How to shoot a rig shot: mount, exposure, and the composite

A rolling shot needs two cars, a driver you trust, and a road where 45 mph doesn't get anybody in trouble. A rig shot needs one car, an empty lot, and about eight feet of carbon fiber. They are not interchangeable, and neither one replaces the other. But if you have only ever shot from a chase car, the rig is the quickest way to put a frame in your book that clients recognize on sight: car tack sharp, pavement smeared into parallel lines, wheels dissolved into discs, everything reading like triple digits.

The car was doing twelve miles an hour.

What a rig shot is, and when it beats a rolling shot

The camera is mounted to the subject car itself, out on an extending arm, pointed back at the bodywork. Camera and car share a reference frame, so no matter how long the shutter stays open, the car does not move across the sensor. Everything that isn't bolted to the car — asphalt, guardrail, eucalyptus, sky — does. Open the shutter for a second and the world liquefies while the car sits still inside it.

A rolling shot works from the opposite direction. You are panning from a moving chase car, matching the subject's velocity by hand, and the sharpness you get is the sharpness you earned. Rollers give you road context, atmosphere, traffic, the driver's actual world — look through the rollers in the archive and what sells them is that they clearly happened somewhere real. The rig gives you something else: a hero frame with a cleanliness that doesn't exist in the wild.

Reach for the rig when there's no second car and no driver to spare, when the only road available is one you can't legally run a two-car formation on, when the location is a lot rather than a canyon, or when the client wants one launch image instead of a gallery.

The rig: mount, arm, safety pin

Three parts. A vacuum base that holds onto the car, a rigid arm that gets the camera far enough away to frame the whole vehicle, and a head that aims it.

The commercial kits tell you the shape of the problem. Kupo's car rig shot kit runs carbon fiber tubing that extends from 3.28 to 13.12 feet, two six-inch pumping suction cups with couplers, an articulated arm and a clamp, a camera bracket, and three quick-release safety pins — the whole thing packs to about nineteen pounds. Carbon over aluminum matters more than it sounds like it should. Aluminum tube from a hardware store will do the job for a fraction of the money, and it will also flex, and flex over a two-second exposure is the difference between a keeper and a folder full of near-misses.

Mounting, in order:

1. Glass before paint. Window glass is flat, stiff, and doesn't oil-can the way a door skin does. It's also less likely to be wearing a fresh wrap or a ceramic coating that a cup will mark.
2. Clean both faces. Isopropyl on the glass, isopropyl on the rubber. Grit under a cup is a slow leak.
3. Pump, wait, pump again. Bring it down past the indicator, give it sixty seconds to seat, then pump it back. Every cup loses a little vacuum as the seal settles.
4. Tether it. A line from the arm to a tow hook or in through a window. If a cup lets go, you want the rig to swing, not to leave.
5. Walk it before you drive it. Push the end of the arm with one hand. Any movement you can feel standing still is movement you will see at one second.

And the part nobody writes down: ask the owner before you put a suction cup on their car. Some corrections mark. Some wraps mark. That thirty-second conversation is worth considerably more than the frame.

Camera settings for a rig shot

Start here and adjust:

• Manual, base ISO. ISO 100 on the Z6 III, which is what most of the archive is shot on.
• f/8 to f/11. Enough depth to carry the car nose to tail at arm's length, short of where diffraction starts costing you real detail.
• Shutter between a quarter second and two seconds. This is the only dial that matters.
• Autofocus off. Focus manually on the shoulder line, then tape the ring. The rig will vibrate; the focus ring should not.
• Stabilization off. The camera is not moving relative to the subject. IBIS will go looking for motion it can't find and hand you softness for the trouble.
• Remote or self-timer, on an intervalometer. Nothing should be touching the rig at the moment of exposure. Set it to fire every two or three seconds and let it collect.

