R.A.C.E. photography school
Vehicle photography, worked out
Most photography advice is a list of rules with no way to check them. These four lessons are the opposite: each one is a diagram wired to the formulas underneath it. Move a slider and the drawing changes, because the numbers changed.
Lesson 1
Where to stand
Walk the camera around the vehicle, raise or lower it, step in or back. See which panels the lens can reach and where the horizon crosses the bodywork.
Controls: position around the subject, camera height, distance, subject type.
Lesson 2
What stays sharp
Aperture, focal length, sensor size and distance decide how much of the car is in focus. Watch the nose and tail drop out of the band.
Controls: sensor, focal length, aperture, distance.
Lesson 3
Distance and background
Keep the car the same size in the frame and change the lens. The car does not move. Everything behind it does.
Controls: focal length, how far behind the background sits, sensor.
Lesson 4
Light through the day
Move the sun by hour, season and latitude. See which side of the car is lit, where its shadow falls, and how long it is.
Controls: hour, season, latitude, which way the car is parked, camera position.
What these cover
A vehicle photograph depends on a short list of things: angle · camera height · distance · focal length · aperture · sensor size · background · time of day. Everything else — the edit, the crop, the choice of car — sits on top of those. Each lesson takes a few of them and shows the consequence on the subject rather than on an abstract scale, because “the depth of field is 0.4 metres” tells you nothing and “the tail of the car is soft” tells you what to change.
How the numbers are produced
Depth of field, hyperfocal distance, angle of view and the diffraction limit come from the standard thin-lens and Airy-disc formulas, using the circle-of-confusion convention of sensor diagonal divided by 1500. Solar position comes from a low-precision approximation that is good to about a degree; it is stated on the page that uses it, along with what it leaves out. The formulas are unit-tested against published depth-of-field tables rather than against themselves.
Why the drawings are drawings
The little tiles at the ends of the sliders are hand-drawn SVG, not photographs. This site does not hold a licence to any photograph that would illustrate a fisheye against a 400 mm telephoto, and a generated image of what a lens supposedly does has no place on a page about what lenses actually do. So each tile is drawn to differ in the way the optics differ, and nothing on these pages claims to be a photograph.
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