This is my X...

... At night, as I did a few time lapse photos. These are the best ones.



Here's another night shot. I think this one's a bit better than the first.



5 Points goes to the guy who can tell me how I pulled this shot off. This was my brothers idea. Just as a clue, I don't have any kind of underbody lighting.



The follow morning I headed down to the dry lake near our camp and had some assistance taking these last two photos.



This X is not set up for desert running. It's growing up to become a SAS crawler. At leats that what I'd like to turn it into. But, it can still kick up a 1/4 mile dust could that refuses to settle for 20 minutes.



That's it for now. Thanks goes to God to keeping my friends and I safe on this bachelor party out in the desert. Thank goes to my bro for help in getting these photos.

Those are some nice shots.... as for the UFO mysterious light... I would have to say that you put some sort of reflectors or something in the wheel wells. there is obviously some bright lights shining toward your vehicle (you can tell by the shadows), so the reflectors would reflect that light...

Am I right, or a complete moron??

Looking great..

Nice Pics.

Mystery Shots: From my judgment the type of light you have on the main body and the undercarriage is different. Looks Halogen for the main body, fluorescent on the under body. I'd like to think it's just a camp light or so that's under there but not sure. The stars aren't blurry so the time lapse isn't too long, probably less then 30 seconds.

But that's seriously just a guess.

Nice shots.

Mystery shot guess....

If it were me I would have put my camera on a tripod and used a long exposure afer metering off the ambient light available. Then I would have used a halogen maglight to "paint" the underside where you wanted the light.

Other than that you might have just used multiple exposures with a maglight in various points on your undercarriage and composited the photo. That would account for the various evenly spaced hotspots and the light bounced onto the ground.

After looking closely at the photo again, I am going to go with my first guess though. There is a some "ghosting" on the lower left and lower right near the Xterra that might be artifacts left by someone doing the "painting".

Yeah - I saw the shackle ghost there too.

Cool shots!

And as far as the mystery lighting goes, it looks almost like you used a camera flash at 5 distinct spots (1 in each wheel well, and then you can see 3 brighter spots of light on the rocker panel, that a flash would create).

That would definitely create a bright white lighting effect only on the undercarriage.

So, do I win?!

I figured out the 'crazy' pic ....
There on the lower right ( if u zoom in on the picture really close ) u can see some arms and legs. There is one arm clearly visiable that is holding some kind of light( location is right front of the frame rail / left of the right front tire). Then another arm thats wearing a livestrong armstrong armband that is kneeling down haolding a some sort of light in the right front wheel well. Then somehow somewhere a person just barly appears on the lower left of the X to light up the rear right wheel well with some kind of light....

First Prize goes to Editor X!

Second Prize goes to EricXE03.

MP3 X - good observations...

First Prize Answer...
Second Prize Answer...
Now for the truth behind the shot...
Shot using a Nikon D70 (Digital SLR)
30 Second Exposure
F 3.8
ISO 200
Distance - 40mm
Contast - Pushed
Color Saturation - Pushed
Sharpness - Hard
White Balance - Auto

RAW image processing.

The camera was place on my camera bag after metering the shot and getting the manual focus set. Using a remote timer the camera took the photo. My brother, using a 4 cell black maglight (a.k.a the ghost in the picture) held the maglight in seven different location, each for about 3 seconds each, both side of each tire and three places under the rock sliders. This was the 4th, final, and best attempt to get desired lighting effect.

I've always wanted to try this with mines - just never got around to it.

"painting the light" with a maglight is probably very effective and easy.

I also wanted to try this method - using a flash in a softbox doing a long exposure and walking around the car just popping the flash away. Watch the video: http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/05/set-flash-mode-to-automagic.html

That is one cool video. I've seen shots like that before but never understood how they achieved lighting like that. But it makes sense now. Looks like I've got another idea to play around with now.