Fun with slow shutter speeds

[TripleTransAm]

Take one early evening in a quiet residential neighborhood.

Add one 1978 Trans Am travelling at just a tick below the posted speed limit.

Mix in 1 part crazy car nut with photography fetish, and blend evenly with a digital SLR capable of 1600 ISO sensitivity.

Stir and serve with a generous helping of bracing the camera against the headliner and the forward windshield trim. Add a dash of Photoshop tweaking (sharpening of the car surface) and a smidgeon of pure old fashion luck.

http://www.tripletransam.com/78ta/2004/DSCF8367.jpg

[Patrick]

All that equals........... :bows: :bows: :2thumbs:

[the_pack_rat]

That's pretty sweet.

Gives the impression your really hauling - tho you aren't.

[stevengerard]

You were driving backwards weren't you?

[DEFYANT]

:up: Nice!!! I like it.

[TripleTransAm]

LOL, Steven gets the prize. :rock:

If you look at the motion blur patterns on the house (particularly the one on the right) you'll see evidence of motion but not in the right direction considering the time of night that I shot that image. In reality, I couldn't manage anything useable at anything close to the speed limit, and it took some 30 frames or so before I got this one, all going backwards. The forward ones were absolute garbage (but mostly because of the hand-held nature of the shots - one of these days I will rig up my window-mount I bought in 2001 and see what I can get).

Even then, it took a fair amount of post-processing to get the hood to be remotely discernable... you can see some of the residual noise on the purplish hue of the dash pad edge (it's pure red in reality). I'm fairly comfortable getting useable shots when hand-holding in really low light with slow slow slow shutter speeds (see other photography thread), but in a 26 year old car? No way... :beatnik:

[gpfarrell]

Looks like that 'Bird flies!

Great image... thanks for sharing!

You should enter that somewhere... maybe Car & Driver will have a 10-best contest or something... you've got a winner there!

Greg

[TripleTransAm]

Thanks Greg, but in today's situation where so much of photography takes place in a 'digital darkroom', how much of a shot is shooter skill and how much is post-processing? True, the greats all had their techniques behind closed doors when it came time to processing their famous shots, but it would be unfair to put something that required so much creative massaging after the fact against something that was more a result of shooter skill. In this case, I had to do a fair amount of work on the hood surface to bring out its outline and kill the blobs of light that were the streetlights (tucked in the hood around the lights, making them look more defined points - I couldn't do much better on that reflection on the shaker hood, though).

But no doubt about it, it's the digital age and the sky's the limit. As I told Marty in Pennsylvania back in October 2003, one should never throw away any digital shot no matter how bad it ends up... there is always a chance that some technique will come around (or we figure out ourselves) that will either make something useful from it (or at the very least, there may be some detail in it that you'll appreciate years later (like a puff of smoke from a grassy knoll, the glowing smile on an intern as she innocently waits in a presidential receiving line, the vapor trail of a desintegrating spacecraft, etc...).

[Eric91Z]

That is an awesome picture and it really makes me miss my '79 T/A WS6 car!!!

[Tallboy]

i think i see t/a 6.6 on the scoop. if i do, and it is, i am a bitter and jealous man and miss mine even more now...:bigcry:

[Mike Poore]

You were driving backwards weren't you?

^That's what I thought! That's a great photo.:)

[CRUZTAKER]

Nice pics Steve!!!


Guess what? I did it....early xmas present to Jessica and myself.

Nikon D70 DIGITAL SLR. We already have 35-70, 70-200. and a doubler lense.

OMG this camera rocks!!! With a $79 1 gb. memory card I can store 300 super high resolution pics, and on medium res. nearly 700!!!!

Thanks for your help.

[MM03MOK]

Nikon D70 DIGITAL SLR. We already have 35-70, 70-200. and a doubler lense.
Barry - that's the one I'm looking at since I have 3 Nikon SLR bodies (F2, F3, FM) and a number of Nikkor lenses. Let me know what you think as you start to use it! My two biggest complaints about my Sony Mavica CD1000 are shutter delay and the flash is only fair at very close range.

[CRUZTAKER]

OMG Mary....this camera rocks. It has the ability to rapid fire! There is zero lag between shots, and it fires at like 3-5 frames a second.

The D70 body only is on sale around here for $899. All Nikkor lenses work with it.

I haven't read all the literature yet, but is has boo-coo options.

[TripleTransAm]

RIGHT ON, Barry!!

Great choice. Nikon makes good glass, so anything from Nikon or Fuji gets my nod.

