vehicle select (2020) (Patreon)

continuing with the digging-through-the-archives theme, I'm still trying to find stuff of any artistic merit I shot before my van trip, and I found this, which I really quite like. Why is it such a strong shot? Well, the summer of 2020 was when I began to shoot with my friend Kevin McCauley, without a doubt one of my favorite automotive photographers on the planet. This is his car, a 1980 Porsche 911 SC (that I reviewed, incidentally) at the top of a parking deck he'd found in Houston. 

I came out to shoot with him for a video or something, I can't remember what, exactly, but seeing how Kevin positioned his car, his eye for lighting, his uncanny ability to pick out perfectly repeating geometric shapes and styles, clearly had a massive impact on me overall. It would take a while for the lessons of this shoot to fully sink in—after all, most of them were unsaid, and I had to simply learn by watching a master work—but this shot on that day feels significantly different than most of what I'd been taking up to that point. This is a re-edit—2020 way, way predates when I learned how to do color grading—but the fact it took my modern method of editing so well means that I was finally approaching a more mature style. 

It would take significantly after 2020 for my style to actually develop consistently past "photograph of a car" into "a scene with a car in it", but this was an early stepping stone, and I'm glad I stumbled on it.