I’ve been chasing this car for a good two years now, maybe even more. It was one of those extensive builds that you weren’t even sure would ever be done. In terms of the overall DC5 “scene”, if you will, this is perhaps one of the best ever built. Hell, I think it could possibly be the most complete, best overall Honda build of the entire calendar year. It is just that good. Builds that take this long are either never get finished, or just aren’t worth the build-up or hype. This is one of those instances when the long-wait was totally worth it. Huy Hoang and his group of friends are very dedicated car guys and it shows. They have their own sense of humor, keep very much to themselves, and all their cars seem to have a similar look. They just pour out quality and you could spend hours just going through each of their cars…

I typically go to the Pacific Northwest once a year to go shoot cars up there but this was one of the cars that had always been on my radar. After I shot the car, I almost felt like I didn’t need to return to the Pacific Northwest anymore. I felt…”accomplished”. It is just one of those things were you didn’t think it would happen and when it did, everything just came together beautifully. It is always fun shooting in the PNW because there is just so much open space to work with and everything is so vibrant in color. From a photography perspective, I feel like this might be my best work-to-date. I never run around claiming that I was the best photographer ever, and I never will. I just merely document things that I see, but I really love the way these photos came out. The car is so bright red that it just pops in any setting. I found a quiet industrial area to shoot at where I had previously shot some other cars from that area in years past. It took a while to find a nice spot to contrast against the richness of this vehicle but I pulled up by this semi-truck trailer that looked to be abandoned and tagged-up with graffiti from local artists. The place had been stock-piled with old tires and it just looked really cool to shoot in front of. The ground area was all dirt so I think Huy might have had some reservations about driving his car into that area but I think the photos that resulted totally made it worth it…

Today, I’m going to show you guys the digital versions of the photos that made it into the magazine, along with the ones that ultimately did not make it. Some shots were better, some just weren’t used because they were similar to others. I always have extras so I wanted to throw them up here for you guys to see. I used to do this a lot more often when there were more magazines around and more print work to do but it is becoming apparent that these types of posts are few and far between now. I think it is important to put up the extra photos because people so rarely get to enjoy the cars as a whole because everything moves so quickly now. You’ll see an epic build like this in a magazine or on the Super Street website, flip through it, hopefully read the story, and then you never see it again, especially with cars like this that come from an area that doesn’t get a whole lot of media exposure. The PNW is a goldmine for great builds but you just don’t see them. The community is relatively smaller compared to the more popular states so you’d have to know a lot of these guys just to be able to see these cars…

Hopefully my appreciation for this build shows in the quality of work that I captured. I really did enjoy this car. Huy kinda drives me crazy sometimes because he texts me like 6 paragraphs at a time but I appreciate his enthusiasm, haha. He is very much a dedicated Honda guy who has a great eye for detail. It also helps that he works very hard, has a great job, and has other Hondas that he works on to keep his mind constantly flowing with creativity and motivation. I think any guy who has had just one car and has spent over 5+ years building it would probably just go crazy at some point and give up on it. While this car was down, he also spent a lot of time and money working on another Mugen DC5, which apparently was/is his daily, and a K-swapped supercharged EK, which he is currently in the process of rebuilding. The guy is just constantly occupied with Hondas and that is absolutely awesome. It’s a dream to most, really…

Below are the photos in the order that I shot them. Set-up is relatively simple: Canon 5DMKII, two Canon L Series lenses, two Alien Bees as strobes, and a helping hand from Ryan Der, who also made the trip with me to hang out in Seattle that weekend. At the end I’ve also attached a 1920×1080 desktop wallpaper sized image if you guys are into that sort of thing. The photos are sized natively at 1600 pixels but the site format automatically downsizes it to fit the theme. If you want the larger photos for safe-keeping, and not to post everywhere on some stupid fucking Instagram repost site to sell your crappy stickers, please feel free to right-click and save…

Here is the link to the original story of Huy Hoang’s Mugen DC5 if you’d like to know more about the car and missed the issue when it originally hit newstands:

“BLOODY MURDER”, Turbocharged Mugen 2003 Acura RSX Type-S by Super Street Magazine

Enjoy and thanks for looking…

Oh I should also mention that I actually originally shot a cover photo for this feature, as Sam Du and I had agreed all along that this build deserved to be on the cover of Super Street magazine. Actually, side story to add to the confusion, I originally pitched this DC5 to Sam as a possibly feature for the Super Street Honda Issue, but we felt that we had already had a cover feature at the time locked down, and it would be better to save Huy’s DC5 for another cover because it deserved its own spotlight. If you remember, the cover that ended up being used for the annual Honda Issue was the Phaze2 DC2 and the ATS Garage DC2, which was already two red Integras. It just didn’t seem like it would be right to have another red car in there, let along another Integra (DC5). This build definitely deserved its own cover so we saved it for later. Okay, so anyways, I shot a cover but I felt like it was too much like the other cover I had shot before and I told Sam and the SS staff that it might be a better idea to shoot another cover, being that I just ran out of time while I was in Seattle. Sam is originally from that area so he actually flew back much later and re-shot the cover, which was the cover that you ended-up seeing on newstands. It all worked out in the end, but this was what I originally had shot as a possibly cover… (Sam’s was better)

Okay, back to the rest of the photos…

The rolling shots are pretty horrible, I apologize. We had spent too much time shooting the rest of the car where the sun came out bright hot (unusual for Seattle) and was just beaming so everything just came out too bright…

And below is the desktop-sized image I mentioned earlier, just click on the link and it’ll take you to the 1080P-sized photo…