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My assignment was to shoot images at the North American International Detroit Auto Show all with one prime lens — a Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro.

The assignment took me full circle back to the days when I was little. When I was maybe 6 or 7, my dad and I began to play a game of who's the fastest to identify the vehicle brand and model while we were walking on the street. The game soon expanded to any time we were outside.

I was so obsessed with beating him at the game that I tried my best to remember the shapes, the contours and the looks of headlights, taillights of every car I saw.  At that time, in the early '90s in China, our subjects included a small mixture of some Soviet cars, some German cars (mostly the Santana), very few Japanese and Korean cars, and the boxy American Jeep Cherokee (XJ).

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The game had such a deep impact on me that I still try to name the brands and models I see on the streets during my commute to work in and around Detroit. Even while driving in the dark, I challenge myself to identify the vehicles by looking only at the headlights or taillights.

I learned to work on my own vehicles to save money while I was in college, with the help of YouTube instruction videos. The process of taking parts off and putting parts on vehicles gave me a chance to see the vehicles up-close, to notice a lot of their details, and to have an appreciation for car design, including some of the so-called Easter eggs hidden by designers.

Here are some of the things I saw during my recent assignment. And if you look closely when you visit the auto show at Huntington Place in Detroit, beginning Saturday and running through Sept. 24, maybe you can make identifying brands and models a game, too.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 2023 Detroit auto show: Taking in the details of all the cars