Hi Guys,
I am new to the group and an an old school advertising and commercial photographer, trained in the 70s, so 10x8 film and roll film, were my metier. I have been working for the last 25 years in TV as a Director of Photography but am now adding photography back into my career. I have used digital still cameras and editing for many years, but very much part-time so have a reasonable knowledge of Photoshop etc but much still to learn, of course.
OK, enough intro. I have a series of about 6 shots to do very soon, of classic cars. It is my intention to do these on location, locally, winter weather permiting. I wish to do dramatic and moody shots rather than the very much more common sunny images that are so prevelant of such vehicles. To this end, I intend to work in cloudy weather, in dark and or desolate, bleak and grim locations. One approach will involve shooting the overall scene so the whole image is dark and dramatic with no artificial lighting. Then without moving the camera I intend to take a series of ostensibly identical exposures, moving my battery powered studio style flash to highlight different aspects of the cars between each exposure; wheels, radiator grill, selected curves in the coachwork, interiors, etc. Lighting this type of subject with flash is all new to me. I did work in London as an associate photographershooting international campaigns for Daimler Jaguar, Ford and Peugeot in the early 80s but we were in car studios with all the tungsten fresnel lights one could ever need to complete the image in one transparency, and so the experience gained is not entirely transferable to these location shoots, with minimal budgets and one electonic flash.
My FS portfolio includes some landscapes of some of the locations we may use, if you are interested, no cars just settings. Other locations will aso be used.
So my question is in 2 parts;
1, I know there is a way to have Photoshop automatically stack the various exposures in layers, with pixel level acuracy, and to then to automatically find the bits of the numerous layers lit brightest and to combine those bits of each exposure to make a composite image which will be a single photograph that looks like I had 30 lights on the job, if only. However, I don't know how to do this. Please any advice will be very interesting, helpful and I will be very grateful. Of course, I could manually do the combining but that would be a crude and time consuming business, and as I mentioned, this is low budget project and it needs to be turned around quite quickly, so time will be of the essence.
2, Can you suggest a better approach to the multiple exposure method outlined above?
I will be using a Canon 5Ds, with top L series lenses, Breakthrough Photography x3 ND filters (3 stops, 6 stops and 10 stops), an Elinchrom ELB HS flash, which unfortunately has only a very modest 50 watts equivelant modelling light, daylight colour LED, but can produce flash at over 400 joules. I have heavy stands and a boom. I also have a variety of light shapers, a 175x70cm Recta soft box, a 1 meter diameter deep parabolic soft box, a 195cm Octa soft box, various open fronted conventional reflectors, a 44cm beauty dish and a 70cm beauty dish and some lastolight silver and silver gold reflectors in a variety of sizes upto 1 meter square. Of course, I have a flash meter and cable release. I do not yet have a Camranger and my laptop died recently and now, having just bough much of the listed kit, buying a replacement field computer is going to have to wait. I have Lightroom and Photoshop. The resultant images are for exhibition display to launch my classic car service. The exhibition is in London starting 18 Feb so I am under pressure. Luckily, I have a contact who can, and is happy to supply a selection of classic cars, and to support the work on location by bringing a colleague so both will help not just by delivering and cleaning the cars but as photographic assistants, so that is very good news.
Sorry it is a long one but a simple question lies at the heart of it. Thank you and I greatly look forward to your replies.
One way you can do this Is by opening bridge you can then slect the photos you wish to stack, open them in Photoshop via HDR pro. This will stack them together and then allow you to edit them in ACR. I do not know the exact work flow of the top of my head but if you look it up on YouTube I'm sure you can find a toutorial that has a better step by step process.
Hello Ian! I joined just so i could post this for you, but you should look into layer align it can be super helpful for situations like yours i attached some google instructions so it might be easier
Thanks guys, I appreciate your time and trouble. I have been out scouting/shooting locations again this evening and, weather permitting, we get started next week. I have some pretty good places in mind and I am quite nervous as the potential for making a lash-up is considerable and time is very pressing. Then there is the question of taste. Will my target audience, classic car owners, hate the unconventional approach I am taking. They are so used to boring photography of beautiful cars they may conflate such pics of lovely machines with great photographs. Also the wind and rain has been a big thing for sometime and continues to be forcast, which will make things difficult to schedule and manage, so that is a worry too. Finally, there is the usual issue of having a stunning image in mind but needing all sorts of things to conspire in my favour to develop the full potential of the latent image in my mind full of silver halides, all the while dreading some small minded security guard interfering whilst I politely tell him to do something he is employed and empowered to do, whilst my critical window of light fades by the second. Could do with a couple of assistants and a rehearsal or two and the back-up of a editing expert to train me in the approach, so the entire workflow is optimal. But that is just the pressure talking. You can tell this is a big one and I am excited. 40 years experience and I have never done this type of work. Fab.