This collection of rare Ferraris was photographed for a connoisseur of both beautiful cars and fine photography in the spring of 2015. The commission was to create a set of 19 leather bound and boxed books, one for each of his extraordinary cars. Each book featured a short history of the car, its technical specifications and twenty-four unique images focusing on that car's unique design features. One book was to stay in the owner’s library, one would stay with each car, and one would go to his Ferrari specialist, Terry Price.

 

The photographs were taken in a purpose built studio in downtown Santa Barbara, near their home base. Cars are like mirror-balls, everything is reflected in their paint and chrome, and the space available to construct the purpose built studio was smaller than the project demanded, which added to challenge of lighting them. In automotive advertising they spend a full day on just one or two images, but I had just one day with each car. Capturing twenty four unique images a day, on both black and white backgrounds, was like running a marathon, day after day, but combining my passion for photography with my love of cars made an absolute joy.

 

It also gave me the opportunity to honor the memory of my father, who was a race car driver, a motor journalist and a collector of classic cars. He gave me my first Ferrari experience at ten, when arriving at Victoria Station on a wet, gray London day, he picked me up from the school train in a bright red Dino. Parked in the line of sober colored cars on Victoria's wide central platform, all the kids raced over and surrounded it. I shuffled through the throng to see my Dad waving me to get in. In that moment I felt like the coolest kid in school. It was the first Dino in England and he was road-testing it for a magazine. 

 

My Father’s passion for all things automotive led to me growing up in Beaulieu, a picture-postcard perfect village on England’s south coast, made famous by Lord Montagu and the National Motor Museum he created. He offered my father a place on the museum’s advisory board, which is how I came to grow up there. The museum was also where I began my career, working in the photography department during my school holidays, so this commission also allowed me to complete that circle.

 

With a total of almost five hundred finished images this was the most ambitious project I have ever done. From the initial scouting, through the studio build, a month of shooting followed by four thousand hours of retouching,  laying out the books, overseeing the printing and binding, it took two years to complete.