Starbucks Meet: First Event Coverage | Blog 3

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Events are a huge deal within car culture, and they bring out some of the best (and worst) cars and characters from within the scene. An event can be anything from huge fixtures like H2Oi or Wöthersee, to the little things like cars and coffee and your run of the mill car park meet on a weekend. This event is the latter, and was a brilliant introduction into the madness that a car meet can bring.

I don’t mean madness in the way that most outsiders to the scene would mean it; racing, loud cars and awful music, no I mean madness purely because of the sheer variety of cars that were there. To elaborate, big shows these days generally focus specific areas within the scene – be it specific makes and models, styles, anything to highlight and narrow the scope of cars down. This isn’t a bad thing, it just tailors shows to specific crowds and draws them in from a greater area. With this in mind, your average local meet draws out all manner of cars in varying states, just because it’s local. These meets are a great way to get together with like-minded enthusiasts, see cool cars and be involved within your local scene.

I only found out about this actually happening about 4 days before, due to certain ‘activities’ the police often show up to get people out. So when it comes to organising a meet short notice is commonplace, means less people know, less police risk too. This time around the meet stayed pretty tame, it was pretty refreshing compared to those I’ve been too in the south of the country.

So I arrived at the spot with my buddy John in the early stages, was around 8pm, this time of year presented me with nice lighting and a thankfully warm temperature to do my thing in. The lighting however was starting to pull back with the day drawing to a close, so as the meet filled out I quickly gauged which cars I’d like to shoot then made my way around the car park in my own time.

These plans quickly went to waste, the more it was filling up the more I saw and wanted to shoot. I eventually gave up on that entirely and became a kid in a candy shop, this proved to be a good more. John and I would walk somewhere and talk to the owners, snap the cars, see something else and move on. It was a really open situation to work in.

One thing that stood out to me was the friendliness and lack of competition within the midlands scene, you’re always going to have slices of banter but largely everyone wanted to be there to have fun and talk about their cars. This is something that I’ve seen disappear in certain places, its car culture; it doesn’t have to be a dog eat dog war – that’s a stupid way to look at it. People were so welcoming of this weird sounding Southerner, and so happy to stand and chat about their rides.

There are differences between shooting a meet and doing feature car coverage, and I learned these whilst I was on the scene. Awareness is probably the biggest difference I noticed, yes while on a single car shoot you have to be aware of your surroundings but a meet is chaos comparatively; revving, burnouts, an active car park, you can absolutely get hurt doing these things but it is just a case of knowing what’s going on around you.

For this occasion lighting was a huge deal, since it was towards the end of the day with dying light I had to adjust my settings or at least check them every 15 minutes. Also using man made light sources was an interesting element to work with. It made for some cool shots showing different light sources bouncing of the bodies of the cars.

My last difference is the sheer busyness of the location, cars going in and out everywhere, people walking about, it was hard to capture that environment and make it feel like a positive and natural occurrence (as natural this could be). Ultimately I wanted to show off the fun side of car culture, seeing peoples hard graft get paid off and getting some interest in Car Club Subete as a project, I met a ton of really cool people, saw some fantastic cars and drunk way to much coffee whilst I was having fun.

You’ll be seeing more event coverage soon, they’re a bit more effort to sort out as I’m not driving at present but as soon as I’ve got another dodgy classic I’ll be at as many places I can. I want to thank everyone who came out and to those who said hi and got involved, also John you really did me a favour with the lift so I’ll buy you a latte at the next meet.