Now the bad news I "neglected" to tell you earlier! ;)
Once you go digital, you start to notice all sorts of shortcomings in older lenses that might have *just* satisfied us (mainly because a digital CCD is so much more detail-capable than film, so you reach the limit of the glass!). So be prepared to be tempted by higher-$$ glass once you start perfecting your technique. It's just like buying a high-performance car all over again! (but by the same token: in some cases, the smaller frame size of a DSLR can use the 'better' portion of so-so glass, making it all of a sudden a very good lens for your DSLR whereas it was mediocre on an SLR - such is the case with the cheapo 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 I bought with my Fuji S2).

And speaking of frame size, you will have to get used to the frame size multiplier... because the CCD on a DSLR is smaller than the 35mm frame, the images have a crop factor of 1.5 . This means that if you go faster than 45mph your Traction control will freak... ooops, wrong subject... if you shoot a DSLR with your lens at 30mm, it will give you the same field of vision (ie. what you caught with the lens, from extremity to extremity) as if you had used a 45mm lens on as SLR. Hence the popularity of super-wide angle lenses on Digital SLRs. (no, it does NOT mean you magnify anything!).

Have fun with the JPEG settings, forget RAW for now until you've grabbed about a year's worth of experience with a DSLR. This way, you can learn the camera first, then tweak the ***** out of it.

And lastly, I don't know if any of your lenses listed above have apertures of f2.8, but if they don't, you might want to try shooting with the apertures at f5.6 or tighter (ideally f6.7 or f8, depending on the lens). Lenses that aren't capable of f2.8 (ie. not super-$$$$$) usually don't perform as well fully open (ie. at their most open aperture value, whatever that may be). When I got my S2, I went for months thinking there was something wrong with my camera's focus or my 28-105mm until my wife took some shots with the camera in auto mode (auto shutter and auto aperture). Since I tended to have it wide open in aperture-priority mode (f3.5 in the case of that cheapo lens) thinking it would give me a sharper image through quicker shutter speeds, it not only performed crappy but gave me a lousy depth of field. The camera on auto tended to choose middle-of-the-road values, which included apertures of f6.7 or f5.6 . Aha!

[TripleTransAm]

i think i see t/a 6.6 on the scoop. if i do, and it is, i am a bitter and jealous man and miss mine even more now...:bigcry:


You do, you do, it isn't, and don't worry. ;)

The car was repainted somewhere in the vicinity of 1986-1987, and they did a FINE job, very thorough. I'm still not sure if they painted the bird on the hood or used some aftermarket bird, because I can see the outline of what *should* be the huge decal, but I can also feel what seems like paint (which has since faded in some places, so it makes it hard to tell!),

Anyway, my point: they made such a huge effort on the hood bird detail (it looks original, right down to the paint scheme as it appeared on the car's original silver paint scheme, which makes it a unique combination with a black finish). However, for the "Trans Am" decals on the fenders / tail and the scoop call-outs, they went with cheap vinyl repros. Like, real cheap. Like, they faded to almost pink (so I have no idea what color they were originally). And the font isn't all that accurate either.

As was popular with many late 70s T/A repaints, the "6.6 litre" scoop callout that came with cars that had the base Pontiac 400 or the Oldsmobile 403 (both around 180hp) was usually replaced with the "T/A-6.6" that was used exclusively on the optional 220-hp Pontiac 400. Such was the case with my car: definitely a 180hp 400 (as documented by Historical Services) and it sure behaves like it (all torque from idle until 3000 RPM - peak 325lbft at 1600 RPM - and gets breathless above that).

No big deal - I'm not trying to pass the car off as anything it isn't. The low end grunt of the lo-hp 400 is nice... I get faster 40-85 mph acceleration times when I let the car stay in 3rd gear than if I go too far and kick the tranny down to 2nd! :lol:

Anyway, a couple of years ago I went over the decals with a spray can and masking tape, and "rejuvenated" them from their faded pink to something between red and orange - the idea being to go one step further and apply grey striping to the letters in keeping with the bird color scheme. I liked the letters as is after the first application, so I'm keeping it as is until the car gets a fresh paint... I'm debating whether to go with the gold bird/decal as was the case with black cars, or keep the unique silver-car trim combination on a black car (as is the case now).
(below photo taken with my son's Fuji A330 3megapixel point/shoot... not a great camera after all, I'm afraid).
http://www.tripletransam.com/78ta/2004/DSCF0191a.jpg

[jgc61sr2002]

Steve - Great pix. :D How is the new house. Looks beautiful. :up:

[woaface]

AHHHHHHHHHHHH I WANT THAT CAMERA SOOOOO BAD!!!!!

HEY CHECK THIS OUT BARRY!

WWW.ELECTRICSAM.COM (http://www.ELECTRICSAM.COM)



OMG Mary....this camera rocks. It has the ability to rapid fire! There is zero lag between shots, and it fires at like 3-5 frames a second.

The D70 body only is on sale around here for $899. All Nikkor lenses work with it.

I haven't read all the literature yet, but is has boo-coo options.