I’ve been attending the monthly Dayton Cars And Coffee gatherings for many years.  And I’ve been photographing them for about the last 4 to 5 years.  It’s a fantastic event and surely one of the largest gatherings of car enthusiasts in the country.  Both the location and the early morning start are quite conducive to getting some good photos.  But let’s face it – after years of photographing a lot of the same subjects at the same location, things start to get stale and boring.  That’s where you have to try to dig deep to get creative to both challenge yourself photographically and keep the experience, fresh and enjoyable.

This particular DC&C gathering took place on in the morning of Saturday, July 5th.  The night before I had been in Cincinnati shooting the city skyline and didn’t make it to bed until 1 AM.  and by the time I left my home to drive to the event, it was already 81°.  So needless to say this was less than ideal conditions in which to work.

GEAR

I decided to use my very standard and perhaps favorite kit for taking photos at this event.  My primary camera was the Canon R5 Mark II with the Canon EF 35mm f1.4.  My secondary camera was the Canon R6 Mark II on which I had the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1.0.  Since I planned to shoot fairly wide open with both lenses, each was equipped with the K&F Concepts Nano-X ND & CPL combo filter.  The filters were hugely important.  This shoot simply does not work with these lenses at the apertures I was planning on shooting without having a knee filters.  and of course, any self-respecting car photographer is going to use a CPL.  So these combo filters that offer both in one unit are incredibly helpful.

THE CARS

My mindset going into the shoot was that I wasn’t going to shoot a lot of cars.  Rather, I was going to find a small number of cars that I really liked and try to shoot them as creatively as I could.  The biggest challenge of any car enthusiast meet up is that you have such limited control of the composition of our subject.  It’s just a car sitting in a parking lot with a whole lot of other cars.  The second biggest challenge, of course, is the fact that the place is mobbed with people who have absolutely no sense of awareness or of their surroundings and can walk in the middle of your frame at any given moment.  I’ve tried to get better about actually trying to incorporate some people into my photos for compositional interest.

Canon R6 Mark II & the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1 @f1.6

I like this shot of this gentleman walking back toward his Ferrari 308 GTS.  Nice candid shot.  I really wanted to get him in the frame because quite frankly I like to patriotic shirt.

Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f1.6

This photo was… Interesting.  Quite honestly, it was a happy accident.  This is a Porsche I photographed what seems like a billion times over the years so I was trying to get it a little differently than I have in the past.  Little did I know that a young lady had drifted into the frame on the left side.  I didn’t even crop the photo – this is pretty much the way it looked right out of camera, though I did apply a rather unique edit.

Canon R6 Mark II & the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1 @f1.6

I’m just over the moon for this photo.  The woman’s form in the photo really does transform the shot.

This is what I call a photo within a photo.  The original shot was pretty basic/boring, but cropping in with the young lady in the background helped quite a bit:

Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f1.6

For most of the day I found myself drawn to taking very tight shots of the cars I photographed in in some cases, only partially photographing the car, focusing in on one aspect of the car.

Canon R6 Mark II & the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1 @f1.6

Canon R6 Mark II & the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1 @f1.6

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Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f1.8

Canon R6 Mark II & the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1 @f1.6

Canon R6 Mark II & the Voigtlander RF 50mm f1 @f1.6

Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f1.8

Even when I took photos which more or less encompassed the entire vehicle, I really looked for ways to make either the composition or the edit stand out.

Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f1.6

This one was interesting.  I shot it at f2 in order to get the car sharp, but wasn’t happy with the almost non existent background blur.  So I experimented with adding blur in Lightroom.

Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f2

This was perhaps the most basic shot of the entire morning.  I played around with it, but there just wasn’t much more that I could do to make this straight on shot more interesting – but I still like it:

Canon R5 Mark II & the Canon EF 35mm f1.4 @f1.8

Overall I’m extremely pleased with the effort and perhaps more importantly, I had a lot of fun both taking and editing these shots.  Hopefully this article will provide some inspiration for you to make it to your local Cars & Coffee and push the boundaries of your own creativity.