The Big Interview: Meet leading car photographer Dean Smith

How did you get involved in doing shoots for magazines?
I used to meet up with car enthusiasts from online forums and shoot their cars. I’d post the photos online and after a couple of years, people within the magazine industry started to take notice.

What was the first title you shot for?
Car Dealer magazine - a trade title with an emphasis on fun. I really enjoyed shooting for them as the work was always varied; the guys and girls on the mag were great to have around and they’d always go out of their way to make the shoot as good as possible. Great times.

How does it make you feel to see your work in print?
Proud and very lucky. I left school at 16 and went straight to work, while all my friends went to college and then onto university. I worked some terrible jobs, starting a career in IT at 22, and by the age of 28 decided I’d had enough of sitting in a windowless office. So despite the good wage I took a bit of a punt and handed in my notice to pursue a career in photography. I had a lot of support from my then girlfriend (now wife) and it truly wouldn’t have been possible without her helping to steer me in the right direction.



Are you freelance in terms of having free choice over projects or do you generally return to similar titles?
I have a retaining contract with evo magazine, meaning that I can't shoot for its main competitors. Other work is quite varied with around 75% of it being return clients - 50% of the clients tend to be magazines and the rest of it is mostly manufacturer work shot for editorial usage.



What’s been the most challenging shoot?
There have been a few! Having a new client fly you to the States for a week and throughout that whole week the fog’s so thick you can barely see the end of your nose – that was fun. Or shooting a four-car group test and cover in South Wales, in biblical rain, in four hours. After the shoot I had to buy new clothes from the nearest supermarket, despite wearing waterproofs!



We may only see one or two shots in a magazine but how big is the set-up for that?
For editorial jobs there really isn’t much forward planning that goes into the shoot from my perspective. I just need to know where, when, how many pages and if there are any must-have shots that the client requires (often a cover option or two of some sort).



evo magazine gave me a good insight into which photos get used, how and why they get used and how many options are needed. The time is always tight so my experience of sitting on the art desk means I can concentrate on taking fewer shots and making these better, rather than overshooting by 500%, which is what every good photographer tends to want to do.

I aim to get everything as perfect as possible in-camera, so retouching is often just adjusting colour for print. A 10-page feature probably takes me less than an hour to repro.

If the shoot's for a manufacturer then it’s an entirely different story. The idea is that you supply the manufacturer with photography that they can hand out to any magazine or newspaper for use with their article. The car has to be perfect in each shot and each must be usable by various magazines or newspapers - you can’t go applying funky filters or tilting the camera 45 degrees for each shot! In many instances the cars will be delivered to my home and I’ll need to organise drivers, gear hire, assistants, insurance, locations, accommodation, logistics and more, and often with less than a few days’ notice - these shoots are for cars that are yet to be released, hence the short notice. For these shoots I tend to shoot multiple options of each action, static, detail, scenic shot. A simple front three-quarter static can take me an hour or two of setup before clicking the shutter button.



Any memorable trips?
I once ended up hospitalised on location, the night before a four-day shoot which was the magazine’s most important shoot of the year. I shan’t go into details but they had to hire another photographer whilst I was in hospital 30 minutes up the road from them for the entire four days. There was another time I lost my glasses from shooting out of the roof of a convertible Lamborghini. Unfortunately, we were two hours into a three-day shoot travelling from London to Florence. I had to do the rest of the shoot by guesswork - many say it’s been my best shoot to date!



What’s been your most rewarding shoot?
That’s a tough one. I guess it would be the McLaren P1 shoot in Abu Dhabi for evo magazine. We had two days on location but only two hours with the car on-track. Being such a privilege getting the car, evo rightly wanted to do a video at the same time, which meant I got two laps of the circuit to shoot tracking shots and then had to follow the videographer for the next hour-and-a-half. How we both managed to scrape a shoot out of the time, I’ll never know. One of my shots made the cover and has become somewhat of a famous image in the industry.

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