Getting up close and personal with a very special race car

Recently I had the chance to shoot this Lamborghini, and not just any regular old run of the mill raging bull, this is the Lamborghini Murcielago R-GT GT1 ( Chassis # 5 of only 9 ever made). A purpose built race car built by Reiter Engineering in conjunction with Lamborghini to compere at LeMans. There are only a handful of parts that are shared with the road going supercar. Somehow this example found its way over here to Melbourne, Australia and somehow i had the good fortune to shoot it. This particular example was restored to its former 2004 American Le Mans Series glory by Jordan Roddy from Bespoke Motorcars in record time ( think serval weeks, not several months) and shipped over to the US just in time for its unveiling at the Monterey Car week back in August. Unfortunately this car will live the rest of its life in another country as 2 days after these photos were taken the car was sitting inside a shipping container bound for the US. Many thanks to Jordan and Vito from Polo Bodyworks for the opportunity to shoot this spectacular vehicle.

How were these images captured?

Shooting this scene was quite a challenge, although it's a beautifully presented machine the messy background and dull light/ shadow was not doing any favours in making the car stand out.
Unfortunately being a race car with no ground clearance it could not be moved more than a few meters. The location was the small industrial estate carpark where this Le Mans race-car was restored by @bespokemotorcars. To make the images a little more interesting i wanted to try something different. I took multiple exposures of the car with the Godox AD600 studio flash making sure to highlight certain areas.

The fog and fire looking smoke were produced by a modified insect fogger filled with diesel which created this haze. For the fire look i placed a Godox AD200 flash with a red gel behind the smoke to illuminate the plumes of fog/haze moving slowly from the front to the back of the car. Although it took a long time in post processing to layer all of these exposures to create the following images i'm very happy with the end result. I could not of achieved these images on the day without the help and expert advice from Ben Galli who i cant thank enough.

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