Ferrari, Lamborghini, and some other stuff

One of these past weekends, a group of owners got together for a drive that started in San Francisco and ended at a daffodil hill in Sacramento with some long, windy roads and a couple of stops along the way.  There were to be at least 20 exotics for this event so I was pretty excited, especially since this was the first big drive since I got my GoPro.   On the day of, a couple of us drove to the meeting point together and stumbled across this Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 Super Veloce along the way.

The Ferrari 360 CS was part of the mini-caravan, and the driver had pulled up alongside the SV to try to get the owner to join us on the impending drive.  As it turned out, the owner of the SV was actually a friend on her way to the meeting point..no one knew she had bought this until now.  Needless to say, it was quite a surprise – something like only 350 of these were made. After meeting with the rest of the group a little east of San Francisco, I hopped into the passenger seat with one of the owners so I could take some photos and video on the long drive to Sacramento.   Some of the other cars in the group include an Audi R8 Spyder, Lamborghini Diablo, Mercedes SLS AMG, a pair of Lamborghini Gallardos, Ferrari 550 Maranello, and several others.  Once we hit the road, I was able to get some decent highway shots of several of the cars before we hit heavy traffic.

After driving along in mundane traffic for a while, we finally hit some roads where these cars could really open up.  Here is a video I took while riding shotgun in the F430 on one of the long stretches of straight, open road..notice the rare manual gearbox with a metal shift gate =)

After that nice little pull, we got to our first destination – a private property with a small collection of WWII-era airplanes that the family restores, including an in-progress restoration of Howard Hughes personal B-23 and a functional German Luftwaffe Messerschmitt ME 262 (or maybe a 202..can’t remember now) with LearJet engines.

This family also had a little car collection of their own, including two classics I had never seen in person before:  A Mercedes SL300 Gullwing and a Lamborghini Miura.

This is also the location where we met up with the rest of the group, including a white Lamborghini Countach (images to come).  I took a panorama of all of the cars parked side by side on the property, but it isn’t all that great.

This was truly an incredible property, especially for photoshoots..I wish I could have gotten to know the owners.  They have a private airstrip that is basically a racetrack around the property, with just about unlimited space to park cars and many backdrops.  Here are a couple of shots of the Ferrari 550 Maranello, including one with Howard Hughes personal aircraft, a 1930s B-23, that is being restored in the background.

The final stop before the daffodil hill, which also happened to be the final stop where I was able to get some decent pictures, was at a small winery about 20 miles away from the residence we were at.  For this leg, I was riding in the 360 CS and had mounted my GoPro on the Ferrari’s glass engine cover outside the car.  We were driving wide open throttle through long, windy roads for around a half hour with the amazing Ferrari V8 screaming every bit of the way.  When I got home to look through the video, I discovered that I had the wrong setting and in fact had only taken one stupid picture and did not record a single second of video.  I was pissed, but hopefully I’ll get to try again with that car this summer. That engine sound…mmmm.

These last photos are from the winery, and include the ridiculously cool white Countach.

This is a short video I took on a recent drive of a Ferrari 360 Challenge-Stradale doing a quick highway pull, followed by another nice sounding yellow Porsche GT3.

I don’t know how else to describe the Ford GT except to call it insane.   This Heritage edition GT, a tribute to the legendary Ford GT40 that won four consecutive 24 hours of Le Mans in the 1960s, is one of two FGTs that I have been fortunate enough to shoot thus far…and I absolutely want to do more.  It is such a unique car in both looks and sound that it is hard to compare against anything else on the road.  With that being said, I couldn’t think of a better place to shoot it than near NAS Alameda, home of another distinguished piece of American machinery:  the aircraft carrier U.S.S Hornet.  Now a floating WWII museum in northern California, the Hornet took part in the crippling of the Japanese navy at Midway in June, 1942.

In front of the U.S.S Hornet at NAS Alameda

This shoot was made even better by the fact that the owner was not shy about using the gas to open up the wonderful sounding supercharged V8.  The only downside was that we shot pretty much at high noon, so the light was relatively harsh and it was difficult to capture the blue and orange Gulf livery colors.  In the end, I was pretty happy with how the set turned out.  It’s been almost a year and I’m still going through and finding more pics that I want to process, so chances are that this set will continue to grow for at least a little while longer.

The full set can be found here:
Ford GT Flickr photoshoot

And a HD wallpaper here:
HD widescreen 1920×1080 Ford GT wallpaper

Thanks to my friend at UberExotica who had a connection at a local exotic car dealer here in the California bay area (Silicon Valley Auto Group which was recently bought out by British Motor Cars in San Francisco I believe), I had the opportunity one day to spend a short amount of time shooting this beautiful $2,000,000+ (what it was for sale for at the time), number 3 out of 20 in the world, monster V12 Lamborghini Reventon.

The rumor was that the original purchaser of this car wanted only the #1 chassis, so when it was delivered he immediately gave it back. Needless to say, at a $2.4 million price tag, this thing sat on the show room floor for quite a while, especially once the economy tanked. I don’t know what they ultimately sold it for, but I’m guessing it’s less than what they paid for it. With the Lamborghini Aventador now on the market, which has stolen some of the uniqueness from the Reventon, owning this overpriced fighter-jet-looking-car has probably lost some of it’s novelty. In any case, there are still only twenty of these coupes in the world and so getting to shoot it, and see it up close for that matter, was a big pleasure. I only wish we could have taken it out of the parking lot for some better scenery!

