http://www.natehasslerphoto.com/

I’m hoping to get my new design sorted out shortly, but in the meantime this will do.  Thanks for looking!

-NH

http://www.flickr.com/photos/natehassler/

My new actual website should be up soon… One step at a time!

-NH

So in the meantime, hang in there. Here’s a couple of new shots which will be included in the new website update, I did these for the Ryan Gates 311RS project:

So stay tuned, will be back online soon!

-NH

First off, our October cover story was my latest soirée into the realm of Virtual Rig Studio PRO, a piece of software that lets you essentially render realistic looking “rig shots” without the use of a physical rig. http://www.virtualrig-studio.com/

I also used VRS on the article’s opening spread. Honestly, I am not happy with how any of the photos in this set came out. I will not make excuses, I will however say that everyone has their “off” days and difficult assignments… This falls into that category for me. I do not think these look “bad,” but they did not come out how I wanted either. So I shall move on, learn from what went wrong on this shoot, and hopefully avoid those issues in the future. VRS is a fantastic piece of software, but unfortunately I’m not able to use it to the fullest extent because of constraints on my own production end. So for now, I have stepped away from trying to integrate VRS into my regular workflow. In an attempt to hone my skills and not try to jump ahead of where I should be, I’m getting back to the basics.

I’ve been enjoying motorsport a lot lately, I spent the entire season following the Formula DRIFT series, and what a time that was! Here’s a few of my favorite shots from the season.

We started the season following Fredric Aasbo and Papadakis racing at Long Beach.

Here, Shawn Hilliard (crew chief) takes a brief moment to rest between repairs.

Fredric’s car has a pretty unique and functional aero setup. These vents on the rear bumper help dissipate smoke and also create a low pressure zone to increase downforce on the rear end. Also, they look cool.

Next up at Road Atlanta was Chris Forsberg.

Here, Chris attaches a small video camera for data acquisition purposes.

SSR Type F wheels — Forsberg’s weapon of choice.

Next up was Matt Powers, at the new for 2011 venue of Palm Beach International Raceway.

Matt is always a crowd favorite, he’s quick to sign autographs and hang out with fans.

Here’s me “embracing blur.”

I missed the New Jersey event because my flight experienced a “mechanical malfunction.” What that meant in my case was the windshield of the plane BROKE mid-flight, so we were quickly diverted to Las Vegas and made an emergency landing. Unfortunately Delta Airlines was not able to pull their shit together to get me to the east coast in time to make the event… Pissed off (but glad to be alive), I flew back to LA and had to explain to my boss Peter Tarach why I wasn’t hanging out with JWoww sampling the finest of Jägerbombs the Garden State has to offer. Thankfully Peter is an understanding kind of guy, it must be the Canadian blood in him. So I met up with Walker Wilkerson in Seattle to resume my season long endeavor.

Walker had a good rookie season, and his team is small and has a great grassroots feel. Here they guys trim part of the frame (I believe) to make room for a new intercooler piping setup.

In case you were wondering… Drifting is hard on your tires!

And here’s a sneak peak at the next installment (appearing in the December issue of Modified) with Joon Maeng.

Joon had a bit of bad luck in practice…

…but he is such a nice guy (and talented driver) that the option of canceling his story just because he didn’t qualify never even crossed our minds for a second!

The final installment will be in our January issue, where we follow Dai Yoshihara for the season finale at Irwindale.

For all these photos, I decided to go ahead and have a bit of fun. I took the team colors and used those as the theme for each story, and I added a healthy amount of artificial film grain in Photoshop. Why, you ask? “Why not” I say. I find drift photos to by and large, be quite repetitive. By adding a bit of color and grain, I think I’ve at the very least succeeded in making my shots look “different” than most. Weather they are “good” or not is subjective so I’ll leave that up to you LOL! Either way, I had an amazing time with all the teams this season. Each and everyone I hung out with was super friendly and accommodating, thanks to all!

