Category: Cars

This photo is something of a “happy accident”, as I did not intend to result in this sort of effect. I was shooting as I almost always do, hand-held and no flash, when the camera had this odd malfunction that resulted in this bizarre lighting. I kind of like the result.

The event was an informal get together of E-type owners on a January evening in San Francisco a few years back. I didn’t have my car there at the time, as I was in town on business.

I was out for a beer after work with a colleague earlier this week and was introduced to a friend of his. Turns out he’s also a “car guy” so we ended up going over to his place to see his project car. It is a late 60s Muscle Car, of a variety I had not seen in ages. It still has its original paint, a nice metallic dark green showing a wonderful patina that only time can provide. His garage was very dark, and I forgot my camera, sorry. We talked about taking a drive and I emailed him a list of driving events coming up, so hopefully I’ll see the car again and be able to photograph it.

This chance meeting reminded me that I don’t put up enough photographs of domestic cars, despite having plenty of them around, so today’s CPotD is an American car just for my domestic-leaning car-guy brethren. Can you identify it?

There is another photo of this scene where the bonnet it is focus, but the reflection and background are not. I captured both views as it is one of those universal things in life to shift focus from near to far objects, especially with reflections. This is the normal way the human eye and brain work together. I always love how old movies would use a “rack focus” shot like this to draw the eye to different parts of the scene. This, not the annoying as hell ‘shakey cam’ so overused in today’s movies and television, is how our eyes work. It is far more REAL than the shakey view, unless of course the viewer is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease or something. (I’ve missed out on a lot of TV of late because I can not stand to watch the shakey style for more than a few minutes. Not because it makes me ill, it just pisses me off because it is trying way too damn hard to be “auteur”… knock it off already and just tell me the damn story! But I digress.)

This is of course an Aston Martin, for which I have a well-documented bonnet obsession. This particular one being a Zagato Bodied DB5, which was parked alongside a hotel in Red Lodge, Montana for the GTTSR. If I recall it dropped out after the first day, but I may be wrong. I just remember shooting it any more after that first day of the first GTTSR I ran.

Yesteryday’s CPotD title brought me a wave of spam comments unlike any other I’ve ever seen! While I dig out from the pile here’s an unusual engine, in an unusual car, can you figure out what the latter is from looking only at the former? If you think you know the answer, have a go in the comments section.

There was a great moment in the famous Top Gear comparison between the Aston Martin DB5 and the E-type Jaguar, where Richard Hammond likens the view through the Jag’s bonnet louvers to catching a glimpse up a woman’s skirt. So here I present to you a little car porn for your Friday afternoon. The filth you see between the slats is an intake manifold and a glimpse of the three Skinner’s Union HD8 carbs. Car spotters can try and guess the year of the Jaguar if they’re good.

For a bit of Friday fun, here’s the Top Gear video:

Part one…

“Passports to a world SO COOL, that people there burn Guardian Furniture Supplements, just to keep warm.”
“The Moss gearbox, which was from the 1940s. Changing gear with it was a bit like… um… stirring coal.”
“Their engines were designed, not to save the planet, but to get ’round it as quickly as possible.”
“Lots of grip, and when you run out… lots of fun!”

Part two, where Hammond says his famous line: