I mentioned last week that one of the things I’ve worked on during the COVID days is flash photography, something I’ve not previously spent a lot of time on. And like last week, this week’s Picture of the Week is quite a bit different from what I typically post, but that’s okay. I’m SUPER happy with the way these two images turned out, and I look forward to playing around with this style of photography more.
The story behind the shot is, while driving home from last week’s shoot, I happened to go by The Hop after hours, but while all the neon lights were on. I LOVED the way the place looks at night, and decided it would be a cool scene to setup with some cars. After some hunting around, and thanks to the internet, I was able to run down the owners of the restaurant to get permission to shoot there, and lined up the cars. Both cars were built by Prater’s Auto Restorations, and Scotty, the owner of the shop, brought the red car down for the shoot. While we were hanging out he mentioned that his parents used to come to this restaurant back when they were dating (it was called the Humdinger back then). How cool is that?
From a technical perspective, the way these images go together is a bit complicated, as I mentioned last week, and adding a second car basically doubles the complication of it all. The key challenge I found was getting the flash to bounce off the cars in a pleasing way. The thing with shiny cars is… well… they’re shiny, and so when you aim a light at them they basically turn into big mirrors. After some toying around though, my nephew Andrew and I have gotten it sorted out – special thanks to him, yet again, for helping me out with this shoot. Also special thanks to the nice owners of The Hop for letting us shoot in their parking lot after hours. We had tons of fun doing it!
–Dan Thompson