Sunday 8 April 2012

Night Time Driving Shots, Outside The Car

Ok, so inside the car driving shots look cool but how about from the outside?

How is that done you ask, well  i have a car rig :) Which consists of two Manfrotto F1100 suction cups, four Manfrotto super clamps, a long aluminium pole and a camera mount. I will cover my next rig shot in detail in a future Blog post ;)



What i decided to do for the outside driving shots was to dis-assemble one of my suction mounts to the car rig, so i was just left with the bare suction cup with its metal attachment spike. Then i took the camera mount from the car rig and attached that to the metal spike of the suction cup, to end up with this.


 

 Once this was done, armed with my cheapo remote shutter cable i got from eBay for £5. I headed out in to the night.

*One very important tip i will give to anyone who is thinking about buying a car mount or suction cup for this sort of photography or anything else is to prepare the surface you will be sticking it too. It is vital to have a clean surface to stick the cup too, as you wouldn't want your camera & lens falling off ant any point!*

Once i had arrived at my desired destination, i took about 5 / 10 minutes with some quick cleaner fluid and cleaned the area of the roof that the camera would be mounted, i also gave the bonnet a clean as the bonnet would be in shot.

I then went about attaching the mount to the roof, i adjusted the camera mount so the camera would be central in the roof, this was the end result.



One thing that i will do differently next time is to put a filter on the lens, even if it is a £3 UV filter, as if a stone was flicked up id rather the filter be broken than the lens front element.

As you can see from the picture i have the remote cable which is just about long enough to get back through the drivers window in to the car, to allow me to release the shutter on the move.

Once the camera was nice and secure on the car i went about composing the shot and getting the exposure correct, i took a number of test shots while the car was stationary and got the exposure / focus correct. I then switched the lens to Manual focus, as i really didn't want the camera hunting for focus as i was driving along.

So now i was set, so i got in the car and started driving at about 10mph. There was no need to go any faster as i had a shutter speed of 15 seconds so even at that low speed i would still get plenty of movement in the shots.

All that was left to do was to drive around very quiet back roads and get a few shots. I didn't drive around on any main roads as i didn't want to draw any attention to myself, but even on back roads i still had a nice passer flag me down to tell me i had a camera on my roof!

The end results!

As with my interior rolling shots the only post processing work done was to adjust the White Balance a touch to remove some of the orange glow from the streetlights.

Picture 1
Camera details
10mm Focal Length
15 Second Exposure
f/10

The green dots were added in Photoshop CS6 to simulate traffic lights.


Picture 2
Camera details
11mm Focal Length
15 Second Exposure
f/10


I shot around 30 pictures, but as they were all basically the same i picked out these two as they were the best of the bunch.

As these pictures have been a success and have had very good reception on Flickr & Facebook etc... once the weather cheers up i will be doing some more of these. This time with the camera in different locations, and also i will do them a little earlier so i get some lovely dusk colours in the sky.

I hoped you enjoyed this Blog entry, there will be many more to come :)

As always, please take a look at my Flickr for my full portfolio of pictures, also my Facebook page where i post new content before anywhere else plus behind the scenes stuff :)

Links are below


Many thanks for reading

Mike








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