Langley Good Times Cruise In: shooting in bright conidtions

Reflections of a Firebird

This past weekend in Langley British Columbia the annual, since 1996, Langley Good Times Cruise in took place, which is the 10th largest car show in North America. During the past few years the show has seen an average of at least 1500 cars, and was a little larger this year due to the inclusion of motorcycles for the first time. I was rather glad to see the car show this year, as for the past few years I have been unable to attend due to work. Now, I'll be honest I did not take the time to photography, or even see every vehicle that was present, but I did see at least a few hundred. Now the most surprising part is that I took less than 100 photos. I was expecting to take a lot more, but for some reason during the last few months I've found myself taking more time to get the exposure right the first time, and taking more time thinking about exposure. The main result, as I've already pointed out, less photos in a session. Considering that I was happy with at least 60/70 of the shots and willing to post nearly 40 of them in my gallery, the most from a single shoot yet, tells me that I must be learning to take fewer, yet higher quality images. Either that or I'm just getting lazy, which I doubt since I was walking around the car show, on a warm, 33ºC/91ºF afternoon for 3 1/2 hours.

Photographing at such an event has its difficulties, first of which is the estimated 100,000 other visitors walking around the downtown core of a small city. Another difficulty is light, the car show starts at 11AM and runs till 5PM, which means not the best shooting conditions on a bright, hot sunny day as this past Saturday was in the Greater Vancouver area. Of course I was able to overcome these issues by either ignoring people in the frame, sometimes I was simply impossible to get a shot without someone standing over the car I was shooting or by being patient around the slightly less popular cars. My solution to bad lighting, was a combination of using fill flash from my SB-800 and suing Active-Dlighting on my D90. I had my Tokina 12-24mm AT-X 124 Pro DX, mounted on the D90 for all the shots I took on Saturday. As I mentioned earlier, I was very satisfied with the results that I was able to get, although harsh shadows do appear in some shots, for the most part I was able to keep them under control, as to not lose detail. To see the results head to by photo gallery, link on the upper right side of the blog, and enter the Good Times Cruise In 09 gallery.