I'm a car photographer because it is what I love to do. And life is too short to do
anything but what you want to do. I love cars for so many reasons: The aesthetic beauty,
there is the mechanical dimension, it is a form of art.
It is a highly complicated, mechanical kind of sculpture.
My name is Richard. I'm a car photographer. It is 2.30 AM here
in L.A. and we are about to head out in the desert for sunrise.
Today is going to be really special. I have been planning this for a long time.
We are going to photograph a really unique car.
In the past I have worked with some pretty amazing cars but this one is a really special
car. It is an iconic, legendary car. There are very few of them. I think 10. To be given
the opportunity to work with this car, it is hard for me to keep my feet on the ground
when we are doing this kind of work.
So we just got this beautiful Ford GT40 Mark IV of the truck
and we are wheeling it into position. Getting ready for a beautiful sunrise
you can see in the background. Things are looking pretty good.
Can we cut the wheel hard down to the right
and just push it back a little so we get like a quarter angle of the car?
That is good right there guys! It is 5.20 AM and we are pretty close to ready here.
The car is in position and looking as good as it ever has.
This is going to be a very natural type of a scene.
The beauty of a situation like this, the hard work of this kind of production,
coming to this place at this time of day and bringing this vehicle and creating a really
magic moment. This is all just about watching the sun come up and when it does,
I don't think it gets more pure than this. This raw environment and this really raw car.
It is very simple but it doesn't take much beyond that.
There it is. And we are off!
I can safely say we got that.
What I would like to try and put one of these zoom lenses on.
Got it?
This is the newest edition to Phase One's lineup. It is a 40-80mm zoom lens.
I've been told it matches or exceeds the quality of some
of the prime lenses that I work with on these cameras normally,
so I'm really excited to try it out.
This is a very impressive piece of glass.
The feel of the zoom, the rings, the weight, is just really heavy and fluid.
Coming from a bit of a film background where you work with really nice Panavision and Cooke
lenses and things like that, they don't breathe when you zoom, the focus doesn't shift and
you don't have that movement at the side of the lens, because they are designed for motion.
And when I zoomed the whole way out with this lens and I fixed the focus, and then zoomed
the whole way in, it would usually lose the focus, but this lens is holding focus the
whole way across, which means that the innards of this glass are cut above.
This is really nice!
We are going to move from the 40-80, to the 150mm zoom, 75-150mm I believe,
and go for the full zoom effect and see how much linear compression
we can get out of this car.
Wow! This is incredibly sharp!
Look at this. There is a little light bulb on the
side of the car which casts light on the number so that when they are racing at night,
they could see what number the car was.
This histogram looks great!
I have got the entire dynamic range of this of this entire scene
and I still got a stop and a half on both ends of the histogram just waiting for
something else. That looks great.
I'm shooting with the 75-150 and I'm using it the whole way in 150
to kind of maximize focal compression and get the lines of the car to really straighten out.
It usually has the effect on cars of making them look a lot more serious.
Because it is very round as you get closer and more wide angle deforms a lot of the car
and a lot of the design elements sort of look out of context.
But right now, this thing is just looking fantastic.
We haven't got a ton of great light left. You see the shadow is falling into the
car pretty quickly now. So I'm switching to the 40-80 and I'll do the rest of my shoot with
this, and I can move a lot faster when we are switching back and forth with lenses.
This is phenomenal. This is a phenomenal lens.
It is 7.15 AM. The shadow that I love
that is drawing away from the car is almost gone. We probably has less than 15 minutes
to get our last bit in so that is gonna be it.
Can you close the door, Johnny? I'm going to shoot the 9 straight on.
We just got the last main shot and we are just making some pick-ups
and then I think they might actually boot it up, so we get to hear this thing.
To be given the opportunity to shoot that car is enough in itself but to see it run
and hear it, and not only that, but for them to have modified it for our shoot to return
the exhaust to the original 60's Le Mans spec exhaust which is just brutally loud.
Very impressive to see this thing do what it was meant to do in
the mechanical condition it was raised in.
I think the shoot has gone very well. My crew really delivered the consistency
I needed to make sure there weren't any concerns. This camera, this new 40-80mm lens did exactly
the same thing. The images, I know even before I look at them on the computer, I already
know that they are incredible. This is an amazing, very sharp lens. And it is pretty
hard to deny that this isn't one of the most beautiful, iconic racing machines of all time.
What a pleasure to work with this thing today.