Going for a Spin

by Sean Setters

I recently shared my experience making a DIY Automotive Photography Boom Rig and I thought I'd share another example image created using the same setup. My goal in creating the image above was to capture a moving vehicle during the daytime without over exposing the sky. The best method I could come up with was to use a location that blocked out most (if not all) of the sky in the frame.

The first location that came to my mind was a parking garage. However, parking garages are generally busy during the day, offer little wiggle room for maneuvering in the aisles and require a [minimal] fee to use them. The second location that came to mind was the nearby Wormsloe Historic Site which features a long avenue flanked by live oaks whose branches are filled with Spanish moss. As I already have an annual pass to Georgia's Historic Sites, and the avenue was wide enough to provide plenty of room for boom rig testing, I decided on the latter option.

To get an idea of how dense the tree canopy is, here's a shot of the avenue (with early morning fog) that I took in late 2016:

After arriving at the location and setting up the boom rig, I set my Canon EOS 7D Mark II (fitted with the EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM + 4-stop ND filter) to interval mode at f/11, 0.8 sec, ISO 125 and drove down the dirt/gravel avenue at 10 mph (16.1 kph) for roughly 3/8 mile (0.6 km) before parking along a small side road. At that point, I removed the camera from the rig and previewed the images.

Every single image was blurry. I had underestimated just how bumpy the dirt/gravel road was.

Unfortunately, I needed to keep the shutter speed open as long as possible to capture a significantly blurred background at such slow driving speeds. However, driving faster would decrease the interval between bumps in the road. I settled on increasing the shutter speed by 1/3 stop (to 0.6 sec) for my next attempt. I backed out of the side road onto the main avenue, turned my wheels toward the park's entrance and drove back to the parking lot. With the only available spot, I had to swing the wheel pretty hard to park in the open space after passing a sign that marked the beginning of the avenue. It was a shot captured during my turn into the empty parking space that provided the sharpest results while also recording enough movement to significantly blur the background, with every other shot from the second attempt too blurry for practical use.

In post processing, I limited the area used by Photoshop when determining how to fill in areas using "Content Aware Fill", and the technique worked very well for removing the boom rig as well as the boom rig's shadow on the ground.