British Car Show

British Car Show

One part of the Greenville Scottish Games that I enjoy is the British Car Show. It is held on Furman University's shaded mall in front of the main gate to the games. There always seems to be a slightly different mix of cars in the show each year. Many of the cars are older restorations, but there are sometimes new British branded automobiles as well. The new Lotus sports cars are almost always a crowd pleaser.

The car show is now kind of a sentimental favorite of mine since it was some of my photographs of cars from a couple of years ago that got me invited to be a photographer for the games last year and now this year. I wasn't able to get many photographs from the car show last year due to the VIP's schedule. However, I did make it a point to get some shots from there this year.

This particular photograph shows that the cars are lined up for quite a long ways down the mall. In fact, they are lined up down both sides of the mall. Quite an impressive collection of classic British automobiles. The photograph is also a handheld, three-shot HDR composite so that the shadows are not blocked out to complete black. I tried to process the image so that it would look fairly natural without the over exaggerated colors that HDR can sometime cause. It's not perfect, but I think it gets close to it.

Keep shooting.



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Jaguar

Jaguar

My favorite shot from the Greenville Scottish Games is this one of the head-ornament of a classic Jaguar roadster. I love how the light plays on the curves of the hood and how it reflects off of the ornament and grill. Like the MG Dreams photograph, I used the Sigma 10-20mm ultrawide lens. I did crop it down slightly to minimize the sun's reflection in the lower left corner. I also desaturated all of the colors except for red, orange and yellow. This removed the green and blue reflections from the hood, but kept the colors from the badge on the grill. I also like how there is just a slight bit of color from the badge reflected in the ornament.

Sometimes the best way to present the essence of something it to isolate at distinctive portion of it. My wider shots of this car did not have anywhere near the same impact as this photograph does.

Keep shooting.

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Belated Blog Birthday

MG Dreams

I thought we were getting close the the first anniversary of my starting this blog. So, I went back through the old posts and noticed that I started May 20, 2008. In other words, I missed the birthday. Guess I might need to do something special for it next year if I remember to put it on my calendar.

More after the jump.

Today's image is again from the Greenville Scottish Games. In particular, it is from the British Auto Show which was part of it this year. The cars were lined up along the tree-lined drive that leads to the Furman Athletic areas including the football stadium. There were a lot of beautiful cars there. This MG roadster was one of those that caught my eye. I took it using my ultrawide angle lens. Since I knew I was going to be shooting automobiles in tight situations, I thought that using the ultrawide lens would help to get more of the cars. It did, but it also got a lot of bystanders which turned most of my photographs into snapshots. However, a couple of them did work out. I like how the lens exaggerated the perspective in this image. For reference I was only about 2 to 3 feet away from the bumper. I held the camera down low and pointed it upward slightly. The focal length was 10mm (15mm in full 35mm frame equivalent). This caused the perspective to distort a bit, exaggerating some of the car's curves.

When I was first processing it, I didn't like the final result. However, just as I was getting into bed that night, I had the idea of inverting the vignette to white instead of the usual black. The next morning I tried that out and liked how it added a dreamy kind of feel to the image ... kind of like a guy daydreaming during his mid-life crisis. ;-)

Keep shooting.
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