Mike Maez Automotive Photography Blog

If you happen to be flying Southwest this month…

For those of you who fly Southwest on a regular basis and just happen to leave all your copies of Modified Mag at home, I encourage you to pickup the latest copy of Spirit Magazine, which is the official mag of Southwest Airlines. No, unfortunately I did not shoot the cover, nor have I ever met Magic Johnson. Buuuuut…

…besides the insightful travel tips and colorful destination photography this month, be sure to check out page 26:

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Just a little something I did mid-last year; documenting the new world’s fastest production car (besting the Bugatti Veyron no less) with the crew at Shelby Super Cars (SSC) on various closed down highways in and around Wendover, Utah. Here are some behind the scenes photos from some of the shakedown runs (yes, that would be 221mph on the Nuvi on their shakedown run):

Breaking a top speed world record is no short order, as there are but a small handful of places in the country where you can actually attempt this feat. The Nevada D.O.T. was on hand to route traffic and close off the road for each attempt, and I also snapped a pic of the local sheriff as a souvenir for what is almost certainly the strangest car he’s ever come across. I sent him some prints at no charge!!

And here is the final image setup and then sent around the world when they broke the Guinness World Record. For the strobists out there – image was shot with a 1D Mark II, 70-200 2.8L IS and 3 580EX’s, triggered via pocketwizard and held by human light stands (the best light stands ever):

Not content to rest on their laurels, SSC has made some interesting announcements in the past year.

1) They have announced plans to release the SSC Ultimate Aero EV, allegedly powered by twin 500hp electric motors and holding a charge of several year(s)(!)

2) The original SSC Ultimate Aero is now outdated, as they officially debuted the much improved 2009 Ultimate Aero at the 2009 Abu Dhabi International Motor Show. The car will now do 270+mph and will have 1287bhp(!!)

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Uh, Officer, there must be something wrong with your radar… « Pocketwizard Blog - [...] Mike Maez documented the event in Utah that eventually made the Guinness Book of Records. And yes, he did snap the officer’s [...]

Phat Photographer - I don’t know what’s more impressive – the car or the photography?

Scott Eyre - awesome photos, I aspire to take photos as good as thes, Im waiting on funds for a flash then I want to give this another shot, and experiment

awesome work

Martin Sector - Uh…is that a horsepower gauge? O_o

February 2009 Modified Mag Cover – on newsstands now!!

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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Dave Pratte - Looking good, Mike! And, um, whoever wrote that Zele story is a mad genius