How’d I Do It :Part 4

So I've decided to do a series of posts with a picture I really like and explaining how I got that picture. These are going to be short and to the point. Typically I'll show you a picture of the set up so you can see how the picture came to be. However I thought this whole series up AFTER this picture so you get this amazing drawing.

I didn’t take a setup picture so here’s a badly drawn diagram instead.

I think this makes it clear that pencil is not my medium....

This experience is made even worse by the fact that I was actually on the other end of the car, but I can't flip the cartoon me with his cute little camera. So you get what you get lol.

My friend came to me and said she wanted to do something special and she wanted to use my vintage Cadillac. So we took the car down the street from the house and laid it out on the edge of the lake. Then we laid her out on top of it. I set up the light at about 12 feet high at about a 60 degree angle shining down on her kind of like a street light. I set it high so the fall off dulls the light reflecting off the car and disappears before it hits the ground/water. It is a Profoto B2 with a 3 foot Octobox with a grid on for just a little more softness. I just wanted the majority of the light to fall on her face and torso but not get a lot of up reflected light on the white surface of the car.

We waited for the sun to drop but not completely extinguish so that we could get some of those gorgeous colors you see in the sky. I set my aperture at 5.6 so that all of her is in a decent focus and everything else is a little soft. I slowed my shutter speed to let that sky color shine through and that lake really shine through and let it fly.

One funny note about this session is that these pictures should have started maybe 10-15 minutes earlier than they did. If they had the sky would have been super pretty instead of just pretty. But we drove down the street, parked the car just right, set the light up annnnnnnd.....I forgot the dog gone camera. By the time I got home grabbed it and came up this is the light we were left with. And this picture, while not the picture I intended, is far more dramatic than the one I intended.

And again this is exactly the way this came out of camera, I didn't do anything in lighroom whatsoever.

And as you can see the car is featured, and it's prominent, but not overpowering. This is 1967 Cadillac DeVille. It's 24 feet long. It's no small thing to put it in a picture and have it not over power everything else you see. But everything in the picture thats not Alexis is just the backdrop. Using the fading sky light and the reflections on the lake effectively backlights Alexis and pops her right off the picture so we can do this with one light. And we give her just enough light so that it falls off right around her waist.

We took about 30 pictures, but we made them in multiple treatments. Using Lightroom we made some black and whites and some color treated ones. I felt with the car and her look I felt that making the photo look more vintage. I think it works.

A sepia-ish coloring is pretty effective.

It might not seem like much but getting enough light to the car surface to pick up reflection without making a hotspot in the picture is a pretty masterful turn if I do say so myself.

I especially love the black and white treatments. The addition of the graininess makes it feel authentically old.

That's it. That's all. Enjoy because we sure did.

How'd I Do It: 4

How’d I Do It :Part 4