Stretching Creativity and Photographing Reflections at the Car Show
On a recent Saturday morning I attended a car show to do a little photography. I arrived relatively early, just after 10 AM and enjoyed getting down low to the ground with a wide angle lens and photographing the cars in profile. I had no intention of photographing reflections that day, the thought of it had never even entered my mind. However, as the day progressed the crowd got larger and larger making it harder to photograph the cars without people moving in and out of the frame.
Instead of packing up my camera and calling it a day, I decided to switch up my approach and try something different! I wandered the car show taking photos of the badges and emblems on the cars, photographing chromed and polished engine compartments and restored interiors. I wasn’t really happy with any of the photographs that I was creating, the reflections on the highly polished paint and chrome seemed to distract in every photo I took!
As I photographed I realized that the highly polished chrome reflections that were driving me crazy could actually be used to my advantage. If I could just fine the right scene, perhaps the reflection could make my photograph, and not break it!
As I wandered the car show looking for reflections I found that the highly polished hubcaps really reflected their surroundings nicely. After searching a bit and trying a few, I found some domed hubcaps on a classic 50’s era Chevy Truck. There was nothing on either side of the Chevy, so I played around taking some shots of the sky reflecting in the hubcaps.
As I sat in the grass admiring the shots on my cameras LCD I heard a low, throaty rumble. Pulling right in next to the classic Chevy truck was a brand new, bright red Ford Monster Truck! Jacked way up, complete with giant knobby tires, this was the ideal choice of a vehicle to photograph reflected in the little Chevy’s hubcaps!
Red Truck Reflections
In my mind I played through all the contrasts in the photograph – old vs new, Ford vs Chevy, bright red vs plain white! Yet there was the one design element in the Chevy hubcap that tied it all together. The simple red trim in the wheel of the Chevy truck matched very nicely with the red of the monster truck!
I could not have asked for a better scene to photograph, and this quickly became my favorite photograph from the car show this year!
The moral of the story: work with what a scene gives you – adapt your photography as the scene changes around you!