(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 122mm, ISO 200, 1/500 sec @ f/11)

The mid 30′s Cord automobile has long been a favorite of mine. The distinctive feature being the ‘coffin’ nose and on some models, exposed chrome exhausts. My favorite Cord designs are the model 810 and later. The 810 was introduced at the 1936 New York, Los Angeles and Chicago auto shows. The show car was unique in that it had copper accents. The show car is on display at the Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg museum in Auburn, Indiana. The 810 was designed by noted car designer Gordon Buehrig. The 810 was originally going to be a 1935 Duesenberg but after incorporating a front wheel drive design, the vehicle was renamed the Cord 810.

The car above is a 1937 Cord 812 Sportsman Convertible automobile, on display at the 2011 Concours d’Elegance of America show held in Plymouth, Michigan. The 812 grew out of the 810 and was introduced in 1937. The 812 included a supercharger to increase horsepower, and featured the distinctive chrome exhaust pipes.

My main goal in processing this image was to draw attention to the two key details of the Cord, the exhaust pipes and the coffin nose. The original color shot (seen below) was a bit too bright, so I reduced the exposure in lightroom to bring back some details. The D-700 raw file is pretty forgiving of slightly overexposed images, you can generally reduce the exposure and have a nice shot, a benefit of ‘exposing to the right’. After some other minor cleanup in Lightroom, I used Silver Efex Pro 2 to convert the black and white. I think the end result sort of looks like an alien being, or the sort of car that an Imperial Stormtrooper might drive.

Here’s a final shot to give you an idea of what the full car looks like. I used Topaz Simplify to rework the background and used a layer mask to bring the car back to ‘normal’.

Please feel free to leave your thoughts, comments or questions.

Copyright ©2011 James W Howe – All rights reserved

(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 14mm (2x crop factor), ISO 250, Exposure 1/8 sec @ f/7.1)

One of my favorite automobiles is the Auburn Boattail Speedster manufactured by the Auburn Automobile Company of Auburn, Indiana. The Auburn company was sold to E.L. Cord who merged it with Duesenberg to create a company which manufactured Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs. Their main facility was housed in an Art Deco building in Auburn, Indiana which now houses the Auburn-Cord-Dusesenberg museum. This shot shows the showroom of the Museum, displaying an array of vintage Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg automobiles (big surprise). The showroom has some great Art Deco touches such as the chandeliers, and detail work in the ceiling, flooring and main staircase. The museum is a great place to visit if you love vintage automobiles or enjoy Deco design.

This image comes from a series of three that I had originally taken with the thought that I might use for an HDR shot. I didn’t have a tripod with me so this was shot using the railing of the staircase for support. I did run the images through Photomatix, but I didn’t like the look. Instead, I use a couple of Photoshop plug-ins to get a look I liked. The first thing I did was crop the image down to eliminate some useless elements from the bottom. I then ran the image through a noise-reduction process because I the 250 ISO on my Olympus E-3 introduced a little bit of noise, and I knew that subsequent processing would probably increase that noise so I wanted to have as clean of an image as I could to start with. I then used Topaz Adjust to bring out some of the details in the floor and decorative elements. In Silver Efex Pro I increased the structure of the entire image and selected the Panatomic X ISO 32 film preset to get a conversion that I liked. I added a bit of tinting as well. Finally, in Lightroom, I applied a different tint as well as added a slight vignette. Compare the finished image to the image I started with below.

Comments or thoughts?

Copyright © 2008-2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.

(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.

A few month ago I took a trip to the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana. The museum has a great collection of vintage automobiles, not surprisingly Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs. I love these cars for their interesting details. This particular image was created from a digital photograph of a 1931 Cord convertible. This is a detail shot of the front fender area. I liked the various shapes in the image and I wanted to make the image less about the car and more about the shapes so I did some tweaking of the image in Photoshop. I played with the colors and used some artistic filters to create the image you see above. You can see the effect by comparing it to the original image, shown below.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2008 James W. Howe – All rights reserved

This image can be purchased.