37 Kick Ass Rig Car Photography Shots
A rig is a tool often used in automotive photography that attaches to the car or vehicle, enabling a photographic motion shot to be taken by the camera on the end of the rig. The results of using a rig are fantastic, allowing the camera to move at the exact same pace as the car gives a high speed motion blurring to the background and wheels whilst keeping the bodywork in crisp focus.
Rigs are available in a variety of shapes and sizes, from professionally built units that bolt directly to the chassis to DIY constructions using large vacuum cups, aluminium poles and specialist camera mounts (as per the example above by Matt Watkinson, from his excellent blog post; How to remove a rig in Photoshop.
The shots taken on rigs are usually at slow driving pace with a long shutter speed, allowing for the blurring action of the background and moving parts. The rig is then edited out in Photoshop by overlaying a photograph of the car without the rig attached, erasing out the unwanted poles and mountings.
Here are 37 awesome examples of rig based car photography from a range of talented photographers:
June 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Sweet, I bet that would look great on my Renault ha!
Think I can see the reflection of the rig in one of those pics - the blue subaru. Still sweet though!
June 12th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Does this Renault make my butt look big?
June 12th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
wow this is awesome. Great post Chris. I never realized how they did those fantastic shots. I expected them to be a Studio image and Photoshoped.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Woah, these are awesome!
June 12th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Only one American car…
June 13th, 2008 at 10:57 am
wow…this is crazy … I don’t know much about cars but I am sure that these cars looks amazing.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I have submitted your article to http://www.autocar-live.com which is a social site where users can submit car/auto articles and vote for already submitted articles.
June 17th, 2008 at 6:20 am
Amazing! I’d be so scared of my camera falling off though haha. Great shots. Rig shots and rolling shots are by far my favourites.
June 22nd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Wow! These pictures are awesome!
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:09 pm
There are some good shots here, I never really thought about how shots of cars in motion were taken but this one solves the problem. Now all i need to do is learn to drive!
June 30th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
@ WIll.
Through some researching I found that most rig shots are created using a super low shutter speed (about 10 seconds or more) with the car traveling no more than a couple miles-per-hour. Some people actually PUSH the cars haha. This reduces vibration from both the road AND engine (since it’s off).
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Wow, truly great shots. Thanks for sharing!
July 8th, 2008 at 8:52 am
great wonderful car …
August 11th, 2008 at 2:10 am
awesome woks…
August 29th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Nice collection & good going Dean! I’ve got a whole lot on my website too. A couple of Shelby GT500 (Eleanor) & several other exotics.
August 29th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Perfect!
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Wow! The Porsche pic is just incredible!
October 5th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Hi guys, just fell across this site and have to say that there is some really superb work on here. I work as a commercial car photographer and some opf this stuff is really top notch, great work guys I’m now a big fan of the site
Tim
October 8th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
pony of the ‘one trick’
October 21st, 2008 at 5:15 pm
excellents pics…
November 14th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Awesome pictures.