For the complete stories and more photos, log on to http://www.modified.com/

And make sure to “like” Modified on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Modifiedmagazine

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And here’s one teaser from my recent trip to the American Le Mans Series at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca… I will be doing a long post about this race shortly, just as soon as I have the time to really dive into the photos. I’ve made this into a desktop for anyone who wants it, so by all means, download and share!

Aaaaaaand, what the heck. Here’s two more from the Long Beach Grand Prix!

So that’s about it for now. Stay tuned for more! I promise it won’t be 2 months until I post again!!!

-NH

Our fearless leader Peter Tarach and I have spent a lot of time getting my Civic ready for use (or should I say, abuse) since the last outing, and I can’t wait to shake it down. Tomorrow plays host to a night time event at Streets of Willow up near Palmdale. Streets is a very fun track, with lots of small and technical turns. It favors cars like mine, which are nimble but don’t have a lot of outright horsepower. Last time out, I managed a 1:34.xxx and if I can match that tomorrow I will be happy. At night, it’s harder to go all out because of limited visibility, especially since I am a relatively inexperienced track driver. I just do it for fun, but I also want to improve! (and bragging rights over my buddy Sean http://seanklingelhoefer.com/blog/ is always a plus )

Since the last track weekend at Buttonwillow in January, we have replaced the head gasket, juiced a little more power out of the car, added some safety equipment, and done a bit of general cleanup and fat trimming. As it sits right now, my Civic makes 223 front wheel horsepower out of its naturally aspirated 1.8-liter Honda B-Series motor.

I don’t have any current photos of the car, but I recently spent two days in our El Segundo office photo studio shooting it… And a little bird told me the that around November the car might go into a body shop for a much needed exterior makeover…!

But until then, check out these links for more info on the build and the current setup!

http://www.modified.com/projectcars/modp-1105-1998-honda-civic-project-civic/index.html

http://www.modified.com/projectcars/modp-1107-1998-honda-civic/index.html

There is another installment in the September issue of Modified, on sale now! Make sure to check it out and let me know what you think!!

PS: LONG LIVE TEH ZIP TIESSSSS! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

-NH

This car features body panels made of dry carbon fiber, pieces which I believe are now available for purchase through Buddy Club. It’s not a crazy outlandish car, it’s just really really clean. And all that CF just makes any car guy smile, I don’t care who you are.

Add on top, the AMS Alpha 9 turbocharger upgrade and custom Buddy Club tuned ECU, the resulting +800 ponies is nothing to scoff at!

Instead of going more into the car, I’ll take this opportunity to insert a shameless plug. Go buy the current issue of Modified! You can read all about the GTR in the September issue, I even wrote the story as well!

Support print!

Anywho, as far as the photos are concerned, this set was pretty straight forward. I’ve been trying to stick to a “less is more” attitude with my editorial work these days, so there’s not too much trickery or smoke and mirrors here, I tend to reserve the heavy lifting for cover images or for portfolio pieces. I’m not going to do an in depth image build but rather just kind of share the elements I’ve used for this set. First we start with the base exposure, clean, but pretty boring.

Now I used my trusty Profoto Compact 600 R’s (powered by a Paul C. Buff Vagabond II) to light the carbon fiber and the vinyl livery.

If you’ve ever tried to light a gloss black car, you already know that it doesn’t really work in the traditional sense. Basically black cars just reflect everything around them, they don’t really “light” like a metallic or a flat paint job would. Typically it just ends up just looking like shit if you try and light a gloss black car in the same way you would light any other paint color, and that’s why I’ve chosen to allow the natural light to do the work for me. But because I need the livery and carbon fiber to show up and, dare I say, POP (I hate using that word) I decided to rely on the Profoto strobe’s specularity to carve out the details in a way which natural sun light simply could not do.

If you look closely, you’ll also notice my vintage blue Pocket Wizard receivers… It’s okay, jealousy is the natural response when confronted with something as awesome as my Pocket Wizards. I digress.

