Lexus LX 2017 sunset shooting.
June 30, 2016After some really busy weeks, I am finally able to write my second blog post! This time, ill be going through the shooting process and some of the edits I did.
Everything started when my good friend Marc messaged me and asked me to shoot the Lexus LX 2017 he had for the week. With the beautiful weather coming up, we decided to set up a sunset shoot and preferably in some rough terrain where would be able to test the off road system of the truck.
We didn’t had a lot of time to put into this shoot and with the engine consumption at 18L/100km, we surely didn’t want to go too far. Thankfully for us, we still live in an area with a lot of farm land and forest, giving us the opportunity to find what we were looking for, trails.
The first step was to use our good friend google map to help us save some time on the scouting. We found what we were looking for, any green spot and dirt road accessible via some public property and headed there shortly with the strict necessary.
- Nikon D600
- Nikkor 24-70mm (Just in case)
- Nikkor 70-200mm
- Manfrotto tripod
The trip took us 10 minutes and it was time to look for those trails. Although, it’s not too easy to look for a small trail when you’re driving 80 km/h and you got a ton of cars behind you. We drive for about 30 minutes discovering that all the trails were blocked for the summer since they are for winter sports mostly and decided to have a look at a spot we used before with the Subaru STI 2016. We were hoping to find the same gravel road there was last year with the forest surrounding it but we actually came across an house development project starting out. Turning this “bad news” into a good one, it was the perfect place to test the offered system of the Lexus LX since there was a lot of bulldozers trail and muddy terrain. We eventually found a small plot of land where we decided to shoot the car. Here’s what it looked like.
While I was setting up to take the shot, Marc was actually taking some pictures himself with his trusty iphone.
The first picture I wanted to take was something a bit different with the sun directly into the lens to create an artistic effect.
I wanted to separate the background from the truck and add a gloomy effect to the sun so I decided to shoot it with a large aperture instead. I wouldn’t have any problem fully capturing the truck since I was shooting it from the side. I knew I would be able to bring back the truck to a normal exposition, so I chose to underexpose it a bit and tried to get as much of the “boring” sky. Have you seen the cloud?
The first tweak I did, was to create that summer feeling of warm and hotness. I used the White Balance tool and cranked the “heat” a bit and then went to the split toning tool to had even more warm to it.
Then it was time to adjust the exposition itself.
Even though those changes made some really great adjustment, I wanted the car to pop a little under that harsh sun. I already knew that this picture was drawing the eyes towards the huge sun glare, so I had to find a solution to lure the eyes on the car a bit more. The brush tool and some clarity would do the trick. I did I quick selection of the car and cranked the clarity slider to a point I liked and decided to give it even more contrast.
The adjustment looked great, it was time to get on photoshop and correct some of the problem the picture has.
It was all about using the healing brush tool and the clone stamp tool to correct those mistake except for the bush on the right where I used a curve adjustment layer just to brighten it up a bit.
That picture was finally done.
Here are some of the other images I got during the shooting. If you want to see more of them, you’ll have to wait for the release of the article on The Car Guide’s website. Ill make an announcement on my Facebook page (Guillaume Fournier Photographie).
