The Autumn months are an exciting time for car photography, the orange leaves present a unique opportunity to play with colour in a natural enviroment.
The tradeoff is that most locations suitable for a vehicle don’t feel especially surreal, the trees are introduced species and to my knowledge mostly only planted intentionally.
In my experience they’re typically accompanied by cable rail fences and other efficient but dull looking modern infrastructure solutions.
Obviously, none of that to see here. This place is called Erindale Hayshed, it’s a property in Taggerty, which is made available for events and occasional shoots like this.
The car that immediately came to mind for a shoot in the golden leaves was this incredible Riviera Blue 993 GT2.
As cheesy as it is to say, this is a car that sort of trancends motor vehicle status, to me it’s more of a mechanical art piece.
In case you aren’t a Porsche nerd, these were constructed by Porsche’s racing department for a racing catagory called FIA GT2, and to satisfy class regulations a small amount were set loose on public roads. They’re essentially race cars with floor mats, and to say that they’re desirable would be putting it very lightly.
As far as the public knows, there are only 4 of these in the country, this being the only blue one. I’d previously done a shoot with it, which was an incredible opportunity, but I felt like I could’ve done more with it photographically speaking.
Obviously I got the opportunity.
I shot the whole set on Medium Format Film. I don’t have a build date for it, but my camera was quite possibly produced in the same year as the car, which I think is fun.
The film stock of choice was Cinestill 400D, it’s notable for it’s lack of an ‘anti halation layer’. The physics of it are a really interesting read, but put simply, the red glow around bright spots in the frames filtered out by most film stocks, but not Cinestill.
The red glow can be mimicked by things like photoshop, but not truly replicated, the same can be said for ‘film colours’ and such, but that’s a longer write up than I’d like to do here.
Cinestill were also keen to share this set on their own social media which is quite cool!
All this to say that I love the car, the location, medium format film, ect.
I’m really happy with the photos and think that they’re the closest thing to my imagination that I’ve been able to produce.
Many thanks to Erindale Hayshed, Irohas Photo, and car’s owner for making this shoot possible.
Shot for Type7