Empowered by my previous success with the 20mm lens I decided to use it on my photo excursion on Sunday.

Every year my good friend Joe invites me to the Classy Chassis Car Show benefiting United Cerebral Palsy. Joe’s one of the organizers of the event and he’s understandably proud of it. And rightly so. This event brings in substantial amounts of money for the charity and boasts one of the finest gatherings of unique and rare automobiles you will ever see in one place in your life.

This year Joe was also wanting me to provide some photographic services for the event as they were somewhat short on photographers.

I gotta tell ya, shooting cars is not my cup of tea. Even the Art Car Parade, which I go to every year, doesn’t really provide me with much in the way of photographic inspiration. It’s not that I don’t think the cars are cool and interesting because they are. It’s just difficult for me to find a unique way of expressing a car photographically.

On the one hand, close ups can show interesting detail but on the other hand I feel compelled to show the entire vehicle for context. In the end I get frustrated and delete a lot of shots.

Still, I wanted to give it a try. It would be the first time at this event with the new dSLR and I thought this would be the ideal situation to play with my high speed 20mm f/1.8 lens. The lighting in Reliant Stadium is pretty amazing.

Walking in to the event I was struck by the idea that a panorama shot might be an interesting take on this so I shot a series of photos panning from right to left with the thought that I would find a way to stitch them together.

Well, I spent a good part of the afternoon playing with various trial versions of panorama programs and after a load of frustration I ended up with this:

You REALLY should click to see the larger size.
This smaller version simply does not do the picture justice!

In fact, I encourage you to have a look at the full size image which you can view here.

Keep in mind that Internet Explorer and Firefox will sometimes resize the image to fit in your browser window so don’t forget to enlarge it if that happens.

It’s pretty cool to use the slider bar and scan from side to side. The stitching is almost flawless.

The entire panorama is composed of 11 separate images, all shot completely hand held (no tripod).

More images coming soon.

Classy Chassis 2007
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One thought on “Classy Chassis 2007

  • June 13, 2007 at 6:25 am
    Permalink

    Absolutely lovely!

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