About a year ago McLaren contacted me saying that they’d seen some of my photos and were impressed, would I like to come to the factory and meet them? Fast forward to last week and I was on a flight to Bahrain writing out a shot list for a photo shoot of a McLaren P1 on the Bahrain International Circuit.
I was lucky with this shoot, McLaren had given me a fairly open brief so I got a lot of creative freedom, which is what is really great for producing the best results possible. This shoot was different to any shoot I’d done before and not just because of the weather. The scenery in Bahrain is very different to that of the UK and Europe that I’ve seen.
There wasn’t a huge amount of time to shoot the car, I was on a tight schedule and had just two days. To get the best light I decided it was a good idea to wake up in time for sunrise which in turn meant waking up at 4am (felt like 1am thanks to the time change) in order to drive to the circuit in time for the sunrise. Most of this set of photos was shot at sunrise and sunset so there was a mad rush at sunrise and sunset to get all the ‘money shots’. I also wanted to shoot some night photos in the pitlane after sunset. So shooting from 5am until 8pm, then back to the hotel to sort through all the photos and decide what to do the next day. After two long days of shooting it was the editing stage which was two days back in the office after the flight home making lots of little tweaks to get the exact feel I wanted on the photos.
Bahrain was an absolutely amazing place to take the photos, the weather was fantastic as you’d expect, but also the track was absolutely brilliant with lots of gradients and without too much clutter giving me the opportunity for clean backgrounds. So that’s close to the perfect location for me sorted, then to have the McLaren P1 to shoot there is just a photographers dream. Certainly was for me as I’ve been a big fan of McLaren since I was very young.
