The above image shows Quocs 280Z, which I photographed in downtown Los Angeles for Canibeat.com. As you can see from the image, my post processing consisted of some tonal adjustments, dodging/burning, and of course removal of that awkward steel pole jutting away from the car, along with my Avenger suction cups which are holding said pole to Quocs beautiful Fairlady Z.

Here’s a before/after of Chris Soehrens LS1-swapped (yep, Corvette engine) S13 240SX, in the paint booth at Elite Automotive Finishes.

This image required a lot of really basic stuff, so while nothing done was difficult it was still time consuming. The black square thing on the side is actually part of Chris’ seat, and I didn’t realize that it had been set there since when I intitially got my camera positioned it was inside the car. After cleaning of the car, it got left outside and I didn’t notice until later. The rest of the changes consisted of removing the window on the left side of the frame, fixing a light that had burned out bulbs, and then some tonal corrections.

The final images I want to share are of Jorges gold Honda Civic hatchback. This is another “rig shot”, and was done in under 5 minutes from unpacking my camera to pulling out of the parking lot. A car as modified (and well painted) as this gold Civic draws a lot of attention, which eventually brought the shopping center security over who had to ask me to leave. He was really nice, and very intrigued, but rules are rules so I hurriedly snapped this shot and we left before our welcome was wore out.

The retouching on this image was pretty simple… Remove suction cups, rebuild every corner of the image by hand, rebuild rear mudflap… You know, easy stuff ;) Oh, and some tonal corrections.

What a sad bit of news… Phoenix International Raceway has closed their infield. There’s talk of possibly opening up a road course in the future, but for now we’ll just have to live with the fact that the folks at PIR need to make money, and NASCAR is their most viable means for that. No hard feelings PIR… If someone was offering me that kind of cash, I’d jump on it too. I’ll get to keep the friendships and memories that I was able to create at Phoenix International, and I have some awesome photos that were captured there so I can’t really complain. Here’s a couple of those images.

I’d really like to say a big thank you to everyone who gave me an opportunity to shoot something for them. Honestly, whether you knew it at the time or not… A lot of you gave me some great oppurtunities. Shooting so many different cars last year gave me a lot of chances to try new things and experiment with my work. Without your amazing cars, exciting products, beautiful family, or awesome weddings I wouldn’t have had the chance to hone my skills. So, thanks :)

I’m finally just about done with the new house, thankfully. Painting the whole house kind of sucked… Especially considering the previous owner decided to paint every room of the house some shade of green. The room that is to become my studio space was a dark green… It was terrible. It’s taken way too much paint to cover that hideous color! Next on my list of remodeling projects is some new lighting for the studio, since all I currently have in there is a lamp. I think I’m going to do some sort of overhead fluorescent but I don’t want an ugly fixture… I also don’t want to spend a ton of cash… Not sure what to do about that yet.

My coverage of XDC is live at AZDriven, so please go check that out and leave a comment.
I’ve got another piece covering XDC coming out next month in Maxx Tuning Magazine, and once video is wrapped, a few of my shots will be up on Canibeat.

XDC was an interesting thing for me, in the fact that I knew I was covering the event for AZD, but Cib had also expressed interest. I was asked by the owner of Ksport USA to make sure I got shots of their drivers and cars, and literally on the way to the track, I got an email from Maxx Tuning Mag!

Hit the comments over at AZDriven and let me know what you think about my article and photos!

The first event I shot for Canibeat ended up not being ran, due to an overzealous contributor who posted his own images before I was even back from Los Angeles. Oh well, I had a great time in L.A. and met a couple new people. While in Los Angeles I got in touch with Quoc, and we got some images of his Z. Once back in Mesa, I shot the All Star Car Battle for Canibeat. Shortly after, Alex from AZDriven got in touch with me and asked for some help with AZDriven. We’re really trying to put the AZ scene in the spotlight. If you’re an AZ resident and have a car, event, shop, crew, whatever, worth a feature please let me know. I’ve done a lot of work over there, from coding the site, to styling the site, to writing content and of course several of my images are being used. I got my new studio setup situated and have been shooting 2 or 3 Ksport products a day for the last week or so.

I can’t show any of the images from Nissan Sport yet, but the car is incredible. 700whp 350Z convertible :D. Also, once I shoot the weddings I’ll share some of those images.

I snapped a few photos while I was there, one of which was this image of the National Archives. After returning home, I was contacted by Schmap about using the image in one of the digital destination guides.

Here’s the guide. If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod, they have a downloadable version as well.