The automobile is a difficult subject because it has already been seen. Every line of a Bentley, every shoulder of a Maserati, has been printed in showroom catalogues and brand films a thousand times before the photographer arrives. The work, then, is not to describe the car. The work is to refuse the obvious view of it — to find the angle, the hour, and the discipline of light that lets the object behave like a piece of sculpture again. That refusal is what an editorial automotive photograph is for.

This series collects work made between 2018 and 2024 for a small group of luxury commissions, brand campaigns, and personal editorial studies in New York, Miami, and the inland causeways around Boca Raton. The cars are mostly grand tourers, a handful of marque flagships, and a few quiet personal projects shot on private estates. None of these images were made for the showroom; all of them were made for the printed page, the long-format brand film, and the watch and jewellery editorial spread, where a car is rarely the headline but is always the geometry under the headline.

The Subject

An automobile is, in photographic terms, a curved mirror with wheels. Almost every surface on a finished car is reflective. That single fact dictates everything that follows: choice of lens, choice of light, choice of background, choice of weather. A bad photograph of a luxury car is a photograph in which you can see the photographer, the assistants, the parking lot, and the building across the street folded into the lacquer of the door. A good photograph of a luxury car is a photograph in which you can see, instead, a chosen world: a sky, a single architectural line, the stripe of a runway, the lip of a marina at dawn. The car is reflecting a gallery of decisions.

That is why these images are so often shot before the city wakes, or after it has gone home. The empty streets of lower Manhattan at four in the morning, a closed terminal at Miami Executive, a slip of marble outside a private hangar — these are not chosen for the romance. They are chosen because there is nothing in them that the car will accidentally borrow. Editorial automotive work is a long argument with reflections.

Light Discipline

There is a particular Profoto setup I keep returning to for this work: a single large soft source above the windshield arc, a long thin strip used to draw the shoulder line of the body, and a low fill that does almost nothing except open the wheel arches. The image is then often built across multiple exposures. One frame for the body, one frame for the chrome, one frame for the wheel face, occasionally one frame for the badge alone. The final photograph is a composite, but it is a composite of a single car in a single place at a single hour. Nothing is faked; everything is allowed to look like itself, only at its best.

Daylight work is its own discipline. The hour just before sunrise gives the cleanest cool wrap on a black or oxblood paint job; the hour just after sunset gives the deepest amber on champagne and silver finishes. Midday is almost always wrong, because the sun is small and hard and prints onto the bonnet as a violent white blade. When daylight is the only option, I shoot under high overcast, which is the world's largest softbox and asks for nothing in return.

Composition & Geometry

A car is built by industrial designers who understand line. The photographer's job is to honour that line and then quietly improve it. I tend to favour three-quarter views taken from a low camera height, because the low angle preserves the visual mass of the wheel and the three-quarter view gives the eye both the front graphic and the long flank in a single read. Profile shots are reserved for cars whose silhouette is genuinely famous — a vintage Continental, a Quattroporte at rest. Front-on shots are reserved for marques whose grille is an emblem in itself.

Composition for editorial automotive work is governed less by the rule of thirds than by the rule of containment. The frame should hold the car the way a jeweller's tray holds a watch — tightly, with a narrow margin of negative space that says this object has been chosen. Wide environmental frames are used sparingly, and only when the environment itself has been earned: a Venetian causeway at blue hour, a private hangar with a Gulfstream's wing as the back wall, a single colonnade of palm.

Commercial Practice

The commercial side of this work is built around three kinds of client. The first is the marque or dealer commissioning a campaign — usually a small set of hero images plus a wider library for digital and print. The second is the lifestyle brand using a vehicle as a prop in a fashion or watch editorial: in those frames, the car is the second subject, never the first, and the lighting is built for the model and the wristpiece, with the car treated as architecture. The third is the private collector documenting a rare car for insurance, archival, or auction purposes — a much quieter brief, usually shot in studio conditions, sometimes on a turntable, with a lighting pass that prioritises accuracy over drama.

Each brief asks for a different kind of restraint. The campaign image must be loud enough to survive a billboard but clean enough to survive a magazine spread. The editorial image must defer to the watch or the dress. The archival image must show the truth of the paint, including the truth of the chips and the truth of the polish. None of them tolerate a photographer with a single style. The discipline is to be quiet enough to let the car decide what it wants to be, and then to make that decision look inevitable.