The way the shots came together was pretty simple. The biggest pain was masking the livery… UGH! Starting off, I adjusted the background so it had a lot of contrast. The sky that day was awesome, so I wanted to make sure it showed.

Now, I add in the lit portions of the cars body.

This is a difficult livery to really capture. Because the graphics incorporate several shades of grey which are very close in value to each other, I had to just suck it up and mask a lot of this by hand.

And finally, I remove a few distractions from the background, do a few final color and toning adjustments, and perform a lens correction/perspective adjustment.

And that’s that! Make sure to check out the September issue of Modified to see the shots in person, and read about this crazy car!

www.buddyclub.us
www.modified.com

-NH

As you can see, there are a lot of lighting positions that all come together into making the final image possible, even inside a studio you have to be very precise with your light. Because the entire studio is painted white, your light bounces EVERYWHERE and can be difficult to control. That’s what all the black foam core and fabric pieces are used for, to act like a kind of “anti-bounce card.” In order to adequately show the true color and flake of the paint, you can’t simply drop the car underneath a soft box or large flat (or “floating cloud” as it’s sometimes referred to) and call it good… That’s lazy, and you’ll end up with photos that do not do justice to the hard work that a good painter has put into making a car look a certain way. For these cars, the only thing I used the bank for was creating reflections on the glass. Everything else was done with Speedotron packs and lots of light modifiers. Barn doors are so helpful!!

Special thanks to Tom Hassler, for being a truly awesome dad by helping me shoot these cars over the course of two very long days, to our lovely and talented art director, Alina Avanesyan, for the idea and help making this video, and of course Jorge Nuñez, our forever patient and always helpful photo studio manager. You guys rock!

www.modified.com
www.mastermindna.com
www.spirit-rei.com

-NH

That is all, carry on!

-NH

Here is a great behind the scenes video of the production:

http://vimeo.com/24775104

These images are kind of like half photography half CGI. The photography of the locations was done by Frank Kayser and the bodies of the cars are all CGI, post production has been done by Gloss Post Production.

http://www.kayser-photography.com/

http://www.gloss-postproduction.com/
http://www.facebook.com/porsche/

And that’s that! Must be nice, huh?!

-NH

Hey everyone, so it’s been a while since I’ve done an in-depth “image build” on one of my photos. So, back by popular demand, here we go!

The Planning:

When the time came once again in April for the small but dedicated crew of Modified Magazine to head out to our annual Tuner Shootout event, held at Firebird International Raceway outside of Phoenix Arizona, the feelings were mixed as always. We love putting on this event, but to say it’s not stressful would be a lie. We all pile into one or two cars and cruise east, away from the City of Angels and into the hot desert. Once we arrive in Phoenix, it’s 3 LONG days of hard work, outside in the desert, with no real time to catch your breath (or even find a cool place to sit down.)

But since this event marks the biggest story we run all year, we want the corresponding cover to be as cool and visually interesting as possible, in hopes of grabbing the attention of readers as they browse through a newsstand. The cover I shot for our 2010 Tuner Shootout was, admittedly, not very good. It’s okay; I can live with that. But still, I had a lot to make up for in my own mind with this year’s event. My boss (and good friend) Peter Tarach is really great about giving me creative freedom with my images, so when we began discussing what we wanted for the 2011 Shootout cover, we quickly agreed on the idea of a 3 car rolling shot concept. We wanted bright colors, the cars needed to be going around a corner (as opposed to a straight away), and it needed to be a daytime shot. From there, it was up to me to make it happen.

The Shooting:

On the day I had to shoot the cover image, I knew we would have about one hour on track. That’s not very much time to get out there, stage 3 cars, and shoot everything I need without rushing. But it is what it is. The day’s schedule must center on the racing, not my photography. Fortunately, I had been able to find my exact location earlier in the morning, so when I got out on track with my 3 “models,” I got to work.

I realized 3 things that sucked immediately.

1. The time was about 12:15 PM, so the sun was essentially directly overhead. Not ideal.
2. I had forgotten the battery power source for my strobes in the hotel. Facepalm.
3. The racetrack surface was hot. REALLY hot. Like burn-your-feet-through-the-bottoms-of-your-shoes hot.

