Just before Christmas last year, I journeyed north to a small village west of Belfast called Magherafelt. My brief was to shoot a couple of cars which were running a new wheel by UK wheel company 3SDM. The 0.01 is 3SDM’s flagship model and it’s not too difficult to see why. As far as the shoot was concerned, the day turned out to be a nightmare. Gusts of wind and heavy rain interrupted shooting all day (along with taking my Nikon SB800 being blown clean off the top of a light stand). Moving the cars to a backup location provided a stroke of luck however. With the winter sun setting over the Ulster countryside, we were gifted with a half hour of magical light.

For the processing, I used a simple system of compositing the lit cars onto naturally exposed and developed backgrounds. Any of you who get past the opening line on any of my posts here will know I’ve been trying to work on my processing skills lately and hopefully you’ll enjoy the fruits of my labour.

More images after the jump …

www.3SDM.co.uk

Post processing a digital photograph is one of the most important aspects of modern photography. Sure, you’ll hear plenty people complaining that it’s ‘cheating‘ but you’ll usually also notice the same people can’t tell their arse from their elbow when it comes to editing an image. After all, even traditional film photographs need to be dodged, burned, exposed etc. before they are fit for purpose. I guess it comes down to each individual situation. Personally, if I’m shooting an event I’ll limit my PP work to a minimum in order to ensure I can get my photographs out as soon as possible and also to give a fair and honest reflection of what occurred. I do think it’s wrong to remove / add items to an image which is to be used for traditional journalism purposes. That is cheating in my opinion.

If you’re tasked to create an image fit for advertising or promotional use, then all bets are off. It’s requires a huge amount of thought and vision both during the shoot and through the processing stage. Although I currently don’t shoot a whole lot of commercial work, it’s something I’m interested in. Whenever I have spare time, I usually find myself searching the web for the best contemporary examples of high end commercial photography. I then try and figure out how the image was lit and processed and see if I can replicate it. This is all part of a personal drive to improve my skill set. What I’ve included below is the images which were used in the creation of the above image. It was pretty much an afterthought to use this shot so there are definitely a lot of things I would have changed if I was shooting it again. But what I really wanted to do here was to see just how far I could take this image. The end result is by no means perfect, but it’s a start. More images and text after the jump …

This is the original RAW file as it was shot. As you can see the exposure is pretty much wrong in every area of the image. I was just walking back to my rental car and liked the trees and sky so snapped a quick shot which I then disregarded and continued on with the rest of the shoot.

Same as the image above but with some slight cropping and straightening.

Using the incredible power of the RAW file, I was able to pull this amount of detail from the shadows.

The tones were a bit too warm for what I wanted so I cooled the image off until it was closer to what I had in mind.

Same image, same RAW file but this time I’m concentrating on the sky. Notice the blown out portion of the sky at the very top of the image, this RAW file was being pushed to its limit and there was no detail here.

Roughly laying the sky over the improved foreground.

I happened to have a similar shot of the car parked in the same position but which was taken with a longer lens. I wanted to use this for the car as there was too much fuzziness and lack of detail in the original. It’s pretty straight forward to get to this stage and have everything placed accurately before the next stage.

Using layer masks, I first blended the sky into the background as best I could. You’ll notice that at the bottom of the sky, the blue fades to white but I’ll fix that later. Once I had the car correctly masked in, I used some adjustment layers to ensure the car matched its background for contrast and colour. Curves, levels and saturation adjustments were the primary changes made. I wanted to add some sun flare to the image – for no other reason that I wanted to learn how – so I painted in the flare on a blank layer and used the blending modes to try and get it to look right. What’s obvious to me now is that the sun is in the wrong place. I also tidied up the foreground a little bit.

With a little bit of help and advice from my work colleague and friend, Linhbergh, we moved the sun to where it should be – I was even feeling brave enough to add the slightest beam of light escaping from the clouds. I worked the reflections on the side of the car a little bit to remove some distracting objects. I fixed the white in the sky by selecting the highlights (Select > Colour Range > Highlights in Photoshop) and gradually brushing in some blue. I also removed the vignetting which was present in the previous example.

I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking things as it’s far, far from perfect but considering the starting point, I’m pretty proud. This was my first attempt at creating something like this, hopefully I’ll have a lot more to share with you in the future.

With December just about to roll around (memo to self, buy Christmas presents) the motorsport season is well and truly done for twenty-eleven. The off-season gives us a chance to relax, reflect and reminisce about the season. We can finally sit back and begin to take everything in. Because their is so little shoots during these dark months, I usually spend my time trying work on my processing styles. This usually involves going absolutely and completely overboard with my processing to the extent that it might make your eyes bleed.

But it’s for good reason. By pushing everything up to eleven, it helps me figure out just how far is too far. From this I can scale things back and find a happy medium. I’ve always wanted to try and create a processing style which pays homage to old photographic prints that have faded, been marked etc. I shot this 993 Porsche recently for Speedhunters and thought it was the perfect shoot to revisit and experiment. You can check out the original feature for comparison here. The rest of the images are after the break …

Ever since I was a kid, there was only one true exotic car that held my attention. Although I respected the Lamborghinis of the same era and I admired the successors that came after the F40, the F40 still remains the only exotic car I’ve held such a deep down desire for. It took me twenty five years to see my first F40 in the carbon and it didn’t disappoint. In fact, it exceeded every single preconception or idea I’ve ever held about the world’s greatest supercar. You’ll find some giddy and excited detail shots after the jump.

Just had my first UK cover feature published in this month’s Japanese Performance. The feature of the Need for Speed D-Mac AE86 has been a particularly sweet moment for me as I was fortunate enough to document the build of this incredible machine. Check out the full feature on this rotary powered beast, on news stands now !

It’s fair to say that the motorsport season is well underway once more and my poor blog is getting neglected once again. You can still keep up with me on Speedhunters or on Twitter if you really miss me that much. I’m also doing my best to keep my Flickr account up to date so be sure to check in for lots of photographs you won’t see anywhere else. Since I’m here I’ve put together a small selection of shots after the jump that should give you an idea of what I’ve been up to since I last posted here !