Equipment & Process

The kit list is short and stable. A full-frame Canon body, a small set of L-series primes — the 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm cover almost every brief — and one long zoom for the rare frames where compression is the entire point. Lighting is Profoto, generally a B10 Plus and a pair of B1X heads, with a portable softbox and a long thin strip that lives in the back of the truck. A polariser stays on the lens for almost every exterior frame, because the polariser is the difference between paint and glare. A grey card stays in the kit because the difference between editorial and commercial is, sometimes, a degree of colour temperature.

Post-production for this work is done in a calibrated print-grade environment. The compositing is largely Photoshop with a long roundtrip through Capture One for raw conversion. Colour is the slowest part of the process: a Bentley red is not a Ferrari red is not a Cartier-jewel red, and a champagne paint job under tungsten is not a champagne paint job under daylight. The promise to the client is that the colour they see in the printed editorial is, within the limits of the substrate, the colour of the paint as it left the factory.

What an Image Owes

Editorial automotive photography is the small, unglamorous discipline of owing the object an honest description. The car is a product of design decisions made years before the shutter opens; the photographer's only ethical obligation is not to flatter it past the point of recognition. Done well, the image gives the marque something the marque cannot quite make for itself — a frame in which the car looks neither like a brochure nor like an advertisement but like an artefact, a chosen thing in a chosen world. That is the standard the work in this series tries to meet.

The photographs collected here are a small selection from a much larger archive built across roughly a decade of editorial and brand commissions in the United States. Commissions and licensing enquiries are routed through Biricik Media in Boca Raton; private and archival shoots are arranged direct.

On Place

An automotive editorial frame is, in the end, a piece of urbanism. The car cannot be separated from the city it was photographed in, because the city is what is reflected in the paint. South Florida and lower Manhattan, the two regions where most of this work was made, give very different photographs. Manhattan gives hard rectangles — window grids, steel facades, the long verticals of midtown — and those rectangles fold into the lacquer like a graphic. South Florida gives soft horizontals — ocean line, palm canopy, the low marble of a hangar floor — and those horizontals stretch out across the body of the car like a long quiet ribbon. The same vehicle photographed in both cities does not look like the same vehicle. That is the point. An editorial commission is an argument for a place as much as it is an argument for a marque.

Boca Raton, where the studio is based, sits between those two photographic worlds and adds a third — the private estate, the long gated driveway, the manicured forecourt. A surprising amount of luxury automotive editorial in the United States is shot on private property for reasons of permit, of permission, and of polish. The estate forecourt is, in practical terms, a private soundstage with real architecture and real planting; it is one of the few places where a photographer can spend three hours building a single frame without a passing taxi reflecting itself into the bonnet at minute one hundred and seventy-nine.

Working with Marques & Watch Houses

Many of the frames in this archive were made for editorials in which a luxury timepiece, a piece of high jewellery, or a fashion look was the headline subject and the car was the architecture beneath it. Watch houses in particular — Patek Philippe, Cartier, Hublot, Breitling, IWC Schaffhausen, Vacheron Constantin, Roger Dubuis, Audemars Piguet, Glashütte, Richard Mille, Jaeger-LeCoultre — tend to commission editorial work in which a grand tourer or a flagship saloon plays the role of stage. The discipline there is unusual. A wristshot must be lit for the dial; the car must be lit so that it does not throw a single distracting reflection into the crystal of the watch. Two lighting plans run simultaneously, on the same set, sometimes with the same hand on the polariser ring of the lens.

The brand-side commissions for marques and dealer networks — Bentley Motors, Maserati, Porsche Design among them — tend to ask for a much cleaner photographic vocabulary: a hero frame, a long flank, a wheel-and-shoulder detail, a badge close-up, and a single environmental wide. The library is then released through the brand's own channels and through the lifestyle press. Aviation and yacht clients — Fontainebleau Aviation, Azimut Yachts — bring their own architecture into the frame, and the car becomes the foreground actor against a Gulfstream wing or a sixty-metre hull. The discipline is the same: refuse the obvious view, choose the world that the paint will reflect, and earn the geometry of the final composition one decision at a time.