Classic Days is a concours and driving festival held every August in the grounds of Schloss Dyck, a castle near Düsseldorf - cars from a Porsche 356 Speedster to a Porsche 917 sharing the same gravel drive as the people who brought them. I went in 2019 with a camera and no brief, shooting purely for myself.
No client, no shot list - just a day spent finding what was actually there: cars arriving and leaving, drivers gearing up before a run, the detail on a wing badge or a steering wheel boss. What's here is a selection from that day.
A concours like this moves in every direction at once - cars driving past, cars parked and static, drivers only in shot for the few minutes before they suit up and leave. There's no set-up shot to wait for; whatever works has to be found as it happens.
The cars range from a 1950s Porsche to a modern Bugatti, in every kind of light a grey August day in Germany can produce - working close for detail when the light was flat, further back when a car was moving fast enough to be worth panning.
I moved between three things through the day: cars in motion - worth panning to keep the car sharp against a blurred background - cars and their owners at rest, and close details worth a frame on their own: a badge, a wheel, an interior. The driver portraits came from working close to the paddock rather than staying behind the ropes.
Nothing came of this beyond the photographs themselves - no client, no brief to close out. It's here because a day like this is exactly the kind of shoot I keep coming back to: real cars, real light, no one asking for anything in particular.
