So I am fortunate enough to have two mag covers this month, one of which got me in a fair bit of trouble, but we’ll save that discussion for another day. Regardless, the February 2009 cover of Modified Mag is something that came together after a good amount of planning and some help from our friends at Tomei USA. Tomei has been at the forefront of JDM tuning since way back in the day, and honestly I can even remember an old issue of Import Tuner (2002ish??) where Non-Fujita’s Tomei crate motor powered car was on the cover. That was apparently one of the first cars in the US to have an actual Tomei crate motor installed, and even today it is a rarity to see the trademark Tomei blue under the hood. Anyhow, Riki and Eiji had been helping us secure some awesome shop tours and feature cars for an upcoming trip to Hong Kong, and as we were discussing their worldwide distributors and partners, the name Zele International (pronounced ZEEL, but not to be confused with the other Zeal) came up. I had seen the car on a couple blog sites and the Murcielago orange paint and the forged Gram Light R57-GT’s made this thing stand apart from the rest of the GT-R crowd. After talking with Kamata-san we learned that the car would be here for the SEMA show and figured we should jump on it before the masses caught wind on the show floor.
Here are some behind the scenes photos from the track portion of the shoot at Buttonwillow Raceway. Back in October at one of our creative meetings down at Source’s LA office we realized that amongst the last few years of cover shots we had neglected the rear 3/4 image quite a bit. It was decided that we should go for one of these on an upcoming cover, and the R35’s distinctive rear end would provide plenty of recognition on the store shelves regardless. So after the long journey to the middle of nowhere (Buttonwillow) we had some time set aside after Super Lap Battle to do essentially just that – setup on a nice corner where we could incorporate rumble strips and photograph the R35 blasting off into the sunset. Since this created a backlit situation in terms of lighting, Peter and I lit the rear of the car with strobes so that we wouldn’t lose the oil cooler and exhaust, and then composited the shot together with the long rig exposure creating the motion blur.
The other portion of the shoot took place in the SIM Studio in Gardena, which is a fully equipped (Chimera F2 Overhead Light Bank) + 30 + packs and heads with some major wattsecond output. I always love setting up shots with the actual gear as part of the composition. Here is one such sample shot that did not make the mag:
Here is a shot of me snapping some details in the cove (if you look closely you can see the booties over my feet to keep the footprints from ruining the white floor). I also added a pic of the folks over at Zele International for good measure:
Right after we finished up with Zele they were back off to Japan to prepare for the next big show, Tokyo Auto Salon 2009…
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