Night Photography – Lighting cars at night

One of the things I have been experimenting with and learning about lately is car lighting at night. I have found it to be very difficult to get right. Typically cars have a lot of angles on them coupled with metallic paint meaning getting the lighting you add to reflect in the way you want isn’t easy. I’m writing this really just to show them off as I’m quite happy with the results. There is still alot of room for improvement but I think I’m getting there.

Volkswagen Passat VR5

Lighting: Handheld flash gun at various points around the car body.

Vauxhall Corsa 1.2 SXi

Lighting: Again, hand held strobe. The dark bonnet is a common problem I seem to encounter.

Ford Zephyr

Lighting: Two bursts of hand held strobe from camera left and right.

Audi S3 Sportback

Lighting: Multiple bursts of flash to light the car, very low lower burst of flash on the grass.
Editing: Light vignette added to prevent the grass from distracting fromt the car too much, a bit contradictory to the original lighting!

Audi A6

Lighting: A short stick with LEDs placed at various points along it. I walked around the entire car during the exposure, causing the car to be lit and the trails in the background.

2009 Renault Laguna Coupé

Lighting: Diffused LED torch used to hightligh the rear end.

None of the above photos were edited outside of the camera unless otherwise stated underneath the photo.

I’ll be looking to write a tutorial on lighting a car evenly with a flash gun in the near future. If you like what you see, or have any suggestions please leave me a comment below.

EDIT: Just a random thing – check out these awesome Widgets!