Below are the highlights from the shoot, and the full set can be found here:
V12 Lamborghini Reventon photoshoot

The first pic is available in a HD widescreen wallpaper here:
HD 1920×1080 Lamborghini Reventon Wallpaper

This Spyker C8 Spyder was a treat to shoot…not only are Spykers ultra rare, but this one in particular has been supercharged to beef up an already powerful V8.  Unfortunately, on the day I was supposed to shoot it the weather was not looking good and I had to drive an hour to where the owner kept it garaged.  By the time I got there it had started pouring, and given the fact that this car literally does not have a top any more functional than a tarp, getting some “wet” photos was out of the question.  On the bright side, the garage it is stored in was quite spacious and had a lot of junk lying around which made for some interesting ‘scenery’.

These shots were all taken on a tripod and heavily photo shopped afterwards.  While I didn’t get many photos that I really liked (all of them are below), the ones that did turn out are some of the most unique I have in terms of the post processing I did to them.  With the garage doors open, the outside brightness made for some nice contrast with the dark interior, allowing me to get the cool effects.

Once the weather clears up here in northern California, I will do a proper shoot of the car and get some great video footage as well.

This is one of the few successful interior shots I have taken of any car ever.  Admittedly I haven’t tried too many, but whenever I do they never seem to turn out.  It’s something I want to work on, but I always get too focused on the car itself during photoshoots and neglect the interior.  This one was taken with my Canon 10-22 on a tripod.

Here is a short video from my recent photoshoot with this beautiful gullwing Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.

Interesting article a friend shared courtesy of Jalopnik written by Chris Harris on the amount of control Ferrari exercises over it’s press “tests”…some highlights below:

“I think it started in 2007 when I heard that Ferrari wanted to know which test track we were going to use for Autocar’s 599 GTB road test, but in reality the rot had set in many years earlier. Why would it want to know that? “Because,” said the man from the Autocar office, “The factory now has to send a test team to the circuit we chose so that they can optimize the car to get the best performance from it.” They duly went to the track, tested for a day, crashed the car, went back to the factory to mend the car, returned, tested and then invited us to drive this “standard” 599. They must have been having a laugh.” Read more

At the end of January I had the chance to shoot a beautiful Laguna Blue Lamborghini Murcielago LP640. Needless to say, given the rarity of this color I was pretty excited for what I was hoping to be one of my best shoots in a while. We met up around 10am and headed towards Hwy 1 near the ocean to look for some good spots to shoot. As we got closer to the ocean, the clouds moved in and they started to get pretty thick which did not bode well for the shoot. After some poking around near the coast and along some side streets, we found a great location at a small volunteer fire station in the middle of the woods that appeared to be closed for the weekend. In the back was a nice open space with a lot of ‘stuff’ around that could make for interesting photos.

The fog was slowly getting thicker, and not long after we started shooting it started to get misty. It was relatively heavy, and more than enough to get my camera wet and coat my lens in water droplets. Fortunately the Canon 7D is resistant to at least a little bit of moisture or I’d be out a few $, but I still had to be careful to keep it covered as much as possible all while I was shooting through a lens that was covered in mist (or all smeared right after I had wiped them off). This was my third shoot in a row that got rained on..I was pretty frustrated.

At the end of the day, I felt the results were pretty mediocre given the car I was shooting and the location we found. The images don’t look very sharp when the car is soaked, and the water droplets were too small to get cool shots like this.

Full set here: Lamborghini Murcielago LP640

Check out my video for a taste of what this V12 Lamborghini sounds like.

In Command

Wide Open

Water Tanks

Blue

Last March I had the opportunity to shoot two convertible white Italian exotics at the same time:  a Ferrari 16M and a Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 Roadster.  Shooting two cars can be difficult, especially when time is limited.   I have to make a conscious effort not to stay fixated on one car, otherwise when I get home and go through the set I’ll find that I have a ton of great shots of one, not so many of the other, and even less of both together…it was a mistake I didn’t want to make for this shoot.

The location was Treasure Island across from San Francisco, which is one of my favorite places to shoot for a number of reasons.  One is that there are a lot of good locations given that much of the island is abandoned…I can get shots with great views of the bay or cool abandoned buildings without having to drive more than a few hundred meters.   The other, and maybe the most important, is that there is very little traffic here.  I can utilize all of the space without worrying about pedestrians getting in the way.  Most other locations I use, if I want to get some good shots I usually have to block a road that someone will inevitably drive by on forcing the owner to keep moving the car.  Not all people like exotic cars and do not take kindly to having five seconds taken out of their day waiting to get around.

Anyways, below are a few shots with the whole set:

Ferrari 16M & Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 Roadster Flickr set.

Ferrari 16M & Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 Roadster

This past Monday I had the opportunity to shoot a friend’s Mercedes SLS AMG, successor to the classic 300SL Gullwing. We were scheduled to shoot at 4:00 in the afternoon at Foothill Park in Palo Alto, California. Although the day started out sunny, the weather got progressively worse up until the meet. It started to drizzle on the way up, but fortunately the weather managed to hold out for most of the shoot while the low clouds created some nice light for the silver SLS.

A few shots from the set are below, and you can find the full set here

Canon 7D w/Canon 70-200L f2.8 IS

Canon 7D w/Canon 24-105L

Canon 7D w/Canon 10-22

Canon 7D w/Canon 10-22