Rig Photos!

Being a motorsports (and automotive) photographer, I have wanted to try my hand at shooting with a “Rig” for a really long time. After several years of putting it off, I broke-down and purchased the needed equipment… and decided to hang several thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment at the end of a 12-16′ pole attached to my car!

Ok, before you call me crazy… this is not as strange as it sounds. I am not the first person to think of doing this, and after reading hundreds of pages of commentary on the subject, what else did I have to do at 4am? Also, the results are well worth the risk!

The advantage of using a rig, over a car-to-car or panning shot, is that you can get results that look like the car is going much faster than it actually is… in a space that would never allow for those speeds. For example, all of the shots done here were shot at vehicle speeds less than 1mph in a small drop-off area of a school. The rig allows for very slow shutter speeds (in this case, between 1-2 seconds) with little to no movement of the camera relative to the car. This results in a photo where the body of the car is very sharp photos, yet there is lots of motion in the wheels/background (like with a panning or car-to-car shot).

The rig is then removed from the frame during post-processing…

After some experimentation on my G8, I was able to convince another brave owner to let me mount the 16′ pole to his car!

After the session was over, I told the owner how nervous I was about damaging his car… he couldn’t believe that I’d put such valuable equipment at the end of a pole.

This was my first experience using a rig, and I learned so much as the morning went on. I learned that the Neutral Density filter that I was using (to block out light, allowing for longer shutter speeds) was causing the photos to have a magenta hue to them. I also realized that I had been sloppy with my exposures (not looking at the histogram like I should have been), resulting in skies that were more overexposed than I would have liked.

Right now I can hardly wait to get out and shoot some more photos with my rig!