I set out to photograph a car. Not JUST a car and not JUST photograph.

I wanted to have it be a bit more of a lifestyle feel, so I needed a model. Because I was hoping to get a car + model combo for this test speck shoot, I reached out to my friend and college Stephen Wang - a fellow photographer. Now, let’s make it clear Steve is not a model, YET I continue to ask him to appear as a lifestyle model in many of my shoots. So, as always, thanks Steve.

Now Steve is a car fan, and because he owns a sweet Honda S2000 I asked if he could help out. Graciously, Steve agreed.

Photographing a car in most scenarios is not always easy. Mainly because it’s a giant reflective object. That’s part of why I wanted to do it. I wanted the challenge. I wanted hash, hard light to push me to figure out how to make a great image. Well, as luck would have it when I set out o challenge myself, nature presented us with a wonderfully overcast day. Arguably some of the best light for capturing most things.

Even though I didn’t get the full challenge I hoped for, I still worked through some ideas. I wanted to setup lights to add shape to Steve and the car. And because the location we had was not ideal, I added an extra challenge by trying to photoshop a composite image after the fact. AND because I didn’t want JUSt a photograph, I added another challenge, I wanted to also include a but of motion graphics to the final shot too. Adding motion to a still image - sometimes know as cinemegraph is something I always enjoy doing. In this case the animation was just a simple dolly out from the subject along with some moving clouds and dust particles to further enhance the depth.

If you look at the visuals I’ve included in this post, you can see the final animated still as well as the behind the scenes and the individual “layers” of post processing.

All in all, I’m really happy with the results from a shoot that was just for fun and practice and learned. All of those things were fully executed.

Bit things to Matt Branscombe and Meghan Olsen for helping out with the shoot too.

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Swang’s Honda S2000