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.

2013 Aston Martin Book – Work Begins

Exciting news this week as work has now officially started on a proposed Aston Martin book. This has been a long term personal for car photographer Tim Wallace and has been under discussion for over 2 years now. It is hoped that the book will be completed and available by the end of 2012 for launch in early 2013 and it will be a hard back book with the aim to bring together the very best collection of Aston Martin photography very before made available to the public. Featuring all the Aston Martin models through the ages from the very early DB1 right through the the current range and the infamous One77 super Aston’s.

Tim “Its a great honour to be asked to do this book based around the range of Aston Martins through the years. Over the last few years I have become quite well known for my automotive car work and most of all probably for my Aston Martin work, for me photographing cars has never been about just showing the viewer what a model looks like but more about trying to capture and represent its form and character, cars to me have a personality, each one slightly different to the other, its having the ability to capture this passion and drama in a single image that is for me the gift of great car photography. We started work on the book earlier this week and as the chief designer said, ‘this is going to be a little like eating an elephant, one mouth full at a time…’
Over the last 5 years I have shot a huge amount of Aston’s and at last count that is near the 200 mark however as with any commercial work the photography and its style is dictated by the final requirement for its output so not ever piece of work has been shot in a dramatic style, for instance people very rarely think that all the parts and engineering side of the work has also to be covered, not to mention the ‘clinical’ work as I call it for marketing and brochures, so it is quite a massive task to ensure that I produce enough high quality work to fill a 300 page book. Also we are seeking to shoot all through the range and some models such as the infamous DBR2 are rare to say the least with only two in existence and with a price tag of £8m we have our work cut out for us but we are very lucky that as this is a joint venture with our client we have amazing access to some of the Worlds most beautiful and best kept Aston Martin secrets.
An amazing project and one that will I feel prove to be both demanding and ultimately very rewarding all at the same time.”