z4sm.jpg

I got a chance to go shooting this past week, and I got a shot of this BMW M-Class Z4 Roadster, taken near dusk on the top of a parking garage near our offices (click for a larger view).

My buddy Rod Harlan, (from DV Confidential.com), came with me on the shoot, and as it turns out, Rod has an uncanny nack for positioning cars for photos, so he was a big help (and did some shooting himself).

I processed the image using my “Photoshop Seven-Point-System,” and then adding the “Hollywood Effect” from my Photoshop CS3 book for Digital Photographers at the end, to give the concrete and sky that gritty look. The Hollywood Effect makes the colors in the image darker and more saturated, so after I applied the effect, I brought the original color of the car back using the History Brush (it’s like undo on a brush, so I just grabbed it and started painting).

That was the easy part; the hard part was removing the distracting objects (like part of the roof from a Courtyard by Marriott that appeared to the right of the car in the distance), oil stains, and other junk you’ll find in a parking garage.

The image was shot with a Nikon D3 (that’s right, baby—I got my D3!!! Whoo Hooo!!! It’s freakin’ unbelievable!!!!), on a tripod, at 100 ISO, at 1/20 of a second at f/8. It was taken with a 70-200mm f/2.8 Nikon VR lens, at 75mm. I shot in Aperture priority mode and used a cable release to reduce any camera shake. It was shot with natural light.