Friday May 30, and Saturday, May 31, 2025
It would seem that I am going all over the place when it comes to my subjects here lately. Just in the last three blog entries, I have shot waterfalls, taught a workshop on decay, and then did a studio session with a chess board. For those that say a photographer needs to niche down and only shoot certain things, I laugh in your face! Photography is too expressive to only shoot one type of photo, and the photographer needs to follow their own direction whenever it changes. I’ve been pretty good at that over the last few years, although I spent many of my formative years stuck in certain types of photography without considering other areas as valid options. These days, I’m all for experimenting and if I get a wild hair I like to explore where it leads.
You might consider automotive photography right up my alley since I do so much decay photography with old cars as the subjects. I think that is a small subsection of automotive photography because it is handled quite a bit differently than your typical photos of cars. You see, the main difference is on one hand, you have an inoperable vehicle that is stashed away with abandon usually and you have to photograph it as it sits. The tradeoff for that compositional inconvenience is that there are rarely large areas of reflective surfaces that will present cameo opportunities for the photographer. Automotive photography as it is more widely known deals with subjects that are full of gloss and reflective surfaces which present many areas for the photographer to show up in, but these vehicles usually can be moved to different areas. Compositionally, there are many more options with operational vehicles which is nice. The other huge difference is that with the decay subjects, the dirtier the better. In the mainstream genre, you want your subject to be clean and shiny to put its best foot forward.
Now that you have the greatly abridged comparison between my decay photography and what I am going to be embarking on with this entry, you will understand that there is a lot more planning that will go into more mainstream automotive photography. Not only are there an endless number of locations that can be used, but the session also needs to follow a cleaning for the best look to the photos. There are even times during the year when a clean car can get dirty in a very short amount of time thanks to the pollen that fills the air for about two months here in NC. I ran into that last year when I did a session with the Miata which was covered in pollen by the time I was done.
These automotive sessions take a lot of time to plan, and some consideration in scheduling so that the main subject can be cleaned, the weather works, and if there are natural elements to be included that the right time of year is planned. This is a great example because Toni originally asked me to do a photo shoot with her car a little over a year ago. At the time, she had a Honda Accord Sport that she loved and wanted some professional photos shot of it. It was a white car which doesn’t really get my motor running for a photographic subject, and it took me a while to come up with a plan of action for doing the shoot. Along the way, she shot down several of my ideas as she wanted more of a natural surrounding while I was looking for something a little more commercial. I finally ended up with a good concept for a shoot that would take us up to the Blue Ridge Parkway with a few sections of curving roads and photogenic backdrops. I just needed a stormy evening to mute the white paint a little bit and to give some drama to the images.
Of course, I landed on this idea in late Summer but felt that the tree colors of Fall would not be good for the photos I had in mind, and didn’t want to deal with the crowds either. If I waited just a bit longer for the leaves to fall, I could get a very moody setting for the car that I felt would work out because I wanted to desaturate the images quite a bit since the car itself wasn’t going to add any color to the frame. I even had a few sections picked out that I was going to take the car to for the compositions.
Well, the best laid plans as they say…..
There was a little storm that happened in late September that kind of affected access to the mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The sections that I wanted to take the Accord up to were now closed and very possibly unrecognizable after the massive flooding that had taken place. Those sections that were open were not the ones that I wanted to use and the little bit of time I had spent up there after those portions opened didn’t inspire me to proceed with the shoot. I just put it off until I could get something that inspired me and that would work for a white Honda Accord.
Fall turned to Winter, and Winter turned into deer season. You might remember that in early February, Toni had a slight run-in with a deer on the way to work which resulted in a bit over $12,000 in damages to the car. It wasn’t totaled, but the repair was far from satisfactory as the panel gaps were way off, and the paint no longer matched. The car also had been sitting outside for nearly two months when we went to pick it up. It was not the same car, and I was very much unhappy with it. After Toni had seen the process of the car, she fell out of love with it as well which prompted us to go and look at a replacement car for her. That was how we ended up at the Lexus dealer since she had always wanted to have a Lexus. After some shopping around, we found the car that would come home with us and would be named “Gatsby” as a nod to one of her favorite books.
