Moving People, Moving Lives – Volkswagen Caddy Sportline
I guess I can only speak for myself but I would hope that a lot of you can relate to this. No matter the vehicle, I think we will always have a life long attachment with our very first car. It doesn’t matter if it was a good or bad one, there’ll always be a part of us that will have a fondness on some level for the first car we owned. It was that first car that gave us our taste of what true freedom really was. It might have been a banger or it might have been brand new, but the association we retain will be the same. There’s no love like your first love, right? But my first car wasn’t a car. It was a van. And what a van. I remember driving it home for the first time, still wearing the previous owner’s dry cleaning business’ graphics on the side. It was a 2005 Volkswagen Caddy 1.9 TDI, which affectionately became known as ‘Sudsy’. This was entirely due to the graphics staying on the van longer than intended, which would take several hours with a machine polisher to finally remove them. My Caddy taught me a lot of driving craft. With 105HP, I needed to learn how to carry speed and to be as smooth as possible if I wanted to retain any sort of momentum. It was also the van that helped me get on my feet when I went into business as a sole trader. It reliably carried me and my camera equipment all around Ireland and the United Kingdom. I have a lot of fond memories of adventures in it. On the other hand, there were some bitter sweet ones too. It was in my Caddy that I helped move my girlfriend to London, where she could finally start the career […]
3SDM 0.01 Wheel Shoot
Just before Christmas last year, I journeyed north to a small village west of Belfast called Magherafelt. My brief was to shoot a couple of cars which were running a new wheel by UK wheel company 3SDM. The 0.01 is 3SDM’s flagship model and it’s not too difficult to see why. As far as the shoot was concerned, the day turned out to be a nightmare. Gusts of wind and heavy rain interrupted shooting all day (along with taking my Nikon SB800 being blown clean off the top of a light stand). Moving the cars to a backup location provided a stroke of luck however. With the winter sun setting over the Ulster countryside, we were gifted with a half hour of magical light. For the processing, I used a simple system of compositing the lit cars onto naturally exposed and developed backgrounds. Any of you who get past the opening line on any of my posts here will know I’ve been trying to work on my processing skills lately and hopefully you’ll enjoy the fruits of my labour. More images after the jump …
Caddy Life
For all three of you (Hi Mammy) who regularly visit here, I apologise profusely for the lack of updates and content. Needless to say the last month or two have been entirely taken over on the biggest project I’ve ever worked on which will hopefully be unveiled to the world quite shortly. In the meantime I have been out and about shooting and plan on filling you in on my adventures over the last couple of weeks. Some of you may know of my rather strange infatuation with my beloved ‘Sudsy’ better known as a 2005 Volkswagen Caddy TDI. Sudsy was my first and she will be here to stay for quite some time. I’ve wanted to use Sudsy as a promotional vehicle for myself for quite a while but instead of covering the van in my company name and logos, I decided to try and approach it a different way. Instead of splashing the van with graphics I decided I’d try and make Sudsy stand out from the crowd by subtly modifying its appearance. The pictures of the transformation are after the jump …
