Chrome and sunshine: the 2025 Santa Monica Classic Car Show

Santa Monica Travel & Tourism hired me to photograph the 2025 Santa Monica Classic Car Show on the Pier. They gave me a gallery from a previous year to work from: very nice car photographs, with the crowds incorporated to show the turnout but without focusing on individual faces.

That meant treating the cars as the subject while still making the show look attended. The Pier was crowded and the light was bright midday sun, so most of the work was figuring out good angles and waiting for people to clear the shot without making the event feel empty.

The Pacific and the Pier gave the whole set a clear Santa Monica context. I covered the complete cars, tighter design details, vendor rows, owners around their vehicles, and wider frames where the crowd helped show the scale.

One detail that stood out was an open chrome engine. It was very cool and exactly the kind of thing worth slowing down for: the polished parts, reflections, and mechanical detail looked completely different from the wider car-show frames.

Santa Monica Travel & Tourism wanted high-resolution JPGs and TIFFs to advertise the following year's show.