Pilot

Do I blog now? Is this my new thing? Perhaps. Hard to tell what “my thing” is nowadays in all honesty. The society I live in got knocked onto its side to say the very least last year, so I’m picking up all the leftover debris I can find to start over, so to speak. Interesting that sometimes when your shit gets scrambled you rediscover interests you forgot about or didn’t have time for.

Anyway, that’s a story for a later post. This post is to share the images I got while my friend Hayden, from high school, was in town on leave from the Navy with his stock 2015 Subaru STI.

He meets my other buddy Tom, my cousin Nik and me at a local restaurant downtown and we head in the direction of some local roads that are “engaging” to drive. Nik also has an STI, just a generation older, and a wagon and Tom owns a Mrk VI Golf GTI. All three cars are capable of going well over 130mph with little issue. What am I driving, you may ask? My ol’ reliable ‘04 Subaru Impreza Outback Sport…with a 3” lift. No way I was going to be keeping up.

I took caboose on the caravan. I wasn’t about to be holding up a collective 800hp behind me while my dinky naturally aspirated engine tries its best.

Before I was inevitably left in the dust as the pavement lead farther out of civilization, I got to hear the scream of two boosted flat fours and a boosted vr6. It was like when Joyner Lucas did a collab with I Prevail on DOA. The most left-field collab I didn’t know I wanted.

Well after they were out of sight, I pulled over into a large parking lot at the base of the hill they were climbing. I knew the only way down the hill was back the way you came, so I was going to wait for them there. While I waited at the bottom of the hill, listening for some roaring engines, I decided it would be a good time to try to frame out some shots of the cars, since the scene was pretty good and the lighting was soft. It was a massive empty parking spot in the middle of the woods, so I had some ideas I wanted to try. The road they were driving is 20 minutes minimum round trip so I had some time to figure out some frames for when they got back.

One thing I had never done before then was shoot multiple cars at once. That was one thing that excited me about this shoot was that I had three very good-looking and very fast cars to stage and photograph. I think if I had done a better job of arranging the cars and put a little more thought into the compositions these shots could have been noticeably better. I’ll just have to look into car posing a bit more I suppose.

I also had recently got a new tripod specifically so I could hold my camera steady centimeters off of the ground. In combination with that, I really wanted to get an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image of the golf, because I had some success with pictures of my cousin’s STI earlier that month.

All in all these shots weren’t the absolute bangers I was after, but I am very pleased with them nonetheless. I think I took about 140 frames that shoot and ended up with 17 I was at least satisfied with. Some well-thought-out and composed images were completely ruined because of camera settings. It’s a new setup to me (Canon 6D) and though it’s very similar to my old one (CanonT3i), the capabilities are a bit wider and I need to expand my knowledge so to speak.

I guess that just means I need to shoot more. Really the only way I’m going to get to know my camera better is to use it more. Which, in theory, means more blog posts. I hoped you enjoyed the images and the writing to go along with them and I’ll catch you in the next one!