Now that the April 2012 issue of Super Street has officially come and gone, I figured now would be as good a time as ever to toss up the rest of the shots that didn’t make the cut. I took a lot of photos of this car that morning of the shoot because it’s a build that I personally really enjoyed. I was the one that spotted this coupe at Hot Import Nights L.A. last year and was the one that pitched this car to Jonathan Wong, the head honcho over at Super Street magazine. Soon after the car debuted, it became quite popular and people left and right wanted to shoot it and do a story on it. Luckily, I was quick with it and Johnny was interested in featuring it in SS. Of all my time shooting and writing story’s for magazines, Brandon Burke’s S13 is right up there as one of my personal favorite shoots. I was very happy with how the photos came out and I had a great experience working with Brandon. He’s a bit of a quirky guy but he’s a nice dude. I had only spoken with him briefly before we met up to shoot his car but I was immediately acquainted with his odd sense of humor. Another reason why I thoroughly enjoyed shooting his car was because I had previously never shot in just a wide open space. I don’t even fucking remember where I shot this car, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and it was cold as fuck. I mean, it was somewhere in the desert but I can’t think of the name at the moment. It was so cold, that the water inside the tire tread marks in the mud were frozen solid. I remember having only one glove that morning too so I had one hand that wasn’t even functioning correctly. On the way to the location of the shoot, I also encountered the musical road for the first time. Do you guys remember seeing that Honda commercial where they drove over a portion of road that created the sound of a song? Well, I found it and apparently it wasn’t the original location. They had moved that musical road over to that area because after hearing the song for 3 or 4 times, it gets pretty damn annoying. I remember Brandon texting me that morning on the way to the location that the musical road was there, I drove over it, and thought it was the coolest thing ever. Than we set up to shoot about a mile or so away from there and after hearing car after car driving over it, it wasn’t so cool anymore. I am still haunted by the song to this very day…

Anyways, it was a great experience for me because I had never shot in a desert environment before. The sun came out unusually early that morning too, which helped to produce some interesting effects. In the photos you’ll see the sun just blazing down, and while it would appear to be hot, it was cold as shit…or should I say shit as cold because it was so cold that morning that if I took a public dump, it would have came out like an icicle spear from Sub Zero in Mortal Kombat. They say the most painful shots turn out to be the best ones, and I have to say that while these aren’t the best, they are defintely some of my favorites. A couple other interesting things to note are that the rolling shots were completely unplanned. I usually have someone roll with me to my shoots and they can drive my car while I take the rolling shot, but nobody wanted to go to the freezing desert with me that morning. I didn’t expect anyone else to come along but Brandon’s friend ended up meeting up with us in the morning. The resulting rolling shots were taken by me, with a complete stranger (at that time) driving me in my car. I didn’t know the guy, I didn’t know if he had insurance, or if he even knew how to drive for that matter, haha. I had to get the shot so I let this dude drive me down some random stretch of road in a completely unfamiliar area. I am still alive so I guess it worked out. That complete stranger turned out to be Gus Rivera, who is also quite a talented photographer. Thank you for not stealing my car and murdering me. Thank you also for driving at a steady pace for me to get the shots I needed. With that said, the same rules apply as normal. Below each photo is a link to a larger version. I liked these photos so much that the larger versions are even larger than normal. Instead of their typical 1400×933 format, I’ve bumped up the resolution to 1600×1067. Fucking neato. I’ve also attached two 1080P desktop-sized images for you guys who like to change your desktop images. You can’t always have a naked broad on your screen. Sometimes mom likes to come over and she’d rather see unpublished images from cars featured in Super Street magazine….

Oh, that other interesting tidbit that I forgot to mention was that I had to use Photoshop to add lug nuts to his car. The man can build the shit out of a car inside his crappy garage, but he can’t for the life of him have a complete set of lug nuts on each wheel. I didn’t even notice until I got home that day from the shoot that a couple of his wheels only had three lug nuts holding them on. I didn’t want the close-ups of the wheels to reveal that so I took the liberty of adding lug nuts to the photos. You probably won’t even notice it with the size of these photos but I thought it was funny. I never had to do that before for a feature and I don’t think anyone would have ever noticed if I didn’t mention it. You can try to take a close look at the photos to see which ones had lug nuts added. If you look at some of the other shots and compare them, I think you’ll start to spot them. In any case, that shouldn’t take away from the car and the owner, it’s still a beauty of a S13…

Enjoy and don’t steal my images. I mean, you can save them and shit but don’t fuck with the watermarks. I made them all gold and fancy this time too…leave them be and whore the photos if you please. If you don’t like them, ehh, fuck off, I don’t know. Go find something else to do but stare at things you don’t like…

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Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you, the paint on the bumpers do not match… and no shits were given by Brandon Burke… The man painted the car himself, give him a break… Larger Version (1600×1067)

Look closely… 😉 Larger Version (1600×1067)

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Larger Version (1600×1067)  Random, but I thought it was interesting that Burke’s coupe still retained the automatic seatbelts…even more interesting is that they still worked…

If you’re still trying to figure out the lug nut thing, this one is probably easier to spot…. Larger Version (1600×1067)

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Larger Version (1600×1067) In some ways, this S13 is still related to this site because the front lip is actually from a Honda Accord, haha…I also love how down Brandon is to just drive at this ride height all the time….shit is just bananas…

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According to the “HONDA KILLER” 240SX hatchback from the Formula D tech day coverage a couple days ago, having a RB25 apparently automatically demands respect from everyone else. Brandon just threw his motor in his car because he had it laying around… You don’t see him spray-painting “_______ KILLER” on his intercooler…. Larger Version (1600×1067)

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Old school Signal Auto bucket looked like it had been sweated on a couple times and was exposed to copious amounts of sunlight…I’m glad I captured Brandon’s sweaty essence on this seat… While I would have liked to see more attention paid to the engine bay and interior, I almost prefer it to be this way because it reflects the grittiness of the build and how it was built inside his garage with a lot of spare parts…. It gives the car character. The outside is just pure white and so clean that you wouldn’t expect it to be built in a random house garage, the contrasting bay and interior says otherwise… Larger Version (1600×1067)

A pair of unused rolling shots below…

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My favorite shots of the day were actually totally unplanned as well. I had met up with Brandon at his house early that morning to shoot, and I noticed how cluttered and trashed it was. Then after hearing him talk about the build, I knew that I had to get a shot of the car inside the garage. The car was so clean and the garage was so filthy that the two contrasting items just seemed to work well together. I shot these at the end when we returned to his house and I watched struggle to drag the low frame of his S13 into the garage. I told him to just act like he was working on the car while I snapped some photos. The sun was glaring down already, harshly onto the front end of the car as it sat in the garage, so I needed no artificial lighting to light the car. It was so bright that the resulting image of the front end almost looked cartoonish and unreal. The garage itself was still dark though so I used one strobe to backlight the car and garage. The shots below were outtakes because I didn’t have a set idea on where to place the strobe since he had stuff laying around everywhere. As it turned out, the random garage shots worked out and the final one I submitted ended up being the opener to the feature in the magazine…Pretty cool…

Of the three different variations I took, this one was probably my favorite, with the strobe directed back at Brandon as he looked at his creation…There was very little processing used for these shots. Just a whole lot of natural light with some backlit artificial lighting… Larger Version (1600×1067)

In this shot, the strobe is aimmed incorrectly because it had fallen over from whatever I had sat it against….the result wasn’t too bad though…And yes, that is a Subaru Boxer engine sitting on two old tires to the left of the shot… Larger Version (1600×1067)

The last two shots are 1080P sized desktop images. I realize now that since the photos above are already pretty large, they could be used as desktop images as well, but the two below are resized correctly to fit a widescreen format….

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This was the actual rolling shot used for the Super Street feature… Desktop Version (1920×1080)

Thanks for looking…