Part one of an ongoing series as I delve into the depths of my hard drives and reminisce over the last five years.

On Saturday I spent a few hours photographing what is probably the last competitive drift event I attend as a photographer. Why? Well that’s hard. I guess my interests have shifted towards different vehicles and away from the drifting scene. I feel like these events are saturated with quality media now and they don’t need another orange vest getting in the way, particularly when the only place my photos have been going of late is onto my laptop.

What will I miss? The people. I have made a lot of close friends through the sport and luckily I still see most of them outside of these events. What won’t I miss? The carnival food. The politics. Some of the people it attracts and the hours & dollars spent following a series like this around the country for 5 years.

I feel like NZ drifting is in a pretty good place and will continue to grow – hopefully with that comes more professionalism from both the teams and the people who run it. Don’t be fooled by the common ‘It’s only drifting’ mentality. You have the foundation of a good series. Make it great.

A few weeks ago I spent the afternoon at C’s Garage taking some photos of their newly finished 2013/14 competition cars. Not long after that my house was broken into and my laptop and camera were stolen. Like an idiot I had not backed up this most recent set of photos and now I only have what I had already uploaded to Flickr – which are the few photos you see below. It’s a gut-wrenching thing to come home to, your house a total mess with shit thrown everywhere by some lowlife scum who couldn’t put the effort in to work hard and buy these things for himself. He could be reading this given that this page was one of those bookmarked on my laptop. If you are – fuck you.

This experience has reminded me to be more vigilant with my backups. I feel for Joel & Adam as they went to a lot of effort moving the cars around for me and we got some cool shots. I’ll have to make up for it as I cover their debut campaigns in the upcoming 2013/14 D1NZ Season. On a lighter note though, their cars are amazing! Joel’s S13 is the same car he has been using for the last few years while Adam’s S14 is a completely new build which has occupied every spare moment of his time over the last 24 months. All the best for the upcoming season boys!