Doing a shoot for marketing Porsche in the Mid Atlantic area is a great way to spend some time. There were some technical challenges and some factors that went in our favor. Here is how it unfolded.
I brought a lot of lights. Just about everything I had. These included some Elinchrome studio lights and four or five Nikon SB-800s and 900s. I needed them, but not in the way I expected. And despite my effort to have any light I needed, my first step was to eliminate light: I did the shot after dark to reduce/eliminate distractions outside the windows. (As it turned out, the cars all faced the large bank of windows, so few images were shot looking outward. But it still helped by not mixing color temperatures.)
The splash of light thrown up on the Porsche logo added more drama because of the color temperature difference.
I had visited the showroom early, before submitting my estimate. It was lit up like a jewelry story and I had my fingers crossed it would be even more dramatic at night. I wasn’t disappointed. The cars were so well lit that I didn’t even need my lights for fill. Except one place: The Porsche logo in the background wasn’t lit. It had lights, but due to some technical glitches, they were rarely used. So I set up an Elinchrome 250 watt/sec light with a soft box behind a desk to light it. At first I thought I’d have to use a gel to balance the color temperature of the flash with the warm halogen lights in the ceiling, but a few test shots showed the cooler strobe looked good against the brushed metal. I used Elinchrome’s Skyport wireless system to trigger them from across the showroom floor. If I hadn’t had the Elinchromes, I could have used one or two Nikon flashes fired wirelessly.
Test shots, and frequent chimping of the LCD monitor on the back of the camera, showed that the lights that were so helpful in making those colors jump, also created a distracting dot pattern across large surfaces like hoods. Solution? A circular polarizer. It didn’t eliminate the reflections, but it knocked them down enough they weren’t hot spots.
Trying to get the people in the shot.
The next day I came back to shoot the service bay. I had asked for a few modern cars and a few classic cars since they did work on all ages of Porsche automobiles. However, they said because it was winter (and a hard, snowy winter at that) there were few Porsche owners willing to bring their classic cars out into the salt rich environment. Rats.
While everyone was certainly cooperative, the service bay was a working place, so they couldn’t spend a half day just cleaning up for me. That required some creative cropping with angles and car placement. One of the shots I like the most was one of the technicians backlit while working on a car. It was a wirelessly fired SB-800. Using fill flashes was tough in there. It wasn’t lit to be glamorous, so any extra lighting really stuck out. I had to be somewhat subtle with adding what I did.
One last trick; before I left the maintenance bay, I laid down a standard plastic Porsche license plate on the floor and took a few photos of that. With some Photoshop work I replaced the real license plates with the Porsche plates. This not only got rid of a liability, it threw in the logo again.
Speaking of Photoshop, I didn’t need to do a whole lot. I did minor color correcting in Aperture, but my Photoshop time was just for the license plates, a few electrical cords that needed to be taken out, and a few exit signs in the dealership. My cameras seemed to understand how to read that environment well, so early on I put the light meter away, set my camera to aperture priority and concentrated on composition.
Trying to get the iconic images to work for me, I set this up to look like you had pulled your Porsche into your own, well equipped, garage.
What tool did I wish I had in my bag? How about a wider lens? I did almost everything at 17mm (true FX 17mm, not the DX with a 1.5 multiplier) with my Nikon 17-35mm f2.8 lens. But if I’d had the 14-24mm, I’d have used that.
All for now. Much going on as spring comes to Annapolis. Don’t forget that it is a great time to have your camera with you. Flowers, early morning fog, etc….
Keep shooting,
Mark