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!