I shot the Auto Expo today. I talked my way into a media pass (I'd exchanged email with a guy previously and he told me who to see, but I had to convince her...and I did. I ended up with a badge that said "Ray the Rat" <G>) and started shooting before the Mongol Hordes descended on the place. For those in Utah, I'll mention that it was the South Towne Expo Center. I've shot shows there before...maybe 4 or 5 times. I've hated it because of the guard rails, crowds and mostly the lighting. I decided to do things a little differently this time.
First of all, after a couple of shots, I decide that I wouldn't shoot any white, silver or pewter-colored cars...and very few black ones....well, very few. That made it like shooting wildflowers in a meadow. The red, blue, yellow and orange cars were bright spots interspersed among the jellybean lookalikes.
I used the 7D, the Sigma 17-70 f2.8, the 430 Speeedlite and a tripod. I also used (mostly) a Sto-Fen diffuser for the flash. Getting there early helped avoid the crowds for...well, to a great extent. I don't think I'll be going back Saturday afternoon when the place is crawling with untamed house apes.
As far as the guard rails, I did my best to adjust the height or angle of the camera to minimize their intrusion. That left the lights.
In the past, the glare from a million different light sources gave me fits. I could edit some of 'em out, but I still had a hell of a time with 'em. This time, I decided to try making the lights work for me instead of against me. I can't say I was 100 percent successful, but not bad. A lot better than before. The diffuser on the flash helped a lot too. Mainly I tried to integrate the pattern of the lighting into the photo to draw the eye to the car or highlight one thing or another on the cars. I'll have to find a good example of that to post. I found that using the diffuser on the flash at a 45 degree angle (sometimes 60 degrees) worked the best for most shots.
That's another thing. I tried to minimize the number of shots I took, as well as minimize the amount of post-processing (leveling, cropping, etc) so that I could just resize, add a watermark and save the shot for use on the web. One shot, one kill sorta thing.
And another: I used long exposures without the flash (or some with it, as well as a long exposure.) I found that between 6 and 20 seconds turned people into something that looked like dust clouds or didn't show at all. I'd done this a year ago, but it's kinda hard to do on a monopod. The attached shot of a Hyundai Genesis shows a blurry figure looking at the spec sheet. It's just a shot that I found as a quick example.
One more: I played with different exposure times on a Lincoln Explorer clone...whatever they are. MKT is the model. A crossover...or cross-eyed or something. I'm not sure if the shot I attached worked or not. It might be like some that Paul's done by blowing 'em up to 20x30. I'll try an 11x14 and see what happens.
As a summation of all of this, I'm pretty pleased with the way things turned out. I'll have something on my server soon.
Last but certainly not least, I came home to find an email from the Canon Repair Center telling me that it would cost $124 to repair the broken lens lock on the 18-200mm lens. I did my best to explain that it wasn't the result of mis-use, but rather an engineering defect, since I'm certainly not the only one to report this...there are several on Canon's own site stating it. All I could get was a 20 percent reduction in the charge. This one ain't over. I'm gonna write a rather scathing review of the product wherever I can and then forward the links to Canon, with hopes of getting the email to someone other than a gatekeeper who'd just delete it and forget about it. This ain't right. It's a lousy design; a cheap piece of plastic and their attitude was, "we only warrantee factory defects." Stay tuned.
RtR
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2010 Hyundai Genesis Coupe 001.jpg
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2010 Lincoln MKT 010r8.jpg
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