Setup for car shows?

[Beltaine]

Car show season is ready to get back into full swing and I'm looking at getting some equipment to help me get the best possible shots.

I have a Canon Elan 7N with the kit lens. This is less than ideal, so help me make some additions to my camera bag that count.

Obviously I'm going to be photgraphing cars. I like to get dramatic shots from low vantage points, and closeup shots of details like emblems and such.

Most car shows are outside, and mostly sunny during the summer. However there will be some overcast days and indoor shows, as well as photographing under hoods and interiors.

I really want the paint jobs to stand out as well. Some of these people have spent thousands on paint alone. If I photograph a car with a red so deep you could fall into it, I want to try and capture that depth in the photograph. The "chameleon" and "ghosted" paints are als used quite a bit, so anything that would help capture those as well would be great.

I know it's a lot to consider. Any ideas/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Sebastian]

The biggest problem with the paint jobs will be matching film to the current lighting conditions. Outdoors on a sunny day will work just fine with any daylight film. But once the clouds take over or you make your way inside the colors will be anywhere from a little off to terribly wrong. This might be the best time to skip the film SLR and get a decent mid-range digicam with a good ISO range and a good lens. A good digital lens (like the Zeiss glass on the Sonys, or Leica for Panasonic) with a fast aperture (f/2, f/2.8) will be plenty sharp, will give you decent low-light capability and coupled with the ability to set the white balance on the fly will provide you with a very good representation of what you saw.

On-camera flash has problems in that the area the flash hits will be true to color, but the rest of the scene will gradually fade to ambient color casts, which can get ugly fast.

A digital in that area will cost you as much as a good lens for your SLR, but the lens won't solve any problems unless it's fast, in which case you will be able to shoot in SLIGHTLY lower light than what you are used to with the kit lens.

As far as film is concerned, they make daylight balanced for sunny conditions, and tungsten balanced (much harder to find) for incandescent lighting. You can filter for other types, but without a color temp meter you are guessing, and as lamps age they shift color spectrums, so even if you have a filter for fluorescent lighting, the lighting might be so far off due to age that you still get color casts. Worse yet, the light above you might be fine, but the one to your right might be off, creating an image that's half correct and half off. And to make it worse, many large warehouses where the indoor events are held (and also gyms, lots of large buildings in general) use vapor lights that flicker with the current, at 60hz. As they flicker, the color temp shifts, giving you a series of several shots where every shot has slightly different color casts coming from slightly different areas of the image. Plus filters can rob you of quite a bit of light, so even if you did get a fast lens for low-light conditions, filtering might bring it back to the light gathering ability of your kit lens. Now this holds true for digital as well, but you can set the white balance for the average conditions present, as well as keep an eye on the shots to see if there are any obvious shifts. The monitors are not very accurate, but they can show you deviations that might render the images useless while you're shooting, as opposed to when you get the roll back from the developer.

Now that that is done, I would get at the minimum a 50mm f/1.8 ($75) and if budget allows a fast wide-angle, in the f/1.8 to f/2.8 range. The smaller the f/number the more light the lens lets in. There is a Canon wide in the 20mm range that goes for about 300 bucks and is pretty fast, I don't remember which one, sorry. If you go to B&H Photo through our member links you can list all the wide angle lenses for the Canon mount and sort them by price pint and other features.

I think I touched upon all my thoughts on this subject, hopefully other will fill in with things I inevitably missed.

[another view]

I think Seb's saying that it ain't gonna be easy.

Two things - in most cases, on-camera flash will look really bad. The ads that you see in magazines have usually been lit with tons of studio lights and diffusers larger than the car itself. Because of this, you'll get the most even lighting on an overcast day (the sky acts like a big diffuser). But try it on a sunny day too - it's a different look. On-camera flash will often just give you a white dot where it reflects on the car's finish, but it may be handy for interiors. You could also get an off-camera TTL cord (not sure the Canon number for this) and move the flash around a little - that can be a huge improvement.

Definately get a good multi-coated circular polarizing filter (like Hoya HMC, B+W, Heliopan). That will help you with the reflections on the paint and glass.

Outside on a sunny day, you may want to use a reflector too. Look at the round ones that fold up into 1/3 of their original size. PhotoFlex makes a 5 in 1 reflector (white, gold, silver, gold/silver, diffuser) that works really well. My 32" reflector folds up into a circular bag 11" diameter. It's pretty inexpensive and easy to carry but you'll need someone else to hold it for you.

[Beltaine]

wow, lots of good info. I think it's safe to say that I will most likely be avoiding the indoor events hehe

[Sebastian]

No, don't avoid them, just be prepared that you might not get the results you are looking for without some work. Still shoot, but don't expect the same results you will get outside.

[Janie]

My dad has a bunch of show cars and the thing I find most annoying at the shows is when you line up the perfect shot and people walk right in front of you, seeing you with the camera - they just don't care. Also, you get glass reflections, they park the cars fairly close together so it's hard to get angles other than the front, they put their chairs in odd spots sometimes and they put big ugly cards in the front windows! I have mine in a directory online, feel free to check them out - it may give you a few ideas. A car show would be a great place to shoot if it weren't for the textured black road, curbs, trees, wires, people, etc. It all reflects on the cars.

http://bizfx.com/carshow

Good Luck! Janie - my dad's cars are below and in a few other pics in the directory: