News Summary

With two to six million hits "in a matter of hours," let's be honest here — Rod Hatfield's photography has got to be one of the most popular things on the Web that's not porn.

It's far from that.

Sort of.

What the nice Catholic guy from Springfield shoots, however, arguably ranks as America's second great lust: cars.

And we're talking the hottest cars on Earth here.

Cars that are surrounded by models. Cars that have John Legend crooning around them and Kid Rock partying next to.

"I've seen 'em come up from the floor and come down from the ceiling with ninjas. I've seen 'em bust through glass," Hatfield explained. "There's always some frequently intense dance numbers.

"I've found my heart racing at times."

As a photographer for the autos section of MSN, Hatfield has toured the globe for the past three years, shooting the world's biggest car shows for the Microsoft site.

Detroit. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Las Vegas. Paris. Tokyo. Beijing. Geneva.

At those shows and more, automakers roll out new models and concepts that make the world temporarily forget about the rising price of a gallon of dinosaur blood.

They're just too cool — and an eye for cool cars will be encoded in our DNA until the next stage in evolution, when a smarter bunch of humans opts for teleporters and hoverboards.

At every show, it's Hatfield's job to attend each automaker's press conference, where the cars are unveiled (often with the aid of stage fog).

"Every one," he said, "is like a two-minute U2 concert."

At General Motors' showcase each January at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, it becomes exactly that — a concert.

One year, fellow Springfielder Legend showed up to sing on behalf of GM. Kid Rock was there another year.

In New York, 50 Cent gave props to the Motor City's finest as Hatfield clicked away. (Nice to know GM has money in its budget for superstar rappers but not for, you know, the people who actually make the cars.)

Hatfield, a 1984 Catholic Central alum who divides his time between his hometown and Seattle, has already seen his share of trends.

Green vehicles and hybrids were hardly mentioned when he started.

At 42, Hatfield is the consummate professional wanderer — he was, after all, so enamored with beat poetry when he graduated from Bowling Green in 1990 that he studied with Allen Ginsberg for four summers at Naropa University in Colorado.

So a job like this is perfect, but it's far from his only job.

Back in Seattle, he co-created a video production company, The Now Device, after years of doing visual effects at almost every club in the city (for concerts by the likes of Mudhoney and Sonic Youth).

Back here, he's introduced a similar multimedia aesthetic to his hometown through the Oh10 New Media Center.

Initially, he wanted to be a poet.

"It was about wandering and being enriched by experience," he said.

At some of these auto shows, though, it must be sensory overload.

I mean, c'mon, ninjas?

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.