Beast mode

Recently visited an off-road racing event held in a large open quarry. I really enjoyed the day and crawling all over the huge open area - the cars were obviously fun to watch as well.

Zoom-zoom

Driving off into the sunset one late autumn evening.

Country Roads, Take Me Home

Gregor's "new oldtimer", Citroen CX Break in a beautiful rainy sundown, on a country road. Taken with the new 24 megapixel Nikon D3200. Not that those pixels are used here on blogspot, or anywhere else :) The car is not new in his garage, but the certified old-timer title is. And comfortable ride this is. No matter if it's driven on a highway or on a country road.

Hemi beast

I spotted this Dodge Ram 1500 (with a Hemi engine, no less) in San Francisco recently. For anyone from the US, this is obviously nothing special, but coming from Europe, we very rarely see a full-size pick-up such as this one.

The Ultimate

Not much to say, after all, it's written a few times - this must be one ultimate machine.

Looking the other way

Sometimes we're more interested in the future than in what's happening in front of us. Even if what's in front of us is a Formula 3 race car. I took this shot quite a while ago in Barcelona, where I spent a weekend - the main race of the weekend was a DTM race, and the European Formula 3 series is a partnership series of the DTM. 

White Power Factory

Why are there so many white Toyota Hilux pickup trucks? Because the desert is hot in summer! Actually taken from the top of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Gift suggestion

This is what I wanted for Christmas, but all I got are red boxers with Santa on it. The picture of this beautiful Alfa Romeo 8c Competizione was taken last year at Bologna Motorshow. It is a true beauty, but sadly limited to 500 pieces. It is powered by Maserati V8 and produces 450 horsepower. Nice, but some tests say that sadly is not driven that good... a beauty though.

Ford Mustang

For some reason I can't quite fathom, our post with the Chevy Nova SS is one of our most popular posts (at least with regards to Google hits). Well, I've recently started seeing another classic muscle car in Ljubljana, this beautiful Ford Mustang Coupe (hardtop). It is a first-generation Mustang, though I don't know from which year. According to Wikipedia, the lights would suggest it's from at least 1969, but the placing of the emblem in the center of the grill, the square mirrors and the emblem on the sides would lead one to believe it is from 1966 (possibly also 1967 or 1968). I took the photo at night with my camera on a tripod.

Smooth as silk

Taken late one evening at the small plateau of Rakitna, to the south of Ljubljana.

Auto-portrait at sunset

Taken sometime last year with a wide-angle lens I was testing. Yes, that's my car and my shadow on the window, behind me is a beautiful sunset. Taking photos of sunsets is way overrated: pretty much everyone who has ever owned a camera has a few nice photos of sunsets. The trick is to look the other way and try to find something else that is interesting in the awesome light a sunset gives off. The mountains in the background are the Karavanke.

The Beast

I noticed this AMG Mercedes-Benz C-Class lurking in a garage at Barcelona's race track. It's from the german DTM series, similar to the car Ralf Schumacher now drives for team Mercedes. This thing weighs just 1050 kg (with the driver inside) and has a 4 liter V8 which puts out around 500 horsepower at 7500 RPM.

"... as you can see, these are not Honda Civics. This is one of three brand-new Mercedes ... "

My balloon

This is probably as good as it gets in life - you are four years old (five?), you get a balloon and you spend an afternoon looking at some weird old cars. There are adults all around getting excited about these old cars, you're not sure what the point is (after all, aren't new cars better than old ones?), but it doesn't matter, you have a balloon.

Anyhow, this was taken with my old Konica on black and white film at a old-timer meeting in the center of Ljubljana sometime last year. With photography, you can usually tell the time period of a photograph by small details such as cars. But with photographing old cars such as these with an old film camera, I could probably convince people that the photos were taken thirty or forty years ago.

Is this what they really want :)

Here are some folks from the Alfa Romeo club slovenia. And this picture was taken on top of the highest mountain pass in slovenia, Vršič. But these guys just don't look so sure that they want to go on :)

Is this going to work?

Janez, a good friend of ours, is nuts about car acoustics (and acoustics in general). I seems like his car will never be finished - there will always be something which can be improved - from better speakers to a better amplifier to better cables (yes, cables). Anyhow, he helped Žiga with the music in his car as well. This photo is from one of the countless tweaking sessions of Žiga's car. It's that final moment before you turn something on and pray that it doesn't blow up. Žiga's expression pretty much says it all.

The Chase

An Audi being chased by what I think is another Audi, last September at the Circuit deCatalunya near Barcelona. Like before, I used a technique known as panning where you follow a moving object with the camera. If you manage to follow it well, the object should be sharp while the background is blurred (you also need to use a relatively slow shutter speed, in the case of racing cars, 1/100 of a second is more than slow enough).

Rock Star

The picture of Grega was taken when we were driving in some hot weather with the windows down and the wind having taken control of his hair. I've removed the Adidas logo from his glasses, because with obviously sporty glasses he looked like a rock star on a medical treatment. With those pure black sunglasses he looks like a real rock star, driving along the highway, free and cool, enjoying the wind in his cabriolet :)

Chevy Nova SS

This is (as far as I can tell) a third generation Chevy Nova SS. I was driving along and just had to pull over when I saw it - american muscle cars are quite rare in Europe, even more so in Slovenia. The photo was taken on Velvia film, which perfectly shows off the red-purple colour.

Overtaking

I've already posted two photos from a race weekend in Barcelona, but no cars. This should fix things. These are both from the DTM race series, and these cars are LOUD. Unlike with most racing series, there are no rules as to how loud the cars can be (or can't be). This is to make the sport more interesting for the spectators. Standing as close to the race track as I could get, it was actually painful whenever one of these thundered by. The Audis are actually more painful to hear than the Mercedes, even though they are not louder or anything, they just have a different sound.

When photographing cars, it's often hard to show speed - if you just point the camera and click, the chances are that the car will look like it's standing still. The trick is to have a long shutter speed and to follow the car with the camera, this way the car is sharp while the background is blurred. It's not as easy as it sounds, especially since I started out with too slow shutter speeds - around 1/30th of a second. I played around for a while, going up to 1/100th, though I later learned that most people shoot even faster - up to 1/200th.

The machine that needs no man

I took a photo of this wild, wild Yugo in a small slovenian village called Osp. We were climbing the rocks above the village and at the end of the day, while walking back to our car, we saw this brutal machine. It had tractor tires and a german registration (license plate). Can anyone explain that? The village boys told us that they made it for the Carnival, and that this is only the beginning :)