A few weeks ago I received a flyer in my mailbox from the Tavern Motor Club here in Bristol. It advised me that a rally of historic cars was planned for this Saturday morning. It involved up to 75 cars over a 165 miles course through the length of the Cotswolds.

The rally would be passing by the front of my driveway. A perfect photo opportunity when an event passes within 10 metres of my house. The cars would drive by my place between 9:30 and 11:30 am. By 9:20 I was in position with the camera mounted on a high-rise tripod facing directly down the lane where I could capture the cars coming up the climb. This is one of my favourite locations for portrait shoots as it offers an opportunity to set your image against a very out-of-focus background by virtue of the long-distance behind the subject. In this location, and with the aid of a fluid pan head I was also able to swing the camera through 90 degrees and catch the back of the cars too.

I quickly discovered that, unlike human models, cars have headlights and from my position looking straight down the road into the beam, there was a serious problem with getting the car well exposed. After the first two cars, I moved the camera off-centre to the road which resolved the headlight issue and caught a nicer perspective on the passing vehicles. I thought I had managed to capture every car, however, there had been a ten-minute gap without anyone driving by and I assumed the final competitor had passed by. Midway through dismantling my tripod and camera assembly two more came by in quick succession. Ah well, c'est la vie as they say.

During the event, I was taking advantage of my camera's new vehicle tracking auto-focus which worked superbly. I was also shooting at 12 frames per second and managed to capture nearly 800 images with virtually all of them in perfect focus. The 130 images below are my cherry-picked favourites. Reviewing the images was like a walk down memory lane as I grew up with these car models and even owned a couple of them. There was even a Rover 2000 which was the first car I ever bought. Sadly mine rotted away in a very short time unlike today's example which is 50 years older than mine would have been by now.

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