Porsche Turbo by night

September 24, 2009 0 By admin

A good friend of mine has decided to sell his 2000 Porsche 996 Turbo

2000 996 Porsche Turbo

In it he has competed in numerous events such as the Mt Buller Sprint and Targa Tasmania, with good results including a 5th place this year.
Matt recently got in touch with me asking if I would be happy to take some photos of the car before it sold as the car has had a total respray and is in better condition now then when it was new.
So on a nice warm night last week we arranged to do the shoot. It had to be late in the day due to time constraints, so we met around 6pm and headed straight to one of my spots in Docklands that I use.
It was interesting to note that the Porsche has a decent storage space under the bonnet, it fitted my rolling camera bag in there perfectly.
Once on location I had to work fast as we were losing light fast, I quickly set up a couple of shots using the available light.

2000 Porsche 996 Turbo

In the shots above you can see some of the city lights starting to give that awesome orange glow

2000 Porsche 996 Turbo

Once the light was gone and the city lights starting coming on, I then switched to work with my flash units to light the car and balancing for the city lights in the background. For the first few images I had my Nikon SB800’s mounted on light stands which I was then triggering using Nikon’s CLS system from another SB800 mounted on top of the camera.

2000 Porsche 996 Turbo

But as we started to loose the ambient light, it became a lot darker and the flashes just wouldn’t light up the dark black paint work.

So it was time for some exercise as I painted with light. I bet a few of you have never heard that term before.

Painting with light is just as it sounds painting your subject with light. But instead of a paint brush you use a torch or flash unit as your brush and paint and your subject becomes your canvas.

But because the camera shutter is open for still a fairly short period of time, you have to quick and be on the run, hence the exercise.

By this time I was working with around a 20 second exposure time, it doesn’t give you a whole light of time to get the car exposed correctly. In this situation I double up and use two flash units to help speed up the process.

2000 Porsche 996 Turbo

I was pretty happy with the results, for the small amount of time I had.
When I shot the first lot of images when we still had some daylight, I shot a range of exposures to then turn them into some HDR’s, the end result was some surreal looking images, but it is still nice for a different effect