Matching shutter to speed

Blur is shutter multiplied by road speed, and that's the whole equation. At twelve miles an hour the car covers about 17.6 feet per second, so a one-second exposure drags every stone in the pavement across seventeen feet of frame. Half a second reads as fast. A full second reads as very fast. Past two seconds the background stops being a road and becomes an abstraction, which is occasionally what you want and usually isn't.

For reference on the far end of the discipline: Nigel Harniman, who shoots rigs commercially, works between eight and thirty seconds on rigs built for it, with pulley systems and hill-climb gradients doing the moving. That is a different job than the one you'll be doing in a parking lot at dawn, and it's useful to know the ceiling is up there.

The ND problem

In daylight this is the entire obstacle. Sunny sixteen puts you at 1/100 second at f/16 and ISO 100. Getting from there to a full second is roughly six and two-thirds stops of neutral density. A six-stop filter lands you around two-thirds of a second at f/16; a ten-stop overshoots to about ten seconds. Carry both.

Or shoot at the hour you should be shooting anyway. At blue hour the ND comes off entirely and the ambient does the work — the same reason the night frames in the archive needed less fighting than the midday ones.

Driving the shot

Eight to fifteen miles an hour. Consistently slower than anyone expects the first time out. The speed in the image comes from the shutter, not the speedometer, and every extra mile per hour is extra vibration bought for nothing.

Smooth surface. Every expansion joint is an impulse the arm amplifies and the sensor records. A freshly paved industrial lot beats a scenic road with bad asphalt, every time.

Straight line, or one continuous arc. A mid-pass steering correction puts a kink in the streaks that reads as a mistake and cannot be retouched out.

Agree on signals first. The driver cannot see the camera and cannot hear the shutter. Leave a window down, settle on a hand signal for stop, and never adjust anything while the car is rolling.

Shoot far more than feels sane. A hundred and fifty frames for one usable pass is a normal ratio. Vibration is random, and you are fishing for the moments it happened not to be there.

Getting the rig out of the frame

The arm is in your picture. That is the trade.

Before you break anything down, park the car in the same spot under the same light and shoot your plates. Two of them. First, with the rig still mounted, a short sharp exposure of the parked car — that's your clean car layer. Then pull the rig off, put a tripod where the rig's camera was, match the height, and shoot the background — that's what you'll paint the arm out with.

In Photoshop:

1. Stack the blurred moving frame on the bottom, the sharp parked frame above it.
2. Align on the car, not the background. The car is the only thing registered between the two exposures.
3. Mask the sharp car down over the blurred one. Feather along the body line, not across it.
4. Patch out the arm and the cups using the clean plate, or clone and heal where the background is simple enough to support it. Same discipline as pulling plates, poles, and reflections out of a static.
5. Leave the wheels alone. If the wheel isn't rotating enough in the exposure, go back and shoot it slower. Radial blur painted onto a stationary wheel reads as fake in every single case, and once you've seen it you can't stop seeing it.

The grade finishes it. A rig frame straight out of camera tends to look flatter than it should, because a long exposure averages out contrast along with everything else. The curve is doing as much work as the shutter was.

Where this works around San Diego

• Office park lots in Sorrento Valley and Carmel Valley, Sunday at six. Smooth, empty, and the light comes in low across the whole thing.
• Rooftop parking structures at first light. The background is sky and railing, which streaks beautifully and forgives a lot of retouching sin.
• The straight sections up Palomar. Good surface in stretches and long sightlines, but the switchbacks will fight you — find a straight and stay on it. The San Diego location guide covers the approaches in more detail.
• What to skip. Speed tables, heavy tree cover (dappled light plus a long exposure is a mess nobody can grade out), and anywhere you'd need a gate opened that you didn't ask about.

That last one is not a formality. A car circling a lot at ten miles an hour with an eight-foot pole strapped to the window attracts attention, and the right time to meet the property manager is before, not during.

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If you want one of these on your car and you'd rather not buy eight feet of carbon fiber to find out whether you like the look, that's a shoot. Tell us what you're driving — we respond within 24 hours.