I get a lot of emails asking for advice on how to shoot cars. I try my best to answer their questions but most of the time, they're just inquiries on what lens, camera body, and flash unit(s) I use. I never flat out tell them that the technical stuff doesn't really make the photo because it does sort of...well, to an extent.
But I will prance around the issue in my replies. Usually, I'll write something like "I pick the lens that'll let me shoot the car the way I want it to look." Very poetic, I know, but it's the sad truth. Basically, it just seems that people rely too heavily on equipment and they use it or the lack thereof as an excuse for failure. We're all guilty at one point or another (don't get me started on what equipment I
need), but the sooner you suck it up and say "let's do with what I have," chances are the quicker you'll succeed.
Take this image of a Mercedes Gullwing, for example.
Before I shot that car, I was hung up on the fact that I didn't have the proper equipment to shoot cars. But, instead of feeling defeated, I went to work on what I could do with my limited amount of equipment: shooting details. I treated a car like it was the world and each detail on the body became its own separate landscape. Cheesy analogy? Totally, but doing so worked and I trained my eye to see parts of automobiles that were lost to normal viewers.
In this time I really began to enjoy using flash. It was like magic being surrounded in total darkness: a strobe would go off and a beautiful image would appear on the LCD of the camera,
every time. Ok, that's a lie but failure is a great thing. Such was the case when I shot that Gullwing photo. I wasn't even really thinking about the concept at the time I was shooting it. Instead, I was shooting the interior, and nothing great was being produced. I stepped back to take a shot of the setup to remind myself how much it sucked when I checked the LCD on the back of the camera and instantly saw tremendous potential if I were to alter the light and camera angle a little bit. I setup the camera and lights accordingly and after a couple shots I had captured everything there is about the Gullwing in one image.
Point is, don't worry about lenses, bodies, et cetera. Instead, experiment, don't feel afraid to fail and concentrate on your subject. That's what you're aiming to capture anyway.
And so should you. Featured in Vanity Fair's January issue, Annie Liebovitz shot her for the cover and article, and Maureen Dowd wrote the article. Read it here thanks to Vanity Fair understanding the potential of posting articles online. Or buy the magazine. Or do both, like I did.
. Who says p&s aren't worthy?
