So last week I got this call from Ian Luff motivation asking me to come out and shoot a driver training day that they were putting on.  Details were a little sketchy, and the offered fee wasn’t so good, but I decided to do it because there was a bit of an opportunity to get my name out there with a few people in the bizz.  The problem was, I had never ever shot anything like this before in my life and, now that I am half way through processing the photos, I’m starting to think about what kind of photographer I am, and what kind of photographer I want to be.

A pretty good photographer that I quite admire once said, “Never turn down an opportunity to create art”.  Those are words that I have tried to live by ever since hearing them a year or so ago and to date they have served me pretty well.  That is, until this job came up and I suddenly realised that I never asked myself the question, “what do I consider, ‘art’?”.  The problem is, I have been thinking that ‘art’ is anything to do with picking up and camera and taking photos.

This is totally not true.

Photography is, at it’s root, a documentary medium.  We see things in the real world, point the camera, press the button to capture that image and freeze it for all time.  Of course, the ‘trick’ is creating things in the real world that are visually interesting and that is where photography becomes art.  This is the space in which I prefer to operate where I am constructing images and creating ‘art’, rather than simply capturing moments.

So what happens when you are asked to do the complete opposite and photograph an event essentially becoming a photojournalist?  You freak out and take way too many photos, most of are just plain crap, that’s what you do.  Or at least, that’s what I seem to have done.  I shot a total of 1068 photos in 7 hours!  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I have absolutely nothing against photojournalism and I really admire those photojournalists out there that are able to capture life as it happens and at the same time create visually appealing images.  I’m obviously just not one of them.

So, back to what happened with Ian Luff.  For those of you who don’t know Ian, he is this crazy driving instructor and motivational speaker.  His son is Warren Luff who can be occasionally caught racing for Dick Johnson Racing (aka Jim Beam Racing) in the V8 Supercar Series.  Ian’s a good bloke, if a bit eccentric.

Anywayz, the event was for LPG Australia and Ian was hosting it as part of “Driving Experience” to show off all the LPG products available, the savings of running LPG and the actual performance you can get from an LPG powered vehicle, blah blah blah.  I was asked to come out and take photos of the days events.  Nothing specific apart from ‘lots of head shots’ and ‘photos of those signs over there’.  Pretty vague, but I did my best.

So there I am trying my best to just capture the day with only a vague description of what the client wants and a tiny little fee to motivate me.  This was really the first time ever that photography had felt like a job and I didn’t like it at all.  Not one bit.  One of the things I have always loved about photography was it’s ability to make me a few bucks while still feeling like I was just ‘playing cameras’.   The fact that this actually felt like real work has made me stop and think as to why.

I think the answer is that, while I was busy trying to be a photographer, I forgot to ask myself what kind of photographer do I want to be.  I don’t want to be a photojournalist.  I’m just not entirely capable of creating an interesting image from something that is happening in real time.  I like getting in there and tweaking the scene, moving lights around, moving cars or telling people to smile, jump or whatever.  I think that now that I have figured out that I’m definitely not a photojournalist, if I’m ever asked to do that type of photography again I will be a bit more relaxed about it.  It’s the pressure to perform that makes me rush and not think about what I’m actually trying to achieve with each shot and find other ways to ‘tweak’ the scene to get the image I want.   I think with a bit more practice I will be able to do a better job than I did.

So do you know what kind of photographer you are?

Now, I’ll be clear from the start that I’m not really one of those “I’ll fix that in Photoshop” types.  In fact most of my automotive work never makes it out of Lightroom2 where I will usually only alter simple things like the tone curve, clarity (for that edgy look I like) and ‘maybe’ do some spot healing to get rid of dust spots from my (currently) uber grubby D700 sensor.

