Moar Rarr Quad

Went out to the farm today with Victor to play with the quad. Deb is so kind to let Victor play with that rather large (and very noisy) toy.

They've actually started riding in a track out there, so we decided to do some drifting pictures of it. It's super slick, so the drifts are pretty consistent and easy to set up. We picked a corner that had a pretty long line, and had lots of grass that could be thrown by quad.

We used three strobes for the set up. I knew that I was going to be shooting at about 45 to the corner, near the exit. This would hopefully give the best view of the drift, but not put myself into the path of the beast. We tried a few runs with the strobes to backlit everything, but having them right behind actually was too much. There were lens flares like crazy, and things got really blown out.

The strobes got moved off to either side of the frame, one on the exit, and two on the entrance. The two were a 580 at 1/2 anddddd mini nuke! So there was a heck of a lot of power over there. This did the heavy lifting on the backlighting of the grass and the quad. The light on the left/exit was propped up by a gas can and was zoomed only to light the front of Victor. Mostly, this just separated him from black, and gave a little bit of insight into the shadows.

I shot at f/5.6, ISO400, and 1/100s. The shutter I wanted to drag just a bit to get the bright headlight, and the rest were to get enough power out of the strobes. Little lights aren't quite enough to light a quad going this fast. I really need studio lights to get a fast enough cycle to freeze everything. The strobes did a good job, but there's still some motion blur going on.


To frame/ compose this, I followed Victor threw the corner, and kept him in the left hand side of the frame. When he was in the right spot in the corner, shutter was pressed.

To start off editing, I went into Ps and brightened up the head light with a curves layer. I just brightened the whites, then only painted over the area of the head lamp. This gave a really cool glow effect. Back in Lr, I converted to b/w because I really didn't like the colors of the scene. With time, that could be changed, but tonight is not enough of that. Maybe tomorrow. I also upped the clarity just a little bit. More pop. All done!

See you tomorrow!