For me, this car had a much bigger personality than the Accord had and seemed to be a bit more artistic and sporty with more attitude. After spending a couple of days detailing it and getting it in proper shape, I was really liking the styling and was feeling inspired by it. Of course, Toni was still wanting a photo shoot with her car, only now she was wanting it done with the Lexus. She was still wanting a natural scene for the car to be put into while I was really seeing a modern building which Wilkes County has very few of. I needed to figure out how I was going to shoot this car, and what I had planned for the Accord wasn’t going to work here because the paint was silver and would introduce a nice cool tone to the image that seemed over the top for my original plan.
I spent time looking whenever I was away from home to see if there were any areas that might work well for a session with the Lexus, but nothing was really jumping out at me. It was always there in the back of my mind though. I think it was around the end of April that I started pressure washing the driveway here at the house and remembered an idea that I had had for the Miata years ago. Because the original owner of the house had done a stamped and stained concrete driveway it was a shade of brick red which made it contrast very nicely with the trees. I also really liked it in the Fall and thought that it might be a good setting for a few photos of the Miata, but when I started to really think about it, the car would add too much warmth and it would overpower any composition that I came up with. As I was pressure washing for the second time since moving in here, the colors were starting to fade away leaving a bit of a texture and a little less of the warm color. This got me thinking about doing the shoot that I had planned for the Miata with the dulled driveway. I think it would still be a little too warm overall, but the idea was solid for another color….like silver.
Could it be just this simple? Toni had wanted the photos shot in the front yard in the grass which wasn’t going to work out great for a low-slung car with low profile tires. These types of cars need hard packed surfaces so that the entire wheel can be visible. However, the trees were very visible from the driveway. That same driveway had a really nice curve to it as it came up the hill, and the color which had been a sticking point for the Miata, was kind of a selling point for the Lexus. Now hear me out on this. Toni is not a fan of red for the most part, although she is slowly warming up to the color these days. In a very surprising turn, she had opted for the red interior on the Lexus which I never would have thought would have been a possibility. She really liked the red, and it looked great in the car when paired with the silver exterior. She liked it so much that I was inspired to paint the engine cover a brick red to match the interior and tie the motor into the rest of the car. It looked really good, and Toni liked it a lot.
With the brick red being the unofficial accent color on this car, the driveway all of a sudden made sense. If you will remember, the silver paint would introduce a cool hue to the car as it would reflect the blue sky and provide a nice color balance to the warmer tones in the image. Those warmer tones all of a sudden became very important unlike with the Accord. The driveway made perfect sense and with me pressure washing it, it would look much nicer than the stained version that I was dealing with. The trees were just starting to really green up and the green worked well as a contrast to the orange and red tones of the driveway. I just had to get the driveway finished in order to see if the idea would work out.
Now, the driveway is a long one which I love having, right up until the time I have to shovel snow or pressure wash it. At nearly 325 feet in length for the main section, this is a driveway I have yet to shovel in its entirety, and it takes about a month to pressure wash it all with about nine sessions at three to five hours a piece. Yeah, this driveway really takes it out of me, but I felt that it had potential for some photos, especially after a morning nature session last Fall when I shot the driveway in black and white for the first time.
By the closing days of May, the driveway was finished, I had done a full detail of the car in early April after we had brought the car home. Of course, she had been driving it since then and it had been washed about a half dozen times over the two months it had been here. After a week at work, the car had tons of bugs on the front and had been driven in the rain a few times. With Toni actually staying at home on Friday, I decided to get out early and get it washed and ready for the next work week. While I was washing it, the clouds were coming in and I started to take note of the light on the driveway. It was really nice and I got to thinking that I could get the car shot before putting it away in the garage. I had great light, the car was clean, the driveway had been finished the day before. It seemed like a great time to make it happen.
When I finished washing the rear bumper and began to rinse it off, I felt some water hitting my head. I wasn’t being that aggressive with the hose, so I doubted that it was splashing up from the hose. Could it be rain? There was none forecasted till much later in the day, but here we were. It was drizzling. I took my time with the final rinse hoping that the rain would stop, but it didn’t. It was now raining hard enough that I needed to get it inside to dry it off which I did. So much for doing the photo shoot. At least I was getting the car clean though and that was something because she was going to need it Saturday morning for bible study.
