A shoot does not start when I pick up the camera. It starts the night before, on the couch, with the camera in my lap and the menu open. By the time an owner pulls into the meeting spot I want the body already configured for the first twenty minutes of the session, because those twenty minutes are usually the best light we are going to get.
I learned this the slow way. Early on I would arrive, shake hands, walk the location, and only then start setting up the camera while the sun climbed off the bonnet. Ten minutes of menu-poking does not sound like much until you watch it cost you the frame you drove an hour for. The unglamorous part of working as a car photographer in the Philippines is that most of a shoot gets decided before the shoot.
Three custom slots, three kinds of shooting
The X-S20 lets you park a full set of settings in the custom positions on the mode dial, and that one feature does more for my shoot days than any piece of glass I could add. I use three of them, and they map to the three things I actually do.
The first is static work — hero frames, the walk-round, details. Aperture priority, somewhere around f/4 to f/5.6 because I want the whole car holding together front to back, single-point autofocus, single frame drive, auto ISO with a low ceiling. This is the slot the camera sits in for most of a feature.
The second is movement. Shutter priority, a slow shutter as the starting point for panning, continuous autofocus, burst drive, stabilisation on. Panning is a feel thing and I adjust after the first few frames, but I want to land in the right neighbourhood without opening a menu.
The third is events. Back to aperture priority but opened up, auto ISO with a much higher ceiling because a Metro Manila car meet at dusk is not generous, a wider focus area because subjects move and I am shooting one-handed half the time, and continuous drive. Events punish hesitation. Flicking a dial to a slot that is already right for a crowded venue is the difference between getting a frame and watching it leave.
Switching between them is one dial movement.
Focus is the setting most people get wrong
A parked car is not going anywhere, so continuous autofocus is doing nothing for you there except hunting. Single point, placed deliberately — usually the leading edge of the near headlight, or the front wheel arch — gets me a cleaner file than letting the camera decide what matters.
Face and eye detection stays off for car frames. It will find a reflection, a bystander, somebody's face through a windshield, and it will pull focus off the panel you are trying to keep sharp. The moment the owner steps into frame I turn it back on, and that is the one thing I still do by hand rather than baking it into a slot, because I want to be thinking about it.
The joystick does the placing. Not recompose-and-hope — move the point to where the sharpness has to land. On the 85 at close range, the difference between the grille and the badge sitting behind it is real.
Exposing for paint, not for the scene
There are no strobes in my kit. Ambient light and a reflector are the whole lighting department, which means my exposure decision is almost always about protecting a highlight on the paint rather than rescuing a shadow.
So I expose for the brightest panel the sun is touching and let the shadow side fall where it falls. A dark underside comes back in Lightroom. A blown reflection on clearcoat does not — once that panel is pure white there is no gradient left to recover, and gradient is the only thing that makes paint look like paint.
In practice that means I am riding exposure compensation on the front dial all day, usually sitting a little under. And I read the viewfinder, not the back screen. Outdoor light here will lie to you on a rear LCD every single time.
Raw files, and why I still set a film simulation
Everything is captured raw. The real colour decisions happen later in Lightroom, not in the camera.
I still pick a film simulation before a shoot, for one reason: same-day social cuts. If a client has event coverage and wants something to post that night, the fastest honest path is a decent straight-out-of-camera jpeg, and a simulation I have already settled on means those files look like my work instead of like a factory preset. The raw files get the proper treatment during the week, inside the normal seven-day turnaround.
What changes for bikes
Motorcycle photography in PH tends to happen closer, faster, and in tighter spaces than car work, so two things shift in the setup. Minimum shutter goes up in the auto-ISO configuration, because a rider shifting their weight or a chain turning will smear at a speed I would happily use on a parked car. And the focus area widens slightly — a bike gives you less surface to lock onto, and a single point sitting on a dark frame rail in shade will hunt.
Staging areas before a club ride are the extreme version of this. Engines running, everyone packed in together, nothing holding still for longer than a second. For big bike photography Philippines-side, that is an event-slot environment even though nobody would call it an event.
The checks I actually do on location
Settings drift. Most of my automotive photography around Cavite starts before sunrise, which means the first real test of whether the body is configured correctly happens in the dark, in a car park, with an owner standing next to me.
So my own car does the checking. The silver Coolray is the most photographed vehicle I own purely because it is the thing parked outside when I need to confirm something. A few frames on it the evening before tells me the slots are still what I think they are.
At the location itself, three things, every time. Clear the card. Confirm which slot I am in. Take one throwaway frame of the car exactly where it parked — that single frame tells me more about the light I am working with than standing there squinting at the sky does.
It buys back the only part of the day that matters
None of this is exotic. It is maybe fifteen minutes of preparation the night before, and what it buys back is the first twenty minutes of the session — which, on a shoot where usable light lasts forty, is most of the job.
If you want to see what comes out the other end of it, there is a spread of static and event work in the gallery, and the practical questions about how a session actually runs — timing, light, what to have ready — are answered over on the FAQ page.