Darien Chin has come up with a really cool idea for reflective stationary objects... like this car. I found the link to his post on Strobist and you can see Darien's original explanation here.
Its a pretty ingenious use of light really. He claimed to use only 3 flashes (his fourth died), which doesn't seem to make sense. I can see 17 columns of 3 lights, not just three lights. You can tell that the lighting is a complete wrap-around if you look at the reflection on the car.
That begs the question: How do you take a picture that looks like you've used hundreds of lights when you only have three? The answer was quite simple (I was thinking a complex system of mirrors... I tend to make things more complicated than they should be sometimes) leave your shutter open. This leaves the sensor open to receive each flash and each reflection as they fire off one AFTER the other, not all at the same time.
How do you do this? Take some $30 ebay manual flashes and some radio triggers. Attach the flashes to something movable (He duct taped them to a stand). Set your camera to BULB and open your shutter. Quickly circle your subject triggering your strobs and moving your lights. I imagine you'll have to do this several times because I can't even begin to figure out the equation that you would need to figure you settings mathematically. Starting with a GN calculator may help here, though your shutter speed is measured in seconds for this effect, not fractions of a second... and remember, you're firing multiple strobes multiple times. So I'd imagine that the snap and check method will most likely be better.
Darien discribes his settings, " What I think I ended up with was a 38 second exposure at f/11 and iso 200. I had my strobes set at 1/16th power..."
I'm putting this on my list of experiments to hit in 2008. I'll post 'em when I do. Merry Christmas everyone!
