Photos from Goodwood Breakfast Club Supercar Sunday 2023

The Goodwood breakfast club meetings used to be a staple in my diary in years gone by. Once a month I would meet up with friends at the beautiful historic racetrack at Goodwood near Chichester, to enjoy whichever car theme was celebrated that morning. It’s interesting seeing how this event has changed over the years.

Today we left the house early, but probably not early enough. We sat in a fairly long tailback as we gradually made our way onto the large parking field opposite Goodwood Motor Racing Circuit. Ten or fifteen years ago we would all park in the circuit itself (assuming we were arriving in a relevant car). The numbers then were easily contained on site and there was plenty of room for everyone. It was fantastically social and I would always bump into at least a dozen friends and their cars. It would be busy, but not crowded - a true enthusiast’s event.

A Goodwood breakfast club meeting like Supercar Sunday is now one of the busiest events in the local calendar, attracting thousands of people from across the south of England and beyond. Gone is the intimate feel and camaraderie, but the event is as perfectly managed and run as always. And the location is gorgeous. I see it as something of a tourist attraction now, a great morning out for a family. The entrance criteria for displaying your car has changed over the years and I can’t help feeling this is reflected in the lack of overall variety I saw today.

To say this meeting was crowded was an understatement and within minutes I felt the beginnings of boredom. Rows of similar Porsches and Ferraris can become a little repetitive after a while, and I miss the days when the lineup would be rare, eclectic, and fascinating. There are also far fewer breakfast club meetings now. I understand why things have changed, the events need to be profitable given that entrance is free. A large captive audience means a roaring trade for the high quality catering stalls serving delicious snacks made from organic produce raised on the Goodwood estate.

Given how jampacked Supercar Sunday was, photographing the cars on display can be a challenge if not impossible at times. I decided to treat the outing as more of an exercise in street photography. With that mindset developed, it became easier to enjoy some casual picture taking. As always, I travel armed with a compact camera and today I had my little Canon G1X III and Sony ZV-1. Capturing interesting moments relies on speed - these cameras have blazingly fast autofocus and I had no problems capturing the visitors enjoying the fabulous cars on display.

Timing is everything, so it’s worth pausing with your camera framed up and ready, then reel off your shots when an opportunity arises. With so many people around it’s completely impossible to exclude them - and we shouldn’t exclude ourselves, we’re fantastic compositional elements in our own right. People add dynamism to a photograph, people can be used to control the visual weight of an image, or to add colour, movement, emotion and interest.

One interesting feature of visiting the same location periodically is the extent to which the light will be different each time. Today’s light was flat but glaring, featureless, devoid of sun yet harsh. There were no clouds, just a flat blank whiteout in the sky. These are the least appealing conditions I can think of, but we have to work with what we find. By contrast the light in August at Classic Car Sunday 2019 was very much nicer!

Another challenge is to create images which are different to the last set of images taken at the same kind of event. We always need to look for ways to shoot the scene differently, or at least with a different vibe. The way in which we process our RAW file can be integral to this. We might choose to ‘print down’ photographs into something slightly moody when we have dull and inspiring light. At the very least we should try to make each outing look a little different otherwise there really is no point in taking any pictures at all. The idea is to be creative each time we go out - how else can we keep improving?

If you’re just getting into car photography, there are some tips in this post: Car Photography Hints and Tips

Here are some of today’s images and the amazing cars I saw: