Celebrate one million page views with some blue hues

I purchased this .com on a whim in 2014. I wasn’t sure what Machines With Souls should even be – it started life as a portfolio of my photography. Didn’t even feature any cars. I shot cityscapes.

But the name stuck, foreshadowing what was to come. Eventually, I worked up the courage to aim the lens at what I really wanted to shoot, and the rest is history.

I mention this because Machines With Souls as you know it today has just hit one million page views (thank you!). To celebrate, I wanted to do what I do best – shoot M3s around New York.

And not just any M3s – blue M3s.

The cars, and the colors

This shoot wasn’t my idea – the credit goes to Frank, the owner of an Enzian Blue G80 M3. He started a group chat and found as many Individual Blue cars as he could, and for a year and a half, the idea just kind of sat there (organizing a free weekend morning isn’t easy).

My M3 might not be an Individual color, but it is blue so I made the cut, along with:

Enzian Blue – @g80_enzian
Interlagos Blue Metallic (Xpel Stealth wrapped) – @alexw_m3
San Marino Blue Metallic – @mobius_g80
Marina Bay Blue Metallic (an M4, but we couldn’t see past the nose) – @TurboAL47
Voodoo Blue – @m3ntal.23
Atlantic Blue Metallic – @jeff.m3
Portimao Blue Metallic (me)

There were others – Tanzanite, Mediterranean…alas, we were lucky to get even this many together.

Machines With Souls shoots his shot(s)

So – seven cars. Next, we’d need a spot convenient enough to all of us that looked great and had enough room to fit everyone. That meant the ferry parking garage at Port Imperial – frequent readers know I shoot there often. It’s always quiet, offers unrestricted skyline views, and since it’s a pay lot, keeps the riff-raff away.

Want a photo tip? Try and control as many variables as you can. With so many cars creating an unknown, I thought picking a familiar spot was the safest way to go.

Arriving at 8 AM (a bit later than what I prefer for good lighting), I got lucky with an overcast sky that diffused light and brought out the intensity of each blue a bit more.

Once everyone arrived, I simply did my thing. We had limited time before rain arrived and people had to depart, so the images you see were shot in about two hours. Hopefully you did notice that I lined them up from lightest to dark, letting each color compliment the next.

Fun fact: manuals outnumbered Competition models 4-3.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get the chance to shoot so many blue cars (a wink to my Bimmerpost days) again, though it would be fun to try this with other shades.

Still…they won’t be blue.

Thank you for one million page views

What does one million page views mean? Not that much – Car & Driver has 6.5 million views…per month. My favorite analogy when someone asks how the site is doing would be the moon. It’s really hard to get to it, and its quite an accomplishment, but if the goal is to explore space, then…yea. Long way to go.

So keep emailing me questions, keep sending me those cars to review (free shoot if you do!), and thank you for participating.

Onto the next million!