Type R Déjà Vu
Although I’ve been shooting for quite a while, and I’ve certainly lost track of the amount of cars that I’ve been fortunate enough to shoot, I can’t remember shooting the same car twice. There’s a whole heap of situations where this could have occurred. For example if multiple publications wanted images or if the owner decided to tear apart a perfectly good car and rebuild it into something even better. Neil Thompson’s Civic Type R is a case of the latter. It was actually only back in May when I found myself meeting Neil at a services on the M1 motorway, north of Dublin. With summer having belatedly arrived in Ireland, it was still too bright after 6PM to shoot the dark colour Honda in the harsh sunlight. I tried a couple of frames and positions at the back of traditional Irish pub, before we scouted around for a couple of different locations. With the sun starting to turn the countryside a nice shade of gold, we returned to the same pub’s car park and got to work. When shooting editorial, you not only need to ensure that you grab everything required, but also to try and vary compositions as much as possible. This allows the designer more freedom when laying out the spreads. A happy designer, means a better feature and the potential for more work in the future. Since turning freelance, I’ve personally felt that a lot of pressure to perform has lifted from my shoulders. I feel more comfortable and have begun to produce much better work than I have done previously. In my opinion at least. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some great editors, who all have encouraged me to shoot how I want. That is, in as much of a LoFi style as […]
Number One
With December just about to roll around (memo to self, buy Christmas presents) the motorsport season is well and truly done for twenty-eleven. The off-season gives us a chance to relax, reflect and reminisce about the season. We can finally sit back and begin to take everything in. Because their is so little shoots during these dark months, I usually spend my time trying work on my processing styles. This usually involves going absolutely and completely overboard with my processing to the extent that it might make your eyes bleed. But it’s for good reason. By pushing everything up to eleven, it helps me figure out just how far is too far. From this I can scale things back and find a happy medium. I’ve always wanted to try and create a processing style which pays homage to old photographic prints that have faded, been marked etc. I shot this 993 Porsche recently for Speedhunters and thought it was the perfect shoot to revisit and experiment. You can check out the original feature for comparison here. The rest of the images are after the break …