Day 164/366

"Painted Nascar"

Last year for fathers day I sold a print of an image I shot at a Nascar race. It was of Earnhardt Junior who was at the time in the #8 car. So this year I was approached again by this client for a new image. I have only shot that one race and so would need to rely on those shots to find this new image.

The race was back in 2007 and I had to borrow my friends Canon Rebel XT. Which needless to say was not the best camera for the job, but as +Chase Jarvis says, The best camera is the one you have with you. I had rented a 70-200 2.8 lens, So I was good on the Glass. Just didn't have a lot of room to crop in, with the low resolution of the XT, especially since this was going to be enlarged to 12x16 image.

So I went back through and looked at the images I had. I was very happy with the image I had sold previously, Here it is if you haven't seen it.

http://bit.ly/L3YCpJ

So I was trying to get something in the same ball park of quality and creativity. And the clients father is a big Earnhardt Jr. fan, so he really wanted it to be of the #8 car. And from what I was seeing in the images, I didn't have anything that was tack sharp and interesting enough. I had an image of #8 and another car battling it out, but it was a little soft and grainy from the noise.

I was all set to cobble together an image in photoshop, I had gone through and tried to get images that would fit together, but it wasn't working, because of the steep bank of the track, the perspective of the cars were off and looked weird, I left it last night and figured I would figure it out today. But apparently there was a scheduled power outage today, so from 9am to 6:15PM I had no power and couldn't work on this image on the computer, which left me thinking time on how to solve this problem. I knew I didn't have the time to do a respectable PS Composite. So I had to figure out a new solution. Luckily with the power being off, I was relaxing and reading the latest issue of Photoshop User, and +Matt Kloskowski was showing off the Oil Paint filter, and I thought that might look pretty cool on my image. Once the power came back on I began preparing the image, I toned the image and got it looking cool, color wise, then took it to PS CS6 and started playing with the filter. And I was very pleased with how it came out. I called the Client and he came over and was as excited about it as I was.

I think if you put your mind to it, there is always a solution.

Thanks for stopping by.