19 Oct The New Addition
Meet Pearl, my brand new 2011 Honda CR-Z. She arrived about a week ago, straight off of the truck, seats still covered in plastic when I sat inside. I had to order her straight from the Honda factory, as there was only ONE of these cars in the entire state that was the model and color that I was after, and it got snatched up the same day I went to get it. Worked out for the better, cause there is just something cool about being the first one to sit in the car after it is delivered. Being that we live in Washington and we are heading into the rainiest part of the year, I figured it best to do a photo shoot with the car right away while it’s nice and shiny and the weather was still decent.
Now… as cool as this car is, Honda just failed to deliver a good marketing package with it, at least visually. To make your decision about the car via Honda’s website and not in person would be a tragedy. It’s such a beautiful car, with striking lines and curves… they just don’t translate well in Honda’s photo set. I’m not saying I took better overall photos of the car, but at least mine look “real.” The photos on their site are SO over-processed, almost have an HDR feel to them that completely disconnect the raw visuals from the car. If you go to the site you’ll see exactly what I mean, they look like artists renditions of the car. I could see if a car wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, so marketing teams would do their best to give an ok car an awesome look in the marketing. But I’d say Honda did the exact opposite here, the photos simply fail the car in most ways.
Aside from my protest of Honda’s site photos of the car, I own the car myself, and I took it upon myself to not only document the occasion of buying a new, cool looking car, I wanted to capture a photo series of the car that would bring out a little more intimacy and aggressiveness of the car, reveal the lines and curves that Honda’s photos just don’t have. (Honda, if you are reading this, I’m totally open to shooting next year’s campaign… :P).
I could go on and on about how much I love this car, but I wanna keep the post focused on the photography aspect. Simply put, this car is as fun to drive as it is to look at. Stylings inside and out are very well thought out by the Honda team, I think they hit the nail right on the head.
Shot all of these in about an hour, taken right at and after sunset, using some fading light in the background windows. Using a zoom while dragging a long shutter speed on these next ones provided some fun light streaks.
The lines of this car are just fun. Lighting the car from different angles literally makes the car pop in contrasting ways.
I still haven’t seen another CR-Z on the road, which is fun to say as well. I have a feeling that I won’t get to say that for long, cause even though this car will not be produced in numbers even close a civic, I think we’ll see a few on the road in the coming months. There are a lot of cool things about this car that I’ll let Honda explain to you on their site, and I definitely think if you like cars or are looking into a new purchase, give it a once over on the site now that you’ve seen some solid photos of the thing! 😉