Boom Rig Photo Tutorial

[Lonnie]

so lot's of folks wanted to know how I pulled these shots off. Since I'm not winning that thing anyway I figured I'd go ahead and spill the bean on how to make this work. As I said in the thread, I put about $100 into this MPC project, about about 10-20 hours work of work to get those two shots. I knew that I wanted to do something for that MPC that was during daylight hours, and I'd seen some boom rig stuff before and thought it would be really cool if I could make something work.

Google is your friend and I found lots of setups for lots of money. Some rigs cost upwards of $1K. I knew that was kinda outta my league for this thing so I started doing some more research. The break through came when I found these tile suction cups online, and the locally at the Home Depot. I then had to figure out how to make a boom and how to attach my camera to it. Home depot to the rescue again. What I figured out would work was heavy duty electrical conduit. My first attempt was with 3/4", but as I quickly found out it was way too flexable and I ended up buying 10 feet of 1 1/4" which worked much better. At this point, all I had to figure out how to do was attach the conduit to the suction cups. A bunch of simple U bolts did the trick. I think I used 6 of them, one on each suction cup, two to attach a bent piece of 3/4" conduit and 2 to attach the center column and ball head from a mini tripod of mine. So with my raw materials, I proceeded to put everything together. I cut the 10' conduit into two pieces and re attached with a coupler joint.

Once I got all of my pieces together, the first step in taking one of these shots is to get a car wash. Since the suction cup attach directly to the paint, any sand or grit could do real damage to the car's paint. Make sure that it's CLEAN. Once it's clean wipe the area where you'll be attaching the suction cups down with a wet rag or towel. Do the same to the base of the suction cups. When you attach them to the car, make sure the handles are parallel to the direction your conduit is going to run. This will become apparent later.



The next step (which I've skipped to in the above photo) is to attache the first piece of conduit. In this photo I have the U-bolts inverted, but for a real shoot you want them pointed down. tighten then down with a wrench so the conduit will not rotate, but not too tight that it losesnes the suction cup handles (the handles provide the bulk of the suction.)



When you get this snug, attach the 2nd piece of conduit with the coupler.



In my rig I already attached the u arm and tripod/ballhead mount. It's simple enough to borrow the pipe bender at your home improvement store when you are there. Here's what that piece looks like (it was a nice U shape when I left the store, but a run-in with the pavement reworked it for me. Scared me to death at the time, but it's still functional.



At this point it's time to attach the camera. I couldn't have done this without my mirrorless. The LCD screen made it a snap to compose the image and the light weight really helped with the flex of the entire rig.



Here's what the whole thing looks like once it assembled and ready to roll.



The shutter was trigger by remote inside the vehicle while I was driving. The trick is to go REALLY slowly. I would take about 5-10 shots at a time, and then chimp and re-compose.



When you are done, you get a bunch of shots that look like this (OOC jpg, dust spots and all...)



That's the easy part.

[Lonnie]

Once you get back home, the real work begins. I think I had about 60 mins post processing the first pic I posted, and about 90-120 mins post processing the one that's up for voting. Needless to say, you're going to be doing ALOT of work with the clone tool. The trick to making this look decent is to zoom in and using a good sized "soft" brush, work in a very detailed way to brush away the boom. It really helps to copy the back ground layer and work on that one. That way, you can bring back any loss of detail if it gets fuzzy from your cloning technique. It's a very tedious and slow process so don't rush it. This is where taking off you front plate, and making sure the suction cups are parallel to the conduit saves a lot of cloning work.

When I shot these, on the first one, I processed the background and the foreground separately because I wanted different effects for each. I then blended them together using a clipping mask.

That's the nuts and bolts of it. Now, some words of caution.

1). There is significant risk of damaging your car or your camera taking shots like this. There are any number of things that can go wrong from a suction cup failure, to the cups scratching your paint to God knows what. If you do this and fubar your stuff, don't blame, me, I told you so!

2). Make sure you are in a vacant parking lot. I figured the boom stuck about 6-7 feet off the end of my car. I rubbed it on the ground more than once and bumped it into the curb a time or two. When you move the rig can really flex, so just because it's off the ground now doesn't mean it will stay off the ground.

3). Try to find the most solid points in teh body work to attach the cups. You're putting alot of weight on them, and they can bend/flex (maybe permanently) if you're not careful.

That's all I can think of right now. I'm sure I'll think of more stuff later. Anyway, that's the maggot guide to the poor man's boom rig. They can get way more fancy, I had a guy wire system devised to help stop boom flex that I never really used. I usually didn't have alot of time away from the house so the faster the setup, the better.

Any questions, just fire away.

[Meathelmet]

Lonnie..

Respect and thanks for sharing.

