On Reflection – More Classics

My friend Booker (www.gourdsbybooker.com) is an avid car photographer.  He has a cool “blackout” technique in which he selects the car and either lowers the luminosity of the background or drops out certain parts of the car, for example, leaving just the chrome.  Hard to imagine, but really cool.

Well, inspired by Booker’s technique, I played around a bit with a couple images from the past few weeks…

1927 Ford Roadster:

Here’s the original, taken at the Laguna Beach Classic Car show:

Another great car…not a classic…yet:  the Lamborghini Superleggera:

Original was a shot of it parked in a friend’s driveway… cool car, but kinda boring environment.

Thanks for looking!

J

Hooked on Classics…

My friend, Booker, arranged for us to meet with Jon, a local classic car collector, this weekend.  I’ve photographed  classic cars at public events and typically there are all kinds of things that get in the way of making good photographs…power lines, trash bins, other cars, other people.  It was so cool to able to shoot in this private venue:  nothing but amazing cars in a beautiful setting!

I shot everything with high dynamic range (HDR) imaging in mind, though I found in post processing that not all of the images benefited from that process.  For those images in which there are cars in sunlight and shade in the same shot (like the first couple images below), HDR really shines…revealing detail in shadow and highlight areas.   I’d have had to sacrifice one or the other in a single-frame exposure.  However, HDR tends to enhance detail.  For some subjects, that’s great. For others, the extra detail actually detracts from the image.  So, as I was processing in Photomatix Pro and Adobe Lightroom, if I found that the HDR process didn’t give me the “look” I was after, I selected a single image from the bracketed sequence and worked with that one in Lightroom.

All images were shot with the Nikon D2x and Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 lens, available light, and post processed in Photomatix Pro and Adobe Lightroom.

Anyway, here are a few of my favorites…

1956 BMW Isetta (the Steve Urkel-mobile)

Other images from the session are on my gallery at:  www.pbase.com/haverstick/classiccars

Thanks again to Booker for arranging the shoot, and to Jon for letting us take up an hour or so of his Saturday morning!

Thanks for looking!

A moment of nostalgia…Nikon F2AS

While I had the acrylic tabletop setup set up, I was looking for things to photograph.  Pulled my old Nikon F2AS Photomic out of its display cabinet.  Still as handsome as it ever was.  I shot with this camera for 25+ years before moving to digital. I haven’t put a roll of film through it in more than 5 years, but it feels really good in the hand.  Nikon always knew how to build cameras…

Thanks for looking!

On Reflection… Adding Reflection in Camera with Clear Acrylic

We’ve all seen it… Apple wasn’t the first to do it, but they sure made it popular.  I’m talking about that subtle reflection below the object in a product photo.

I’ve been doing reflections by shooting on black acrylic. I love the look of black acrylic: very reflective. A few examples:

Even white acrylic gives a nice, albeit very subtle, natural reflection.

But I’ve found a new technique that allows me to add reflection while shooting a subject on something other than black or white acrylic…basically, any color substrate I want. By placing a thin sheet of clear acrylic (or plexiglass) over the base material (in this case, red paper from my local craft store), I was able to keep the seamless sweep backdrop, but add natural reflection without the aid of Photoshop in post processing.

Here’s the setup… I’ve outlined the acrylic so you can see how it’s placed over the seamless.

I found that thinner acrylic works best, since it presents the smallest gap between the subject and the substrate.  I did have to do a little touch up to remove the visible edge of the acrylic at the back of the set, but it took all of 30 seconds to do in Photoshoop with the healing brush tool.

Anyway, I think it’s a technique I’ll be using frequently as it gives me more options for backgrounds.

Thanks for dropping by!

More Images from the Pharmacy Collection

I returned to the pharmacy collection last weekend with the express intent to photograph some particular medical devices: scarificators–used in the “art” of bloodletting, and other purposes prior to the advent of the hypodermic needle.  These images represent only a sampling of the variety of the scarificators in the collection.  I think what intrigues me most is the “mechanical-ness” of these devices, and craftsmanship with which they were made.

Of course, what bloodletting collection would be complete without the leech carriers?

Though I had set out to photograph a variety of scarificators, I also found this magneto-electric therapy device to be particularly interesting: the “Improved and Compound Magneto-Electric Machine for Medical Purposes, Ashael Davis.” Per the collection’s proprietor, this particular device is unusual in that it includes an apparatus for applying current to the eye  via the glass tube / eyecup in front of the box in the photograph below.  The “patient” was instructed to hold the metal conductors while the “practitioner” would turn the crank.  Depending on the rate of crank turnage, the patient would receive a therapeutic current: ranging from a gentle tingle to a significant shock.  Guaranteed to cure just about everything….

Thanks for looking!