Photographing Cars at Museums, Shows, and Races
Photo Ops Every Weekend

By Joe Farace

Cars come in so many different sizes, shapes, and colors it makes them the ideal photographic subjects, but capturing images at shows, museums, and races can be a challenge for many reasons. Here’s the last group of tips to help you create memorable photos at the next car show you attend.

Tip #6:
Explore unconventional views of the car. Try low angles and tilt the camera to provide a dynamic image. One of the disadvantages of using low camera angles and wide-angle lenses is that sometimes wheels will not appear round because of a combination of distortion at the edges of the lens and the camera angles used. If that’s the kind of thing that bothers you, you will need shoot with view cameras as Paul Peregrine does for the back cover of Clive Cussler’s novels.

The crowds at most car shows are some of the most polite people you will find anywhere. However, they can make it difficult to use a tripod so I bring one only occasionally and some museums don’t permit their use without a permit. Monopods provide a steady platform for your camera in low light conditions, such as indoor museums and end-of-day outdoors shots, and you can use a tabletop tripod for on-the-ground low angle shots. Image Stabilization lenses, like Canon’s EF 28-135mm lens, let you hand hold slower-than-normal shutter speeds while maintaining small enough apertures to keep most of the car in focus. Fast films or ISO settings can also help in letting you shoot at hand-holdable shutter speeds.

When space and conditions permit, bring a ladder. It will give you the ability to make images from high angles instead of the ubiquitous eye-level shots everybody else makes. From a higher perch you can include the ground or grass as a background to make your car photographs look different from one another as well as the other dude’s. But don’t assume that even a step stool is welcome at a car show or outdoor exhibition. Ask first. Keep the ladder in your car and ask someone in charge before unfurling an 18-foot ladder like the kind you see in use here. This particular ladder was used at an outdoor museum and permission was requested and granted before I schlepped it to the shoot. Note the Canon EOS 1n film camera slung over my shoulder while an EOS 10D with 16mm lens attached is used for test shoots. (The clients ended up ignoring the film and used the digital “tests” instead. Go figure.)
Image © 2003 Joel Aragon

Tips #7:
Dress for success. Dress comfortably and wear the kind of clothing you won’t be afraid to get dirty when laying on the ground to get an interesting camera angle. And be sure to wear a hat to keep the sun off your head and like the song says, “be sure to wear sunscreen.”

Shoot your own car. While visiting the Adam’s County Historical Museum, I asked permission to photograph my daily driver, a limited edition VW GTI 337, in front of their restored 1920’s Conoco gas station. Although originally captured in color with a Minolta Dimage Xt, I used The Imaging Factory’s (www.theimagingfactory.com) Convert to BW Pro Photoshop-compatible plug-in to convert the TIFF file into a slightly warm-tone monochrome image in keeping with the mood of the location.
Image © 2003 Joe Farace