Since the very first time I saw this photograph, I was probably 12, it never failed to make me smile, i still can feel the energy of the frame, every time. And since then, I had this idea of "wouldn't be cool if instead of a speaker-sound its a bunch of dirt from a racetruck?" I kept thinking... Didn't realize my fascination with photography then, but now it's a different story.
Original work for Maxell: Steve Steigman
Lately, SCORE's races have become a playground where I can try different things, the perks of the freelance life...
Decided to take advantage of the Baja400 coming at the time, I managed to get exactly the parts needed to accomplish the 'vision-in-my-head', most of them were accomplished by a couple runs to the thrift stores.
I had an opportunity, I had the furniture and I had the hair... just needed the trophy-truck part...
I thought having a top-tier team would be the coolest thing ever, so I reach out Justin Chaisson of Menzies Motorsports, I told him the idea and they agreed to take a shoot during pre-running days, just a couple days shy of race day.
Luckily for me, Bryce Menzies uses on specific days, an exact replica of his actual trophy-truck to pre-run... I knew a pre-runner in the frame wouldn't have the same 'feel'.
Finally, I needed a clean background so I opted to go to the beach section, figured it's a win-win situation to have the sea in the shot, such an iconic Baja scenario.
Shooting day! Left my place at 4 am, I wasn't sure at what time Bryce will go thru that section so i needed to be sure I was there and ready. My old friend 'Parnelli' and I got there with a couple of hours of spare time, enough to find a little patch of fesh-fesh and set the scene. Meanwhile we had to be careful of the hot-traffic coming literally through my set.
We intercepted some friends along the way. Cheers GetSome crew!
The photo is a result of a composite (obviously, i mean, i'm too pretty to get my face smashed like that) made of several frames that were puzzled in photoshop together. Notice how much the light changes between the photos below, we shoot a lot of frames, just to be sure...
And then Menzies prerunner approaches followed later by the trophy truck and even the helicopter, felt like a rockstar for a moment, not gonna lie. We then opted for two different approaches for the TT into the frame.
First, easy enough, to make the truck do a burnout in front of the couch, but due to the 4WD capability, the truck was out of the frame by the time it started spraying dirt, a 2WD truck would do it in a second, but not this one, the tip of the spear in trophy-truck technology...
After a few takes we changed the approach into a 'turn', letting Bryce get momentum enough to slide as close as he can from the couch without touching it. He delivered on the first take but did a couple just to be sure... After that, with smiles all-around, I thank them and off they go, to continue doing their homework.
Thank you Bryce, Justin and Rene from Menzies Motorsports team for helping me putting all this together.
Also thank you to my friend 'Parnelli' for assisting me during the whole day.
I ended up with both compositions that worked great, I picked the one on the left, as is more ad-hoc to the original 'Maxell' photograph but to make the poster a reality we used the one on the right so we could have more truck, you know, sponsors and all that...
Which take us to the final poster design; I wanted to keep the simplicity of the original Maxell poster but adding a little connection of the #1 truck body pattern into the background and using the same Maxell fonts it became a retro-poster that I hope to see for years to come at random places in Baja...
Finally, to keep the intensity of the top phrase, I took the liberty to change it a bit...
I'm cooking other ideas now and I can't wait for 2025... actually I can wait, i don't mind some time off...
Happy holidays and I hope to see you all next season.
E.
Ps. my buddy parnelli was able to shoot a little bit of that day if you want to check it out too...
