Ken Block Gets Crazy With VectorMount for GoPro In Gymkhana 6

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So I don’t know if you guys remember the company I was doing video and photo work for until early this year, VectorMount for GoPro (there's one of my pics above that you might recognize), but all that time and effort has begun to finally pay off in immeasurable dividends, especially throughout the racing community, most evident in the Hoonigan production of Ken Block’s latest iteration of the Gymkhana series…number 6, the Ultimate Gymkhana Grid Course. If you haven’t seen this followup to the now legendary Gymkhana Five, in which he drifted through the streets of San Francisco, DO IT! In this one, Block basically drifts his souped-up Ford Fiesta through a video game obstacle course, replete with wrecking ball cranes, police-laden Segways, Lamborghinis, and shipping containers. Yeah, he’s a bit off his rocker, but that’s precisely why it’s already got 15 MILLION views in less than a month. 

The flagship VectorMount product, if haven’t checked it out, uses a wind-vane and centrifugal force to automatically turn the camera in the direction the car turns in, so you’re effectively seeing the angle of the view that the driver is seeing, versus a static mount, which, well, gives you a static shot, so you’ll just see whatever is off to the side, rather than the angle the car is heading into. Anyhow, Steve Greenthal, the owner and inventor of the VectorMount has been tweaking and adjusting and modifying and perfecting the bugger in his usual mad-scientist ways over the past 8 months and has managed to make the VectorMount into a prominent part of this Hoonigan production! I suppose I’m just a bit proud that I got to be a part of this thing from it’s infancy and was there at Formula Drift in 2012 where Ken Block and the Hoonigans crew got their first look at it. Seeing it plastered all over his latest madding production just reinforces the long way it's come since we used them on Go-Karts with Tony Hawk and Kev Jumba less than a year ago.

Anywho, that’s it for now. Just got off the phone with Steve and saw the videos and figured I’d throw this around! Any of the shots from the roof exterior that remain focused on the course while the roof underneath it swivels left and right…that’s the VectorMount in action!

Above is Ken Block and Hoonigan’s official Gymkhana release, and below is GoPro’s cut of the same course as well as a few of Steve Greenthal's pics of Ken Block pimpin' one of the VectorMounts used during the Gymkhana 6 taping.

Check out more about VectorMount at www.VectorMount.com (they make holiday gift recipients love you more…).

My Best Photograph Was A Mistake!

So last week I was hired to photograph a Scion FRS that was completely and insanely modified by Megan Racing's Race Division. The day started with some closeup detail images from underneath the car of the various modifications they performed for a presentation that the company would be doing to show off what they did with this thing. In effect, they turned an already sweet looking ride into a growling piece of art that I'd be afraid to let out of it's cage.

But once we finished the close-ups, it was time to get the entire sucker, so they brought it down off the lift and unleashed it into the parking lot. It was like letting a lion out of it's cage. While they wouldn't let me take the POV shots I jokingly (not really) suggested, they did let me position it around the buildings and lot adjacent to the shop, so I got to work. The time of day was still about an hour away from optimal, but I had to work with what we had, so just went for it, gambling on the game of numbers, if I shot enough, I was bound to come away with a few keepers. This was another instance in which my Eye-Fi card came in handy...that sucker has yet to leave slot two!

Anyhow, I definitely came away with what I thought were some solid keepers, but what I didn't expect was that the shot I ended up liking the best was one that, at the time, was a mistake - a painfully obviously underexposed image as I was trying to compensate for a very bright sky, but I went too far on the right side of the dial.

Yet, for some reason, I didn't delete it.

When I got to my laptop, and loaded them into Lightroom and started starring and flagging the obvious ones, my eye kept glancing over, but eventually passing by one particular shot. "But it was almost a completely solid black frame," I kept telling myself. Regardless, every time I scrolled thought the images, I'd instinctively slow down when I got to that image. So finally, after about 20 minutes of this, I said screw it, I'm gonna play with it. If anything, I can get it out of my system.

So I opened the Develop pane in Lightroom, viewed it at 100%, and RIGHT AWAY knew exactly why I kept subconsciously coming back to it - the highlights. The cars contours were just about perfectly highlighted from a backlit sun. So I decided that's exactly what I'd focused on. Ironically enough, I ended up further under exposing an already underexposed image...I figured it was the mysterious highlights that were drawing me to it, so why not magnify the effect of those very highlights.

That's what I did. I brought up the highlights, I emphasized the shadows, and that created an beautiful contrast with the sky and the silhouette of the background and surroundings - skyscraper stacks of discarded wooden shipping palates.

Yes, the car is insane!! Absolutely. And I'm sure Megan Racing was none too happy that my featured image on a car that they spent so much time and money and energy on was an image where, well, you couldn't see the car, but if you're like me, after seeing this image, you just want to see more, whereas if the car was shown clearly right off the bat, you would have already absorbed the payoff!!

The moral of the story? Make more mistakes!

Without any further adieu, here are the finals: