Lighting Revealed: Or, How I Lit The Civic
I hooked up with JDM Mike from azht.net the other day to shoot his clean EG hatch. When I say clean, I mean it. This car’s got all the right modifications, and it’s my favorite Honda chassis. There’s absolutely nothing about this car that I don’t dig. I was really feeling the windshield banner, too. “I like my bay like my girls, fully shaved”
WORK Meisters, Recaros, carbon fiber everywhere, and a K swap. What is there to not love?
JDM Mike – Composite, originally uploaded by M Chandler.
Anyway, I’ve had some questions about how I lit one of the shots. I lit the whole front 2/3rds of the car, at night, with one Sunpak PZ40X. I also lit the interior with the same one light.
Now, I’m sure most of you have figured it out by now, but for the rest of us here’s how I did it.
Using a tripod, I took 4 images. Each image, I moved my light source. Which, by the way, was a bare PZ40X triggered via Cactus V2s triggers and held by my lovely girlfriend Jessica. I then placed the flash inside the car, on the center console and snapped one more shot.
I took those 5 images, and set each one to a proper white balance via ACR. I used the same WB value for each shot, to ensure that the areas lit by the flash were all balanced. After opening in Photoshop CS3, I used layer masks to paint the perfect picture. I’ll be doing a tutorial on this topic later, the next time I find something worth compositing.
If you like the composite from this set, please head on over to my flickr album of JDM Mikes EG Hatch. My Automotive set has some nice images, too.
Feel free to leave some love hate.