(shot on my phone so I could text it to my editor and tell him what he was missing)I was told to show up at 1pm and that the festivities would start shortly thereafter. I showed up at 1 on the nose and the whole group of 150 people was munching on lunch. I lurked in a corner in the back with some coffee until one of the leaders of the group found me, sat me in his seat, and demanded I eat some lunch. The cheesecake was particularly good :-) If every speaker I shot was like this, I wouldn't need to get paid!
After I got the frames I wanted, I snuck out the back (again with coffee, I'm getting addicted) and as I was leaving the hotel lobby I saw a 2006 Corvette in a gorgeous orange parked in the loading/unloading area.
I'm going to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of corvettes. They produced way too many icky bodies in the 80's and 90's to be really high on my list of awesome cars. With that said though, I love the corvettes from 2005 on. LOVE them! As I walked to admire the car, its owner came out and notified me that approximate 250 MORE corvettes would be joining him in about 2 hours! If I had made any plans for that afternoon, I would have cancelled them. As it was, I didn't have any plans, so I drove home, edited the shoot I had just done, formatted my card and went back out to the hotel.
Here's a crappy camera-phone shot of corvettes as far as the eye could see. As soon as we hit the back parking lot (where the parking spaces were wider), it was nothing but corvettes from every era. Most of them were '98 and newer, but there were a few older models as well.
Of all the ones I saw (and I did my best to see all of them), I only found 2 that were supercharged. The car above had absolutely monstrous rear tires. I have never ever seen tires that big on a sports car, easily 18" wide (though I didn't measure them).
The hardest part about shooting all these cars was getting an angle that didn't include a bunch of noise in the background, and that excluded all the other cars. There was no uniformity in the way they were parked, so a pattern was out of the question. Most of the cars had their owners shining, cleaning and polishing them (which it appears they do every time they park). It felt great to see people who really care about their vehicles, but they did get in the way a bit. Now that I think of it, it probably would have been cool to get a few shots of the owner/car combo... but it didn't occur to me at the time and most of the gentlemen (and they were mostly older men) were too absorbed in their cleaning rituals to pose for pictures.Overall, saving my editor's butt turned out to be a huge win :-D