Occasionally though, you just don’t have a choice if you want to get the shot you want…

A couple of weeks ago I finally got to do a photo shoot that I’ve been hanging out to do since I was asked back in December ‘09.  The car is Marty Notaras’ absolutely awesome 390awkw Lancer Evolution track car.  This is probably the most awesome car I’ve ever seen in person, let alone photographed.  “Pfft, but it’s just a Lancer”, I hear you say?  Well, let me put it this way.  This thing has been re-skinned in carbon fibre with an aluminium wide-body kit attached to cover the whopping 10.5″ wide tyres and has 20grand of suspension, just in the front and does laps at Wakefield in about 1:05.

Yeah, it’s insane, to put it mildly.

So the reason this took a while to organise was because I had the thought…. “It’s a track car, so let’s shoot it on a race track.  Where is a race track I can use?”  So I traded favours with the nice people at the Southern District Motorsport Association (SDMA) and was granted access to their hill climb track at Sutton.  We had the track all to ourselves and it was set to be a fantastic shoot with heaps of cool motion shots of this awesome race car tearing around the track.

Then the car turns up on a trailer and I’m told that it’s not actually running!  How the hell am I supposed to get shots of the thing zooming around the track if it can’t move under it’s own power?????

Original image with LR2 'tweaks'.

Easy.

Drag it around behind a Holden Ute and “fix it in Photoshop”.

This is the second most complicated shot I’ve ever had to work on in Photoshop and the first is actually from this shoot now and I’m STILL working on it (might discuss it later).

Seeing as the car couldn’t move on it’s own, we tied it to the back of a Ute that someone had with them and towed the car around the track with me sitting (ie: sliding) in the back tray of the Ute.  Now, to make this look good we needed to go as fast as possible.  This was because anyone who knows how to do motion shots knows that this is the absolute worst angle to be shooting from.  Shooting head on does not give a real good sense of motion as the background usually comes out pretty clear because it’s much further away.  For this reason, I did most of my shooting in the corners where the car would be moving slightly sideways to the Ute.  The problem then was that the corners are when I’m sliding around in the back the most.  I probably took about 200 frames here, just to get 2 photos.

Then into Photoshop we go to get rid of the ugly strap that’s towing the car.  I liked working on this one because I’ve never done anything like this before and I got a chance to improvise.  Sure, people will probably know easier ways or not think it’s special, but for someone who never does this, it’s kinda cool.

The end photo is actually only the one frame with a tiny bit stolen from another photo.  Step 1 was getting rid of the strap that was covering the road.  Easy enough to clone out and took seconds.  Then Step 2 is getting rid of it from the tow hook.  I went for a mixed solution here and cut a section out of another photo that was from a similar angle and placed it over the top with some minor transformation to make it fit nicely.  Then I added a layer mask to remove it all and then masked back in only the parts that I wanted, which was the hook and the eyelid (which had an intercooler pipe behind it).  After a little more cloning it all fit together nicely, but the colour was way off.  So I added an adjustment layer that would affect only the tow hook layer and tweaked the colour to look like the rest of the photo.

And voila!

I think the lesson I learned here is that it doesn’t matter what you do to get the shot, it’s the end result that matters.  I feel sorry for all those ‘purists’ out there that scoff at the use of Photoshop because they’re only limiting themselves and as you have seen, I would not have been able to get this shot without it.  Sometimes, you just need to suck it up and “fix it in photoshop”.

The trick is knowing when to.

So there I am, a predominantly Automotive photographer sitting in an office full of Real Estate agents for reasons I’ll leave out for now, when I let slip that I sorta know how to handle a camera. Next thing I know one of them is convincing me to shoot their next listing. Not taking it too seriously, a few minutes later I happily forgot the whole conversation.

Fast forward a week to this morning when I get a phone call from said real estate person, asking me if I can shoot a property for them THAT MORNING.

Master Bedroom

“Sure!” I say thinking “how hard can it be?”.

