Chromium Auto Photography
With over 15 years of photography experience, I always wanted to turn my camera into a fun and thriving side-business.
While most photographers turn to family portraits, event photography, senior mini sessions, and so on (and I’ve done my share of all those), when the rubber met the road, my passion for cars was where I wanted to focus my photography.
Dodge Viper GTS
This venture is really new. I just started focusing on it in October, and my first step has been attending car meet-ups and connecting with the car community here locally in San Antonio.
I was actually shocked to learn how many different car organizations there are and how many different meet-ups take place every single week. Not being able to devote every single day to attending a different event, I started by focusing on the largest regular car meet-up, Cars & Coffee San Antonio, which meets once a month in the Fiesta Texas parking lot.
With over 500 cars in attendance, to say it’s huge would be a significant understatement.
Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder
1950 Mercury
1964 Chevy Impala
While taking pictures of all the amazing cars at these meet-ups is extremely fun, the goal is to be able to provide a service to individuals by taking special photos of their vehicles.
But I had to start with people I know first.
Luckily, I had an old boss of mine reach out to me, letting me know he had a Porsche Taycan as well a Porsche 911 Turbo S that he would love some photos of.
The all-electric Porsche Taycan
The latest 992 variant of the iconic Porsche 911 Turbo S
He mentioned that his brother also had a Porsche 911 Turbo S, and he would love to come along for the shoot.
His brothers bold champaign 911 Turbo S
Not too shabby for my first professional shoot.
What I quickly learned is that shuffling people around is a lot easier and faster than multi-thousand-pound metal machines.
It’s obvious in retrospect, but in practice I discovered that moving cars in and out of frame and positioning them correctly – alone or in conjunction with other vehicles – takes a lot of patience and trial and error.
Car angles are really important in photography, and having the car owner move the car just slightly 3 different times to make sure the composition with the other car is correct feels tedious, but is absolutely necessary for the photos to look fantastic.
Luckily, I story-boarded the entire shoot beforehand to make the most efficient use of our time together.
Pretty it ain’t, but it got the job done. (Oh, and yes, it did get run over at one point.)
The entire photo shoot took about 2 hours, but that was just the beginning.
Editing is where the magic happens, and where most of my time was spent following the shoot.
One feature I loved about both 911’s were the yellow brake calipers. The yellow calipers are the indication that these cars had the high-end racing ceramic brakes, a key feature of a powerful sports car.
During the shoot I noticed just a small handful of yellow wildflowers poking up over the edge of the tall stone wall next to us – and that gave me an idea.
I wished that we had yellow wildflowers growing in the grass sections all around the cars, tying in the yellow accents of the brake calipers. But, alas, there were no yellow wildflowers growing in the grass around us.
Luckily, we are living in the age of AI image generation.
Editing starts in Lightroom Classic.
The first step was to do most of the heavy editing directly in Lightroom. It’s critical to get the photo looking as good as possible in this step because once we jump over to Photoshop, these edits are essentially baked in.
Once the photo is looking good, it’s time to jump over to Photoshop to add that creative touch.
Using Photoshop’s AI tools to produce wildflowers where my imagination wanted them to be.
I feel comfortable saying that Photoshop’s AI generation features are really good, but they are far from perfect.
In the advertising you’ll see someone type in a simple prompt and the computer magically spits out exactly what the user was dreaming of in their heads. In reality, it’s a lot more painstaking than that.
For example, highlighting the areas to be affected and prompting the AI to generate a field of yellow wildflowers would generate dozens of vastly different versions of wildflowers, which is to be expected without providing specifics about a certain type of wildflower.
I didn’t have a specific wildflower in mind, but I would know it when I saw it, so after. a dozen or so generations, it finally generated a flower that matched what I was looking for.
Now, technically, once it created a really nice version of wildflowers about the right size and color I was looking for, it's supposed to let me create multiple variations based specifically on that image it just created.
I think it’s accurate to call this process hit or miss. Sometimes it would again generate wildly different variations of flowers even though I was asking it to use the specific flower reference it just created.
Again, in reality, it would take another 10 or 20 AI generated images for it to hit on the right style again, and considering generating each image could take up to 20 seconds as the results are processed in the could on not locally, you better have time and patience on your side.
Producing a nice image that looks realistic is a lot more work than the folks at Adobe would have you believe.
The original image straight from the camera (top)
and the final image (bottom).
The other challenge with AI image generation in Photoshop is if the area where you want to generate something crosses a part of the image you don’t want manipulated, you have to get very clever about how you preserve the part of the image you want left alone.
It’s not as simple as just NOT selecting the portion of the image you don’t want manipulated. Putting a hard edge on the modified area can produce some odd and unpleasant results.
For example, if a field of flowers is meant to continue behind say, a car, putting a hard edge where the car is likely won’t produce the results you’re looking for.
What I ended up doing is making a cutout of the car and placing that on its own layer on top of everything else. That way my AI generated imagery could more realistically “flow” into the background behind the car like it would in real life.
One funny challenge with this method is that if you select an area for AI to manipulate that includes some portion of the car, it won’t just leave the car alone. As part of its process for generating the wildflowers, it will also generate what it thinks that portion of the car should look like, resulting in some pretty wacky results that are as insane as you can imagine. (AI has some interesting thoughts on what a car should look like.)
Keeping the front of the Porsche unmodified in this image took more work than you would expect.
In the 3 months since I’ve started, I’ve done 4 personal car photo shoots. I’ve found that each one comes with its own unique challenges, but they are all fun challenges to solve.
I enter each shoot with an idea of the kinds of shots I want to get and what I think will look good, but am often struck with other ideas or concepts once on location and actually creating the shots.
Even more, once I’m in the editing process, it still surprises me what final images look amazing, and what shots I thought were going to be awesome but something just isn’t quite right.
I’m definitely still new to the car photography skillset, but I’m finding the learning curve to be incredibly exciting.
This is something I certainly hope to be doing for years to come.
Ferarri 812 Superfast
1973 Volkswagen Super Beetle
1970 Ford F-100 / 1973 Ford F-100
Lamborghini Huricán STO