For the past few years one of our kids’ favorite video games has been Mario Kart. They started on the SNES original and then graduated to Mario Kart Wii, then Mario Kart 8 (not Deluxe; we only have a Wii-U, not a Switch) and also dabbled in Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart 7, and even Mario Kart DS. So it seemed only fitting that we get them some Mario Kart Hot Wheels cars for Christmas, and I can assure you these little vehicles were very well received :) I also thought that they would be fun subjects to photograph, and finally gave it a try on a recent evening after the sun was down and the kids weren’t yet in bed. They, like in last week’s picture of Link, helped me compose the shot: placement of cars, color and direction of lights, and even the aperture of the lens to control depth of field.
We didn’t use much in the way of colored lighting, but instead used normal white light but set to different color temperatures. I don’t remember exactly what we used, but we did make sure to include a bit of blue overhead light to add a bit of extra dimension to all the characters, and enhance the reflections a bit too. One of the fun things about this was figuring out the positions of all the racers, even Bowser way in the back. In the finished shot you can tell that there’s someone behind Waluigi, but can’t quite tell who, and those subtleties were really cool to play around with.
I used a pretty small aperture of f/32 to help keep depth of field under control, and used ISO 100 to keep the image as clean as possible. That gave me a shutter speed of 2 seconds, which might seem slightly ironic given that this is a shot of some very fast racers :) As you might expect though, the best part of this image was the experience of doing all this with my kids.
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