Although it would have been nice to use my strobes to light the lead car, a blue and orange Subaru, I had a few reflective bounce disks, so I had my plan B covered. The weather and timeframe was outside of my control, so I suck it up and get to work.

The way I begin a shot like this is by first attaching the camera to the “lead” car using my trusty and very lo-fi suction cup based rig. You need to frame your shot based on this lead car. All the motion achieved by using the rig is dependent on the trajectory this car takes while in motion, so frame carefully! If you plan to do a rig shot with several components where the camera will be hanging off the car for a while, try this trick: raise your tripod up directly underneath the camera until it just barely touches the camera body, supporting the dead weight of the camera. If you do this, your brackets are more likely to line up, and you won’t have any camera shake during your static exposures. Always shoot a shot like this with mirror lockup turned on.

Once I have the car where I want it and my camera rigged/supported, it’s time to start shooting. Bracket bracket bracket bracket! Shoot from way too dark, to far too bright, and everything in between. Better to have more than you need than not enough. I had my lovely assistant Brandon help me with bounce card duties — the silver side of a bounce disk acts similarly to a strobe with a reflector, where as the white side of a reflector acts more like a soft box. Once I have everything I need for the lead car, it’s time to bring in the chase cars. No motion yet…

If you want to do a multiple car rig shot, you need to remember that the angle of both (or in this case, all three) cars matters. It’s a bit difficult to explain, and please excuse my horrendous diagram.

Think of it like the shot were a moment on track that was actually happening. If these three cars were actually driving around a corner chasing each other, they would be lined up in kind of a rounded arc shape, right? Think of it from a bird’s eye view. The cars are not lined up straight to one another while they are mid-corner, are they? This is the same position you need to put the cars in to achieve a believable composite. If you line all 3 cars up straight to one another, what you’ll end up with is a photo where it looks like the 2 chase cars are understeering horribly and about to fly off the track… Not exactly what you want from a racecar!

The placement of the chase cars is the biggest element of making this shot believable. Once they are set, shoot brackets as usual, minding the polarizer positioning of course. Because the cars in my shot are facing forwards and almost directly at the camera, I have a bit of luck in my corner. I can quickly transform the moving wheel from the lead car into the proper shape for the first chase car using Photoshop. The second chase car does not show any wheel face to the camera so even more good luck for me. Both front cars have black wheels and Continental slick tires, so when the wheel is spinning, no one will know that it’s not the “right” wheel on the white chase car.

Note: If I needed to show the sides of the chase cars, I have to raise up each car with a floor jack, spin the wheels manually (literally. Politely ask your assistants to spin the wheels with their hands) and shoot brackets for that motion. If you decide to try and do that using radial blur in post, remember that you’ll need to isolate the brakes and ensure that those are not spinning along with the wheels… Which is a huge pain in the ass.

Now, once I have all the brackets I need for the chase cars, it’s time to take them out of frame completely and finish the last part of the shot: MOTION. Once the chase cars are out of frame, remove the tripod that has been supporting the dead weight of you camera this whole time, and get ready to roll the lead car. Make sure the lead car is traveling along the proper path to achieve the right kind of motion you have envisioned your shot. In my case, it was turning slightly, which at low speed with long shudder drag translates to an exaggerated amount of curvature to the blurred background.

Remember that less is more. No one wants to see a rig shot that looks like the car was going 50 miles an hour at full steering lock, while inside a warehouse. That’s stupid.

A rig is merely an element to help make a photograph interesting. Simply having a rig, does NOT inherently make your shot good!

The blur part is easy. Push the car back and forth a few times to get the wheel and ground speed correct. Then you’re done.

