1013MM: Photography By John Zhang Blog

Rotora x HRE Wheels Land Rover Evoque

John — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:05:00 +0000

About a month ago, HRE sent a shoot my way and as usual, I was given an unexpected car to shoot. This time it was a Land Rover Evoque from Rotora. Although I wasn’t used to shooting a SUV or a car this size, I managed to do so. I brought along all my strobe equipment with me thinking that I would have enough space on a “not so busy” early weekend morning to shoot, but I was wrong. There were plenty of cars flying past us during the shoot so with the safety of the car and my equipment in mind, I opted to shoot with just my camera and lens. Quite a bit of time and planning was put into this one. Since the car was an SUV, I thought it would be best to shoot it in it’s natural habitat, the mountains. The editing took about a week or so and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. When it comes to companies like HRE, they demand the highest quality and I was more than happy to provide that. This was one of my all time favorite photo sets. Hope you enjoy as much as I did and still do!

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Courtney’s Down Town LA Photo Shoot

John — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:47:02 +0000

First off, let me just say that Courtney is by no means a “model”, we just wanted to do a casual photo shoot by the graffiti walls in down town Los Angeles in the art district. And I don’t usually shoot humans, so be nice. Anyway, I knew the typical photographer would take the opportunity to bump the saturation due to the walls being so colorful. So instead of bumping the colors, I desaturated and toned them. In the end I like the effect without going too overboard. What do you think?

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Before and After #5

John — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:14:07 +0000

Due to popular demand, here’s another one of my before and after posts. I’ll begin this post with a photo by William Lee, I’m always jealous of all the cool cars he gets to shoot. And when he sends some of his photos for me to edit, it just teases me even more so. Here is a nice Nissan GT-R he shot at Auto Talent. This was his first venture into using strobes so he was a bit confused as to what to do. Judging by the photo, only the front of the car was lit and the rest was lighting from the shop. My first impression was the contrast was lacking, which was probably due to the fact that the camera settings he used was a longer exposure and with a couple different light sources, the darker shadows were not there. So I first took the liberty of correcting the contrast. Shooting a white car is always fun, the contrast is easier to deal with without having to worry about over saturating or desaturating a car’s paint. The easiest way to tell if a car has enough contrast is if you can still make out the body lines of the car and the shadows/highlights are easily differentiable. In this case, my aim was to bump the shadows up to make the body lines more apparent and since the GT-R has such strong body lines, it make the job a lot simpler. Next up I lit the whole side of the car which did not match up with the front to begin with. The front was lit up more than the side. Along with the side, I “strobed” the wheels in Photoshop and corrected the mag blue color spoke by spoke and brake by brake. Again, when you try to bump the exposure, brightness, or something similar in Photoshop, the colors will tend to be a little off so it doesn’t hurt to take some time out to correct the color to make it all blend correctly. After that I cloned out a few stray elements from the car. Of course after the car was edited, it still blended into the background and foreground so I liberally bumped down and darkened it making the photo look like it was strobed with 3 strobes. One from the front and each of the wheels. I tried to make the finished photo as believable as possible. One of these days I plan to make a tutorial on how to “strobe” non-strobed photos in Photoshop, so keep an eye out for that.

Next up we have a photo by Ben Young who was lucky enough to photograph the celebrity model Leng Yein who was crowded Ms. World in 2003. Since I wasn’t lucky enough to photograph her, I offered to help with a mock edit of one of his photos of her. Most of the critique that I have of this photo will come even before editing. The first thing that caught my eye was the weird vignette on the right. If I were to say where that vignette came from, I would say that it came from the the right strobe pointing too angled to the left. That would be a major part to work on in post. Another blatant element was that the sofa was crooked and pushed a tad bit too far back on the left side. The photo would have been perfect if these two elements were fixed off camera, which means less post work. Anyway, there was nothing I could have done about that. In Photoshop, I corrected the white balance from the strobes and natural lighting. The fact that she stood out a lot due to her bright red dress would help a lot to distract from the slanted sofa. I cloned out a bit of the sofa to make it seem more uniform on both sides, lighting and position-wise. Overall, this was my favorite edit.

Finally, we have Casey Durham’s photo of a Nissan S13 from Australia. When I first saw this photo, my eyes immediately landed on the “Kangaroo Crossing” sign. Awesome since we don’t have those in the states and I’ve never seen an actual kangaroo before. However because of that fact, I knew that the signs would be distracting. The general edit of this photo took a lot of cloning. I took the right side of the photo and flipped it to the left then cloned out dual elements. Thankful the car was perfectly aligned horizontally or else it would not have worked out great. Of course when you use this method you’d have to clone out a lot of things to make it seem like it was not flipped. After the flip, I took out the cyans and blues on the car since it was a black car. Then I bumped the contrast a lot to make the car stand out. The over hanging trees now made the car even more of a focal point and since Casey used a nice f-stop, it gave that “never-editing” effect.

Ferrari California for HRE Wheels

John — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:36:24 +0000

Here’s a recent photo shoot I did of a Ferrari California for HRE Wheels. I must say it’s a pretty refined beast if that makes sense. It was my first time shooting a California and it was also my first time shooting a location I had no clue about. I basically winged it, for a lack of a better phrase. I must admit, it took a while for me to get used to, especially with the angles and curves of a car I was unfamiliar with, but eventually I got a better grasp of it. Hopefully I did the car justice. Also want to note that black on black is the worse and it took a lot of post-processing work to bring out.

