It's Show Time!

Did goe to the Hot Rod show yesterday and was greatley entertained gazing at the horseless carriages.

And at the end of the day I think I learned something - you can paint the outside of a car metallic candy burgundy, upholster it in orange vinyl, and get away with it - indeed you can cause the hearts of little boys and old men to hammer with desire by doing so. Likewise you can send young women through the crowd dressed in short skirts and tight tops and 6-inch high heels and have much the same effect. They also sold hot dogs and beer in cups. Ask me if I enjoyed myself...

I was a bit on the perplexed side when I looked at the lighting scheme of the venue - the ceiling letting in daylight filtered through a translucent canvas - the edges of the Burswood arena flooded with some sort of harsh white halogen - and spot lights popping up from the floor level in various tints. Add on the LED accent lights of some cars and you have a real fejuada of lighting. There were half a dozen colour temperatures and some of them were in Roman numerals...

I was shooting with a Nikon D300 and SB 700 flash. I boosted the ISO to 650, told the camera to deal with the mess, and snapped away - confident that later in ACR or Aperture that I could even out the fluctuating colour balances. Thus it has been, with the added bonus of a car owner who painted his Ford a pure white, thus allowing a big reference patch seen in a number of pictures.

It's still a mish mosh in some respects, and if I had taken the time to do a custom WB for each group of shots I might have been better off - likewise if I had thought to haul along my HONL light-balancing gels I could have tailored each shot to take into account the dominant flood at the time. But you can only haul so much and if you are carrying a cup of beer and a hot dog and chasing the Shannon's girl it all becomes difficult. You'd be surprised how fast some of them can run in those 6-inch heels...

I also learned that it is no fun trying to change from the 18-200 lens to the 8-16 lens in a crowd. Methinks if one were to do this sort of thing a lot it would be worth investing in a second D300 body ( and they are cheap as chips now) and a Black Rapid double camera rig. Might feel like a bit of a pack mule to start with but at least the weight would be evenly distributed over both shoulders.

Finally, I got to look under the top cover of a DSLR camera to see what a processing engine really looks like...