Aston Martin – How to Photograph Cars

Cleaning the bugs from a windscreen after the shoot

I recently had a gorgeous and historic Aston Martin DB3 S to shoot at Goodwood for a magazine feature and, tight on time, and with rain threatening, had to shoot the statics quickly straight after the track test.

This isn’t ideal as the car can collect a myriad of bugs on the windscreen and I only noticed when I got back home and was back in front of my Mac editing the images. Glass or lightweight perspex in this case is always tricky to retouch as the light is often graduated from light to darker across the panel and great care must be taken with the clone tool or healing brush to avoid making a mess of it.

A quick solution is to start out with the clone tool set to a low opacity of 60-80% and copy over each bug mark from a point immediately adjacent to it on a high magnification and then go over it again at 15-25% with larger brush from the cloning tool palette to smooth any marks…

One thing you learn the more shoots you do is what to worry about on the day and what you can leave until later.With the benefit of hindsight there are many things you might have done differently at the time but the important point is to recognise priorities so you can get on with the main part of your day…photographing the car. This is useful to remember both on location and in the studio where it’s easy to spend valuable minutes fretting over a small highlight that could be removed in seconds during post production.

Best 5 places to shoot at Goodwood Festival of Speed

I’m still recovering from this year’s fantastic Goodwood Festival of Speed.The event has grown from a small gathering of motoring enthusiasts with their cars going up Lord March’s Sussex country home’s drive into the largest motoring event in the UK .

With a slow pan of 1/60th second the grandstands blur nicely making the awesome 1973 Porsche 917 stand out in this image.A faster shutter speed would make the busy background sharper and the car trickier to pick out. 70-300mm f5.6 1/60th second

I caught this grabbed image of the brand new Aston Martin Hybrid as it headed back from it’s run up the hill…I like the excited people in the shot and the dust kicking up behind the car. 70-300mm f5.6 1/250th second

The super cars very often light up their tyres on their way up the hill like this 2016 Camaro burning rubber. Don’t centre the car in the frame but leave more space in front to give the idea of it moving forward.70-300mm f5.6 1/500th second

This is one of my favourite views looking down the drive to the start line, here with the awesome 730bhp 1972 McLaren M8F driven by Andrew Newell.It’s a difficult shot as the car drives through the shadow and highlight from the trees above.Pre-shoot a few frames to work out the best balance of contrast.70-300mm f5.6 1/640th second

Another good place to catch all the action is the start line.Here the Renault Streamliner takes off at quite a sedate pace. 17-40mm f9 1/250th second

If you only have one place to shoot over the weekend this image of the car driving past Goodwood house is probably the shot to go for.Here the 1906 Grand Prix Renault is nicely framed in a medium speed panning shot.To make sure you don’t lose the focal point during your pan switch off auto focus and pre-focus on the point where the car will be when you want to shoot it. 70-300mm f8 1/25th second

Dealing with nasty reflections on location

I had a reasonably typical experience the other day on an auction catalogue shoot with a stunning Aston Martin DB2/4 that was just out of MOT. We had planned to run the car to nice location to shoot it but short on time we had to compromise by photographing it in a fairly scruffy garage back yard. All was not lost as the space had bamboo screening and it was a nice day and the shoot was going well until we had to turn the car for the nose left front 3/4 view an saw nasty reflections.

Aston Martin DB2/4 with nasty reflection in the side

This projected a horrible reflection of the brightly lit yard into the shaded side of the car but looking around we found a sheet of white painted ply which we used to shield the background with the added effect that it bounced the light back into the car lighting the side.

The result was pretty good…….