DAY IN THE LIFE

Sending her first photoshoot to Octane has led to a stellar career for this car- and ’bike-mad photographer

Motoring photographer Amy Shore

published in Octane really was the start of my career. I graduated from university in the summer of 2013 with a degree in Design Craft, specialising in silver-smithing and metal-smithing, but I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a living. I liked photography, but I never imagined I’d be able to do it as a career.

Then, in the August, I took some pictures of a Ferrari P4 replica that a friend of my father was building in his shed. I had no idea what to do with them so I sent them ‘on spec’ to

Octane’s then-art director, Mark Sommer. He was very encouraging and they duly appeared as a feature in issue 132.

I’m about to turn 30 and I’ve been a fulltime professional photographer for seven-anda-half years. In 2017 I became the youngestever ambassador for Nikon UK, and I’ve just signed a new contract with Nikon Europe. That gives me an allowance to buy Nikon gear in return for appearances at shows, stores and the like – and I get to keep the kit afterwards. That said, I don’t use a lot of equipment: mostly I shoot with a 35mm f1.4 lens on a Nikon D6, which is my workhorse, and a D850 with an 85mm f1.4. I’ve always felt that if my photographic heroes such as Henri Cartier-Bresson could manage with one film camera and lens back in the day, then I should be able to do the same with digital.

Most of my work is to do with cars, but I shoot some portrait and fashion, too, including quite a bit with the model David Gandy. My clients include Bentley, who really kept me going during lockdown: they would drop off a car so that I could shoot pictures for use on social media. I had no idea how important that would become to my business. Instagram is my main platform [Amy has 143,000 followers ]and so many enquiries and jobs come from there. I try to give something back, too, for example by talking about mental health. I’m on Twitter, but I hardly use it since it seems to be for witty journalists, and I am neither of those things.

Assuming I don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn for a shoot, I’ll wake about 7am and work through some emails before going for a run mid-morning. At home, my day revolves around mealtimes because I’m a real foodie! I tend to work in small, intense chunks, particularly when editing after a big shoot such as the Goodwood Revival. I try to avoid answering my phone because I lose so much time dealing with enquiries, and I now have a PA in London who helps me deal with emails and arrange shoots. I feel we’ve become quite good friends, even though we have never actually met!

Of course, everything changed in March 2020. Before then, I was taking 35-40 flights a year for jobs abroad; I haven’t flown since, and when we first went into lockdown I didn’t work for three months. But the second half of 2020 proved to be a great time for doing car shoots, since locations that would normally be busy were completely deserted. My boyfriend, Will, comes in really handy as a minder and driver; he’s the grandson of William Heynes, the onetime chief engineer at Jaguar, and his day job is restoring E-types.

We live in a small cottage in Warwickshire with no garaging, which means that my 1985 Mini and my 2003 Land Rover Defender have to live on the street. Although neither is an ideal choice for a really long journey, I do use them a lot – I drove the Mini to the Shetland Islands for a job before Christmas. I also have a motorbike in the living room. It’s a 1965 BSA Bantam, a really pretty ’bike that I found for sale in an antiques shop near Goodwood. Of course, it leaks oil and so the stone floor in the cottage now has a stain underneath the BSA.

I’m mad-keen on motorcycling. I try to do at least one ’bike road-trip with my dad each year, which is partly down to guilt because he had to give up his job with the Lotus F1 team when I was born! When he met my mum, she was living in Leicestershire and he was in Norfolk, but he moved across the country to be with her. Just the other day he called to tell me he’d found an old extractor spray booth in the garage that he’d been keeping back in case the photography didn’t work out and I needed to follow in his footsteps and become a custom painter of crash helmets…

As it is, I feel I’m getting paid to do my hobby, although I’m also a big believer in getting the correct work-life balance. Part of that involves getting enough sleep, so I tend to go to bed about 10-10.30pm because I really do need my eight hours. Fitting everything in can be a challenge, but you just have to make it work. My life revolves around cars and motorcycles, and I’ve been very lucky that photography has been my way into that world.

‘I HAVE A MOTORBIKE IN THE LIVING ROOM, A 1965 BSA BANTAM THAT I FOUND FOR SALE IN AN ANTIQUES SHOP’