Ross Burns has a passion for fast cars – but not real cars. Those which he likes best are the small Hotwheels 1:64 cars and trucks.
He takes a car out with him every day, and has done for almost three years now.
Ross’s day job is Head of Comms at Edinburgh Napier University but more importantly he is also dad to a 6-year-old son who is just mad about HotWheels cars. He challenged himself to take a photo featuring one of the cars each day, and has so far created almost 900 posts.
This is a bit of fun which all started in Summer 2020. Ross explained: “My son has a passion for Hot Wheels although I used to like Matchbox cars when I was younger – which are still about but we’ve chosen Hot Wheels as they are a bit more ubiquitous.
“When you have a child you find yourself out and about. One day we were in Saughton Park and he had taken some cars just to play with as usual. I took some photos of the car and truck he had with him. I started thinking that he had a lot of these cars and it would be a good way of forcing myself to go out for a walk every day. At the time there wasn’t much else to do, so it started that way and here we are all these hundreds of posts later.
“It quickly became something that I had to do every day – I have posted every day since late August 2020. These cars are quite cheap at £1.50 each and we would rather Daniel had something like that rather than sweets. There are now around 500 in his collection, so there’s a wealth of material there. It is sort of an equal excitement for me when he gets a new one. I do have to ask him not to bash it up before I’ve taken a photo of it.”
Some of the vehicles have featured more than once with favourites being photographed several times over.
“At the beginning I used only real looking cars and not the fantasy type that Hot Wheels also make. I try to make the car lookout home in its environment so that it looks as though it could actually be there. The ones that do achieve that tend to do better. So if I post a Land Rover for example (people like the off road vehicles – we call them big wheels guys!) people always go for that as they look at home in their surroundings – on the beach, in the forest or wherever and they look real.”
“It is now very much a part of Daniel’s routine now so this is for him as well as for myself. First thing in the morning he asks is to see any new posts – I tend to post in the evening once he has gone to bed. Then he goes to school and draws that day’s post from memory. So if I have hundreds of posts he has several hundreds of drawings. They are fascinating and his drawing has much improved.
“The detail he gets of the car and the background is quite amazing. He also has an encyclopaedic memory of which cars have been used in previous posts. He got a camera the Christmas before last and he uses it to take photos of Hot Wheels now.. No idea where he got that idea from but it has been the best present he has ever had.”
So now Ross cannot really stop taking his photos which are mainly based all over Edinburgh as this is about more than him.
Take a look on his Instagram scot.wheels
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
