Had a lovely relaxed Christmas with family (and chocolate). Managed to get a quick shoot with this nice BMW 3 series coupe. Click through for lighting setup.
Cars can be a real problem to light as they like to reflect and pick up hot spots pretty quickly. Soft lighting seems to take some of the edge off of this but you can see there are still a couple of hot spots here – avoidable by using more lights.
To start I’ve setup two heads into 60cm softboxes to the left of the camera with the light hitting the side of the car and filling in as well. Next I put an Alien Bee 800W with an 86″ parabolic umbrella camera right up quite high. It still resulted in the hot spot at the front but filled enough of the bonnet and background. Lastly another Alien Bee 800W with an umbrella softbox is hitting the front of the car to fill in. This still left the background a bit too dark to I’ve fired a bare Metz 48 (set to 18mm) into the back of the garage (it’s a little bit cool unfortunately). These are all fired with Yongnuo triggers alongside built in optical triggers.