I'm never playing Hide-And-Seek again. People just keep finding me. I don't go looking to be found but they find me.
A few years back some friends and I went for a photography walk through the city of Melbourne. We do this from time to time. Most of us all met on Flickr.com. We became friends in the communities there and then caught up and have been good friends ever since.
As much as we all love photography, we do these photo walks more as a catch up than anything else. It's our version of Golf. Walking around and chatting, take a few shots, walk some more, chat some more, take a few shots, and repeat, and then coffee.
It was this walk back in 2011 that led to this post.
We'd been walking around for an hour or so when I spotted some lovely light coming down this lane and I stooped down to get a shot next to this classic Mercedes. I took a few shots and the more I took, the more I began to appreciate the lovely lines of this beautiful machine.
I decided to focus on the headlight and in the few shots I took I liked this one the best so I just adjusted the white balance and some contrast and posted it up on flickr. I've added the image below and also provided the link to the original post on flickr.
Original Photo on Flickr
And so it was that I left the image there, got a few lovely comments from people who saw the post and that was that, until August 5th, 2014, one year ago to the day.
A fellow flickr user named Van Heland had dropped me an email within flickr. Once again, because I hadn't been back in a while I didn't notice it at all but thankfully I check back every so often. His real name is Andreas Hellman and he was working for a company called Premium ClassiXXs, based in Germany, that do scale models of classic cars. He wanted to use that very photo for the new 1:12th scale model they were doing of the 1965 Mercedes 280 SL, the very car I had taken a photo of just in passing some 3 years earlier. Each car comes with a small booklet detailing the history of the car and they wanted to use my photo in there. I told you, they just find me.
Normally these transactions involve payment for use of the imagery but the transaction here was that they would send out one of these limited edition scale models and I was perfectly fine with that.
And so, exactly one year to the day later, this box arrived on my doorstep, and there's my photo, as promised, in the booklet. It's a beautifully crafted model and something I'm proud to have in the collection. :)