I finished the car up in the garage and got it all pretty again. The rain was on and off at this point, but I don’t like starting the motor for short periods if it can be helped. I had already started it twice for the wash and that was enough. I wasn’t going to crank it up again to try and do the shoot in-between rain showers. However, the light was looking good on the car through the garage door. Some of what I had planned on doing was some isolations which I could realistically do in the garage. When Toni came out to talk to me about some things, I remember drying off little drops of water as they went down the side of the car as I was finishing up. I would linger in places while she was talking to me, and I saw an interesting idea on the front right wheel that I was standing next to. The light was great on it, and I was inspired once again. I also saw the way that the bumper lines were looking with the very directional light on them.
When Toni went back inside, I finished things up with the car and went into the studio to grab my camera and tripod. I selected my telephoto lens because I knew that I was going to be picking out a detail within the wheel and didn’t need anything wider than 70mm to do that. The brake disk was showing some surface rust from the car wash, so I had to be careful to avoid that showing up in the shot. As it turned out, the angle that I liked most of all didn’t show the brake disk at all, and everything just came together beautifully. Well, everything except for the humidity which was causing the camera to fog up a little bit after being in the A/C. I wiped off the lens and waited for the polarizer to lose the fog before getting the shot.
After that, I moved on to the area of the bumper where the grill and the headlight were close together. Now, to be fair, I don’t really care for the large grills that Lexus has on their complete lineup, but this one is growing on me a good bit. It seems better proportioned than the other cars’ grills. The way that the lines all came together here was artful on the part of the Toyota/Lexus designers. The composition pretty much made itself, I just had to work around the ever-changing light from the sun as it was going in and out of the clouds. There weren’t many frames before I had exactly what I wanted.
From here, I moved to the other side of the headlight and framed up a composition that I thought would make for a good abstract composition. The fact that you aren’t seeing that shot here is probably a clue that it didn’t turn out all that great. I thought it was better than it was when I was capturing it, but it was just too confusing and there was no real visual pathway through the frame. I wasn’t quite done though. The rain had stopped for a moment, and I moved out of the garage because I knew that I liked how the car looked from outside of the open door. Since the car had to be in the garage, I felt that it might be worth a photo or two. As I got the camera set up and the general idea worked out, the rain came back and forced me back inside to avoid drops on the filter.
I looked around the car for some other isolations but didn’t find anything that struck my fancy. Just before packing the camera up, I saw that the rain had stopped once again. I went back out to get that last composition that I had wanted to shoot. I already knew how it was going to be set up, so it didn’t take but a moment to get the camera ready. What took the longest was waiting for the lighting to work out as the bright sun made the concrete too bright and full clouds made the contrast too weak. I really wanted the front of the car to be the dominant feature in the frame, but even light forced the shadows to open up too much. There was one other concern as well because I wanted to get the Lexus flag in the shot as it told part of the story and added an important element as well as a flag for the light to show the shape of the body lines on the hood. With the breeze picking up, the flag was moving quite a bit, and I had to time the shot when it was relatively flat on the wall. There were a lot of conditions that I had to wait for in order to get the shot, but I did end up getting the shot that I wanted before the rain came back again.
By this point in the afternoon, I had shot 23 frames of the car and was ready to pack it in. Normally, I would have gone and started to cull the images and start with the processing, but I had the wild idea to finish up the shoot the next morning before Toni would leave for Bible Study. She let me know that she would leave around 8:30 or so which would give me a little bit of time before she left to get a few more photos and to get the compositions that I had started out wanting to get under the clouds. I was doubting that I was going to have clouds in the morning and was wondering if the sun would cause me problems since it would be coming up behind the house and providing front light on the car. As long as it was soft light, I was thinking it would be ok.
When Saturday morning arrived, I got out of bed a bit earlier than I normally would have. I was then informed that Toni wanted to leave early to drop a package off at the post office. That meant that I had to get a move on to make sure that I had enough time to get the shots that I wanted. I got dressed and grabbed the camera from downstairs before going out to let it acclimate to the humid air to avoid fogging as I started to work on the compositions. The lighting wasn’t the same as it had been the previous day, but there was still a nice quality to the light. It was soft and there were plenty of shadows in the woods which I was happy to see.
I put together about four different compositions in my head before starting the car up. I moved it into position approximately where I thought I wanted it to be. I came back to the camera and looked. The scaling was off, so I moved in closer as well as to the left a bit more to change how the brick wall appeared on the right. I then moved the car a bit closer to the camera and changed the angle slightly. This was looking better to me.
