HD Badge — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

The Art of Close-​up Auto­mo­tive Photography

I recently watched a course by Tim Wal­lace on Kelby Train­ing about close-​up auto­mo­tive pho­tog­ra­phy. Hav­ing seen is work before (check out Tim’s web site for exam­ples), I was eager to under­stand his tech­nique and try it myself. The image above is from my first effort. The course was intrigu­ing, but extremely easy to under­stand and repli­cate. In his con­clud­ing remarks, Tim urged prac­tice of the tech­nique. Here’s what I learned from my first experience.

It’s Easy to Get Started

Per the course instruc­tions, I used a sin­gle light (an Elinchrom BXRi 500) and a strip light setup at roughly a 90 degree angle from my cam­era & sub­ject. My cam­era set­tings for this shot were as follows:

• ISO: 200
• Aper­ture: f/​22
• Shut­ter Speed: ¹⁄₂₀₀
• Focal Length 52mm (using a Nikon 24-​70mm lens)

The expo­sure set­tings are there to ensure that the light falls off rapidly. You can’t see any ambi­ent light in this shot, so the back­ground doesn’t mat­ter. I was just sit­ting on the garage floor shoot­ing up at the H-​D badge on the fuel tank.

It Takes Prac­tice to Master

Hav­ing only done this once, I’m no mas­ter. How­ever, I believe that it’s good to learn tech­niques and give them a try. That’s one of the rea­sons why I have been an annual sub­scriber to Kelby Train­ing over four years now.

My brief expe­ri­ence here rein­forced many of the things that Tim men­tioned dur­ing the course, but they had more mean­ing after a bit of expe­ri­ence. For exam­ple, he spoke about ensur­ing your sub­ject was clean before the shoot, as it was much less time con­sum­ing than deal­ing with it in Pho­to­shop. I sprayed the bike with a pol­ish, wiped it down, and did my shots. Every­thing OK, right? Not even close. The light­ing revealed many lit­tle spots in the badge, swipe marks on the tank, and a plethora of imper­fec­tions that I never saw while look­ing at the bike. How­ever, they were quite bold and evi­dent when look­ing at the full res­o­lu­tion images. Every spot & speck is plainly vis­i­ble, and there are hun­dreds of them in this shot. Take this engine shot as an example.

HD Engine — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

The angle of light mat­ters, but that doesn’t mean you move the light. Instead, move your­self. Using the mod­el­ing light, I could get a feel for which parts would be lit and where there were shad­ows. By mov­ing the cam­era around before the shot while look­ing through the viewfinder, I could eas­ily see which angle offered the best lighting.

Even then, it still took a bit more refine­ment once the flash fired. In some of my early shots, only half the tank badge was lit prop­erly, and that sliver of it on the left side was com­pletely gone. I knew that I also needed to adjust my expo­sure, but that brought new lessons.

Since I wanted to allow more light in the cam­era to show the entire badge, my first instinct was to open my aper­ture a bit. Bad move. The key to mak­ing this shot work is the light falloff. By open­ing my aper­ture, I let in more ambi­ent light and had less falloff. That made the sub­ject more vis­i­ble, but less dra­matic. They key was to keep my cam­era set­tings as they were and adjust the light to punch out another stop.

Angles mean every­thing here. There are plenty of reflec­tive sur­faces and I didn’t want the soft box to show up in a reflec­tion. That meant spend­ing time tweak­ing the light in small moves until I got the angle I wanted. As I said, the con­cept is sim­ple. It’s the refine­ments that mat­ter. It worked well for me on some parts, and there are oth­ers (like the speedome­ter) where I need to go back and prac­tice a bit more to work out the angle I need.

Knowl­edge is a Bar­rier to Learning

Some­times you can talk your­self out of try­ing some­thing because you know it won’t work. I never tried shots like this before because I knew the reflec­tions would kill me. Tim’s course opened my eyes to the pos­si­bil­ity and exper­i­ment­ing with these shots was a blast. After I thought about it for a bit, I real­ized that I also knew exactly why this should work. It’s just that I didn’t let that knowl­edge come to the forefront.

When you think about it, the key here is a fast light falloff and using an angle to elim­i­nate the reflec­tions. I never put 1+1 together to do this on my own, and now I’m keep­ing myself awake with the pos­si­bil­i­ties for other sub­jects. That is exactly why your mind­set is more impor­tant than your gear. This expe­ri­ence proves to me once again that pho­tog­ra­phy is sim­ple. The only hard thing about it is allow­ing your­self to suc­ceed. Sure, it takes prac­tice to mas­ter. These shots, at least for me, are just proof of con­cept. Now that the bar­rier in my mind is gone, I can prac­tice & tweak things to have fun with more sub­jects. You should, too.
Kelby Train­ing has been a great resource for me to see what other pho­tog­ra­phers are doing, under­stand the con­cepts, and then put them into prac­tice. They keep adding new con­tent all the time, so I never stop learn­ing. It’s a won­der­ful feel­ing to know that there’s always some­thing else to learn, some new tech­nique to add to my bag of tricks, or per­haps just to get me to think about using my knowl­edge in ways that I hadn’t con­sid­ered. Kelby Train­ing really works.