Vintage Schwinn
by James Howe on Jun.23, 2009, under Michigan
(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 35mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/160 sec @ f/4.5)
At this past weekend’s ‘Motor Muster’ held at Greenfield Village, the show displayed more than just automobiles. They had a nice collection of older scooters and motorcycles, and they had a great collection of bicycles from various decades. The image above is of a Schwinn, most likely from the 50’s (I neglected to take a picture of the info card, so I don’t have the particulars on this bike.) I did punch up the color a bit in the post.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Discarded #1
by James Howe on Jun.23, 2009, under Abstract, Michigan
(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 23mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/125 sec @ f/8.0)
As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently attended the 2009 Motor Muster held at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Greenfield Village is part of the entire Henry Ford Museum complex, a great place to visit year round. Anyway, the Motor Muster had cars located throughout the village, and behind one group of car was the Armington & Sims Machine Shop. In front of this building sits a variety of discarded bits of boilers, coal and other wonderful rusty objects. The picture above is just one of the many interesting pieces of old ‘junk’ which is on display. I’ve always been attracted to mechanical things and I love high contrast, so when I have of a bright sunny day combined with some interesting historic junk, I’m a happy camper.
For the processing of this image, I used a couple filters (Topaz Adjust and Simplify) to help bring out the color and texture in the metal. The bright sunny day sort of washed out the color in the raw image and I wanted to bring back the feeling of rust and contrast that I felt when I took the shot.
The image is named ‘Discarded #1’ because I took several shots of different items at this location. I’m planning on posting more in the near future.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
1936 Pontiac Six Hood Ornament
by James Howe on Jun.22, 2009, under Automobiles, Michigan
(Olympus E-3, 70-300mm at 114mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/100 sec @ f/10)
This past weekend I attended two car shows, each showcasing vintage automobiles. The first show that I went to was on Saturday and it was the annual ‘Motor Muster’ held at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The ‘Motor Muster’ is a huge event, with hundreds of cars, motorcycles and bicycles from past to present. While the show has some very nice cars, and the location at Greenfield Village is wonderful, it is disappointing in one regard because the show is laid out in such a way that you really can only see the fronts of most cars. Still, I was surprised that I came away with a large number of good shots this year.
What you see above, is the hood ornament of a 1936 Pontiac Master Six 2-Door Touring Sedan. I was able to lean over the rope to get a nice shot of the hood ornament. The yellow/cream color you see in the background is actually the body of a 1935 Cadillac. Sometimes it’s hard to get a good shot of a hood ornament in the field because you can’t always control the background. In this case, the positioning of the other car resulted in a perfect background to my shot.
Processing of this shot was minimal. There was some lint or other fuzzy things attached to the ornament, probably from a cleaning brush, so I cloned those out. I also darkened the hood of the car in the lower right corner. Other than that, some minor contrast and sharpening was all that was done to create the final image.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
This image can be purchased.
1933 Lincoln
by James Howe on Jun.18, 2009, under Automobiles, Michigan
(Olympus E-3, 70-300mm at 70mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/40 sec @ f/11)
This shot of a 1933 Lincoln was taken at the Classic Car Club of America (CCCA) car show held at the Gilmore Car Museum in early June. The cars were displayed around a big oval track and I had already made a pass around to see all the cars. I was walking behind the cars to head over to another spot when I noticed this Lincoln. For some reason, the license plate in conjunction with the other elements of the car really caught my eye. The raw shot out of the camera didn’t convey the strong graphic nature that I had felt when I took the shot, so I used a combination of Topaz Adjust and Topaz Simplify to create a image with a stronger graphical feeling (at least to my eye).
Let me know what you think.
Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
See more automobile detail images at my Automobile Details gallery on ImageKind.
1937 Cord Beverly Sedan
by James Howe on Jun.11, 2009, under Automobiles, Michigan
(Olympus E-3, 70-300mm at 70mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/320 sec @ f/9.0)
This shot shows the drivers side engine ports of a 1937 Cord Beverly Sedan. The car was part of the Classic Car Club of American (CCCA) automobile show held at the Gilmore Car Museum near Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ve always been a big fan of Cord automobiles. They have wonderful interior and exterior details that are fun to explore, but sometimes difficult to capture in a photograph. When shooting at car shows, it is sometimes difficult to get a good shot without annoying reflections, harsh lighting, etc.
The day I took this the sky was mostly cloudy, but bright. The image had some reflections on the fender that I didn’t car for, so I tried to find some way to tone them down. I ended up doing several things. I used the Topaz Adjust filter to bring out a bit more color in the image. I had contemplated trying the Topaz Simplify filter and I wanted more color variation. Instead of Simplify, I decided to see what the image would look like in black & white. By playing with the color sliders in Photoshop CS4, I was able to reduce the reflection to something you could barely see. I didn’t want black & white as my end result so I created a toning layer using curves. I played with the Red, Green and Blue curves until I got a color which was similar to the color of the car. Some tweaking of the color balance helped as well. I masked out the exhaust pipes to keep them chrome color. Overall I like the way the image came out, particularly the ‘soft’ look of the paint job with minimal reflections.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Visit my Automobile Details gallery at ImageKind. I have other vintage car shots available as well at www.vintagecarimages.com.