Notes: There was nothing about this shot that was particularly difficult on the shooting end. Knowing what you want going in is a great way to make your life easier. Being able to deal with curve balls and not letting it ruin your shoot is another skill that simply must be learned. Technical photographic ability itself plays a very small role. But the shooting is only half the battle. Or, less than half the battle I guess. If you time it all out, I probably spent 3 or 4 times the man-hours on post processing than I did actually shooting this image. But that’s just how it goes!

The Processing:

Okay, this is the part where I start to get a lot of naysayers and Negative Nancies.

Processing a photograph in a digital “darkroom” is just as much an art form as making a beautiful print in a traditional darkroom. Both processes have their time and place. If Photoshop strikes you as a bad thing, then you’re not going to like how this blog post ends up.

Okay, now that I have that out of the way. The way I being processing a shot like this is always with the background. I pick the shot which has the best looking blur on the ground, and go from there. I typically start by putting my raw settings for Blacks, Contrast and Brightness to zero, and use Recovery as necessary. I prefer to adjust exposure in Photoshop, but that’s up to the individual.

Perform basic curves adjustments and color corrections to get the background look going where you want it.

At this point, I want to get rid of that nasty tire wall. I’m going to add a layer of “haze” to cover up those tires. The small portion which remains will be covered by the chase cars, so the edges are VERY rough on this layer.

The distant background is looking empty to me now, so I think a bit of mountains is in order. These mountains are not by the track, in fact, they’re not even in Arizona.

Now adjust so the atmospheric haze works. Again, the rough edge will be covered up by the chase cars so I leave it be.

Now it’s time to start on the body of the blue Subaru lead car. First, I’m going to add a different wheel bracket, it’s easier to do this and adjust the new layer independently than to try and isolate the wheel from the already adjusted background.

Okay now is where my own theory becomes questionable. I’m not claiming this is the best or only way to do it, but it works for me. In order to get the body of the lead car looking how I want, I am actually going to save and close what I have so far, and create an entirely new image and begin working on the body there. By doing this, I am saving memory and speeding up my process by not trying to layer everything together in one massive PSD file. Here’s a few closeups of how the body of the car looked before touchup.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Using a combination of the patch tool, cloning stamp, and a lot of individual color gradient layers, I have cleaned up the body and essentially “re-drawn” all of the body panels and vinyl livery. I have left a few imperfections, but I wanted to remove the reflections and smooth out the color variations in the vinyl. I’ve also added a new bracket for the wing. Now save, flatten, and drag/drop this new body on to the original file.

Now it’s time to add the chase cars, add curves and color adjustment layers to get the bodies close.

For this image, I need to remove a logo from the hood of the first chase car. Continental Tire is the title sponsor of the Modified Tuner Shootout, so we can’t have competing brands shown in the cover image.

Carbon fiber is tricky to clone, so I took a different portion of the hood, copied to a new layer, free transformed, masked, and added curves layers so it blended smoothly.

As you can see, the chase cars look awful with no shadows.

To add the correct shape of the shadow to mimic the lead car, I take the static bracket of the chase cars where the natural shadow exists, and use that as a template to draw my own shadow on the moving background.

Now I have to deal with the wheels. For this shot, I’m taking the wheel from the lead car and free transforming it to fit the first chase car. This is not necessary to do on the second chase car, because the wheel face is not visible.

Here’s where I’m at so far:

Next, I add a few global color adjustment layers to warm up he feel of the image. I like to do this by creating a new layer with the color I want, change the blending mode to “soft light,” and adjust the opacity to between 10 and 50% depending on the look I want.

It’s getting close now, time to fix the vignette problem. I do this in the same way that I fixed the carbon fiber hood. A blurred background is not easy to fake, so make sure to blend and smooth accordingly.

And for the last step, I clean up all the edges as best I can!

Here’s the final image in context:

Final Notes:

Over all, I am happy with this image. Considering the circumstances I think we came out with a very strong cover, and I learned a lot of things to do differently next time.

Please let me know if you have any questions. All the methods I use are pretty much common sense and common knowledge, I’d be happy to share specifics if there are parts that seem unclear.

Make sure to pick up a copy of Modified to see the event results!

-NH