So I jump on Flickr to do some quick research on technique, gear, etc, and found the Photography for Real Estate group.  And MY GOD some of those guys are good at this stuff. My jaw literally dropped. Everything I’d seen on real estate sales websites had seriously been with a P&S and was nothing compared to what I saw there.

Suddenly I didn’t feel so good.

So I went out and shot what I will conservatively refer to as “a cat poo smelling dump”, with little more than an hour and a half worth of reading up on how to actually do this stuff, in 32 degree heat (that’s Celsius, folks) in a house that smelt like cat poo and had no air conditioning. I kept saying to myself “you gotta start somewhere I suppose”.

Main Exterior Shot

Talk about getting dumped in the fire (or is it trial by deep end?). I also created a new line item for my invoices called “toxic exposure fee” which doubles my standard rate. As for shooting, I tried two techniques while I was shooting because I didn’t know what would work best. I set up a tripod, composed and shot 9 frames for HDR. Then I went about lighting things with strobes because it’s something I sorta know. The strobed stuff turned out much better so I think I’ll be sticking with that.

Anywayz, after all of that I have decided that this Real Estate stuff is something I’m interested in doing more of and I have a new found respect for it. It really is an art-form within an art-form.

In this post is 3 of the photos from my shoot. None of them are ’staged’ apart from me moving the odd chair, TV cable, etc. In fact I didn’t even learn that term until 3 hours after I’d finished. I’ll definitely be putting more effort into staging the next one. They all have lots of things wrong with them, so feel free to rip into me in the comments. I can take it.

Rig Test #1, originally uploaded by .Jazz.

The in ‘thing’ at the moment in automotive photography is, “the ‘rig shot”. For those that don’t know what a ‘rig shot is, it’s very simple. It is basically just a camera mounted to a car and using a long exposure technique you’re able to create some pretty cool motion blur while keeping the car itself crystal clear.

There’s a few guys out there doing it really well, but someone I keep an eye on, and inspires me regularly, is Chris Brasher. He’s doing some really good stuff at the moment. Check him out at his blog.

Example of a panning shot

So what is the point of all this stuff? Simply, it is to give the feeling of ’speed’ to a photo by creating motion blur around a fixed subject. There are a few different ways to do this.

One is called ‘panning’, which is where you set a reasonably slow shutter speed (i shoot around 1/40th) and attempt to track a fast moving object. I’ve been doing this one for a while now and pretty much have it down pat. This technique is great when you need to be a fair distance from the subject. This might be so that the subject has more context, or just because you have no other choice. I used that technique here, here and here.

The other way is by attaching the camera to the car itself and to attach the camera, you need a rig of some sort.  For the above shot I used a rig with 2 vacuum mounts and a long boom so that a wide-angle lens could fit in the whole car.  With that I could drag the shutter and move the car a lot slower. For example, a 1 second exposure with the car moving at walking pace and you can see that it has comparable motion blur to one of the above panning shots where the car was moving at about 80-100km/h with a shutter speed of about 1/40th.

Original rig shot before the rig has been removed in photoshop.

In a nutshell, using a rig gives you a lot more control over the image itself in regards to the angle, amount of blur and even removes a lot of the ‘hit and miss’ you get with panning when it comes to keeping the car clear, in focus and reducing camera shake.

So, before I laid out the quite copious amounts of cash to buy all the gear, I decided to borrow what I needed off my friend, Teon, who already has all the gear. You can check out Teon on Flickr or at his blog where he’s got a nice little write up on how he edits his rig shots.  I managed to get some practice in and found using the rig to be, well, kinda fun.  It also allowed me to practice on my own without the need for an assistant to drive the car.  Using a wireless remote shutter release made it possible to trip the camera from the drivers seat.

The rig brought with it some of it’s own issues though.  It’s quite difficult to make the boom 100% rigid so camera shake was still a small issue.  Also, shooting in the middle of the day is difficult as even at f/22 with ISO set to 100 (Nikons can’t go down to ISO50 ) i was still slightly over-exposing at 1 second exposure, and that was WITH a 3-stop ND8 filter!  I think to pull this off better, location will have to be taken into account.  I’m thinking undercover parking areas  would be quite suitable.