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Alan’s BMW 335i Interior

John — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:31:35 +0000

I recently got a chance to shoot Alan’s BMW 335i coupe again, but this time he had an updated interior and engine bay. I don’t usually shoot bays and interiors so it took a while to get used to during the shoot. I really hate going to shoots unprepared and not sure if it showed, but in the end I got the shots I had envisioned. Even though it took longer than a regular shoot, I used the time I had with the car to teach myself how to shoot interiors. This shoot took nearly 3 hours. The black on black really didn’t help at all since it would require a lot of back light and rim lighting to help bring out some of the details that would have been lost without it. The first photo took an hour to compose and shoot. It then took 25 photos to compile and 8 hours later in photoshop I was able to get
a single completed photo of the interior. Although it took a while and some adjusting on my end, I was able to adapt. Luckily I took back up shots with the strobes I had so I could “piece” the photos together. Almost the whole set was shot with strobes. This was one of the most post-processing-intensive shoots I’ve done in a long while. So enjoy!

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Baby Blue Nissan GT-R

John — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:20:33 +0000

Hooked up with Ricky again to shoot this beautiful baby blue colored Nissan GT-R. The blue did give me some trouble editing, but it was a nice change of pace from the common whites, blacks, and silvers I’ve been shooting a lot lately. I added in the warm tones to help bring out the blue even more. This set is pretty much straight forward with limited editing because I wanted the baby blue to shine by itself. No need to mess with a good thing.

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2011 Year End Recap and Wallpapers

John — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 04:14:42 +0000

2011… Man! What a year it has been. I’ve never been busier in my life. All I can say is, it’s been a GREAT year. I personally feel that I’ve grown so much in terms of photography. Yes, my writing skills still suck and is quite evident, but that’s not what this blog’s about, it’s about some badass cars and my photos of them. I’m just so grateful that I have been able to meet new people, cars and work with some awesome companies in 2011. There’s more to come in 2012. My goal is to work some even more badass cars and do more individual features. Just be on the look out. If you want to a brief comparison between 2011 and 2010, I managed to nearly triple my blog posts and triple my viewership on my blog in 2011. So as a holiday gift to everyone who comes to my blog, I’ve hand-picked and re-edited some of my more popular photos from 2011 and have turned them into some high-res desktop wallpapers for you all to enjoy. There are close to 30 of them, so you can switch them out anytime. All I ask for in return is if they are reposted elsewhere, please leave my watermark intact. A link back would be greatly appreciated! Stay tuned for even more to come! :D

Click on the photo you want to save as a wallpaper below. Give them some time to load since they are full resolution.

Autocon 2011

John — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:21:48 +0000

As another year comes to an end, the Socal car scene will also end too. To end off the year, Autocon 2011 was held at the Orange County Great Park El Toro Field & Festival Site in Irvine, California. Similar to last year, Autocon was a charity car show event again. However, this year, it was on a much larger scale. I’ll personally, honestly admit that it was a bit hectic and unorganized in the beginning since we were staged no where near where we were planned out to be by the staff and a lot of people who were not supposed to be in the show (did not pay for registration or entrance fee) got to show. But how can I blame the Autocon staff? I’m pretty sure everyone was caught off guard at the turn out compared to last year. I just felt that last year was too strict and this year was too lenient. I’m sure once the staff gets a hang off it, they can be able to pull off a very organized show like Nisei or Wekfest. I wasn’t able to walk around for much coverage during the day because I was too busy manning the Canibeat booth, but here is my coverage anyway. As they say, quality over quantity any day.

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LTBMW Buttonwillow Track Day

John — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:27:24 +0000

I recently spent a carefree day with my friends over at LTBMW on the Buttonwillow track. It was a casual outing so the following photos were all shot for personal portfolio building. I find days to go out to shoot casually in order to allow myself some time to experience with new shooting techniques and post-processing. This is how to keep improving when it comes to photography. When people ask for tips, I always reply back with “keep shooting”. Check out the shots I woke up at 4am for below.

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Cross Country Road Trip With iPhone

John — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:46:27 +0000

Sometimes life can get pretty interesting. On Friday December 2nd I flew out from Los Angeles to Georgia in order to drive cross-country back to Los Angeles. The trip took a total of 3 days with sleep every night in some shady hotels. It was an adventure of a lifetime and everything I went through was worth it. The following photos were all taken AND edited with an Apple iPhone 4Gs. I did take my Nikon D700 with me but ended up not using it since it got left in the trunk. I took up the challenge just to prove you can shoot excellent quality photos with a cell phone.

The trip started with cool 60 degree weather from Georgia to Tennessee…

There of course were lots of barren roads, but it was a great time to rest up during those periods…

Lots of night driving too of course…

Can’t forget those wide angle rolling shots…

And then more driving…

Then we hit New Mexico and there was snow… Lot’s of snow…

The snow cleared up a little the next day, but was still snowing up until Airizona…

Enter the sunnier half of Arizona…

Enter Grand Canyon roads…

Close to California…

Finally arrived in California, home sweet home…

And this was main source of transportation for the journey. Yes, Honda S2000 was slammed…

And yes, it did give us some trouble once… Because rear wheel drive doesn’t mix with snow that well…

And of course this was the main reason for the trip…

And just to confirm, all the photos were taken AND edited with my iPhone.

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