In this video, I'm going to show you how I shot a recent car photoshoot and TV
commercial and I'll give you some lighting tips as well as show you how I
had my car lighting rig made for my studio. Thanks to Squarespace for
sponsoring this video and use coupon code 'Karl' to get a 10% discount.
I've shot plenty of bikes before but cars are a bit bigger and whilst my studio has the
space I'd been wanting to fit a proper floating panel for car photography for a
couple of years now there was a lot to consider should I go with a purpose made
system such as Bacht or should I try and fashion my own setup? I decided for
what I needed I could work with Adrian, my local metal worker and between us we
could come up with what I needed. I knew I wanted to use reflected light off of a
white panel rather than lighting through a scrim as it's easier to control that
much lighting from ground level. To do this was going to require a rigid frame
that allowed me to attach highly reflective plastic white panels. Adrian
and I worked out how we could create the frame from aluminium box section and
have connection points that would allow us to include adjustable straps to vary
the angle of the lighting panel as necessary. This is important for
controlling the reflections on the surface of a car. The whole rig had to be
light enough to be lifted by an electric winch which was fitted to our I-beam
in the studio ceiling. We designed the electric winch so it was
secured on a pulley system to provide some horizontal movement as well as the
height adjustment from the winch to meet safety regulations all of the components
exceeded the weight loading of the frame and we also secured three additional
safety and tensioning lines all which also exceeded the safety requirements of
the weight of the frame. To ensure a super white finish we sourced a high
quality plastic that was then sanded and painted with an ultra bright white matte
paint. The plastic sheeting was then secured to the aluminum frame using
industrial-strength velcro on all the aluminum cross-sections and frame. This
new setup brings a great deal of extra versatility to my studio and will allow
me to undertake more motor vehicle shoots such as the previous bike shoots
but now include cars too. Although many new car images are created with CGI,
there is still a demand for good car photography and my plan is to shoot
classic cars too. I can also utilize this adjustable floating panel for many other
shoots too without the need for lots of stands and supports. My first project was
for an electric car company who wanted to promote their range of cars in Stills
and video along with some funky short animations. For stills, I used a
combination of studio flash lighting and some HMI daylight-balanced continuous
light. Here I'll talk you through some of that and then we'll look at the
differences for video. Right we're just partway through this new EVgo car
range electric vehicles... a kind of funky odd-looking things but typical car
photography, a lot of difficulty in lighting getting all the bits that you
need, so I've got glows on the bonnet here,
glow in the front area spotlighting one of the headlights and the side panels of
the car were particularly tricky because I was getting too much
glare so I've actually polarized part of the light with a polarizing filter
that's allowed me to polarize the glass on the side as well so I can see through
the car and then change the polarization so I can vary the amount of reflection
off the side of the car if we look at the setup you can see obviously how
complex it gets with car photography so we've got the big floating ceiling panel
above. That's being used actually for a light here at the moment which is
primarily this one which is lighting the bonnet of the car, coming over, this one's
lighting the interior of the car, this one's going into a big mobile wall
lighting the front of the car, this little one here, this little fresnel is
actually just spotlighting that headlight to bring a bit of life to the
car, then these big three boards on this side have two lights into them. Those
two lights are creating my gradients down the side of the car here and then
at the back I've actually got three of the broncolor HMI lights, so those are
continuous lights and those are illuminating the whole back cove.
The reason I'm mixing them up with studio flash doesn't really matter
because I'm giving a slightly long exposure about half a second with flash,
half a second on the pure daylight balanced HMI lights gives me that lovely
white background and I need to use the HMI later because we're going to be
doing some video clips as well. I actually left the modeling lights on
during the long exposure because I wanted a bit more warmth in the side of
the car down here so that was the little trick on doing that. So car photography
is notoriously complex, difficult a lot more to think about it's taken a long
time to set everything up on this car and get all the lighting right but
literally nailed it in a one shot take without having to comp loads of bits
together. One thing I needed to do for the video and stills was ensure that the
cars were in the same position so we could do this.
It's the perfect choice for my business commute. With less than £60 per
year running costs it makes it ideal for the school run or quick pop to the shops.
... and even though they're super compact the van version is ideal for my business
it's even got a reversing camera. Now you can see here, I've just put down some
markers on the floor which we just put in now because we're going to roll this
car out the way and it is now going to be replaced by the little brown, bronze
colored one which is the 4 seater. This is the 2 seater we've got here
and we're going to get in exactly the same position and then the lighting
should pretty much be correct for the next next shot so all going well so far.
Right so we've just wheeled the second car in using the markers got the
position just getting our reflector panels back in using our marks on the
ground and then we'll get our lighting back in and then obviously we just got
to paint over the tire marks we tried to minimize the tire marks we're going to
paint over those with a fresh coat of matte white emulsion and then we should
be pretty good for the lighting on this one bar slight exposure change because
of the color of the car. The car's a tiny bit longer than the previous one and it
might be a tiny bit wider so there's a few little things we'll have to deal
with but hopefully we'll be pretty much in the ballpark for this one. After
we nailed all of the still shots it gave me a good idea of how I was going to
light the shots for the video elements which would also involve actors and
dialogue. For the video shoot I could no longer
use my studio flash lighting so I decided to use our HMI lights and a few
of the new Broncolor F160 LED lights, this would provide me with a clean
daylight balanced light for video. Right so we are now on the last stage of the
video we've got the white van in and I thought I've just talked you through how
we've lit this for video because it's a little bit different. So what I've got
here if you come and have a look as a mixture of HMI lighting so I've got the
Broncolor HMI lights but I'm also using the new Broncolor LED F160s
because these can be perfectly daylight balanced as well to match the HMIs.
They're actually variable in color temperature so we can go from warm
tungsten to the colder daylight you know neutral color temperature for daylight so
we've got them set at day light, I've got one down there bouncing into light the front
panel, I've got one up here into the overhead rig which is bouncing off of
the bonnet of the car and at the back to floodlight my whole cove area
to get a nice clean white area around I've got three HMI 400s at the
back there and then I've got another LED F160 up here bolted onto the rig
that's shining in there that's putting a nice bit of light down the side so
that combination of lighting is giving me a nice clean pure daylight balance.
That's the great thing about the new LEDs they've got a really pure color
index so I think the CRI is running at like 98 or 99 so really good quality
we've done most of the filming with the actors we just got one last bit to film
with Dave with the van and then that'll all be cut together with the cars
changing and the colours changing so I'm looking forwards to the Edit part as
well. Believe it or not, I also filmed the video elements on a Sony A7S-II with a 70
to 200 Sony G-lens. The video lighting worked well and I was
very pleased with the results. For the cars changing color in the video
Ben, my video editor worked on the color changes and some clever keying around
the actors as necessary, from the stills and the video we were able to deliver
the client a multitude of assets for social media, print, and television. This
first shoot with the new rig has made it worthwhile and the work and the
investment is there for the future. This video is brought to you by Squarespace
from websites and online stores for marketing tools and analytics.
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and
run your business.
Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to
Squarespace com/Karl to save 10% off your first purchase of a
website or domain.