Day 156

156/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

I came home today for the first time in over a month and I'm super stoked. One top of that, my brother decided to tear apart his truck, so I seized the opportunity to make a pretty cool picture. A lighting walkthrough is after the jump... 
Garrett has been working on his truck for what seems like eternity. It's his pride and joy. His dream is to race it, and he always complains about having a V6. We have an old '93 Lexus that sits in the driveway, and after some research Garrett discovered that he could take the V8 out of it and put it in his truck. After convincing my dad that this was, indeed, a great idea, he roped kyle into it and started working. 




It was like watching the three stooges pull apart a truck, I could not stop laughing. They kept forgetting to disconnect parts of the engine, so the motto for that night quickly became, "Let's just cut it." After some maneuvering, an oil spill, some work with the clippers, and a sketchy incident involving a jack balanced on a gokart tire, the engine was out. 




Needless to say, they were enjoying themselves. Once it was out, I had them wheel it to my studio and the rest was easy. Yea right! They put it to the side of the truck and I got to work. Here's what I started with:




This was ugly, but it was a start. I used a fast shutter speed and a high aperture to try and kill any light in the area, that way I would only get the light I wanted from my flashes. Once I had everything dark I started building it back up. I knew I wanted a nice highlight/rim, and I wanted to get some light on that fan because I thought it would look cool, so I set up my new canon 430EX II a little behind the motor on the left side of the frame. With just that light, I was getting this:




This was a lot better, but it still needed a few things. I zoomed the flash head a little bit so that I wasn't lighting anything in the background and I wouldn't get any flare. I moved out the hose and the tarp from the background because they were ugly. Then I wheeled the motor a little camera left so that I was just getting the gate as a nice, solid background. The middle of the engine was a little dark, I felt like I wasn't seeing the good stuff, so I brought out another light and put it on the right side of the frame. I set it up high, pointing down, so that it wouldn't light the background at all. I also zoomed the head on this flash, too, to focus in the light on the area that I wanted. With just the SB-24 on the right, it looked like this:




I thought that looked pretty good, so I turned both the flashes on and took the picture. After a little crop and a touch of color correction, I had my final image. I'm super stoked on this picture, partially because I never thought I'd be shooting an engine hanging off of a cherry picker, and partially because I'm really happy with the light. It was nice to have the time to actually take a nice picture for once, too, after the last few days I was starting to get worried...