The sights and sounds of the race track. Moments of waiting, silence, contemplation. Then frenetic pace, the smell of petrol and rubber. The sound and the sweat. Pride on the line, for the drivers, the mechanics and the supporters. Winning matters, but the experience of it matters more.
The Beauty of Design | Shooting Cars
I’m a bit obsessed with my car. But I’m also generally obsessed with design, which is why I bought a Defender rather than a Prado. I’m a sucker for Apple products too. It’s all in the design. Functional but also beautiful.
The two cars below are, in my opinion, functional and beautiful. The backdrop, the hinterlands north of the Otway Ranges in Victoria’s west, were bathed in golden light through mist when we took most of these shots, and it was freezing but just perfect. The morning was cold , really cold, which the turbo-charged engines loved and the tyres hated, but that cold created wonderful conditions for taking photos, with the background soft and muted, a hint of the sun’s warmth casting a glow over the land, and hoarfrost on the rough grass.
Both of these cars have some of the most sophisticated passive aero you’ll see on a sports car, all but hidden unless you look closely. Take the Alpine and that rear three quarter shot. Around the tailpipe you’ll see vertical fins. These diffuser strakes extend half way to the front wheels, and the whole underbody is flat (that’s right, no exposed mechanicals), which allows the air to accelerate under the car, creating a vacuum, and then slow down as it escapes at the rear, creating positive pressure. The result: downforce without drag. The Trophy R has the same advanced underbody structure.
Now look at the front of the Alpine. Those two vertical wedges ahead of the front wheels are actually tunnels that pass air over the face of the wheels, drawing trapped air out from the wheel arches to reduce high pressure lift. At the same time, they direct air to cool the brakes. And the Trophy R has a big splitter, forcing air under the car, again helping to create high velocity flow that sucks the car to the ground.
Finally, the shoulders running under the windows of the Alpine might look cosmetic, but they actually funnel airflow to the small air intakes sitting just behind the doors. As a mid-engined car, air needs to be fed into the back and not the front. Those shoulders keep oxygen flowing to the combustion chamber. All functional, but all beautiful design as well.
Now some tips for photopgraphing cars:
Shoot (if possible) when the sun is low in the sky. Winter is good, because it stays lower for longer.
Look for the defining shapes of the car. The Alpine has a single line that goes from front to back, an arc starting at the headlight and flowing to the tail light. The Trophy R has a distinctive wedge to both the stance of the car and to the way the nose develops. Find these angles and bring them out.
Get low. Cars are designed to be seen from other cars. Not from head height. Or get high to show the car from an angle no-one ever sees it.
The rear 3/4 view is particularly important. When you see a car on the road, you typically see it from this angle for the longest. Shooting side on doesn’t always work, but 3/4 shots almost always do.
Take a polariser. Metal reflects, and unless you have really soft and low light you are going to get all sorts of complex reflections from your surroundings. Polarisers get rid of that.
Situate your cars. The background matters. Sparse, urban, rural, coastal all work, but make sure the background adds weight to the image. In some sense, the background can become a secondary subject, like the tree and the fence and stop signs you see here.
Use depth of field to create a sense of depth (duh). Open up your aperture and blur the foreground and background to make your subject car standout. The photo with the front corner of the Trophy R works because the relatively narrow depth of field blurs it, allowing the eye to focus on the Alpine while maintaining a sense of the environment and the presence of a second vehicle.
Turn your headlights on. Especially if they’re cool.
Turn the wheel to expose the rims. Not all the time, but some of the time. Maybe even pop the bonnet, or open a door. Have someone in the car, or leaning over it.
Clean your car, or make sure it has road grime representative of spirited driving. A sense of the car as a useful object is important, but bird crap isn’t (unless you use it collect specimens for your study the ornithological scatology).
Love the car you’re shooting. Forget about whether it costs a lot or a little, whether it goes fast or is in your favourite colour, whether it is an Audi. or a Kia. Just learn to love it as a design study. All cars are engineered to meet standards, but all cars are visually appealing if you can open up your mind and forget about the badge.
124 Sport , A110 & Trophy-R
Road Trippin'
I’m an ambassador for Roadstr, a network for passionate car owners who want to share photos and attend social events. It sounds important, but really it’s just a glorified event organiser. I’ve been “paid” in stickers (which I give away) and a t-shirt (which is a size too big). Nonetheless, it does satisfy my driving habit, and it also affords me a unique opportunity to meet people interested in cars and inclined to let me photograph them, which supports another interest: car photography.
Car photography is a bit like portraiture and landscape combined. You have to know your subject, its quirks and best features, its good angles, its not-so-good angles. And you need to pose it, because it sits within a context. Posing requires a high degree of patience or an assistant willing to jiggle the car into position, back out, and back in. Think of your eponymous furniture delivery man positioning (and repositioning) your new couch…if they even do that anymore.
But automotive photography is also landscape photography. The car is the subject, but it’s situated in and complimented by the environment it sits in, and so you have to position the car relative to that environment in a way that is pleasing, considering lighting, angle and perspective, leading lines, foreground and background, rhythm and so on, just like you might when taking a landscape photograph.
Photography is more than images too: it’s about story. A single image can be a whole story on its own, but a collection of images facilitates narrative; a sense of actual experience and the passage of time. Above, the four images are all set in the forecourt of Lancemore Hotel in Werribee Park, but that last image says something. For all the admirable elegance of the car and the context, the last image reminds us that a car is a living thing designed to be driven. That admiring it from afar is an entree, but not the main course. From car, to driving, with the Deep End reminding us that the car is always waiting to be fulfilled.
In car photography, and especially when road tripping, that story involves a passion for driving, but also for the open road, the act of connecting man, machine and tarmac, of control and the elements, the horizon ahead and already passed.
What does it feel like to be at the wheel, wind whistling across the windscreen, road disappearing into the distance, world passing by in an impressionistic blur? Good. Even better when you’re sharing the experience.
With the right combination of cars, you can take shots that otherwise remain the province of imagination. A trailing image from a lead car, or a tailing image from a follower. The lines still need to be right, the composition and lighting still spot on, and the image needs to be sharp (which is not trivial when you’re shooting from a moving car), but when it works, then the sense of the road trip is distilled.
The images below work to this ideal, but I have a long way to go as an image maker. Little things are missing, like a capture of the coffee at the beginning, or the car talk at the end. But each journey is a discovery, and I’ll get there eventually.
Locations The top four were all taken at Lancemore hotel, Werribee Park. The middle four at Licola in Victoria, and the final four at Lake Mountain in the Yarra Ranges. Werribee Park is not to be missed if you are touring Victoria or even Melbourne. Licola is at the end of a long road through steep sided valleys, off the beaten track, but a quaint village embraced by the Victorian Alps. And Lake Mountain is the greatest driving road in Australia (don’t believe me, ask a slew of motoring publications, including Top Gear).
Image Credits All images mine except for the picture with me in the Roadstr t-shirt, which is copyrighted by a friend and borrowed for purposes of the blog post.