[Fuzz]

Very cool, and thanks for sharing. That rig hangs w-a-a-y out there, more than I'd imagined. What focal length (in 35mm format) were you shooting? I'm wondering if a full-frame + ultra-wide angle would allow for a shorter arm.

[systemoverblow'd]

Holy balls. WAAAYYYY scrapier than I thought. Good thing you're shooting with a cheap light camera... I wouldn't trust my big boy out on that rig...

[Lonnie]

Very cool, and thanks for sharing. That rig hangs w-a-a-y out there, more than I'd imagined. What focal length (in 35mm format) were you shooting? I'm wondering if a full-frame + ultra-wide angle would allow for a shorter arm.

Fuzz,

I was shooting a 16mm lens on an APS-C sensor for a 24 mm effective focal length. I imagine you could go closer and wider, but you'd have two things working against you, 1). the weight of the camera, (which with a shorter lever arm for the right might not totally be a bad thing) and 2). I imagine you'd start to lose part of your background as it would be "blocked" by the view of the vehicle. I would imagine that there are many, many ways to do this.

My last point there reminds me of something that I should have added last night. Picking the back ground is really important in shots like this. More important than I realized when I started doing my test shots. To get the right look, you have to get the car pretty close to the background. I tried several locations trying to get the right look and researched alot more. I did google searches for graffiti hot spots where I thought I might be able to get the car close enough to make it work, I visited multiple parking garages, steel and glass office parks, neighborhoods, etc trying to get the background "right". Shot #1 was taken at a new movie theater a few miles from my house and #2 was an office building a couple miles from that had lots of exterior "uplights" on the outside of it.

Since you are going to be making laps around these sorts of places with weird stuff attached to you car, police interaction should also be anticipated. I didn't have any during this experiment, but I totally expected to with the looks I got from neighbors and passerby's. To be honest I kinda felt like the Man of La Mancha, fighting impossible yet righteous battles while the world laffs.

[Fuzz]

^ Interesting, so you were driving around the streets with the rig attached? I imagined that you drove to where you wanted to shoot and then attached the arm. How did you drive around with the arm attached without taking out anything to your right (cars, pedestrians, trees, lamp posts)?

[Lonnie]

^ Interesting, so you were driving around the streets with the rig attached? I imagined that you drove to where you wanted to shoot and then attached the arm. How did you drive around with the arm attached without taking out anything to your right (cars, pedestrians, trees, lamp posts)?

I drove around parking lots and the like, not on the road. On the last day I shot, moving from one location to the other (close by) I left the main part of the boom and the cups attached. That only hung out a foot or so.

[smmokan]

Wouldn't it have been easier to just drive your other car 4-5 feet in front of your Outback with a tripod mounted camera, and do the same thing?

[Fuzz]

Wouldn't it have been easier to just drive your other car 4-5 feet in front of your Outback with a tripod mounted camera, and do the same thing?

I think it'd be much harder to match the two cars' motion, not just in speed, but also in direction and any bounce from the road.

[Lonnie]

Normally when they shoot these, there's a crew of people and they actually just push the car. Doing that, you can have somebody handle the camera and be ready if it splats.

Let's not forget that inertia and relative motion plays a big part of this. Surprisingly there is a lot of physics that goes into a shot like this.

[DJSapp]

Thanks for sharing, that is freaking awesome. For anyone else looking at trying this, you might do better with a 2x4 than a 1-1/4" conduit, or if you want to go whole hog, a piece of uni-strut. Less flex in the boom and whatnot.

Not to criticize the MPC voting poll choice, but I liked your first shot better than the second, and probably would have voted for it. The wavy lights in the second kill it for me.

[Lonnie]

Not to criticize the MPC voting poll choice, but I liked your first shot better than the second, and probably would have voted for it. The wavy lights in the second kill it for me.

Eh. NO worries. This would have been shot #3. It was really one of my first test shots, but there were some things I didn't like about it (mostly due to movement in the rig). This one was shot with the 3/4".



PS, what's uni strut?

[SchralphMacchio]

^ Lonnie I think that one fit the theme better than your other two!!!! You should have submitted that one!

[Lonnie]

^ Lonnie I think that one fit the theme better than your other two!!!! You should have submitted that one!

Hum. That's what Fuzz said too. You know, I have the ability to exchange photos on my site.... lol.

[Mathematics]

very cool, thx for posting

[SchralphMacchio]

PS, what's uni strut?

Stuff that is way more rigid than 1.25" EMT for the weight. You often see it above ceiling (commercial office, not resi) to brace piping, ductwork and cable trays for seismic support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strut_channel

[Tippster]

Honestly you can get nearly the same effect with subject and pace car going 30+mph, shooter hanging out the window with camera on a steadycam rig, and exposing for a 1/2 or full second.

Nice effort tho.

[Chainsaw_Willie]

Thanks for the info Lonnie!

I can see how the cloning work could be time-consuming and potentially frustrating.