Category: Cars

Jeff Gatesman hasbeen photographing classic automobiles since the early 90’s and automobile racing since the mid 70’s.

Laguna Seca Race Weekend

The Monterey Peninsula is one of the most beautiful places in California and home to the Weathertech Laguna Seca race track, which is a great place to watch a race. If you enjoy taking pictures of race cars, access at this stunning track is perfect. You can walk all around and in some places get fairly close, unfettered views of the action. And the famous Corkscrew is just a stunning place to experience auto racing.

The GTD class was won by Alvaro Parente and Katherine Legge bringing her closer to a potential Championship this season. And the legendary Bobby Rahal, the R in Team RLL, saw his team win their second consecutive Championship race in the number 25 BMW driven by Connor De Phillippi and Alexander Sims.

 

Will Power Wins 2012 Grand Prix of Long Beach

This year’s Long Beach Grand Prix has been one of the most exciting I’ve witnessed: there were new cars, the Dallara DW12, a controversial 10-position penalty for every team powered by Chevy, lot’s of passing, nail-biting fuel consumption strategies, and a pile-up on the hair pin turn 11, on the last lap, after Will Power had taken the checkered flag, which prevented him from taking his victory lap. Above is the video I took from my vantage point.

An obviously exhausted, yet elated Power just gets out of his car in the middle of the turn, climbs on top of it and claims his victory. One he fought his way up from the 12th starting position to achieve.

Two Pontiacs entered into the Spider Awards

The Black and White Spider Awards is the leading international award honoring black and white photography. This year I submitted two of my car images, both classic Pontiacs. Click on the thumbnails to get the full view.

Photographing cars has always been one of my favorite things to do outside of actually driving them, and classics are the best kinds of cars in my mind. I just love their curves and all the chrome, I mean if Bling is your thing, the makers of these cars did it over the top and yet, with some elegant style.

I think these two images in black and white are a testament to the timeless beauty of these machines. I hope you agree.

Culver City Car Show

The car show that takes over the main street in Culver City every year is one of my favorites. There are usually a selection of George Barris creations, some cool music and of course, some great cars. Here are a couple of images I made this weekend.

Monterey Auto Week and Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance

Monterey Auto Week has got to be one of the finest collections of rolling art on the planet and the pinnacle of the entire week is the Concours d’Elegance where 175 of the finest collector cars in the world roll onto the legendary 18th fairway at Pebble Beach.

I was there this past week to shoot some 3D car footage with the guys from 21st Century 3D, but managed to get a few stills of my own during a frantic week of chasing cars all over the peninsula.

Carroll Shelby’s Wife drives a mini van

Last week I was working on a project being produced by 21st Century 3D which will ultimately be a 3D Imax film about legendary car builder Carroll Shelby. As much an American Icon as his cars are, Shelby is a true original who, over the course of the past nine decades has been everything from fighter pilot to chicken farmer to race car champion and Philanthropist. Without an engineering background he designed and created cars that crushed then world dominating Ferrari race cars and has gone on to develop some of America’s greatest automobiles. So it was rather humorous, as we shot in his Gardena plant, to see his wife drive up in a generic mini van.

I’ve always been a huge fan of his work and had a rare opportunity to grab a couple stills of the cars in his collection.

The film will likely be in production for some time, but keep a look out for it. I’ve been a big fan of Shelby for a long time and after meeting him, and though he is well into his eighties, he is absolutely a larger-than-life character whose story you won’t want to miss in 3D.

Culver City Car Show 3D!

The George Barris Car Show came to Culver City this past weekend and I worked with the 21st Century 3D team to capture all of the fuel injected fun in 3D video.

Harleys and HDR

This week I took a trip out to the Salton Sea to try and find a place I had been to 10 or 12 years ago, where the sea had encroached on a small town and partially gobbled up several of the buildings. I thought this would be a great place to make some more images and practice my new found HDR techniques.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for the folks who live there) the interesting place I was looking for no longer exists. Some years ago they had built a berm around the town to hold the water back and destroyed all the buildings that had been eaten away by the extremely salty water.

Jakob on the berm at Bombay Beach

That’s the thing about adventures, you have to expect them to be disappointing sometimes. But the bright side is that I got some more pretty cool images, like the one above of my friend from Copenhagen, Jakob, standing atop the berm.

As I learn more about HDR I think my images will get better. I knew enough to look for the high contrast scene like the one above which, using typical photography would have been a blue sky with silhouettes of the berm and Jakob.

” alt=”” border=”0″ />Two Harleys on Rt 78

I have some more images from this trip to work on, but I’ve got to get to work, so more later…