Red Bull

This weekend was the annual Battle for the Bay which is generally afflected with a massive lack of wind. There was less this year than last year, which is saying a lot. The sun shone on Saturday though; it did not on Sunday so there was dancing in the rain and stuff.

Anyway, I took a few photographs; not too many, just a few to play with.

One of the major sponsors of the event is Red Bull and they have a fleet of Minis. And a big tent. They also have a big Dodge too but I’ll come to that in a while.

I like messing with cars. Not Minis so much but I had a ball at Japfest last year. I didn’t really know quite what to do with the Minis – there were 4 Red Bull Minis and 3 Spin 1038 Minis and apart from getting down on your hands and knees with a 10-20, there’s not a lot else of interest. At some stage though, the clouds caught my eye, and I lined up the pyramid behind it. The Dodge was nowhere to be seen but that’s just a small price. The biggest hassle was realising the Mini had a dent on it. Darn it anyway.

I wanted a slightly more ominous cloud so I poured a pile of sepia paint onto the sky and bumped up the contrast a little. Had to undo that for the car which got overly dark after that.

I seem to wind up photographing these things in the rain. I should possibly have tried the day before but at most I got a couple of the Spin girls in front of their Minis and while the photo is nice, it’s not cover of a magazine nice. I’m heavily influenced by the cover of car magazine, basically, and maybe a little TopGear thrown in now and again. If I were doing this again, I’d try and get the front wheels of the car turned out a little.

Here’s the Dodge.

I’d love to know where they got it. I saw it for the first time last year or the year before, can’t remember which now and it’s amazing what they’ve done to it. Megapimped up. I love it. I pushed this as far into the high keys as I could so it’s a bit burnet out looking. I’m toying with painting out extraneous stuff in the background and then seeing if I can get more of the sand back in to a floor texture. Could be fun. Not doing it now though.

Right. Now for some pointing out of nice things that other people are doing.

Richard is recreating Jack Vettriano scenes. I’ve known about this for a while but since I haven’t been posting myself I haven’t actually flagged it. Today’s one is really lovely though so here’s a link to it.

Triple S is on in Hatteras at the moment. I planned to get over to it this year but for various reasons, a short trip to North Carolina just wasn’t possible. Day 2 looks like it was a stunner – certainly Bryan Elkus has a few really hot shots from yesterday.

I used to do the singer songwriter evenings in the International years ago, at the same time as Damien Dempsey in fact. Which is why this one of Tommie’s caught my eye. That being said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say Damien Dempsey gives me hope…per se.

Another place I might have been had I not been in Dublin is Galway for the powerboat racing. Count on John Smyth to pick up something nice there, however

I’m also slightly behind in my feedreader which is why I missed this diving special from Big Shots. I’ve tried springboard diving. Respect; that’s all I’ll say.

Update.

I haven’t been in here much, but this is the retouched version of the RedBull Dodge above.

I am biased of course, but I like it….