When BMW revealed the i8, many who saw it proclaimed it a work of art. When I first saw it, I did not think it was a work of art; I thought it was a car—a low, wide, mean-looking singularity that screamed speed and power. Of course, the first time I saw an i8, Betty and I were driving through Death Valley in 117° heat, and the i8 was all covered in BMW blue squiggly camouflage, and we only saw it for a moment as it zipped past us. I didn’t even know that it was an i8—but I knew that it was a BMW, and that I wanted it.

    However, I didn’t think it was art.

    About a year later, when BMW revealed the car without its camouflage pajamas, I wanted it even more, and without its disguise I realized that it was beautiful, with lines and curves the likes of which had never before graced a BMW. Pretty much the whole world agreed. But while I thought it was very artfully designed and crafted, I still didn’t look at it and say to myself, “Now, there’s a work of art.”

    To make a long story only slightly longer, a 2015 BMW i8 eventually took up residence in my garage. It is finished in Crystal White Pearl Metallic with BMW Frozen Blue accents. I sometimes stare at it, especially when it is outdoors in the sun, and I contemplate the lines and contours, from the kidney grilles to the wings that don’t look like wings, much the same as one might sit in an art gallery appreciating a masterpiece by examining how the brush strokes transform oil and canvas into light and beauty.

    But I still could not see the i8 as art—yet.

    One day last year, our Kansas City BMW Club organized a road trip to a local eatery and arranged for photos to be taken en route. The event went very well—as all of our events do, thanks to our excellent chapter leadership—and seeing the photos afterward was a nice touch.

    Some time later I was contacted by the same photographer, Tim Lair, asking if we could set up a photo shoot of the i8. Sure, that would be great! No one before had ever asked to do a photo shoot of a car I owned, so I was excited. After I checked out Tim’s website (www.timlair.com) and viewed his car photos and his time-lapse projects, I was even more excited.

    We met at the appointed time and place, which was a Saturday evening at a water-supply warehouse—not the first thing that popped into my head when I contemplated shooting locations for car photos, but warehouses can be interesting, so great; let’s get started.

    Tim and his friend and assistant Anthony Lawson set up their equipment. Tim shot everything with a Canon 6D DSLR, which I understand is a pretty nifty camera. But I had seen cameras before. What I hadn’t seen before was the 320W strobe that Tim used to illuminate the car and remotely trigger the camera’s shutter.

    Tim placed the camera on a tripod to capture the angle that he wanted, and then walked around the car with the strobe, releasing the shutter to capture a section of the car with exactly the light he wanted. As Tim explained later, he would get a few dozen different images, and then use Photoshop to blend the parts of each shot he wanted to keep to make the finished photo more dramatic or surreal, depending on what he was going for. For any one finished image, Tim used between five and 65 different strobed shots to get his desired style and end result.

    Our photo shoot took only two hours, which kind of amazed me when I saw the finished products. But for Tim, those two hours were only the brief beginning of the project. He then spent about twenty hours editing all the material to come up with eight final photos of the i8.

    The results were amazing. There sat the car, looking like an i8—but in every picture, it was so much more. If I hadn’t been there, I would have sworn that the pictures were of two or three different cars; that’s how much Tim had manipulated the light with his equipment and by using different parts of the warehouse. Where previously I had looked at the i8 and seen a car, Tim had seen opportunities for the car to reflect light and color.

    The shots with the setting sun and the starry night sky were accurate—that is, we did shoot at sunset and after it got dark—but he also enhanced those scenes artistically, with better backgrounds than the urban clutter that was really outside the warehouse doors.

    I am not an artist. I’m not a great photographer. But I do know that great artists and great photographers have in common the ability to see and understand light, and they know how to manipulate it to get the results they want.

    When I saw those finished pictures, I saw not just a gorgeous car on which form beautifully followed function, I saw that Tim had turned the i8 into what I finally saw as art. I guess that it always was art, but it took Tim’s special talents finally to make me see the art that was there all along.—Scott Blazey

    [Photos courtesy of Tim Lair Photography.]