The Hotrod — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

The Hotrod

When you look at this photo, what do you see as the sub­ject? Is it the car, the cou­ple, the man or the woman? I shot this at a group event where we got a bunch of clas­sic cars, motor­cy­cles and mod­els together in a garage. Some­times that’s the only way to make it worth­while for folks who aren’t shoot­ing on an assign­ment. The nice part is that every­one gets something.

Before I took this shot, I had to decide what story I was telling. The envi­ron­ment, the cou­ple, the hotrod, or some­thing else? To me, this is the story of the man behind the wheel. He has the car, the girl, and a cocky atti­tude. It’s not about any­thing else. This is his world, even though he only shows on a small part of the photo.

Every­thing else fol­lows that deci­sion. I chose my light­ing based upon him as the sub­ject. His arm lean­ing out the win­dow of the hotrod leads your eye right to his face. His eyes are the sharpest thing in the photo. His gaze is right through the lens. It’s all about him in this story. He belongs in that car, in that garage, with that girl.

OK, so now think back to my ques­tion about the sub­ject. What if you didn’t see the same sub­ject as I did? That’s OK. Art is sub­jec­tive. You can take away any­thing you want from a photo like this.

The rea­son it was impor­tant for me to select a sub­ject and a story to tell is because it set every­thing else in motion for me. It gov­erned how I com­posed the photo, where I set my focus point and how I directed the light­ing. Even if you don’t see the same sub­ject that I had in mind, you wouldn’t see this photo with­out that inter­nal process.

Dif­fer­ent pho­tog­ra­phers can approach the same scene and come away with dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent pho­tos. Some­times you’d almost swear you weren’t even in the same place. That’s due to the inter­nal story and how you approach your sub­ject. By bring­ing that story to the fore­front of your mind before you shoot, you can start direct­ing the ele­ments to sup­port the story and start mak­ing the pho­tos you want.