Friday before last I had a photo shoot scheduled with a friend of mine to photograph his car. I’ve had an idea rolling around in my head for a bit, and I thought his car would be a good one to experiment with. My thinking was we could get some really cool shots of his car and he could use them around his shop if he wanted (he runs a local auto restoration business). Well, turns out him and his daughter both came down with strep throat the day before the shoot… so I went scrambling. I already had other friends and a warehouse lined up, so I didn’t want it all to go to waste (and I hate rescheduling stuff like that). Hmmm… who else do I know that has a cool car? Ah yes, my friend Chad Quesenberry. After a little convincing he agreed (which frankly consisted of “your car, my camera, you get pictures”) to let me borrow his car for the evening, and everything was well and good in the world of photography again.
So, what exactly are you looking at here other than a super slick, supercharged 2010 Camaro (yep, it’s FAST)? It’s a photography technique called light painting… and it works the way you’d guess. We setup the shot in a pitch black warehouse and then use lights to “paint in” what we want you to see. In this case, specific lines on the car that I find interesting. We then used a red light to light up a little area around the car to give you some context as to exactly what you’re looking at and to give the car shape. Why red? It sounded like a good idea at the time! We actually did it several different times with white light and with red light, and the more I looked at the end result, the more I liked the red one. I keep saying we, because it takes a few people to really pull something like this off. I suppose you could pull it all off by yourself if you were so inclined, but for this specific shot, I’d have spent a LOT of time running up and down a flight of stairs to see what I had done. Special thanks to my friend Colby McLemore and my new friend Tony Mashburn for giving me a hand with the lights and with the awesome ideas (and use of the warehouse!), and of course Chad for letting me borrow his car… I got all the rubber off the quarter panels, right?
–Dan Thompson