Last year I made a post where I picked out my overall favourite image that I captured during the year so I thought I would do it again. The frustration involved in trying to isolate a single image from a years worth of photographs is immense. It’s no easy task. In fact I even considered abandoning this post, but fortunately I stuck with it and followed through.
However, I am going to cheat a little bit. I’m going to narrow it down for myself, but with good reason. My photography was born almost 10 years ago in the automotive scene. My very first photo with my first SLR was of a car and I’ve been shooting cars ever since, still to this day. Â So I thought it would be nice if I found my favourite image of the year from the automotive archives. That makes it a hell of a lot easier.
I’ve photographed a lot of nice cars this year, and I have created a lot of favourable images. The fact that I decided to pursue photographing Supercars again this year, makes it even more difficult.
Lets have a look at some of the contenders…
The one you see above is a nice shot of a WRX that I took recently. It combines a number of techniques I’ve learnt and experimented with over the years. If you think the headlight beams of light were created in photoshop then think again! Â Anyway its a nice image I wanted to share.
Next up, is one of my dream cars, the McLaren MP4 12C. It was such a pleasure to shoot this car and I absolutely fell in love with the location. This has been my desktop wallpaper for quite some time and is one of those images I always like to look back on. It just worked out better than I imagined and its a really rewarding image for me.
We all know how much us photographers love to shoot black cars, especially at night. In case you missed it, a rocket propelled grenade full of sarcasm just flew past your computer screen. This was always going to be a tricky one but it worked out, once again even better than I thought it would. The rain was a nice touch, but certainly wasn’t planned. It seemed to work to our benefit though as everyone has commented on it. In high resolution you can really see the detail in the water droplets. For me, I like the dramatic nature of the shot. I had Batman, The Dark Knight film in mind when creating this and that dark dramatic feel is exactly what I wanted.
Also featuring the McLaren, and a rather tidy brand spanking new Lamborghini Aventadoor, this aerial image is one that will stick with me for a while. I mean, how often is it you get to chase down two cars like this from a helicopter and take pictures of it? Not very often thats for sure. It was a true pleasure to do this and I hope I can do it again one day soon. It certainly rates extremely high on the scale but just can’t quite knock off the next image from the top spot.
Now this decision was incredibly difficult, but it was just not possible to go past this image of Andrew Puljars magnificent HK Monaro.
Photographed in an old rustic tin shed complete with all sorts of automotive signage and memorabilia, it set the perfect scene with so much character for this once old car. Every inch of this beautiful HK Monaro has been brought back to life like it was still sitting in the showroom floor, which gave a nice contrast to the location.
This image was light painted by hand, and composited together in photoshop using around 10 different images. Â The smoke effect in the image is real, we had a smoke machine at the shoot. Every part of the background was carefully lit in such a way to keep a dramatic scene with lots of atmosphere.
I love how it turned out and it was a great success, and this.. is my favourite automotive image from 2013.
The Winner, Automotive Photograph of the Year from Brodie Butler:
