Night time shoot - Dodge Challenger RT and an abandoned GMC pick-up

It was unusually warm for this time of the year in North Texas.  But 70 degrees for mid-November is not always a bad thing.  It was partly cloudy which actually worked to our benifit as it gave some interest to the sky.  This evening it was Todd, Lonnie and me with the plan of shooting Lonnie's Dodge Challenger RT.  Started out at about 4pm on Saturday and I didn't get home till about 3:30am on Sunday morning.  We had a lot of fun and it was good meeting another N. Texas 'tog!

When we got to this site, we realized that there was a huge sodium vapor light on the opposing corner of this building with this super cool 'ghost sign'. I decided that I was going to try to get the image anyway. This is actually a stack of about 7 or 8 layers and a lot of tweaking. I actually think that the color of the overbearing light really kind of made it for the color of this car.

Todd knew of this little site in another little Texas town.  This is an old gas station that had been converted into a diner.  I was happy to see that they still had their old pumps and they seemed to be in pretty good condition.  Because of the big lights close by, I was unable to gel strobe the way I wanted to in one shot, so I seperated the different colored gel frames into their own 10 second shots.  This one is 5 images stacked and masked, blended... 

Still on the same site, this truck was begging to be shot.  Again with the large amout of light polution.  Wish that the truck had better wheels, but I still really like this shot.

This is my favorite shot of the night. 

Yet another small Texas town.  We were driving through and crossing some train tracks looking for a different spot to spin some burning steel wool, when Todd and I both at the same time noticed that the trains were parked here, where they usually never were.  Plenty of beautiful non-flamable gravel.  Positioned the car and took the 24 second shot (the shot on the left).  Checking it on my screen after I really liked the sparks but was really bummed out that the car was seriously under exposed.  Trying to be a problem solver, I formulated a fix that involved taking another 30 second shot, this time popping a bare 580EXII multiple times during the exposure.  My thought was that I could stack the images, mask out the sky on the second shot, partially mask out the gravel and change the blending mode so that the properly lighted car layer would show up and blend with the spark layer.

This is the final vision I had.  I am actually really glad that I missed the exposure on the first frame.  I learned something and I have a new 'tool' in my imaging arsenal.  I really like the way this turned out!



Most of these were taken with my Tokina 11-16 2.8 on my 40D.  The first one at the ghost sign was taken with my Tamron 28-75 2.8.