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Oct 7, 2013

Kub Kar - Year 1

  Kub Kar Year 1 by Jay Scott on 500px.com

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Unlike the Kub Truck my dad built for fun, this was the Kub Car that I built in my first year of Cubs. That was a long time ago. I'm happy to say that it won first place in the regionals for design. It didn't track very straight and its top speed was not up to the competition, but it certainly did outshine the other entries that year in Swift Current.

A few of the decals are hidden by the camera angle, but it looked pretty good in my opinion. I remember that as much as the cub leaders and parents were certainly allowed to their help their boys in the construction, I remember that my dad did not take over. He left much of the design up to me, but helped me to take care of the dangerous work when it came to refining the curves on the bandsaw. But when it came to the filing and sanding it was up to me.

The paint color was obvious, the difficult to obtain Department of Highways yellow; the same color you see painted on the highways. It wasn't that difficult to get a hold of when your dad works for that organization, but it made my car stand out from the others. I chose the decals from some Lego and Playmobile sets and rounded out the look with some 80s GM pin striping. It was definitely a great first year for building a Kub Kar. The speed and tracking came in later years when I won trophies for those cars, as well. Photos of those will be coming in the near future.

The Technicals


The background was provided by the one of the galaxy slides included in one of the creative kits available to accessorize a Light Blaster. From about 5 feet away, focused to 4.5 feet (to increase the perceived bokeh) zoomed into approximately 45 mm, by one SB 28 set to 1/4 power, with the consumer lens' aperture opened to f/4.5, the image was projected onto my white fleece blanket hanging in the background.

The camera settings are 50mm, f/7.1, 1/200", ISO 200. I list these because I know there would be photographers who would ask, but really, when you are combining five light sources with different types, power settings, gels, modifiers, distances and triggers, those first four basic camera settings are little more than a baseline. They were adjusted around my flash power limitations. That limitation being the minimum output possible. The fog, created by my new Dragon Puffer kit from Zero Toys, was illuminated by one SB-28 @ 1/64 power with 1 2/3 cut of red gel. The galaxy projection was tweaked with a one third cut of CTB, the snooted flash on the camera left side of the car had a 1/4 cut of CTO, while the camera right side gridded flash had a 1/2 cut of CTO. 

The final gridded light source was projected from quite high and just camera left onto the reflective sticker on the front of the car to emulate a bright headlight. It was altered with a 3/4 cut of CTO and two thirds cut of lavender gel, chosen to emulate the color of today's higher and car headlights. Because of the sticker's reflectiveness it needed to be just bright enough to create that purple-blue reflection. The tarmac was made of black neoprene rubber while the dirt colored ditch was simply the brown packing paper that came with the Dragon Puffer.

I had tried numerous times to use the twenty second timer on my camera to time it while timing the puff of smoke but it takes a few seconds for that Puffer to warm up then belch the fog. Timing that with the countdown that only lets me know 3 seconds before the shutter will trip, was very difficult. So, I had Angie create smoke and I just sat at the shutter release to get the timing just correct.

I look forward to seeing what my friend Stacey's pack comes up with for cars this year.