In addition to the wall to the right, which was pointing to the car, I had chosen to position the car beneath an arch of tree branches that framed the car quite well. It was the first time I had seen the color combination in person through the camera with the reddish driveway, the bright greens of the trees and the silver car pulling the blues from the sky. I was sold. This was going to work very well. I worked out the exposure and depth of field for this composition and decided to move the car a bit further down the driveway and angle it in the other direction for a closer view of it without the wall in the shot.
Still using the telephoto lens, I was able to get the driveway to spread across the lower portion of the frame to introduce the composition. It was a little more direct when it came to how the car was presented within the frame, but I thought that it was rather effective. The sun was starting to cast the warm light of morning across the scene, but it wasn’t direct just yet. I was really liking the light and how it was working with the colors in the scene. The polarizer helped me work out the way that the light interacted with the car and the windows, so I was really enjoying how it was all coming together. There were some hot spots that developed on the bumper which caused me to underexpose the image by about a stop so that I didn’t lose detail in the bumper.
The underexposure wasn’t a problem at all because I was really going for a different atmosphere than sunrise. I wanted this to be a little cooler in appearance and not quite as inviting as the warm morning sun would have usually dictated. What I was really wanting was kind of a dusk appearance to the images, but with good lighting throughout the frame. Underexposure is a good way of achieving this look and since I was being forced to because of the highlight on the bumper, I might as well embrace the concept and execution.
When I had that shot worked out, I backed the car up some more and changed the angle for a different composition. It was at this point that I was very happy that the parking brake was solid on this car and that it automatically came on when it was put in park. As you can see from the photos, our driveway is a little steep and the last thing I wanted to do was explain why Toni’s new car was sitting in the neighbor’s living room. I was still very mindful of making sure that the car wasn’t going to go anywhere when I got out each time I moved it.
From this angle, you could see the curve of the driveway leading up to the car which made for a very dramatic composition. I was embracing the shallow depth of field with the lens that I was using and was making most of the shots at f/2.8 or f/4 which really showed the depth in the scene while keeping the car tack sharp. A side benefit was that I was able to keep a really fast shutter speed at ISO100. This allowed me to freeze the leaves even though there was a slight breeze.
While the car was this far down the driveway, I decided to see if there was a shot from the passenger side. It was pretty much like the one I had just shot, but I wasn’t able to get the driveway in the background which made it a little less impressive. However, I did have some options over here that I didn’t have on the other side. After backing up a bit, I was able to get a few tree limbs in the shot as a foreground which I really liked. Now, this is an old portrait technique to show depth in a scene, and it gets overdone by just about everyone. I am not a huge fan of blurring the foreground because it looks gimmicky most of the time. However, there are times when it works very well, and this was one of those times. The leaves had a great shape to them that really framed the car, and the greens just worked so well with the reds in the driveway.
I spent a few minutes with this composition just to make sure that I had it right. It was one that just felt good to me, and I wanted to ensure that I had a frame that would work out as a keeper. With the sun getting higher in the sky, I had to really work on my exposure and was underexposing a great deal by this point. Looking at the histogram, the vast majority of pixels fell below the middle gray point, and a good portion of those were in the shadows. I knew what the camera was capable of in terms of dynamic range, but I also knew I was pushing the envelope at this point. Fortunately, I was wanting a high contrast and kind of low-key image which was what the lighting was setting up for me.
The problem really came to a head when I went for the next composition. This was actually one of the ones that I had scoped out while washing the car the day before. It was another one that incorporated the wall which was looking much better after the recent pressure washing. For this to work, I had to move the car back up the driveway once again so that it would engage with the wall. I then moved the camera down to the lower section of the driveway at about tire level to the car. With the sun coming up over the house, the side of the car I was photographing was in the shadows while the front bumper was solidly in the sunlight. This was causing the clipping warnings to go nuts even when greatly underexposed. Not wanting to lose the detail in the shadows for the sake of maintaining my highlights, I decided to go with an HDR blend.
I used the last exposure that was underexposed, but still clipping the highlights as the base exposure. I then dropped it by a stop more to get the highlights under control. I then increased the exposure by two full stops for the sake of the shadows. This gave me three images, each a stop apart to stretch the dynamic range of the photo. I was just hoping that there wasn’t any motion in the frame that would cause me issues when blending them in post. This was the best way that I could work out to get all the detail in the image that I was wanting, and I had the right conditions to set it up in the field to make easy work in post. It is always easier to deal with these decisions in the field than to try and fix oversights in post.
