Photography Newbie - lens positioning and lighting

[jsherwood]

Hi,

I was looking through the impressive artwork in a few Matchbox catalogues, and noticed that a lot of it was drawn as though you're looking at the cars from underneath or ground-level. Here's an example from 1971:

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It seems to have the effect of making the cars look larger, so I tried to take photos of a few my models as though they were life-size cars, although I don't know much about photography. The photos below were taken with a smartphone (no DSLR yet) , with the lens about an inch off the floor. The first batch of photos were taken in natural light as the sun was setting.

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When the natural light had faded too much, I used a bedside table lamp from about 5 feet away from the model to try to mimic a sunset effect.
I picked models with warm paint colours - yellow / red / gold. I've cropped the photos, but not too much as i wanted a sense of wide-open space. I haven't adjusted anything else after I uploaded them.

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Enjoyed doing this - Any tips / feedback would be good

Cheers
John

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Hi John.

Well, you have started with some good pictures and these are the results of using basic techniques. The different types of light can cause problems for model photography but because the pictures are digital, some post production can usually correct any colour casting.

In trying to recapture the artwork in your first image, you will need to play with lenses and filters, but a smartphone is limited in that respect and a DSLR will help to achieve pictures nearer to that artwork.

Two things of note regards the artwork. The artist would have used forced perspective to add action to the car as we see it, meaning the basic outline of the car is drawn wider towards the front but reduced towards the back of the car which means if we could see the car from above, the front would be wider across it's entire width than the back!

The artist has also used 'Infinity' guide lines that start at bottom left corner then as the lines come towards us they spread out like sun rays and by copying the model's colours onto these lines it adds to the action and speed effect. This is quite hard to replicate in photography at our level, but is a nice chalange we might like to try!

Ghosthunter.

[Jeremiah]

Cool models.

[radar]

Well done.
Tipper is most realistic. Often the quarry/construction models look most at home in a dirt-dusty or gravel environment. Someone here had nice pic of their grey wheel Caddy/caravan towing combo in front of a 1960s postcard that looked cool.