Mitsubishi Colt - Strobist Shoot

A few days ago I went on a mini strobist photoshoot with Cardiff based photographer Gavin Dando. Our mission, to take some shots of Gavin's car using multiple off camera flash units. Click through for a step by step of how we set this shot up, from the initial idea, through planning and execution. More...

Photoshoots like this require some planning at the least, it is never good to start something like this without at least a faint idea of what you want to achieve.

So we had the initial idea, take some shots of the car. Now all we needed was a location, se we had a look at a few locations and eventually chose part of an Industrial Estate under the A4232 leading into Cardiff. At this point we didn't have any of our gear with us, we were just looking at the location, looking at how we could compose the shot, thinking about lighting etc.

So armed with a rough idea of what we wanted to do and a good idea of the layout of the place we headed back to Gavin's house and started planning the shoot, making a rough sketch of the layout of the shot and the lighting setup.


The main problem with lighting a black car is that it will not reflect the light that is thrown at it, but rather show a reflection of the source the light is coming from. For that reason we decided to use 2 large 6x4ft Lastolite Bounce Panels to light the side of the car and a large reflective umbrella to light the front. To finish the shot off we decided to throw some colour on the concrete pillar behind the car, this would be courtesy of a rosco CTO gel to create a nice contrast in colour between the post sunset sky and the black car. Now we just had to wait for the sun to set.


We got back to the location just before sunset to give us enough time to set up the lights, we ended up sticking pretty much exactly to the planned light setup. The shots below show how each of the flashes add to the finished shot.


First flash with large 6x4ft Bounce Panel to light the front wheel and foreground.


Adding the large reflective umbrella to finish lighting the foreground and to highlight the Manufacturers badge and number plate.


Adding the second Lastolite Bounce Panel to finish the lighting on the car, notice the reflection of the panel on the drivers side door.


Finally adding the gelled flash onto the background to complete the shot.

On Flickr

View Gavin's shot here.