Super car photographer and chronicler of Chennai

For most of us, the sight of mean, gleaming super car cruising on congested city roads is one to behold. Be it the ultra-smooth Lamborghini Aventador or the sleek Ferrari Italia, a super car on the move compels us to fish out our mobile phones and capture the moment live.

While these candid camera moments usually remain confined to the memory chips of mobile phones, a city youth has made it his passion to photograph super cars in the city and has a dedicated Facebook page for exotic cars and bikes on Chennai roads.

The FB page ‘The Exotic Cars and Bikes in Chennai’ created by Taha Hussain (20) from Triplicane on November 4, 2012 presently has 47,187 ‘likers’ and is among the most popular pages on Chennai in the social networking website.

Taha Hussain

Taha, who is presently pursuing his Automobile Engineering at the Hindustan Polytechnic College in Padappai, started photographing high-end cars in the city out of sheer passion for automobiles. “During late 2012, I attended a meeting of the Exotic Car Owners Club here seeking permission to shoot the cars. Since I wanted to showcase these cars and their beauty, I put up my photographs on Facebook,” he says.

The amateur photographer’s and sports car lovers enthusiasm for these extreme automobiles caught the attention of car lovers in the city who gladly took pictures of any super car that they sighted on the road and sent him through email. 

Soon the popularity of the FB page grew leaps and bounds and earned Taha the reputation of being the most popular super car photographer among car lovers and also a familiar name among high end car owners in the city.

After attending college on weekdays and during weekends, the lanky youth takes his Canon 600D camera with stock lens and shoots super cars in the city. “Some of the top businessmen and industrialists in the city who came to know about me offered to take me for a ride on their super cars or bikes seeing my enthusiasm and I gladly rode in these dream machines at breakneck speeds enjoying every bit of the engineering marvel that has been brought into these cars,” says Taha.

Unlike his other class mates, the engineering student who comes from a humble background understands even the subtle differences in the carbon fibre body of Avantadors deployed to keep the car grounded to the roads or the paddle suspension intricacies of an Aston Martin.

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On Sundays, Taha and his friends have been organizing a super car rally of sorts from the Tidel Park on Rajiv Gandhi Salai to Mudaliar Kuppam on the way to Puducherry. “We cruise along the road early in the morning at speeds ranging from 250 km/hour to 300 km/hour to test the potential of these machines. I just sit in the passenger seat and take pictures admiring the engineering precision that has gone into the making of these machines,” he says.

So which car would Taha want to own when he grows up and earns big money? 

The young automobile enthusiast says that all he wants is to be a hands-on engineer. “Some day, I want to be a part of the team that builds a Ferrari. I want show the car to my friends and say I had a role in making this beauty.”