Another look at automobile photography

I'm often asked if I miss the darkroom and frequently surprise people when I answer with an unequivocal "no." I don't miss bad fumes, heaps of paper spent making the perfect guide print and the sharp corner of my darkroom table that never hurt quite enough to round off, but still ate my hip weekly. I DO, however, miss the results. Ilford HP5 on a nice oriental warm tone paper could make for a delightful print. Even more so when it was printed by someone with true skills like Tim at Amaranth Photo lab in Boulder (now closed sadly).

The photo above is one of the first shots we did for the car shoot below. We had a few questionable minutes while nature decided not to rain and security decided whether my credentials were legit. The edits you see took about an hour and I was specifically going for a look reminiscent of the Oriental papers I love.

Before you look at the car photo in it's enlarged state, check this simple monitor calibration chart out. if you can see all of the different bars of gray and black on the chart you're more likely to see all of the shadow and highlight detail in the black and white photo.

Classic Hot Rod Photography

I've been working on a fun personal project here lately and thought I'd share an initial result with those of you stopping by. I've had this concept in my head for a while and as luck has it the location that most closely fit what I wanted was off limits to professional photography. After some serious phone time I was able to make good on my location scouting and get the first choice for the shoot. I spent some tense hours hoping that we wouldn't get rained out as we waited for the car's arrival. Fortunately we had just a few drops and the kind of clouds that make me glad to be alive. I'll share some more as we move through the project. Huge thanks to Harold for his amazing car collection, Eric for being photo slave and whoever ordered the show in the sky.

p.s. this photo and all of the others on my blog has an embedded icc profile, it'll look more like I intended if you're using Safari or Firefox or another browser that knows color counts.