With summer being basically over, we’re greeted with fall leaves and surprisingly cooperative weather (especially when we consider how awful and full of rain our summer has been). To capitalize on the color change and to celebrate the fact that Tim (@tim_type_r) finally has his 911 figured out, we found some time to do an early morning shoot.

The first location looks pretty familiar, as I wanted to go somewhere with plenty of fall foliage. Emily Murphy has it in spades and serves as a great backdrop to these cars. Photos below!

At this point the sun decided to peek out, so we rearranged the cars to take advantage of it.

I then decided that it would be nice to park the car on the narrow roads going to and from the parking area. One at a time though, since we had to move quickly in case someone needed to pass by. Here’s a side by side of Tim’s 997.1 and my 997.2.,

After having our fill of the fall foliage, we moved on to our 2nd stop, right outside the CCIS lecture halls at the U of A. There’s no actual parking allowed there so we stopped, spent 5 minutes shooting and went on our way, trying not to obstruct people.

Our last stop is at Jubilee Parkade, which I’ve shot at before, but only during at night. Turns out it doesn’t look too bad during the day either. At this point, the sky had clouded over, offering a darker, more somber backdrop. Matches the more industrial aesthetic of the area so I was more than happy.

Overall, this has been one of my favorite shoots so far and it’s not because I love Porsches. I felt like I did a lot right with the photography. The weather was cooperative as well.

Good points:

• I remembered for the first time to rotate my circular polarizer from shot to shot to reduce the reflections on the cars as much as possible

• Also remembered to use a variety of angles and a mix of landscape and portrait

• Effective use of natural lighting

Overall though, I feel that more than anything, with outdoor shoots you really are at nature’s mercy. If she decides to give you weather that helps your photography then the photos are just that much better. If not, then you can try your best but you can only work with what you have lighting-wise.

The one other thing I noticed is that many of the photos that were shot as RAW and under-exposed in camera came out better. When given a lighting situation with a large range of brightness (eg. shooting towards the sun with the subject in front of you) using the A7RII’s EV function and reducing the exposure made sure the highlights weren’t completely blown out. This retains the detail in the sky and the camera is good enough at picking up color in the darks that increasing shadows in Lightroom evens out the exposure perfectly. This is something that I’ll have to remember to use, especially on those darn sunny days.

Hope you enjoyed the content. More to come soon!

Cheers,
Gary