'Merica Monday... Bonjour! [Plus Photography Bonus!]

So for some reason a good portion of my 1:18 collection gravitates around the ‘98 to ‘00 24 Hours of Le Mans years. I was in high school during those years but cars and certainly endurance racing were not on my radar at the time. So to explain my draw to these endurance racers is undefined but I do enjoy the liveries and variety of cars from all the classes. Maybe because of the explosion in endurance racing during this era make them seem easily attainable at a reasonable cost to detail ratio as well.

Today we focus on the GT2 classification of cars from the 1998 66th running of the famed 24 hour race. The battle in this class that year was primarily between the Chrysler Viper GTSR entries and the retiring chassis of 993 GT2 911s. The #51 Oreca Viper we see here was 2nd in class behind its class winning #53 sister car. Notable driver of this car was a young Pedro Lamey of formula one and DTM fame.

I stole this older Autoart off Ebay earlier this month. Came in the original box with the only defect being a missing drivers mirror. Details are great on these older Autoarts in my opinion with everything being accessible and having a great solid feel about them. This car will pair nicely with my other red Daytona winning GTSR, also an Autoart.

In this post I also wanted to focus on another part of this hobby of ours. Photography. By now many of you have seen my signature style evolve over the past few years. I thought I’d walk you through a little behind the scenes before post editing my pictures. The hope here is to give some of you new members some motivation that anyone can do it. The majority of pictures in this post will be paired with the originals to give you an idea of the importance in post editing.

Some of you have much more fancy setups and equipment then I but I use the basics: stock software on my Samsung Galaxy 8, incadesant desk lamp, poster board for both base color and light reflection and clear frosted plastic for light dispersion. For this post I’ll be focusing on studio style shots as I rarely shoot outside or diorama pictures.

This might seem basic knowledge but try to get the best original picture possible. This means paying attention to light sources and isolating them if needed or reflecting them to brighten shadows. Make the picture interesting and pay attention to your perspective! Mind dust and fingerprints, everything shows up at high resolution...including your reflection, so make a black fabric hood to shoot behind if lots of reflective surfaces are involved.

Editing. I can honestly say I edited all of these pictures in under 20 minutes total. Far longer to setup the actual shoot or write this article. It’s worth it to post edit. I always start with cropping first. Once I’m happy with angle and centering I feel like I can move on to color correction. Due to my setup I tend to deal with white balance first with a focus on the blue spectrum as incadesant lights make everything yellow. Next I’ll adjust backlighting to bring out shadows. Once happy with that I’ll jump over to contrast to sharpen colors and darks by around 10 percent. This sometimes will call in the need for saturation adjustments. At this point if I’m happy with the subject I’ll focus on darkening the background which usually means knocking down brightness and/or contrast by a smidge. Lastly, I add 25 to 40 percentage vignette to the borders. One final check on white balance and I’m done.

Enjoy!