I’m a predominantly a wildlife photographer. I do enjoy experimenting with other things though, dabbling in a bit of portraiture, landscape, and even automobile photography.

Chris is fond of his car (a 1999 Subaru Forester), and on a number of occasions we’ve done shoots in various locations. It’s all for fun, I’ve no expertise in the area, and we just enjoy taking photos and driving around.

On this particular occasion we were coming back from a swim in the lake having been chased away by storm-clouds. We drove into a wall of water, and as we were driving up the hill he had the brainwave of taking some photos of the car spraying through the puddles of water that were accumulating on the corners. Naturally, he’d be the one driving the car. So I was booted out on the side of the road in a deluge, bundled in a massive raincoat with a plastic bag over my camera. He took a few passes, I blazed away until I thought I had something at least interesting, and we went out for lunch.

They were fun photos to process and I revisited them a few times, and we ended up entering a few into the subaruforester.org 2014 calendar competition. And promptly forgot that we had.

Last weekend I was tossing and turning when my phone started buzzing. It was three in the morning, and Chris was calling me. Madness. In a fit of exhaustion-induced grumpiness, I declined the call and resumed trying to sleep. In the morning I asked what had possessed him to call me in the wee hours, and got no reply. After marathon training, I got a reply in the late afternoon. Out of nearly 200 entries, one of ours had been chosen for the March photo on the calendar. So that was quite exciting. There’s some fabulous photos in the calendar, and I’m quite tempted to buy one although our month has been and gone!

I like the interaction between car and weather, I feel it adds a certain dynamism to photographs to have the duality of subject. I’ll be on the lookout for more impressive meteorological moments to do some more car photography in the future.