If you’ve seen my twitter posts in the past week, I spent a few days on the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah shooting the FIA Bonneville Shootout land speed record attempt with 400+mph cars!  For those that don’t know, the FIA is the governing body for race series like F1 (Formula 1) and the WRC (World Rally Championship).  I ran across all sorts of people, but the mechanics seemed to be the most colorful out of all that was there.  This guy (I can’t remember his name for the life of me) was pretty cool and with that beard, I had to take a few photos.  What you see is what you get out there on the salt.  Salt, lots of it.  Wide open nothingness.

A few weeks ago I went out to Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele, UT to help out Orlando Echeverria on his shoot for Modified Magazine of Aaron Brown’s Mitsubishi Evo 9.  Orlando’s shown me a bit with his camera rig shots and has a bit on his blog here of the behind the scenes.  As much as I’d love to be shooting my own rig shots, I haven’t committed to the investment of getting a proper rig, as they are quite expensive for me to do that right now!

Anyhoo, I finally got a chance to use some graduated neutral density filters, and take a car portrait out on the track so it was a pretty good day of new things for me.  I do have to say, driving my truck on a race track to get out to the shooting location was so so so painful……a truck, on a race track.  Yah.

This past week was quite the busy week.  I went out with the JMills Entertainment crew filming for their upcoming moto video, “Elevate” to New Plymouth, Idaho for “The Big Nasty” Moto hill climb race. After a few days of shooting one of the gnarliest races I’ve ever shot, we moved on to Mountain View, Wyoming for a freeride shoot on the moon.  The terrain there is crazy looking desert peaks with endless gullies and rolls.  It was a lot of fun with some real long days and I have more photos than I know what to do with to edit through.  Actually, it’s 66gb to be precise.  I’ll have my hands full editing so this is just a tease until I can get through those.  The photo above is hill climber of Jason Smith the 2010 NAHA champ in the 450 cc class.

The Bonneville Salt Flats is a place I’ve been to a few times, however never while any racing was going on.  It was quite the scene, very different from any auto race I’ve been to in the past, no frills, just insanely fast cars, as many RV’s as you’d see at Burning Man, vintage cars, vintage people, and…rednecks, lots and lots of rednecks.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to spend much time there so I didn’t really know the schedule and missed out on things like rocket cars, and an electric powered car breaking a land speed record reaching 307.66 MPH among many other things.  Another thing of note for those that haven’t been to a race out at the Bonneville Salt Flats, the racing itself is not exactly much of a spectator event, as the courses ranging from 1, 5, 7 and 14 miles don’t leave much for you to see.  What is great is the people and the cars themselves.  It’s definately worth the trip and I did get to see a lot of insane cars, the weird scene and of course being out on the salt is always an interesting experience!

Notice the VHS camcorder being held on to by the older guy……

]]> http://www.erikseo.com/blog/2010/08/speed-week-bonneville-salt-flats/feed/ 3 http://www.erikseo.com/blog/2010/08/subaru-sti-up-on-the-aspen-loop-near-mt-timpanogas/ http://www.erikseo.com/blog/2010/08/subaru-sti-up-on-the-aspen-loop-near-mt-timpanogas/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:47:03 +0000 Erik Seo http://erikseo.com/blog/?p=1517

This photo, shot about 2 years ago in October of 2008 is one I simply forgot about until recently.  It wasn’t until recently that I met a local automotive photographer, Orlando Echeverria and reminded me about composites and how I could make this shot work better than when I shot it.  I had some issues with my flashes working on this shoot so the lighting wasn’t as even as I was hoping for.  Today, I opened it up, and did some work in photoshop to bring it closer to what I had in mind originally.  I’m pretty stoked to get out and shoot a bit more, things such as this.  Look for more to come.

About a month ago I was out at Miller Motorsports Park taking some photos of my friend Matt Guiver racing his junkyard Nissan 240SX project and came across an old friend, Scott Brown who runs TDC Motorsports in Salt Lake City.  TDC helped me on my 77′ Scirocco build way back in the day, so needless to say I spent a lot of time at his shop and got to know him and his crew.  Scott brought me into one of the team garages out at MMP to show me the Audi R8 and all the parts from Heffner Performance twin turbo kit about to go in.  I’d been wanting to shoot some photos while Matt was working on the 240SX however our schedules just didn’t seem to work out very well but as it turns out, I had time to come out during the R8 build that Scott was doing.

The twin turbo would bring the R8 some pretty big gains, going from a stock 353 HP at the wheels to 536 HP with the added bonus of some great sound as well as some great looks under the trunklid (rear mounted motor) however once the heat shield and the rear bumper go back on the beauty of all turbo piping and exhaust get hidden.  At least it’s being covered with the PPI carbon body kit with the carbon diffuser on the rear bumper.  In fact in order to get some of the PPI carbon body kit parts mounted both bumpers had to be modified, as of course some drilling and cutting to mount the twin turbo kit.

It was pretty sick to see how quick Scott from TDC and Zach from Heffner Performance worked to complete the build in 5 days as it was quite a daunting task that was achieved.  It’s been a while since I shot a project that was really for fun and nothing else.  There will fortunately be more projects this summer that I’m doing, just to do.  I’m hitting the reset switch.

It’s been far too long since I had been out there, it’s such an amazing facility and we are very lucky to have it out there, especially since it’s only a 45 minute drive away from the city!  It was a fun day and it being a smaller level event it was a mellow scene there and I could go anywhere.  I also hadn’t actually shot from the infield before so it was nice to shoot from a different perspective than I’m used to from the perimeter of the course.  They have done a lot of work to the facilities out at Miller Motorsports Park since the last time I had been there which also made it really nice to be there!

I’ll be updating the site with more stuff from MMP in the future, mostly with Quick Pic blog posts but I’m doing a few projects out there that I’ll be posting later in the Summer when I’m finished.

Nothing else, just this photo.  Shot it a few weeks ago out in the garages at Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele, UT because it just looked cool.

Friends Billy Brooks and Eric Bizzak were both driving for Cobb Tuning with Billy driving one of the only JDM Nissan Skyline GT-R’s in North America and Eric driving Cobb’s Mazda Speed 3 in another class.

Of course, I took photos, check them out below.