Commercial car photographer Tim Wallace has been working closely with our Aston Martin client this month as a new project to create a dedicated Aston Martin ‘Enhancements’ website nears completion.
Aston fully restore many vintage classic Aston Martin’s ranging from very early models such as the DB1 through to the infamous DB5 and later models such as the more recent V8. All of these cars are able to have modern enhancements made to them such as the installation of power steering and handling suspension upgrades through to satellite navigation systems and adjusting the driving position from the right to the left. The site is planned to go live in August and represents a view off all the current and popular enhancements available with all photography being provided by Ambient Life and shot by photographer Tim Wallace.
Archive for July, 2012
The ‘Pro Book’ represents a online copy of our automotive car photography work presented on screen as a portfolio but more in the traditional sense, a soft copy you could say of the actual Pro Book that we may use in client meetings or with agents. The book is updated four times each year and we are very pleased to announce the launch of the Q3 version of the book.
Tim’s Pro Book for his automotive car photography receives a vast amount of interest from clients and agencies alike and we hope that this new release of Tim’s Portfolio inspires and demonstrates his create style and approach as well as showcasing some of his recent work both in the UK and Internationally.
DBS shoot Switzerland
The Aston Martin DBS is today still seen as one of the best known current Aston super cars and one of the most aggressive looking with its sleek lines and deep intake details. This week car photographer Tim Wallace spent some time with the DBS for Aston shooting this elegant beast in locations from the Swiss Alps to the beautiful rural town of Estavayer-le-Lac in Switzerland for an advertising feature.
The car was made famous by James Bond in last year’s Casino Royale, with the DBS is a race-bred road car based on the DB9 and Le Mans class-winning DBRS9. Using a tweaked version of the six-litre V12 engine from the outgoing Vanquish S, the DBS produces a titanic 510bhp and 420lb/ft of pulling power.
Engineers have tuned the engine to give it a bit more oomph above 5,500rpm – making it the fastest accelerating Aston ever.
The DBS rockets from 0-62mph (100kph) in 4.3 seconds and 0-100mph in 9.4 seconds before running out of steam at 191mph.
Weight has been cut by 120kg, by fitting lighter seats, lighter brakes and carbon fibre panels.
The DBS’s handling is more responsive than on the brilliant DB9, with an adaptive suspension varying the level of stiffness according to the road conditions. On the outside, the DBS – which rolls on sexy 20-inch wheels – has a sculpted, muscular bodykit reflecting the DBRS9 with more air intakes than on the DB9 to increase airflow into the engine
Welcome to new client Spellbound
This week we would like to welcome Spellbound as a new client to Ambient Life. The company based just outside London that are passionate about cars and provide a specialised business for the restoration and race preparation of models such as Ferrari and Jaguar. Spellbound Cars is a union of individuals all passionate about iconic cars and the pursuit of excellence. Experience, passion and a great drive to deliver the highest level of service is at the heart of a very unique workshop. The workshop is equipped with high-tech machinery and facilities, enabling restoration or repairs of all levels to be completed in-house. The Spellbound Cars team has wealth of experience in both the building of cars, and from behind the wheel, both on road and track.
They understand what is required to prepare a car to withstand the specific demands of every discipline whether fast touring on Alpine passes, or competing in hillclimbs, sprints, track days, historic championship racing, or even challenges such as the Nordshleife Marathon and the Spa Six Hours and of course Goodwood.
This week saw the launch of a new ‘Car Photography’ competition launch with the Organisation ‘I SHOT IT’ who run several themed competitions through the course of the year and have professional photographers in the chosen fields to judge these with the winner collecting a cash prize. Ambient Life photographer Tim Wallace has now joined that panel of judges and this week was the launch of the first ‘Car Photography’ competition that will run until the 26th August when Tim will select the overall winner and the runners up.
Join the race at I SHOT IT and become the winner of the Car Photography Competition
All entries are welcome and it can be photography of a car static, with dynamic movement, detail of a car or anything car related that you feel gets a message across about what you are trying to say in regard to the car. Get shooting and I look forward to seeing your entries over the coming months.
Good luck everybody
Aston Martin Switzerland
This week commercial car photographer Tim Wallace has been completing some further advertising work for our Aston client as well as taking the opportunity whilst out in Switzerland shooting to create some ‘Vanquish’ based work for the up coming Aston Martin Legends book that Tim is currently involved in.
Developed from the 1998 Project Vantage concept car, the V12 Vanquish entered production in 2001. The Vanquish marked a large step in the company’s engineering featuring a bonded aluminium chassis combined with many pieces of traditional craftsmanship ushering in a new era for Aston Martin.
