Client: Japanese Performance
Location: On a farm, near Yeovil

A few months back, I was given a commission for the excellent Japanese Performance magazine to shoot a feature car for an upcoming issue. I’m based in Cambridgeshire, the car was in deepest darkest Yeovil. To save you a trip to Google Maps, it’s a round trip of 650 miles plus and, what’s more, there was a limited window to get access to our location. This resulted in a crazy early start but, hey, that’s the lot of a photographer.

Once on site, conditions were challenging. The sun was beating down which resulted in harsh shadows. So, the solution was to even up the exposure and combat the directional light with some portable flash. My Lencarta Safari strobes are great in these situations, and really make the paint on these modified cars pop. A grad filter keeps the detail in the sky and the addition of a second flash unit make the background pop too.

When shooting for magazines, it’s important to remember that you need to leave room in the frame for the designers to add a headline, intro and the main copy of the feature. Look at the original images and look at the space on the left of the frame, which has subsequently been filled with text.

A final word on this image – look at the bonnet, you’ll see that it has somehow become transparent and the bare engine can be seen. This is a popular shot for performance tuning magazines and is done by combining two image – one with the bonnet open, one closed. Photoshop takes care of the rest.

It was a tired drive home, thank god for Starbucks.