Hi guys I've been getting a lot of questions on how to take better photos, and I hope by creating this thread can help someone. First off I'm not a professional photographer, I'm only sharing with you what I know and experienced, but I hope you will find this thread helpful. On this thread we're going to talk about before/after pictures and how I set them up. After wash/prep, I like to setup all our shop lights, they are Husky LEDs from Home-depot and a Fenix TK35. I used 2 Husky lights, one with a stand for top panels and one w/o stand for lower panels. I place these lights 45' degrees to what I'm taking picture of, and I'm standing on other side with the camera, also pointing 45'degrees to what I'm shooting. Then I start taking pictures of the fenders, doors, trunk, rear bumpers, roof, hood and front bumper...I moved the light as I go. When we're done with the detail, I repeated the same procedures for AFTER pictures. I know some detailers like to use the sun to inspect paint, but the sun's light is fixed, so you would have to move the car around the light source to get the picture. Also you are limited to what your eyes can see at the moment. At noon you can only see the top panels ( and sometimes the light is too strong ), at sunset you will have to rush to get the lower panels and might not get the top panels Benefits by taking all these before photos at once with LED lights, before any paint correction. You can thoroughly inspect the paint and know what you're exactly dealing with. how much time is needed for correction? Did you under quote for this job? NOW is the time you should contact the client if more time/money is needed. You don't have to pick up your camera again during polishing! cameras do not like dust. Here are some photos of a M3 we did a paint correction on. Paint was pretty mess up and we were able to improved the finish by 80-90%. The shop camera I used was a Canon 70D with sigma 18-35 F1.8 Lens. All these pictures are edited through Lightroom 5. Some photos are overexposed to show defects. all are taken in Manual mode, on live view with 10X zoom , so I can manual focus. Thanks for looking! I hope this thread can help you guys in some way, Please like or comment if you like to see more threads like this one here Franki
are you exporting straight to JPEG through lightroom? The photos look a tad bit low resolution almost for a 70D. Unless you are exporting in low quality format to be 56k friendly nice lens! If only they made it compatible with full frame. I personally prefer JetBeam over Fenix. I've had many Fenix lights fail on me. And the warranty was not very helpful either.
