Some pictures from the car show

[Prospero]

Hello everyone,

Last week I went to the Amstardam AutoRAI, the largest car show in the Netherlands. Due to the Easter Weekend it was very busy, which made photography a bit hard. Also, the lighting was really tough. It was not so much that the light was too low, but the bright reflections on dark cars make it impossible to get a correct exposure without blowing out part of the subject.

Anyway, I took lots of pictures (350-400) but there are only a few 'keepers'. Most shots were ruined because of distracting crowds or noise after I brightened the shadows of the pictures.

I took all pictures with the 17-70 this time. I found that 17mm was about as wide as I could go without distorting the car too much. I tried using the 10-20 with a polarizer as well, but I found that the polarizer could not cut back the reflections enough.

Here are the pictures. I hope you will enjoy the pictures. As always, comments and critique are welcome.

#1: A race car by Audi, I removed the crowd behind the car here:



#2: A pink Seat. I again removed the crowd:



#3: Audi S5:



#4: Honda Formula 1 car:



#5: Honda Civic. Perhaps a bit underexposed, but I liked it this way:



#6: One of Lancia's cars. I blurred the background in Capture NX, but kept the eyes sharp.



#7: Large interest in the Formula 1 car of McLaeran:



#8: Rolls Royce

[Classic96]

Very cool pics. Job well done!

[tcadwall]

Great PP.

I really liked the Lancia processing... Before reading your title even, I was struck by the eyes, and the blur and trying to figure out whether you used a large DOF and blurred parts, or whether you did some type of double - exposure / overlay.

[coldrain]

Very nice photos, prospero. I especially like the two Audi shots.
Noise is playing tricks in the McLaren photo though, weird green and blue blodges in the black of the tires and the grey of the body work. It may pay to selectively remove colour noise in those areas before the rest of post processing and resizing.

[Prospero]

Thanks a lot for the comments, Classic, Tracey and Coldrain.

Tracey, I took that shot at 17mm and f/4 (I didn't use f/2.8 because f/4 is a lot sharper and shows little vignetting), but at that apperture the depth of field was already way to big to show any background blur. So I did that in Capture NX.

Coldrain, the picture of the McLaren is one of the pictures that got a lot of noise when brightening the shadows. I forgot to remove it after the brightening.

[TNB]

Send the cars this way so I can photograph them in action.

[XaiLo]

I like the work you did on number six... good edits, nice set Prospero.

[rawpaw18]

And I thought you only made nice landscape shots, apparently not.
Could you post some lousy pictures next time, you are killing my self esteem.
I like the Audi S5, simple yet classy shot. Nice work.

[Rooz]

how did you get rid of the crowd using NX ??

[Prospero]

Thanks for the replys, Xailo, TNB, Rich and Rooz

TNB, I'm not sure if these cars will see some action in the US anytime soon, but if you send me your 70-200VR I will gladly take the pictures for you

Rich, how many of the over 200 lousy shots I took there do you want me to post . If it makes you feel better, all the "important" pictures I took there (the pictures of the pretty ladies standing by some of the cars ) were blurry because I didn't watch my shutterspeed .

Rooz, I removed the crowd in photoshop, but it can be done just as easy in Capture NX. Capture NX has a brush tool with wich you can paint a certain region in a colour. Once that is done, you can do several things with the painted region. You can make it black (similar to what I have done here), you can soften it (as in image 6), you can also change the colours or make it black and white and a lot more things. I found out about this in the link Jcon posted this week.