'57 Imperial

This shot of a 1957 Chrysler Imperial was taken at the 2008 Eyes on Design car show held at the Edsel and Eleanor Ford Mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan. The show itself is a fundraiser for the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology. They had several cars in different age and style groups. I found this Chrysler Imperial to be particularly interesting. The color is typical '50s and the chrome on the car was beautiful. I really liked how the passenger side mirror combined with the antennae and shadow from the sun, created a nice abstract pattern of lines, shapes and colors.

As you can see from the image to the left, the original image lacked just a little bit of punch. Most of the processing was designed to bring out the color that I saw at the show and to emphasize the lines. Overall, processing on this shot was really quite minimal. I used Adobe Camera Raw to make some minor white balance adjustments along with enhancing the blacks just a bit. In Photoshop, I used a very simple curve to increase contrast. The chrome was reflecting a bit of the trees and grass so I added a HSL layer and desaturated the yellows and greens. This helped the chrome be more 'chromelike'. I also cropped the image just a bit to eliminate just a bit of the windshield wiper.

This shot was taken with an Olympus E-3 and a Digital Zuiko 14-54mm lens at f22. Zoom was at 29mm (58mm full frame equivalent). Shot at 1/80 at ISO 100.

Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome

This image is for sale at my Automobile Details gallery at ImageKind. I hope you check it out.

Duesy

The image you see above is a close-up shot of a 1935 Duesenberg Automobile. This particular car is one of many fine vehicles in the collection of the Gilmore Car Museum. The museum is spread out over 90 acres and has over 200 classic cars. It is located near Kalamazoo, Michigan and is well worth the trip if you enjoy automobiles and are in the area.

The image itself was taken mid morning. The car is located in a barn which has several windows which provide reasonable lighting but not really enough for a hand held low ISO shot. Fortunately the museum is very accommodating of photographers and I was able to use my tripod. One of the features of the automobile that I wanted to capture was the way the chrome exhaust tubes come out of the engine and go through the fender itself. In the lighting that I had, the area under the car was dark so I experimented with an off-camera flash in an attempt to brighten the underside without making the entire car too bright. I used a manual exposure on the flash and cut the power down to about 1/32 or 1/64 power.

The finished shot required minimal processing. The image below is the raw image as it came out of the camera. As you can see, the car was white, although in the barn lighting the car took on a bit of a yellow-ish look.

I wanted to keep the feeling of the white car and I wanted to emphasize the details rather than color. I converted the image to black & white, but I kept the bit of red on the spare tire holder. About the only other change to the image was a crop to remove some extra information at the top and bottom of the image, neither strip contributed much to the image. I wanted the focus to be on the details and the chrome exhaust.

As always, I'm interesting in hearing constructive feedback. Thanks!