The Ghost – A Honda S2000 Story – a car for analog photographers?

I love to use analog cameras, because they often need more of my attention, but on the other hand they also are often easier quicker to use. Analog is about haptics and feelings. Photographing becomes like meditation.
Depending of the job, of course I like also my digital cameras, they make my life so much easier.

I feel the same thing about cars. Modern cars are so nice to drive, they are comfortable and make also your driving experiences better. Perfect for driving from A to B, while having a nice conversation or listening to good music.
But sometimes I just want to enjoy driving. I don’t want to be distracted by anything, I just want to have a pure driving experience, I want to enjoy haptics and nice materials around me.

This is where this car comes into play. It’s a Honda S2000 AP1. And not just any AP1, it is one of the last ones that were build. So it has some improvements of the early versions, but it doesn’t have the electronic helpers from the AP2 version. In my eyes it’s a pure sports car.
It only shows you RPM, Speed, Temperature and how much gas you have left. No clock, no glovebox and even the radio is hidden. The haptics of the gearbox is just a dream and also the whole leather cockpit is something you do not see these days anymore. For me it’s like one of my analog cameras. More to take care of and this results in more fun. Recently the German passionate car enthusiast Jean Pierre Kreamer (founder of JP Performance) started to work also on a Honda S2000 and shared his first videos on YouTube ( first and second one ). JP is a successful entrepreneur and driven workaholic (I have the feeling he has lots of fun), he owns and drove lots of super/hyper cars. But this quite “low power” car still puts a smile on his face. If you have followed JP’s work and videos for a while, you know exactly what that means.

This car is tough to capture with the wet plate process, because this process only sees the blue light spectrum (from about 360 to 420nm). Thats why I had to expose for the blue paint of the car and as you can see, everything else does fade out because of that.

This was the first tintype I captured of my Honda S2000

Honda built the S2000 to celebrate its 50th anniversary, inspired by Formula 1 and the legendary Ayrton Senna. This sports car delivers pure driving excitement with a high-revving engine that screams up to 9,000 rpm. Its cockpit is stripped down to essentials—only revs, speed, temperature, and gas level are shown, with no clock and no glovebox. The car demands full attention, leaving no room for distractions. It’s a pure, addictive driving experience that keeps you coming back for more.

Some people may thing it is a new car or maybe even a Miata, but this car was firstly build in the year 2000

The V-Tec engine of this care was build for 9000 rpm. Nobody would build a natural aspirated engine like this anymore. It feels like a motorbike on 4 wheels.

Like many Honda’s it is a car build around the driver

the co-drivers option to interact with the car are non existent. Just sit and enjoy.

This is a dream that became reality, known from movie The Fast and the Furious or the popular computer game Gran Turismo, it was always somewhere in the back of my mind, but now it stands in front of me and I can’t stop smiling.
This car is for me very equal to analog cameras. It has a throttle cable, it steals quite directly and you sit nearly on the road. I was lucky to get this beautiful car in nearly mint condition with under 80000 KM.
It’s like a good bottle of wine, I don’t drive to get somewhere, I just drive it to enjoy it.

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