The Landy Snapper
Meet this month’s Land Rover Legend Nick Dimbleby, who has seen the brand from behind his lens for 30 years
NIKE USED to have this really clever billboard campaign. It read: “’66 was a great year for English football… Eric was born.” I bet that after reading the first few words of that advert you were thinking about England lifting the football World Cup at Wembley after the incredible Geoff Hurst hat trick against the Germans, rather than Cantona. If Land Rover (or Canon) were to try a similar marketing move their slogan might be: “’73 was a great year for Land Rover… Nick Dimbleby was born!” And so was the Series III, of course...
Some of you reading this might not have heard of Nick Dimbleby and if that is the case then you are probably wondering what makes him one of our Land Rover legends? Well, if you have admired an official Land Rover image in the past decade or two then the chances are pretty good that it was taken by a certain Nick Dimbleby.
Our paths first crossed when I was covering my first-ever Land Rover story, the African leg of the inaugural Land Rover G4 challenge in 2003. I was a green, young buck of a journo with a Pentax MZ-M camera. I only had one short lens and had to get really close to the action to take my snaps; the hardened foreign journos told me off when I got in the way but Nick was different. He is a real Land Rover enthusiast who never really gets his knickers in a knot. Well at least not in front of us. You can always approach Nick to ask for a specific image you are looking for or else just have a chat about his favourite subject, Land Rovers. He is one of the good blokes who has spent all of his working life photographing Land Rovers, thereby combining both of his passions into one.
For as long as he can remember Nick has been into cars, which comes as no surprise as his family moved to the USA for a couple of years when he was still in nappies. “There were loud, big V8s everywhere and I was hooked. Mum says that I would identify the various makes by their badges as she pushed me along in the pram. That is probably where it all began for me,” laughs Nick.
His Land Rover story began when he was ten and living in the UK again. Nick used to pick up his Dad’s Pentax P30 SLR camera and snap away, mostly at cars. “I used to read Car magazine back then and loved the amazing images of cars. I always knew that I would be doing something creative.” Little did he know at the time that soon it would be his images of Jaguars and Land Rovers that would be gracing those very pages.
“I have an uncle who lives in Kettering, Northamptonshire. There is a coachbuilding company in the area called AE Smith and Son. They have been going since 1898 and did a lot of Range Rover conversions in the late 1970s and early 80s. I was captivated by these conversions and I ended up doing a book on Range Rover conversions when only 13 years old.” The book was published by Haynes and they sold 6000 copies. Today you can pick up a copy on ebay for a tenner. The book led to an invite to appear on Blue Peter, along with several Range Rover conversions, of course. Although Nick has since published several more Land Rover books he is fairly modest about his first effort. “It was effectively a scrapbook. I would write to companies to ask for info and images of their Range Rover conversions and I collated all of it into my book and sent it off to Haynes,” he explains.
Land Rover Owner International magazine reviewed the book in 1987 and Richard Howell-thomas contacted Nick to ask if he had any more features or images to contribute to the magazine. Richard was blissfully unaware of Nick’s age at this stage. So despite not being old enough to drive, no Land Rover in the family and still at school, young Nick became a Land Rover photojournalist and regular LRO contributor.
Nick grew up in rural Somerset where one of his parents’ farmer friends Michael Clarke (brother of the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke) had a 1978 two-door Range Rover Classic. Michael was quick to recognise Nick’s love of Range Rovers and asked if he would like to come and drive it on his
farm. “I was desperate to drive the thing,” he recalls. “Even though it was a farm hack with straw in the back and a collapsed seat, I was grinning from ear to ear, especially when taking it over the quarry section.”
When he turned 19 Nick purchased that Range Rover and rebuilt it. Land Rover Owner International ran a series of technical articles on it. It was christened Camel due to its Sandglow colour (even though it was later painted Ascot Green).
“Once we replaced all the rusty bits it actually polished up all right,” declares Nick.
