nosaJ wrote:Coooooolll. Got a Nikon D40. Thought I cold do something like this
(no experience with camera's). Any tips?
Again.Fantastic photo's.
Good post.
Jas.
Well as Stumpy says, there are quite a few ingredients to getting good shots, or there often is anyway. All of the above shots have had significant post processing, personally I use Nikon Capture NX for most of this.
Generally for car shots I prefer long focal lengths, so start somewhere around 100mm and use the 1.5 times the focal length rule for shutter speed for minimum shutter speed, so if you're shooting at 100mm use at least 1/160.
Keep you ISO low, modern cameras are pretty impressive at keeping noise low at moderate ISO levels but you will be losing detail and colour saturation and if you push your files in processing you will quickly see ugly artifacts, noise and colour banding.
Don't bother trying to light your car with your camera flash, it will be ugly, I have 4 flashes, none of which are used on camera and these really need to be shot through diffuser panells, which currently I don't have. But what you can do is use existing light, so if you are shooting at night find well light areas and use your tripod and long exposures.
Experiment with differnt angles, get down low, get up high, tilt the camera.
Get a circular polarizing lens to cut down on glare from light bouncing of the shiney surfaces.
If you don't have one yet, buy yourself a 50mm f/1.8 lens. Every good photographer has one in his kit and you'll be able to get shots with shallow depth of field and nice out of focus areas, usefull for isolation parts of the image and good for portraits too.
And the one piece of advice you'll always hear is get out there and practice!
Mart
