seeing red 75 – unfinished Plymouth

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seeing red 74 – ornaments

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seeing red 73

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WARNING: MORE TECHNICAL STUFF BELOW!!! READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

More photos from the Webster (Where Life is Worth Living) show. The last post had some information on the making of these photos but it certainly wasn’t complete. One important thing I failed to point out in that post was that I do not strive for any accuracy in any of the photos. In many cases, color accuracy is not important to me. The owners of some of the cars spend a lot of time and money on the finished paint colors on the cars. Some owners go to a great deal of trouble to get accurate paint colors that match the original factory paint. Most of the time they are rewarded for their efforts. In these photos, though, I’m not concerned about color accuracy. The Olympus camera and lens combination usually provides good color but I sometimes find that the photos require a little help to achieve the best look I can get.

At the Museum, I try to achieve the most accurate color of the objects we’re shooting. I use a color check card or gray card to balance the finished photos. Most of the time I have the objects that were shot in the studio with me to double-check color accuracy. I don’t use this method or any other method to get the colors right on the cars. I take lots of liberties with color. I change the TEMP and TINT sliders until I’m pleased with the result. I’m constantly using the HSL sliders all the time, too. I use the little target icon in the HSL panel on almost all the photos and a lot of the time it’s mood dependent.

Having written all of that, I seldom will make any drastic changes to color. I have never changed a blue car to red or green or yellow – yet.

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seeing red 72

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I shot this image on 6/24/22 at the weekly car show in Webster (Where Life is Worth Living). It was a perfect evening for most folks that like these shows. The temperature was around 80° F and the sun shined bright. But the bright sun and the shiny cars are a bad combination for photos. There are a lot of cars at the show so they tend to park very close to each other. Getting a full profile of a car is practically impossible. The owner of this car asked me what I was shooting. I said “details”. I think he was amused by that answer but it does sum up what most of these photos are.

WARNING: TECHNICAL STUFF BELOW!!! READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

With these limitations in mind, I take one camera (Olympus) and one lens with me and leave the camera bag and tripod in the car. I have the camera set to f5.6 or f8 and shoot 3 (bracketed) frames of each shot. I prefer to shoot if the subject is in the shadows rather than in direct sunlight but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way. All the files are shot in the RAW format and converted to dng on import into Lightroom. This is what the shot looks like before processing:

I have a standard editing routine and use the same routine on almost all the photos. I have presets for sharpening and noise reduction and apply that as a first step, Second step is what I call spotting or the removal of bugs, dirt, small scratches, and specular highlights. This is done at 100% magnification with the spot removal tool.

The new masking tools in LR have made the rest of the editing procedure much easier. Just about every photo has several masks which are unique to each photo.

The last editing step is usually cropping the image, but I seldom use it. I almost never bring a (car) photo into PS for more editing.