Fast Cars And Slow Shutters

Here we go with another photo helper blogpost. I have a friend that has a 2017 BMW m4 coupe. Super fun car. He was thinking about selling it, and before he did, he needed photos of it for a listing to put on the web. I took him up on this offer for the simple fact that I really wanted to try some rolling shutter images.

We started with the standard stuff like right front/front/ left front. Side. Back. Interior. Standard stuff. How it looks from the drivers seat, to how the navigation looks turned on. Who cares right.

Next we started playing around. The BMW is super easy to break lose from the ground, so he did some donuts and we did some more staged stuff with the doors open and whatnot. But what I really wanted was to have him drive and let me drag the shutter for some really fun motion stills.

I learned a lot again on this one… such as you don’t have to be driving very fast, it works really well if you just maintain a constant speed. Next, I learned I prefer to drive/ride at the same speed so the subject is easy to focus on and keep steady (it’s harder to do with a pan shot, especially without a tripod or some way to keep the other axis stable) side by side was the winner. Also… I would never recommend doing this on a public roadway and driving at the same time. Don’t be an idiot.

Compose. Look around first. I hated the background at first, but I loved the asphalt and concrete contrast. I also liked the trees in the foreground. The weeds and debris in the parking lot gave it the “mad max” ish vibe, without the toe cutter causing a threat. (Ha) There was dirt, cars, speed, churches, power lines and burnouts. Everything a little boy loves.

I set my shutter to 1/30 or 1/15 and somewhere close to f/5.6 s I didn’t lose any of the car to shallow focal depth. I really wanted to see the entire thing, not just a wheel or a grill. The ISO was set to make the image exposure meter a little high because of the nature of the scene. Sadly I never think to meter in different parts of the frame because I get too excited (hard to admit at times) I took a ton of images. I only liked a few, but that’s how it goes in this digital photo age.

Why I take gigs like this sometimes because the valuable knowledge gained is so much better than just reading about it. I’ve seen this technique used over and over. Commercial car ads have used it for ages, and they’re going to come and go with it. Cars are for motion, and that’s what I wanted to capture. He ended up selling the car, and was really happy we took some time to enjoy it before it was gone forever. I made sure the entire vehicle was in focus and made sure to make the image wide enough to capture the surroundings, but not lose the object in the busy background. All in all I’m really glad I have these images, and so is my client.