At the moment, I still prefer the panning shots over using the rig, but that’s probably only because I need a lot more practice. Hopefully Teon won’t mind if I hang on to his gear a little while longer so I can do some more practising. I’m still fine tuning my process for mounting and shooting with the rig as well as my post-process technique. It’s all a little different to Teon’s so I may post up more details on that in a later post.

Stay tuned for more…

I thought it was about time that I wrote down some words on how all this photography stuff started to become a serious enterprise for me.  So this post is part of a little bit of back-story on how I came about getting involved in the automotive stuff I like to shoot today.

At the beginning of 2009 I did a photo shoot for my best mate.  He owns a pretty remarkable piece of machinery.  A 1998 Toyota Supra RZ with a heart-stopping 620kw at the wheels (that’s 843hp for the yanks).  Yes, you read that right and no it’s not a typo.  For those not of the world of killer wasps, for comparison, the most powerful brand new Ferrari you can get, a 599 GTB,  puts out about 400kw.  So this Supra is pretty impressive, isn’t it?

Anyway, he wanted some photos of his car once it was back on the road after living at the mechanics workshop for 2 years, getting lean by eating a healthy diet of pistons. The word got out somehow that a fellow photographer friend and I were both going to be taking a few photos of his car.  That word, somehow, made it back to Performance Imports Magazine and they asked if we could send copies of the photos to them for a feature car spread in an upcoming issue.  I think we hesitated for all of 0.23 seconds before saying yes.

As soon as I heard that they wanted us to shoot this like a feature spread, I decided to attack it as though I was the only one doing the shoot.  This way I could get some experience with doing a full feature without the pressure of having to supply a full feature.  It also meant that if either of us stuffed up we could cover each others butts.  These magazine guys usually want about 50-60 photos submitted, which is a lot, especially for amateurs.  I think I managed to weed out about 30 odd good ones and my friend did the same so we ended up submitting about 60 photos in total.

And they were freakin’ STOKED…

Seriously…  My friend and I were getting emails from editors and art designers telling us how they loved working with our photos and sending us enough compliments to inflate our heads so much that I needed my car keys just to scratch my ear.  I was flattered, to say they least.  I decided to bite the bullet and ask them directly for more work if they have it.  And I did eventually get some, but I’ll leave that part of the story for a later date.

I also created a video from the shoot as well.  Sort of a “behind the scenes” but really it’s just all 500 odd photos that I took during the shoot, in chronological order from start to finish.  I recently “re-mastered” this video which was actually released months back as I have now purchased Adobe Premiere Elements 8 which is an in-expensive but fair decent video editing package.

So the video is now in high-definition 720p format for your enjoyment.

Today I officially become part of the club.  I’m now an emerging member of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography.  Don’t know who they are?  Check them out at www.aipp.com.au.

It’s a pretty sweet deal.

It costs a few bucks to become a member, but for that you get a few subscriptions to some photography magazines and some other stuff.  But what I find most useful is it allowed me access to their online document resources which includes thing like model release forms, commercial contracts, wedding contracts, and a whole bunch of other documents I’ll probably never use.  Full membership details here.

What I’m most looking forward to though, is next weeks Technology Day.  Basically it’s an all-day workshop on the fusion of HD video and photography, something that I’m dabbling with unseriously now. It will be a great opportunity for me to meet some fellow photographers of all levels of experience and mingle and learn how things are done.

One of the guys giving a talk about it is grandmaster photographer, David Oliver.  Now, this is quite a piece of irony for me. I actually met David a long time ago, back before ‘the switch’ where photographers where still shooting film and digital was bad and evil and would NEVER replace film.