He used it as his daily driver while reading Media Studies at Sussex University in Brighton. It also saw action when being used for LRO greenlaning shoots. That was until it was swapped for TEW 78X, Nick’s 100inch Defender hybrid. Some readers might remember Colin Dawson of International Off-roader fame using TEW 78X as his project vehicle.
The reason for the swap? Nick did not like trashing his Range Rover when duty called.
TEW 78X was originally a 1978 two-door Range Rover that was imported into the UK from Belgium by Russell Fisher on behalf of 4x4 Magazine, then it became a project vehicle. He too was destroying it in the lanes.
Nick picks up the story: “At the time Defenders were expensive so the cheapest way to get a coil-sprung Land Rover was to use a Range Rover chassis and add a Defender or Series body. This was done by Pete Rowe in Exmoor.
“It’s become a rather famous vehicle for anyone who has been reading about Land Rovers and 4x4s over the years. I’ve had it 20 years now and it has become a part of my history really. When my wife Lisa and I got married in 2002 that was the vehicle we drove away in from the church. It’s very much a part of the family and has changed quite a bit over the years.”
After leaving university, Nick moved to London in an attempt to kickstart a career in TV production. He even made it onto the final ten candidates for a BBC Poduction Trainee Course. Unfortunately they would only pick someone who had already done an internship at the BBC.
He took this rejection on the chin. “I don’t really feel that I have steered my career,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate in that mine is riddled with a series of convenient or happy accidents along the way with happy endings.”
Through his LRO work, Nick was offered a journalist’s spot in the UK car on the 1996 Camel Trophy in Borneo. Things stepped up when a friend introduced him to Lee Farrent, the Photography Director of Camel Trophy, before the event. Nick showed him some of his work and Lee straight away offered him a deal to use his photos officially. “This was a dream come true.,” enthuses Nick. “I grew up looking at Camel Trophy and Dakar images. Now I was going to be that person behind the camera.”
Obviously they were very happy with what he did as they
invited him back the following year. Nick could not believe his luck.
“I was getting paid to do something that I love, travelling to exotic locations and shooting Land Rovers.”
During those early days of his photography career Nick not only shot for LRO but also Performance Car and Max Power. Today there is hardly an automotive magazine in the world that has not used one of Nick’s Land Rover or Jaguar images.
It was while covering the Camel Trophy in 1996 that Nick met the late Bill Baker, the former PR Director of Land Rover in the US. Bill was a fan of Nick’s work and so he got him to shoot the Freelander preview at Windsor in 1997. That was his first official shoot for Land Rover and he has pretty much been shooting for them non-stop since.
His next official Land Rover shoot was a Discovery 2 Round the World trip. Nick shot the first leg of that, from London to Calcutta, before heading off on the Camel Trophy again, and then returned for the last leg which went from Valencia to the Paris Motor Show, where the Discovery 2 was launched. “Back then I just did the big jobs with not much going on in between, whereas now there is always something going on at Jaguar Land Rover, so I don’t get the time to work for other brands that I used to.”
The L322 Range Rover launch at Skibo Castle in 2002 really took Nick’s relationship with Jaguar Land Rover to the next level. “For the first time they asked me to shoot the whole event, which lasted for several weeks. That was my big break with them. I also did a lot of the test and development photography prior to the launch event.”
The test and development aspect is a vital part of each new Land Rover’s story and it needs to be documented and captured. This pattern and volume of work for Nick has continued with every major Land Rover (and later Jaguar) launch until today.
After the L322 came the Discovery 3 launch in 2004 which was preceded by shooting test and development stuff on the D3 in Sweden and Dubai.
Then came the 2003 Land Rover G4 Challenge, which started on Fifth Avenue in New York City before heading to South Africa, Australia and Brazil. “The G4 was 15 years ago and it was just myself and Neil Emmerson as the official shooters. When I look back I don’t know how the heck we covered that whole event with just two people? It’s insane. We were shooting half digital and half film at the time.”
