Since the arrival of an Audi Exclusive Sport Classic Gray S5 late last year, there has been a huge interest in doing a photo shoot with the S5 and an Audi Exclusive Aviator Gray Audi TT RS. Between busy schedules and typical Spring weather in the Pacific Northwest, the opportunity to do the photo shoot got pushed out.
Last week, with the weather forecast for the weekend looking good, I coordinated with the owner of the TT RS to do the photo shoot after PDX C&C. Although the weather forecast listed a 40% chance of rain and some dark clouds came rolled by about an hour before the shoot, the threat of rain never really materialized and the photo shoot was a go.
As you’ll notice in the following photos, there have been several changes made to the exclusive Sport Classic Gray Audi S5 since the first photo shoot. Those changes include tinting the windows and wrapping some of the chrome trims on the car. The black wrap around the grille frame looks absolutely stellar when combined with Sport Classic Gray. But, there has been another significant change… the S5 has since been listed for sale at Audi Wilsonville.
All of the photos were shot with a Leica M9 in manual exposure mode, ISO set to 160 and with a Voigtländer Color Skopar 21mm f/4. Although I also brought a Voigtländer Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 with me, I wanted to make use of the unique properties of shooting with an ultra-wide angle lens. This did lead to some very interesting perspective distortion issues, but allowed me to get the framing that I wanted. There’s nothing like being sprawled out on the ground, awkwardly looking through the viewfinder and hitting the jackpot.
The other issue (read: user error) I ran across while processing the photos was that I accidentally shot a good number of the photos at f/4, rather than f/5.6 or 6.3 as I should have. This caused the depth of field of some of the photos to be a bit shallower than I wanted. D’oh!
All of the post-processing was done through Photoshop Lightroom and with DxO FilmPack, selecting a custom profile that helps make the grays stand out more against the asphalt and gray skies. I also had to make sure that I kept the two unique colors as true as possible, showing off their subtle, but important, differences. Both in the photos below and in person, Aviator Gray is a hint darker and has a slight touch of blue. Sport Classic Gray is a nice, pure gray that cannot be matched in its uniqueness… well, maybe with the exception of Suzuka Gray Matte Finish.
The above photo was one of those jackpot moments, in which I was laying on my back, attempting to frame the shot, shielding and focusing the lens with one hand and depressing the shutter button with the other. This shot was processed with a very unique profile in both Lightroom and in DxO FilmPack to make sure the blue sky didn’t clash with the blue-ish tint Aviator Gray has.
Yeah, I had to sneak in my Sprint Blue S5 into the photo shoot towards the end, even if it isn’t an Audi Exclusive vehicle. This is one of the photos that I had to correct the significant amount of perspective distortion created by using an ultra-wide angle lens in the way that I did.
High resolution versions of the photos can be found on my Flickr photostream and in the “20 Apr 2013 Exclusive S5 and TT RS Photo Shoot” photo set. For more information on my non-Audi related photography, check out my QLP Photography blog and Facebook page.
I want to thank John Wiegert, the owner of the Audi TT RS, Scott Mitchell and Audi Wilsonville for making this photo shoot happen.