Just wanted to post a little behind the scenes action for an upcoming tire review. Let’s face it, photos of tires can be boring, but they don’t have to be. Here’s a few shots and a “behind the scenes” photo demonstrating how glamorous  shooting tire photos can be.

I not only wanted to create a bit more drama than the typical “here’s the tread” and “here’s the sidewall” photos so time to rethink the “Tire” photo. One way to add drama to in image is to tighten up your shot on just certain features, like this shot at the right.

Another way is to use direct and sharply angled lighting can create deep shadows and accentuate textures. This can be observed in some of the shots below. The deep dark background and tightly focused lighting come from using a grid and just have the edge of the resulting light “kiss” the edge of the tire.

I plan on covering wet traction of these tires in my review so I took the opportunity to have some fun with the hose sprayer. Setting up at the edge of my garage, I clamped the sprayer and hose to a light stand and proceeded to capture shots of the water cascading onto the the front tire. I took quite a few shots while I moved the sprayer around to try and get the right mix of water spray while still seeing the tire tread clearly. The end results left me with about three “keepers” from the water shots but that was all I needed.

This was the most fun I’ve had shooting tires, not that it was really hard to be that, and in the end I’m quite happy with the results. I still think there is room for improvement on these water action shots so so more experimenting might be in order down the road.