At the time, I was shooting with my trusty Nikon D100 (a camera I only sold 3 months ago) and I had it with me at an event we were both attending.  David noticed and, as was appropriate for professional photographers back then, scoffed at my digital abomination.  By the end of the event I had convinced him to have a play with the D100 and when handing it back his response was, “it’s ok, I suppose”.  The look on his face was one of amazement, however, and I like to think that his 5 minute play with my camera is what sparked his transition to digital.

Now, 5 years later he is giving a talk on the fusion of HD video into photography, which is something that the majority of ‘purist’ photographers are now calling an abomination to the industry.  Ah, the irony. 

After the T-Day workshop there will be xmas drinks and a chance to mingle with some of the best photographers in the country.  With any luck, I will make a few contacts and learn a thing or two about the industry.

Wish me luck!

This running a business stuff is hard work….

And the worst part of it is, I haven’t really even started yet.  I’ve been doing more business related setup over the last few weeks than I have been taking photos.  In fact, until last Sunday I hadn’t taken ANY photos for weeks!  How can this be the life of a photographer?  Dealing with websites, blogs, business cards, accounting software, meetings, pimping myself out, etc.  When do I actually get to take some photos!?!?

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel…

The result of all this hard work seems to be paying off.  I have a number of jobs lined up and actually have 2 clients on the books who are sending me multiple jobs.  It’s all coming together.

So with the website out of the way as of last Saturday night, Sunday called for some downtime with beer and friends and some time to just relax and do something I enjoy.  And that is take photos of cars.

Sunday was Marques in the Park.  A rapidly growing car show held here in Canberra which ANYONE can enter their car into.  Despite that, there are always some freakishly nice cars there.  Also, of those freakishly nice cars, there are a few that stand out above them.  Like the old school Ford Mustang in the above photo.  It was just immaculate and gorgeous and I found myself staring at it, getting lost in it’s hard lines, perfect paint and spacious open-air interior.  Simply THE nicest ’stang I’ve ever seen.

But, back to the photography thing, I managed to snap off a few photos at the show and suddenly everything started to feel better.  Then, when I finally got a chance to process them and see how I did, I just felt even more at ease.  I was happy with the results and it made me realise that it’s these moments that make all the annoying businessy stuff worth it.

I guess, the moral to my rambling here is, if you’re starting a photography business, or even if you’ve been running one for a while, and you find yourself getting caught up too much in the business side of things and it starts to get you down.  Just remember why you started doing it in the first place.  For me, it’s because I love taking photos and creating images, so all I needed to do was step away from the computer, pick up my camera and take photos of something truly beautiful….

So, check it out at: www.jamiecarl.com.au

The Back Story

I was shopping around for a nice flash-based website to use which had a good gallery function to show off my portfolio.  Unfortunately, as seems to happen a lot with me, I wasn’t able to find anything that I liked for what I was willing to pay, so I ended up writing my own.  What was cool about this was 2 weeks ago I didn’t even know flash. 

The funny thing is I’m doing the same thing with accounting software.  I wasn’t able to find a job management/account package that did everything I wanted and wasn’t aimed at 25+ people studios and agencies and cost an arm and a leg, so I’m writing my own.  I’m keeping other people like myself in mind as I do it though and I’m hoping to open it up as a service or saleable product.  More info coming on that soon.

For now, check out the new website and have a poke at some of my favourite images.  And, if you feel like it, shoot me a message through the contact page and say hi!

Jamie

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but this is it.  Today I launch my new website and begin my journey into a new world.  A world without cryptic codes, bad software specifications and a steady diet of red bull, pizza and $2 chocolate bars.  A world limited only by my imagination and how much photography gear i own!

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this website up to date with stuff like behind the scenese photos/videos from shoots, tips on photography and photoshop and really anything else I can think of that might be interesting.  At least, I hope people will find it interesting.

So thanks for stopping by.  Come back soon (or even subscribe to my RSS feed) and there should be some new developments!