cars

All posts tagged cars

Night photography

Posted by Arno on March 19, 2012
Posted in: industry, long exposure, object, photography, Photoshop. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

I guess you can say I’ve gotten myself into the night photography stuff a bit. I know the pictures with the light trails are pretty much as cliché as clichés come, but I always try to look at it from… well… a different angle 😀
I’ve tried that with the images you’ve found here that I took from the window of my apartment. I’ve tried that with for example the dead badger (talking about different angles, if any 😉 although that wasn’t really about the light trails, I had completely different intentions with that one). And I’ve shot a few mushrooms with light trails in the background, so I guess in many ways I’ve managed to get it a bit un-cliché.

My aim is always to not go stand on a straight road. Not to shoot at that “normal” angle. That would be plain boring. I usually try to find a point of view or a location where several roads collide. And then it usually still takes some post-processing, because I think it’s virtually impossible to get light trails to actually visibly cross in one exposure of say 10-30 seconds.

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 10 sec @ f/22, Nikkor 14-24mm

Those different worlds…

Posted by Arno on February 28, 2012
Posted in: color, lightroom, long exposure, object, photography, Photoshop, shapes, travel. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

… I mentioned before… I think I also mentioned in one of them that I was waiting for some blue lights from ambulances or fire trucks. Well, I got my wish. At least partly. Usually they always speed by, which would give a nice blue stripe in the picture, but now they were all gathering across the street here.
An extra bonus was that there was a tram coming out of this street, which it usually never does.

And again it’s a whole different world…

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 20 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm. Bits and pieces put together from six different images in Photoshop.

(In the mean time this is growing into a nice little collection. Exhibition material maybe?).

Same place, more different worlds

Posted by Arno on January 19, 2012
Posted in: color, industry, lightroom, long exposure, object, photography, seasons, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

As a photographer you know that “light” is one of the most essential variables in anything you do.
Living in a country as Finland, and especially in winter, you see funky things happen with light whenever there’s snow around. It may be in the middle of the night, and pitch black, but with a nice pack of snow, it could almost be twilight, because the snow reflects every bit of light.
It’s the same with both natural light and artificial light.

Yesterday I shot a picture of the street down here in daylight, the sky so overcast that it was a perfectly white massive softbox, good for nice and neutral colors.

This morning I set up the camera again, but earlier. It was still (or again) overcast, but there was the shade of this 15 minutes of civil twilight, where everything turns blue for a short while. It was just before 9am when I took the first shots, with the street lights still burning. It’s funny how the street lights seem to absorb all natural light and throw off this funky orange hue.
Below first the colors as the camera recorded it (slightly accentuated from the RAW file) and on second what I turned it into (because I like it better when it looks a bit warmer 😉 ).

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 5 images combined in Photoshop

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 5 images combined in Photoshop

But then, I actually didn’t know this was going to happen beforehand, the street lights switched off. It was in the  middle of one of the 30 second exposures when that happened, so in that particular image (not posted here) you can actually see the after-glow of the street lights. That image ended up somewhat underexposed (salvageable, but not really interesting), but the following exposures gave a nice example of how big an influence the light, its color and the color of the environment influences the image you take.

Below again first the image with the colors as the camera recorded it, and the next one adjusted to how we “know” a snowy scene is supposed to look.

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 4 images combined in Photoshop

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 4 images combined in Photoshop

Traffic jam

Posted by Arno on November 30, 2011
Posted in: color, industry, long exposure, object, photography, Photoshop, shapes, travel. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

They’re a pain in the arse. Especially when you’re in them. But sometimes, when you’re NOT in them, and you have a nice overview of what’s going on, a traffic jam can be a very inspiring thing. When you’re a photographer, at least.

Traffic jam

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND filter

The cool thing is that you can take a whole series of shots and they all turn out differently. And then you can combine stuff. Take a car from here, a tram from there, some tail lights from a third, etc. etc. And “minor” details like a biker and/or pedestrian from a few others to set the mood.

Now all I’m waiting for is ambulances, fire trucks and police cars to race by so I also get some blue lights in there still. Since that happens pretty much on a daily basis, it’s just a matter of time.
To be continued…? 😉

Classic American cars in Helsinki

Posted by Arno on June 6, 2010
Posted in: black and white, color, object, photography, Photoshop, shapes. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

Last Friday night there was a big Classic American car tour in Helsinki. Lots of nice cars: old ones, newer ones, new ones, small ones, bigger ones, huge ones… Great photo opp! Usually the drivers/owners of the cars also dress up to match the era of their car. Unfortunately this time I didn’t see much of that, and there were so many cars and so many people crowded together that it was next to impossible to get pictures of the whole car without getting the background or foreground completely cluttered. So I stuck to the beauty of the cars. Even the simplest car can turn into something artsy if you know where to look 🙂

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/3.3, Nikkor 50mm

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/3.3, Nikkor 50mm

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm (and some serious cross-processing in Photoshop)

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/350 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm

Classic American cars

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm