Car Shooting !

Before lighting...

My original plan on last Saturday was cancelled pretty much on last minute one. Not long after I received the plan cancel message, I received a call from the a professional car washer cum photo shoot mate of mine. He asked:"Wanna join me for a car shooting ?" I said, why not ? He said, must wake up early early one wor ! I said, what the heck, I got baby sleeping with me, can I sleep through the whole night ? Then he said, ok, on ! And WTF he asked me to be there at the point of meet at 5.30am on a cooling Saturday morning ! LOL

Oh, by the way, my friend who is a professional car washer cum photo shoot mate of mine has a blog one. Here. Btw, he ain't those fella who wash and vacuum your car for RM 10, ok ? LOL

So, early in the morning, we went into the winding road of Batu Dam, and we came to a special spot that should remain secret which has a nice vie of the dam. It was still pitch dark and we quickly set up our lightings before the sun comes out from the east. Our original plan was to capture the sun rising up from the horizon with our hot car in the foreground, lit by Darren's newest toy, the 180cm diameter Enlinchrom soft box. Want to see how big is this softbox ?

The huge Enlinchrom softbox vs the smaller LumiQuest Softbox.
See the HUGE contrast ?!

That big ! And inside the softbox is an 1,100 Watt Swiss strobe that could easily overpower the sun for sure ! And the sweetest part is this strobe is powered by a portable battery pack ! And the whole package cost our friend a 5 figure amount of money. *fainted*

It was indeed an eye opener to me !

Anyway, I was there to be like an assistant to him. You know, those assistant that helps to carry bags, lights, setting up, cleaning the scene etc. Yeah, the venue was dirty. And sometime couple as a VAL to the main photographer lar.


The sky was cloudy that day. The ambient light raise so fast that we had no much time to design the lightings. A quick couple of test shots, and some twisting on the light location, we are good to go. The huge main softbox will be the main light lighting up the car, but not to nuke it of course, and some small portable flashes as key lights to shape out the car outline.


Yes, the portable flashes, cheap and small like this one, the Sunpak 383. Small, powerful and cheap. It has a PC-syn port that could connect to the Skyport receiver. Why lar our good Sony flashes doesn't has this pc port one ???

When we are out of flash stand, we use what ever prop we had. The bag in the picture contain one "camera" that yet to be launched in the market. Cool one, and I kinda like it. :D

Have a look at the behind-scene shot I did for Darren:


Ambient drop at about 1 stop. The car is entirely lit by the flashes and strobe as shown in the pic.


The good A900 camera. Thanks to our special flash hot-shoe mount, we need an adaptor to mount the radio trigger. And it doesn't look cool at all....

We wrapped up our shooting by helping Wei Chek shoot his beloved Silvia. See how the master demonstrate to us how a VAL work and how to become a light tripod. LOL

I always wanted to be someone's assistant so I could witness how they work and produce a picture like that. Being an assistant also got me have my hand dirty so I got the hands on working on producing a photo. This early morning shooting was indeed a very good eye opener to me. Now I know lot of tricks how to shoot a hot car already ! :D

Thanks mate !