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geoff liebrandt's picture

First Fstoppers post - some recent car show photos

Hello everyone! I just recently discovered and joined Fstoppers. I am an amateur photographer with interests in several areas, including cars. I am a professional graphic designer and that probably affected the way I approached my recent car show photos. It was a crowded show with a lot of visitors and background clutter. Difficult to shoot some of the cars that were on display. I was pleased with some of my shots but didn't like all the background clutter - I wanted to focus on the cars themselves, so I decided to try cutting out the backgrounds completely and leave only the cars and their ground shadows. The result is kind of artsy rather than straight photography, but it is what I was trying to achieve.

I took the photos with a Nikon D3200, using a Nikkor 18-55mm lens. Adjustsments were made in Lightroom on exposure, highlights and shadows, clarity, vibrance and saturation. Then I took the photos into PS and did some final tweaking with levels and gamma adjustments on the ground shadows. I purposely did minimal retouching on the cars themselves, keeping reflections as they were shot. The only major edits on the cars themselves were replacing the backgrounds seen through the windows with a plain light blue color.

I hope you enjoy the photos and I am looking forward to any comments!

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5 Comments

Welcome! I really like your use of the white negative space... It really makes each car stand out. Good vibrant colors and good detail. I have that same lens, and I really like it for stuff like this because it gives the image an "artsy" feel when it's processed in PS.

My only critiques (which are really nothing more than my own personal preferences/pet peeves):
* The 2nd image has a line in the top right corner that didn't get erased.
* Just my own quirky personal preference... I'd have to do away with the yellow parking lot lines in the shadows. For whatever reason, my eye automatically goes straight to those lines.

Great work, thanks for posting these! I look forward to seeing more!

Hi Mark, thanks for your reply and comments. I totally missed that line in the second image! And on the yellow parking lot lines, I was debating removing them but got lazy. There's more car photos from the shoot than I posted here so far. I'll probably go back at some point and do as you suggest and do away with the lines. You're right about them, and my aim was to get rid of the distractions and focus on the cars.

Brilliant work Geoff! Good to see your name is spelt right also.The owners would love these in frames.

Hi Geoff, absolutely delighted to meet another Geoff! I'm glad you like my efforts. I'm hoping to do more work like this and ultimately be able to find car owners who would like shots of their cars like this.

With work as good as that you should be able to find buyers. Just hand out your card or a flyer athe car meets.