Audi R8

My first-ever photoshoot completely based on lightpainting. After several smaller shoots with friends or tests with my own car, I finally felt confident enough to create a complete set of photos of this glossy black Audi R8 on MBDesign wheels.

Location

The photoshoot took place in front of the P-Performance.at headquarter as we planned to use most of the images in advertising and social-media posts for P-Performance. So for the first photo we parked the car directly next to the glowing Logo of "P-Performance".

We ran into several issues in lighting the car with just a small torch because some of the spotlights on the house were permanently visible in the highly reflective car paint. Luckily all of the light systems in and around the house can be controlled seperately, so we were able to create absolute darkness whenever it was needed.

How it's done

So the shooting could start off and I began to light up the car. At first, several shots with my off-camera flash to give my some photos with different directions of incoming light and shadow direction.

To control the reflection on the black car paint exactly the way i wanted it to be, I followed the lines of the car alongside with a small torch from a hardware store.

Finally, some additional exposures were made, with turned on headlights, brake lights and the neon sign next to the car.

The same technique was used for the complete set including rear view, sideprofile, perspective shots and several detail photos.

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Final Touches

The main reason why those kind of photos take way more time than "normal ones" is, that each of those exposures have to be blended together to create one complete piece. Stacking all of them above and masking out the uneccessery parts lead to full control of the final look.