Category: Road Photo

This scene is in Montana, but I know that John “Mad Dog” Morrow’s E-type is almost done with its restoration and will soon be delivered from San Diego to Seattle. Not quite Denver to San Francisco, but a worthy road trip nonetheless. Lots of great roads to choose from.

Another photo from the smoky summer of 2006. I think I may be in violation of a law here, somewhere in the inland northwest.

Commentator “Vroomie” (aka Paul Wigton) seems to think I can’t take a crappy photo. Honestly I take LOTS of crappy photos, I just don’t share them with the world. What you usually see is the needles from my vast fields filled with haystacks. 😉

I had a great idea, on the GTTSR last summer, which came upon me as we descended from the Lost Trail Pass & Chief Joseph Pass areas on Montana Highway 43 towards the Big Hole. I’d park the Jaguar on a wide spot, then capture the rally cars as they came by, with the static E-type framing the left side of the photo, and an in-motion slightly blurred other vintage car framing the right side. Mark & I were at the front of the pack, so if I was patient, I’d have a chance to shoot a couple dozen cars. If I was lucky, I’d get a good shot of maybe six of them. If I was really lucky, I’d get a hero shot of one or two.

I found a spot, with a semi-dramatic backdrop, but not too busy for the (hopefully) very dramatic foreground. The light was right, even the clouds were interesting. I set up my camera way down low to get a nice perspective, and tuned my ear for the sounds of internal combustion. Sure enough, car after car came roaring by and I dutifully held the (set on auto-drive!) shutter down at the moments I deemed appropriate.

What I got was mountains of crap. Either cars too far away, or examples like this one, with a slice of car in-frame as it passed. NOT ONE image with a car balanced in-frame with the E-type. I noted this in the long pauses between waves of cars and adjusted my position (thinking the camera was getting too much road in the foreground and screwing up the auto-focus. I turned off auto-focus (not really needed with my big wide angle lens anyway. I adjusted my auto-drive shutter intervals… no dice. Piles and piles of crappy photos.

Photography is an art form because it involves composition, light, and if you do it right, some forethought and planning. But as Field Marshall von Motlke so famously said “your plannink ist vucked” or something like that. Sometimes, hell… USUALLY… my camera does not bend to my creative will, and I get steaming piles of pixels such as you see above.

Besides, even if I had captured that red ‘vette perfectly, my shadow would have ruined it!

My memory of this shot’s exact locale has escaped my brain, but with the “#20” GTTSR sticker on the wing I know it was taken last summer on my rally trip with Mark Collien. The landscape is sort of generic “Inland Northwest” so it could be Montana, Idaho, or Washington. I strongly suspect it is the latter, perhaps somewhere on SR 20… though it could be Montana Highway 200.

But… you know, it doesn’t really matter does it? The road ahead is empty. The wind is in your hair. The weather is mild and inviting. The engine growls contentedly beneath that shapely bonnet. All you really care about is approaching that vanishing point.

Put your foot into it and smile.

There is something uniquely American about scenes like this. You find them all over the West. A ribbon of asphalt, two lanes, running like an arrow for the horizon across barren, unpopulated country. Never varying from a plumb line in the horizontal, but undulating freely over the varying vertical terrain. From the Great Plains through the Rockies and Great Basin, to the Sierras and Cascades you’ll encounter this phenomenon. I never saw anything like it in anywhere Europe, and I’ve never seen anything like it east of the Mississippi river either.

I imagine you see nothing but this in parts of Australia, but I haven’t been there… yet.

As the vast majority of my lifetime as a license carrying adult has been spent within a day’s drive of the Continental Divide I’ve spent a lot of time looking through windshields at this sort of horizon. Driving this sort of road. To me it is like being home. As comforting as my driveway.

I’ll never forget running the Cannonball Classic almost ten years ago. We barreled west from New York and the route took us through Colorado and Utah to US 50, aka “The Loneliest Road”. Leaving I-15 in Utah US 50 makes a couple of cursory turns and then settles into a straightaway that I swear goes on for 100 miles. Of course it crests a hill at one point and you see the road going straight over the distant horizon. There were 4 British journalists stuffed into a Subaru WRX covering the event and I had just returned from the UK about a year before. I remember thinking how absolutely mind-blowing experiencing this must be for them.

Picture yourself out there. Go ahead, floor it… nobody will ever know.

A slight alteration of theme, at Paul Wigton’s suggestion: Road Photo of the Day. I hope you enjoy it.

This was shot last year on Montana Highway 279 northwest of Helena. The question is who shot it? I know it was taken with Mark Collien’s camera, but I can recall taking a shot like this somewhere on that trip. I know both of us drove portions of this road, and I was playing with his Nikon whenever I was in the passenger seat. I know I did my best to grab shots at the end of the day that I knew I snapped, so perhaps this is one… who knows? Mark?

If it is your shot Mark apologies for the blanket application of my copyright. 😉