Chevrloet Camaro Spy Images

I have always loved reading about and seeing the work of automotive spy photographers.

The first article I ever read was about Hans G Lehmann, it appeared in Wheels Magazine back in the early 90’s.

It talked about how he spends every summer in the Utah Desert chasing the latest prototype and test mules from the worlds leading manufacturers. I can’t remember how many times I have re read this article, it had me just fascinated with it.
Over the years every time I have seen a spy image printed I have check for the photo credit and yep sure enough there was the same old name.
Recently I noticed that there has been a new name starting to appear in the credits for the spy images but not only in magazines but online as well on websites such as www.autoblog.com , that name was Brenda Priddy and Company
So back in January I was driving through Southbank, when I saw parked on the side of the road a black new generation Chevrolet Camaro Convertible test mule. Now I know we have all seen the Camaro before, but this was a convertible in virtual final sheet metal.
I thought this has got to be worthy of stopping to take photos of. So I did a quick U turn and went parked up the street from where it was sitting. I grabbed my gear from the car and crossed the road up from where the Camaro was parked. I slowly walked down the street staying in close to the buildings as not to be seen with a camera in hand.
Once I was opposite, I raised the camera and started shooting, I shot only a couple of angles there as I wanted to get back over to the other side of the road and shoot some images from the front and rear.

But just as I crossed the road the car took off from where it had been parked. I thought that was it, my chance was blown.

Lucky enough for me the car pulled into the area directly behind Southbank near the Langham Hotel, which is a dead end, which means I knew they were going to have to come back to the lights before they turned either left or right. My only hope was that they would get stopped by the lights.

They did !! I jumped back out of the car grabbed the camera and ran down the street towards the car, hiding behind anything to help conceal the camera.

Just I got close enough the lights changed and they took off. They turned right which gave me a great shot of the back of the car, which turned out to be one of the most interesting angles of the car.

The reason, it had what looked like a tow bar fitted as well as high rear stop light, all things that weren’t expected but have reason for being there.

The tow bar fitting is for towing of test bed equipment to simulate drag and to put stress on the engine and drive train. The rear high mounted light was for Australian road laws which states their must be a high mounted third stop light on all new vehicles driven on Australian roads.

Once I got the images onto the computer and had a look thru them, I pulled out three real strong images. Now I thought what do I do with them ? These have to be worth something to someone. So I jumped online and googled the spy image queen Brenda Priddy, yep sure enough she has a website with a email address so off I fired a quick email asking if she thought their may be interest in the images. A few hours later I got a email back saying yes sure was, could I send them thru high res.

So off they went across to the other side of the world.

Over the following few days, I kept a eye out on line for anything to pop up about a new Camaro convertible being spied in Melbourne.

Slowly the word got out and car forums and online automotive news websites starting running stories and the pictures of the car.

Over the following 5 months, the images appeared all over the world. I had kept in contact with Brenda and she told me that the image had sold well. In June she contacted me and said that the interested had stopped and it was time for her to pay me for the run, so a wire transfer was made and our business was done. Brenda had also given me a list of who had run the images, so I went on the hunt to find the sites I hadn’t already seen as well as one of the magazines that had run the image

Below are a series of frame grabs from the various websites that run the pics