Nick’s first digital camera was a 3.2 megapixel Canon D30 which he used on the launch of the L322, six months later he upgraded to the 1D. In fact he was one of the first people in the UK to own one. “I have had every 1D model since. With my first royalty cheque from the Range Rover book I wrote aged 13, I purchased a Canon T90.
When you look at it now you can see that it spawned all modern cameras. It cost £500 in 1987. Imagine having that in your hands as a teenager. It had the fastest built-in motor drive at the time.”
Obviously the nature of the shoot determines what kit Nick takes with him but he does have a basic kit bag which consists of two 1DX Mark II bodies, 16-35mm lens f4 image stabilized, 24-70mm f4 image stabilised, 14mm f2.8 lens, 100mm Macro lens and then a 100-400mm lens plus a flash and speedlight remote. “That is what I take on the plane with me. Even if all my luggage still gets lost I can still work.”
Fortunately this has only happened once; his luggage did not make it to Kazakhstan when joining the 1 Millionth Discovery trip to Beijing. They were on a tight schedule and threatened not to wait for Nick’s battery chargers to arrive on a later flight. Nick has always packed battery chargers into his carry-on luggage since.
While it might seem as if Nick has shot and seen it all when it comes to Land Rovers, he was nowhere to be seen on the last day of Defender production on January 29, 2016. “I had already committed to a four-week job when I first heard about the last day of Defender production shoot. It was a shame not to be there as I am an enthusiast first and a professional photographer second. To not be there was really very tough. I was lucky enough to photograph the last Defenders being built over a period of six months but I could not be there for the last cars coming off the line. So that is something missing from my personal archive.”
Despite the odd gap in his Land Rover timeline, Nick is well aware of how lucky he has been in his career as he has been capturing Land Rover progress, development and history as it is being made. “I get paid to do amazing things with the vehicles that I love but I don’t take anything for granted. I have obviously seen some interesting stuff but I need to maintain an air of professionalism. I see myself as a trusted member of the JLR team and I have worked with them for a very long time. I have seen lots of people come and go over that time. I sometimes work with new people who weren’t even born when I started shooting Land Rovers. Some haven’t even heard of the Camel Trophy. So events like the 70th anniversary are important for educating people and reminding them of where we have come from.”
As we hop into Nick’s black supercharged Range Rover Sport I ask him about the future of the brand. “Land Rover is quite unique in that there are a core of people who are incredibly passionate about the company and what they do. These people are key to the future of the brand, in fact they are shaping the brand. This has been the case throughout the history of the company.”
The pictures in this feature are just some of his favourites that he has shared with us. I ask him to pick one. “One of my personal favourite shots is the G4 Challenge salt flats helicopter shot I took in Bolivia. When I was taking it I knew that it was going to be an amazing shot. I could not believe I was doing it and I kept on reminding myself not to mess it up. As a photographer it’s all instinctive but you are actually using all of your technical experience to make that shot. I wanted to get a little bit of movement but not too much because of camera shake, of course. A lot of photography is planning and preparing, the actual taking of the shot takes less than a second.”
As he is often shooting things the Land Rover public has not yet seen, I ask Nick to describe what it is like on one of these shoots. “The last big secret shoot I did was the Discovery Sport in New Mexico in 2014. You want to be able to shoot it at your location of choice but that is not easy. We had to rent a piece of road and the local police had it in complete lockdown. We also had our own security in attendance. The Disco Sport then came out of the transporter for the shots and once I was done it was hidden away again before the road was reopened.”
Despite the fact that we think he may have seen it all Nick is far from done. “I want to get that iconic Camel Trophy tyre type shot from inside the cab of a Defender that is virtually submerged in water. There are also places that I have been to that I want to go back to.”
Nick is fortunate in that he is on the frontline where the Land Rover magic happens. It’s a responsibility he greatly cherishes and does not take for granted. “I want to be a part of Land Rover’s story. This is not just a job to me. I have been photographing Land Rovers since I was a little boy and I hope to still be doing so when my hair is a bit greyer than it is already.”