No moody black and white image today, just a simple color shot of a wonderful automobile. This shot shows the exhaust pipes of a 1935 Auburn Speedster. The Auburn was manufactured in Auburn, Indiana and was noted in its day for being a high performance automobile. Before a customer received their automobile, it was certified to have been tested to 100.8 Miles Per Hour by Ab Jenkins a professional race car driver known for setting speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. I’ve always liked the look of the Auburn Speedster. There is something about the chrome pipes coming out of the engine that just looks cool and exudes speed.

I recently received an e-mail from Gary Grobson, a photographer and retired architect who had some nice comments about my web site. Of course I had to check out his web site as well and I was quite impressed by his work. One of the areas I really found fascinating was his Circles gallery. I really liked the interesting shapes and forms found in these images. I asked him how these image were created and he sent me a Photoshop action which he uses to create these images. If you haven’t seen these before, the images are created by taking a square crop and using the Photoshop Polar Coordinates filter a couple of times to create the circular image. Naturally I had to play around with some of my images to see what I could come up with.

I’ve always been attracted to images with a strong graphical quality, whether they are color or black and white. When I was wandering around our cruise ship I had my eye out for subjects which might make interesting subjects. This image was taken from a bridge which overlooked the pools on the Freedom of the Seas. The pools have a variety of colored elements which make for interesting visuals. For this shot I simply pointed down at a portion of the pool and attempted to capture an interesting pattern of shape and color.

I love winter (as long as it snows) but sometimes you just need to get away for a bit. I’ll be taking a short break from my blogging activities but will return shortly. In the meantime, I figured I would post this shot that I took on a trip a couple of years ago to North Myrtle Beach, SC. This image has been sitting around waiting for me to decide to do something with it. I’ve always liked the repetition of the chairs and the warm color but I held back posting it anywhere. I just purchased the PhotoTune suite which includes Focal Point 2. I decided to try it out by slightly altering the field of focus. It’s not a big change, but I like the added blur. I also used PhotoTools to bring out just a bit more color and contrast.

I figured that after a series of asylum pictures it might be nice to do something completely different. This shot was taken a couple of years ago when my family and I returned from a trip. The picture shows the tunnel which connects Concourse C to the main McNamara Terminal at Detroit’s Metro Airport. The tunnel is quite interesting. There is ambient music playing in the background and they use continually change the color of the lights. There are two long moving sidewalks which pass by long panels of glass sculpture. It’s a really nice change of pace from the typical chaos found in airports.

I like to take pictures of classic automobiles but dealing with lighting conditions that you can’t control, reflections of cars and people, etc. can make it difficult to get a nice final image. I like to focus on the details which make these cars so interesting and sometimes the reflections are really a distraction. In the image above, I actually liked the reflections. The picture shows a 1932 Packard Stationery Coupe on display at the Classic Car Club of America (CCCA) show held at the Gilmore Car Musuem near Kalamazoo, Michigan. I took the shot primarily because I liked the way the reflections looked in the curve of the spare tire holder and other places on the car.

This past weekend I attended the 2009 Eyes on Design car show held at the Edsel and Eleanor Mansion in Grosse Point Shores, Michigan. The event is an annual affair and is a fund raiser for the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology. This is the shows 21st year. Each year has a different theme and this year highlighted advertising and cars. Many of the cars on display had a framed advertisement for the vehicle next to it. It was interesting to see the way cars have been marketed through the years.

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.

Here’s an image that is a bit different than what I’ve been working with recently. This is actually an older image that I took at a friend’s house a couple of years ago. The image shows a Le Klint 172 pendant lamp, tinted to give it a little color. I took the shot by first turning the light on. I focused in on various parts of the lamp until I got a composition that I liked. For this image, I took the raw image, added some contrast and then played with the hue/saturation slider until I got a result that I liked. I have a couple other versions of this lamp, including a black and white image that I really like. I recently found a group on Flickr which is devoted to Le Klint.

On Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan is a terrific little store with a variety of interesting merchandise. The store is Acme Mercantile. I took this shot of the storefront on a morning walk through town. For some reason I was in the mood to take storefronts that day. Most of the images I shot on my walk were taken with the potential to make an HDR image. I set my camera to shoot 5 bracketed exposures, 1 stop apart. I was doing this hand held and I set my camera to fast shooting and clicked off 5 quick shots at various exposures in an attempt to minimize movement. Of course, one problem was that it was windy that day, so any thing which could be affected by the wind (like leaves on a tree) created motion that I didn’t want.