I had a phone call from Martin Vincent, a freelance contributor to Japanese Performance magazine saying that he wanted to do a feature on the supercharged Corolla. At Japfest 2006 he took some pictures of the Corolla and they had been used for a cameo piece in the magazine’s Japfest coverage. Now he wanted to do a full feature – was I interested? YES PLEASE.
He explained the format of a photo shoot - taking the pictures would take up say 3-4 hours and then maybe another hour talking about the car for the words in the article. I asked what sort of location he would use and he suggested moorland roads where there is plenty of room to move around the car and with uncluttered backdrops.
I googled Martin’s website and saw that his gallery showed pictures of the Hyeline Honda NSX taken on the B4560 that runs over Mynydd Llangynidr. This location has also been used by other photographers who have had articles published in Japanese Performance. I did some web research and came up with a couple of other locations – the A4059 Cantref to Hirwaun road and the unclassified road from Tredegar up to Trefil quarry. I decided to do a recce so took the car out for my own photo shoot.
Here are some pictures taken that day with the car still wearing it's winter (Rota Grid) wheels.
Martin had a look at the pictures and decided that he wanted to use the Trefil quarry road and we agreed to meet there on 12th April.
The OS map of the area shows the quarry as disused but that didn't stop a monster dump truck travelling back and forth for most of the day. Every time it went past it created a large dust cloud that settled over the car and I had to get the dusters and Speed Detailer out.
Having looked at the location Martin decided on the type of photographs he wanted, we got the car into position and he started shooting. Front 3/4, rear 3/4, head on, with and without flash, whole car shots, detail shots, engine bay shots. Some pictures close up and others from a low angle with lots of sky to allow text to flow around the image on the page. Then he wanted some panning shots so we moved away from the quarry back onto a smoother piece of access road. After the distance panning shots Martin moved into the road and took some head on moving shots, at one point lying on the road surface to get a really low angle. We went back to his car where he recorded our chat about what I've done to the car since I bought it. I plugged the all people who have done work on the car and I praised Babs for her enthusiasm and support. That wrapped it up.
When I arrived home the car was covered in a thick layer of dust but could not leave it like that. The Gilmour Foam Master and snow foam followed by a rinse with plain water made short work of the dust.
The 7 page feature was published in the July 2010 edition of Japanese Performance.