Saturday, September 06, 2008

Beetle in the woods

I regulary use to drive around in my small town to see if I find something interesting to shoot. A couple of weeks ago I came to think about an abandoned Beetle which almost had become one with the forrest. I drove up there with my lighting gear, just in case.

It was pretty dark and the car was unconveniently situated among rusty scrap iron and dry sharp branches. I brought one translucent umbrella (which I almost tore apart on on of the branches!) with light stand and the camera with 50mm along with the SB-800 and SB-600. There was a lot of mosquioes there too. Since I wouldn't be there for too long, I decided to just shoot with CLS to avoid a lot of test shots.

It was difficult to find a shooting location. I wanted to shoot the interior of the car since every thing was removed and the floor was a part of the forest floor. The 50mm is also considered a short tele lens (I didn't have the 35mm at that time) so going inside the car was out of the question.

I finally ended up shooting forward through the back window. I placed the umbrella on the left side of the car to create a bright point on the dashboard.

The setup shot:


I chose a medium aperture in Aperture priority to emphasize the focus on the dashboard. 

Settings: (SB-800 on-camera was used to trigger the SB-600 slave)

SB-600: TTL +1.3
Exposure: 1/60 at f/4
Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D

The final shot:

The happy Beetle

3 comments:

John Brainard said...

There's a lot of nice closeup opportunities there. The dashboard would be great for getting in there with the 50mm and extension tubes. Perhaps a good opportunity for the 10-20mm lens too. :)

Nice shot though and good commentary. That's the kind of thing that would make a nice summer project, or a one-day thing where you set out to shoot it from different angles, using different lenses and lighting setups. Kind of like my NiftyFifty project.

zetson said...

Hmm, close-ups on the dashboard... Nice idea, John. I guess I wasn't in a close-up mood that day:) Thank you. I have to hurry back before the grass turns brown...

I haven't tried to do any projects yet. But it sounds like fun to just pick a completely random theme and shoot a photo a day. Maybe a good way to keep up the motivation too?

John Brainard said...

I would think so. I chose not to go with a photo a day project as I just don't think I could do it. I went with something that would get my 50mm f/1.8 lens on my camera more than it was. It did... Now it has me anxious to do even more close ups than my lens is physically capable of. I long for a set of extension tubes to play with! Especially with the fall season nearly here.