My gamble worked out very well and I was left with a single image that captured all that I wanted to in the frame. I had plenty of detail in the shadows as well as in the highlights. The direction of the sun made for some fantastic sculpting on the side of the car which was a great little side benefit for me. To go along with the lighting interpretation that I was using for these shots, I added a little light to the fixtures on the wall with some local adjustments. I liked how this turned out so well, I went bac and did the same thing to the other photos where the wall was an element. It was a subtle touch, but one that helped to sell the way I was presenting the light. I had first done this technique years ago when I did a photo shoot with Toni by this same wall.
Now that the camera was in this lower section, I decided that the car needed to be moved down here as well. This was another one of the ideas that I had while washing it the day before. I had originally planned to get a front quarter shot of the car here, but since I had a ton of those already, I wanted to highlight the rear of the car for a change. I really do like the way that the taillights look, and this angle would also show off the exhaust that I installed shortly after we brought the car home.
This might seem like an easy composition to make, but it was one of the more difficult ones oddly enough. I think I have to move the car about four times to get it in the right position so that the wall looked right when compared to the car. It was also at this time that I decided that the telephoto lens wasn’t working for this composition, so I swapped it for the standard zoom. This allowed me to shrink the wall a bit more while emphasizing the car more in the frame. That simple change eliminated the constant repositioning of the car and allowed me to get the shot.
Since I was back there with the taillights, I decided to move in close and get a few intimate captures of the lights. These were a lot different than what I usually am capturing, so it took me a while to work out a composition that featured them in a way that was flattering for the car. For a bit of added interest, I chose to include a portion of the trunk spoiler which was black and that allowed some really nice contrast with the silver paint and helped to draw the attention to the shape of the taillight. With the lights activated, there was a great little red glow coming from the light which just made the photo pop. I love isolations on cars, and even when faced with modern designs, I can really appreciate the design philosophy that goes into these cars. It is the futuristic design of this one that really spoke to me, and I hope that I have captured that aspect in the photo.
I took a few moments here and looked around the car for other isolations. I found a few that interested me, but the compositions failed to deliver the images that I was hoping for. I was starting to run out of time as Toni needed to be on her way to Bible Study here very shortly. For the most part I was pretty happy with what I had come up with considering I was just getting photos of the car in different places around the driveway at home. I wasn’t sure what was going to turn out but felt that I had about a half dozen good images to this point. I even was considering this to be a really good location for some car photography in the future. I’m always looking for good spots and this one was proving to be quite interesting with the right car as the subject.
As I was about to get wrapped up for the morning, I spotted one more composition that I kind of liked. It was nothing overly special, but it would make a good simple postcard shot of the car. I moved the camera to the front left corner and started to figure out the right height to place the camera. I wanted a composition that showed off the sculpting of the hood as well as some of the other body lines. I had to be careful about how the rearview mirrors were placed in relation the rest of the car because I didn’t want them to break important lines, but I also wanted to include a good portion of the front bumper so that both headlights would show. This was a game of inches and compromise after compromise, but I finally got the car positioned in the frame like I wanted it to be.
The last shot of the day felt like where I would normally start my process with my old decay subjects. The difference here was that I wasn’t showing off patina or a location that told a story. This was a shiny car with a modern design in a rather pedestrian location. There was no less of a story here though, and I can still hear the growling of the engine as I look at this photo. Whether it be a rusted Buick, or a two-month-old Lexus, I’m a car guy at heart and I just love the designs of these modes of transportation. Cars are rolling works of art and sometimes that art can be polarizing. While I will always say that the older cars have a lot more personality as compared to the modern cars, there are some that really stand out and are something special. This IS350 is rising to that point right alongside of my Miata. They are both cars where the designers got it all right.
There is no doubt that this Lexus appeals to me more than the Honda did, and maybe that is why I was quicker to do a photo shoot with it. I don’t dislike the Accord design, and still very much like the 10th generation, but the fact is, you see them everywhere and they have gotten boring. This Lexus is a bit more unique, and it has better lines which makes for a much better photograph. What do you think? Is this as photogenic of a car as I think that it is? Let me know.
Also, if you are interested in doing a photoshoot of your car, or maybe with your car, I would love to work out a concept with you and make it happen. I’m always up for something new to shoot and different ways of doing it. You provide the car and the wash; I’ll provide the visual creativity.
Until next time….
