The single most challenging photograph of my career

My fascination with mechanical objects stretches back to my earliest memories. My father was a mechanic and ran a panel-beating workshop so cars have been a constant in my life. In my teens, I progressed from customising pushbikes to working on my cars. Though I no longer have a project car, my interest hasn’t waned and much of my recreation time is spent watching car content on youtube.

Throughout my photographic career, I have had a few opportunities to photograph cars but nothing ongoing. That was until Finch Restorations asked me to photograph a coffee table based on a Porsche 911 (991) engine and PDK transmission. It turned out to be the beginning of a great symbiotic relationship.

This shoot was the single most technically demanding photograph that I have made to date. The vision was to make a highly refined advertising photograph, but the conditions were far from favourable. We only had a small window to shoot the table between its completion and it getting shipped to Sydney. Glass is the main ingredient in making mirrors, making it extremely difficult to photograph without a purpose-built studio space. The table was too heavy to be moved easily, so it needed to be photographed in Finch’s Mt Barker workshop in daylight. The background would have to be photographed at a separate location in their mechanical workshop in Woodside in the Adelaide Hills.

With the camera in a fixed position, I worked my way through photographing the various sections of the table. I used studio flash to override the ambient light and used both my wide black and white paper backgrounds to block the surroundings and to reflect clean graduations onto the tabletop. I could combine these various sections in post-production to make a creamy smooth even graduation which could be made transparent towards the front edge of the table. With the table photographed, I meticulously measured out the exact dimensions of the table and recorded the camera's relationship to it. I built a basic 1:1 cardboard frame of the table that I used as a physical reference to set up the background shot at the Woodside location.

With the dummy table in place, I replicated the camera's height and settings from the previous session and began setting up the background in relation to the faux table. We started adding the components into the background scene to flesh out the storytelling of this table being the centrepiece of a car enthusiast's den. Whilst doing some test shots for reference, we placed the cars into position and added plants and a couple of armchairs. Then came the job of shooting the components to build a lighting state that would convincingly match the lighting of the table.

The Ferrari and XU1 needed to be lit in a way that would look plausible when combined into the final image. The various section of the cars were lit individually to guarantee that I would have enough detail where required and so I could replicate the smooth gradient and direction of light on the table.

The final image was composed of over thirty sections of individual photographs. It took two whole days of post-production work to blend them into a cohesive final image.

Since this first shoot, Finch Restorations has built eyefood a black wall studio space specifically for automobile photography. So far we have shot over a dozen of their restored vehicles, including cars, trucks and motorbikes and we have recently launched Finch Studio. A place where private car collectors can have their vehicles photographed by me in their preferred style. The space also functions as a studio for me to shoot automotive advertising work as jobs crop up.

I’m very proud of the end result. To shoot the parts of this image was one thing, but to seamlessly pull them together in a plausible-looking photograph was a challenge, to say the least. It took careful planning and an enormous amount of very detailed post-production.