I find that a good majority of shoots I've been doing lately have been last minute planned and have been pretty epic (for me). On August 14 I was invited to come shoot two cars that had just been detailed by Martin and his team at Alpha Shine on Richmond St in downtown Toronto. I hadn't heard about Alpha Shine before and this was my first time coming by the shop, and I was quite impressed with the setup they have there.
For a downtown location they have a good amount of parking available and the inside of the shop is squeaky clean. The floor offers some great reflections especially once it's been freshly mopped, making for an even better shot. As though I didn't have enough pressure to make a good impression by delivering great photos on the first visit, this day was extremely hot and humid, so the entire shoot I felt like I was sweating profusely.
There's something just so epic about having doors that go up like this. Ever since I got to sit in the Pagani Huayra BC and experience how cool it is just to close doors like these, I was sold. I find that the SLR had so many neat features to capture, so I tried to balance both promotional shots like the one above, with detailed shots like the ones below.
I find that the experience of seeing a car first in person and looking over all of its details before researching it online gives a much better impression of the car. Apart from the way the doors open, I hadn't really known much about the SLR, so seeing the front side exhausts, the McLaren badge, as well as the interior was very interesting.
In my opinion, I think that the outside of Alpha Shine has a beautiful contrast with almost any car that parks in front of it because of the dark background it offers. These next few shots I was really happy with, and when I posted them on Instagram they seemed to be enjoyed by many others as well.
Next up was the beautiful Mercedes S65 AMG. This car was going to be interesting to shoot as the colour of it is slightly green, but from far it looks like its black.
Even though I had to shoot on a high ISO, these interior shots were some of my favourite. It took me a few whole minutes of just looking around the inside to see all of the features this car has. I can only imagine that if you were to actually own this car, you'll probably need to sit down for a good hour or two to learn all of it's unique functions.
