Light-painting an E46 M3

[ejm]

Saturday night I decided to do some lightpainting, I like to experiment and after a couple of hours of messing around and then even more hours on photoshop I got the following:
Now I know its far from perfect and boy do I have a shed load to learn, both from the photography side as well as the photoshop side, but for a first attempt Im super pleased with the result!

Anyhow, helpful hints appreciated especially from you season light painters

m3 fun - lightpainting by Esta-Jane Mace, on Flickr

 

[arclight]

I am not into car photography, but the image is very eye catching and, unfortunately, ruined by the text.

 

[ejm]

Thanks arclight - yes I left the text as unfortunately a few people seem to think it's OK to take my images and claim as there own, I seem to have several on instagram that were supposedly taken by other people :-0

 

[Raincloud]

I like it. Nice work.

As for the text, yes, it does spoil it and anyway, it would be easy to remove it if some one wanted the image!

 

[ReinisB]

I'd have loved to see light on the roof line a bit as well. Nice idea btw!

 

[ejm]

I'd have loved to see light on the roof line a bit as well. Nice idea btw!

Thank you

Actually that's a good point, the light on the lower lip "finishes" the bottom off, whereas now after what you've said the top of the car isn't really finished off! I'll have to buy some step ladders for the next attempt

 

[Jh84]

Really like this, I wanna have a go myself

 

[Buck]

@ejm A good tip I read was to take one shot for each element of the car so, for example, take the roof and A pillars as separate shots then you can blend them in PP or if you don't want them in the shot, simply exclude.


edit: should have said, good shot and processing.

 

[ejm]

Thanks Buck

 

[Gsrai]

I love the way the picture brings out the menacing front of the E46

 

[Gsrai]

Do you mind if I ask a question as I wanted to do something similar with my E36 - how did you get the background to be so black, I've tried a bit of light painting but am hopeless at it - the street lights around my house ruin the effect.

 

[ejm]

Do you mind if I ask a question as I wanted to do something similar with my E36 - how did you get the background to be so black, I've tried a bit of light painting but am hopeless at it - the street lights around my house ruin the effect.

Not at all!
I did this in the middle of the night (the night we had loads of storms so loads of cloud cover N no moon), we have one annoying Street lamp but we keep the E46 in a carport that's basically blocked on 2 and a half sides and of course the roof, and the light from the street lamp isn't bright enough to ruin it too much and it's around the corner of the house rather than directly in front of us .
This is a composite of several images to keep as much of the light out as possible. The longest exposure was for the front wing to keep a continuous flow. The light I used for the light painting was one of those aircraft/traffic directing things (I'm too tight for that ice light haha!) but it worked well enough with this shot because it caused fab reflections on the paint but didn't emit enough ambient light which kept the background nice N dark!
There was some adjustments in photoshop (with the raw files) after to bring the shadows right down to just tidy up the odd glows of light (like my neighbours yard light that kept going on and off cus of their damn cat lol) but I think that was all I had to do darkness wise - hope that helps

 

[ejm]

Do you mind if I ask a question as I wanted to do something similar with my E36 - how did you get the background to be so black, I've tried a bit of light painting but am hopeless at it - the street lights around my house ruin the effect.

PS I'm no expert, only done lightpainting a couple of times and this was the most complex thing I've done, but I would suggest you go somewhere real dark (helps loads!) and just practice practice practice! I thought to myself how hard can it be, but I spent hours doing this image above! Hats off to those that do this stuff all the time cus each image is a work of art that's probably taken hours to do!

 

[Gsrai]

Thanks very much, I think you've helped spot a problem as I have quite a few street lights and nowhere that is really sheltered - I'll need to think about this a bit more.

I never really thought about composites, is that where you take lots of pictures from the same angle but light up different areas then overlay on photoshop (I'm hoping my understanding is correct).

I've never really done my E36 justice in a pic so this looks a great way to do it, I'll get my thinking hat on - thanks

 

[ejm]

No problem

And yes, that's lots of photos at the same angle and same focus!! So make sure you have a tripod and a fairly still (wind wise) night!
LOCK YOUR FOCUS!! I put this in caps because first time I did an image I didn't even think and of course non of the images fitted as they were all slightly out! *duh* but use light to your advantage at first to focus on whats most important to you, then look your lens/camera and fire away (Good torch or similar does the trick!)
Another tip perhaps is wireless trigger. On my old DX camera I bought a generic branded one for about £50, on my new fx wireless is built in so I just use my phone to change settings etc, but basically the more you can do without touching the camera the better, as it takes out the risk of camera shake and accidently knocking the camera so your images won't line up

 

[Oddshapedoctopus]

Looks like an advertising image and I can understand why people would steal the image and the need for watermark but it does distract away unfortunately. Love the image though fella. Nicely done.