V12 Vanquish featured a body tub made from extruded aluminium and Carbon Fibre with extensive use of more Carbon Fibre and composite materials throughout the crash structure of the car. This extremely rigid and safe body-shell was then clothed in hand-finished, Superformed aluminium panels. Underneath the handmade bonnet sat a 460bhp version of the Aston Martin V12 engine, delivering its power via a 6-speed manual gearbox controlled by an electro-hydraulic paddle shift gear change.The V12 Vanquish became famous when it was the latest Aston Martin to be driven by James Bond. This special car was painted in Tungsten Silver and was fitted with a number of non-standard options including rockets, guns, ejector seat, and an invisible ‘cloaking device’ – all provided courtesy of ‘Q-branch’ of course.
Hand-built at the famous Newport Pagnell factory, just 1489 examples of the 460bhp Vanquish were constructed before being replaced by the more powerful V12 Vanquish S in 2005.
The man who retired from racing and built the Cobra, then went on to work with Mustang
A sad loss, a great man who will always be remembered.
Carroll Shelby, the colourful American racing driver and engineer who shared the winning Aston Martin with Britain’s Roy Salvadori in the 1959 Le Mans 24-hour sports car classic, and who later gave his name to the iconic Shelby American Cobra high-performance sports car, has died at the age of 89.
The genial Texan’s trademark was his distinctive striped, bib-style racing overalls, which gave him a swashbuckling, Casey Jones-like appearance throughout a distinguished racing career that included eight world championship grand prix outings driving a private Maserati 250F, and latterly for the ill-starred Aston Martin Formula One team.
Born in Leesburg, Texas, the son of the town’s postmaster, Shelby was a child when his family moved to Dallas. Despite being diagnosed with a slight heart murmur at the age of 10, he served as a flight instructor with the US air force during the second world war. He went on to work in the truck business, before turning his hand to chicken farming, unsuccessfully, in the late 1940s.
Meanwhile, Shelby had started to dabble in sports car racing, and by 1952 had gained a degree of recognition after some promising outings at the wheel of a Jaguar XK120, before switching to a fearsome, Cadillac-powered Allard the following year. In 1954, spurred on by the offer of a cup from Kleenex heir Jim Kimberly – one of the great US racing philanthropists of the time – for the best performance by an amateur driver, Shelby entered the Allard in the Buenos Aires 1,000km sports car race, co-driving with airline pilot Dale Duncan, who was a useful contact when it came to air freighting the car to Argentina.
This first competitive appearance outside the US for Shelby was memorable: he and Duncan finished 10th, despite a carburettor fire during a pit stop, which had to be extinguished by the simple expedient of Duncan urinating on the engine. More significantly, Aston Martin driver Peter Collins introduced Shelby to his team manager, John Wyer, who had been impressed with the Texan’s handling of the wild and woolly Allard. Shelby now had his foot in the door at Aston Martin, which would lead to a place in their works team – and that memorable victory at Le Mans five years later.
Like most of those who drove for Aston Martin in the 1950s, Shelby loved the team’s ambience, and he never seriously considered any of the fleeting, and possibly empty, offers to join Maserati or Ferrari. His Texan penchant for straight talking occasionally made David Brown, the Aston Martin company’s owner, wince: telling the boss one of his cars handled like “10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag” was pretty strong stuff from a hired hand in the mid-1950s. Shelby recalled Brown’s reaction: “He got pissed off at that, turned round and walked away.”
Along with Salvadori, Shelby also took up the F1 Aston Martin DBR4s during the 1959 season. But these front-engined museum pieces were obsolete even before they raced for the first time, a new generation of mid-engined cars from Cooper dashing their hopes of success. At the start of 1960, Shelby suffered bad chest pains that alerted him to a now-serious heart condition. Despite attempting to control the situation by driving with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue, Shelby decided to retire from racing at the end of that year.
One of Shelby’s dreams had been the manufacture of a high-performance American sports car, so when he heard in 1961 that supplies of Bristol engines had dried up for the British AC company, he brokered a deal that saw AC switch to using a 4.7-litre Ford V8, and the famous Cobra was born. Ford backed Shelby’s efforts on the race track, and the Shelby Cobras were duly homologated as GT cars by the start of the 1963 international sports car racing calendar, when they were pitched against the Ferrari GTOs. In 1965, the Shelby Cobras won the FIA GT championship, wresting this prestigious title from their Ferrari opposition.
By 1970, Shelby was diversifying into other businesses outside motor racing, but in 1982 Chrysler boss Lee Iaccoca, an old friend, offered him the opportunity to serve as a performance consultant to the automotive giant, bringing him back into the motor racing orbit.
He is survived by his wife, Cleo, his two sons, Patrick and Michael, his daughter, Sharon, and his sister, Anne.
• Carroll Shelby, racing driver and engineer, born 11 January 1923; died 10 May 2012.
