Car Photo of the Day: Just another trick of the light.

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.

Bien sûr, Je ne parle pas Français, Je suis un Americain!

Bien sûr, Je ne parle pas Français, Je suis un Americain!

I can say this phrase in near-perfect French. Like Magritte’s painting of a pipe, it has more than one layer of irony.

This is not a pipe.

I took four years of French when I was a kid. Two years in grade school – 4th & 5th grades, and two years in high school. Because I had to have two years of a foreign language, and I was a lazy slacker, I took the same two years of French over again. This was pulled off because between grade school and high school my family moved from Illinois to Texas. The Texas schools had no idea I had already been through the course and gave me credit for doing it again.

I haven’t spoken a lick of French since. The ability to read it hasn’t vanished, but there are always mystery words. If I listen hard I can understand spoken French now and then. For example if there is a hockey game on Canadian radio en Français I can mostly follow along. But if my life depended upon saying something in French right now I’d be a goner. It would be au revoir Chuck!

Something has come up lately that has me studying French again (too early to share, as details are sketchy, but be patient!) so I’m looking for suggestions for online or offline lessons. I’ve been playing with livemocha a bit, and may just spring for their course… but I’m open to suggestions.

Or even direct help from any of you Francophones out there!

My work in laser cut vinyl.

The digital.forest logotype

This is my work.

That’s a double entedre of sorts as it is also, for the moment, my employer, but what I’m talking about here is this logotype. Back when dinosaurs in neon-colored Member’s Only jackets roamed the earth, I was a Graphic Designer. I designed this at the request of my friend, Chris Kilbourn, who started d.f back in 1994. For posterity, here is the back-story of its creation; (Kilbo can fill in any details I’ve forgotten in the comments)…

When I was a professional designer I kept sketchbooks. Usually hard-bound books of blank heavy paper. I doodled and wrote in them constantly, usually with a black felt-tip pen. )I hate ball-points, and pencil doesn’t hold up well to wear.) I’ve kept all sorts of bad habits over the years but losing this good habit of doodling I regret deeply.

Several years prior to doing this logo for d.f I had done a whole corporate identity for a housing development called “Pine Lake Glen” on the Issaquah/Sammamish plateau. Back then it was a lot like the area I live now; high ground in the Cascade Foothills, with a few horse properties and widely scattered houses. It was just beginning to be developed. Now it is a bustling surburbia with a Starbucks on every corner, and expensive SUVs plying the driveways and parking lots. In my sketchbooks at the time I doodled a lot of trees coming up with the look for PLG. I settled on a set of three, which I had created with a paintbrush. I’ve often thought about driving up to the plateau and seeing if the signage I designed is still there, some 20+ years later.

When Chris asked me to design the d.f logo I remembered all those trees I had drawn years before and dug out my sketchbook. Sure enough, at some point I had made the perfect “tree”, with a fat loose-ended marker that had a wonderfully frenetic, organic shape. It would contrast well with the circuit-board motif I planned to mate with it to capture the incongruous combination of thoughts that is digital.forest. The typeface may look familiar to anyone who has ever driven the Autobahn: it is the condensed variant of the Deutsches Institut für Normung face created for highway signage. You know… all roads lead to:
All roads lead to Ausfarht!

I prepared other designs, but I knew this was “the one” as soon as I completed it. I presented a range of offerings to Chris but he saw the beauty in this one and went with it. I created some great letterhead, and some truly amazing translucent business cards (which d.f sadly no longer uses.) We’ve kept the overall design in the intervening sixteen years, and like a good logo should, it has stood the test of time. Recently we went through an office remodel. It took forever, and frankly drove many of us nuts, but one highlight was revealed at the end. Out in the lobby, highly visible as you step out of the elevators is my work embedded in the floor in laser-cut vinyl:

Though I’m leaving digital.forest the identity I created for it sixteen years ago will always remain. As an artist, it is always satisfying seeing your work… at work.

Car Photo of the Day: Name the car, by the engine.

Name the car, by the engine.

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.

Car Photo of the Day: Automotive Upskirt

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:

The Virtual Storefront for My Automotive Photography

Now you too can buy this image.

After years of consideration I’ve finally decided to take the advice of many friends and fans and offer some of my automotive photographs for sale. I have no illusions of this being a means to making a living, but if all goes well I’ll be able to buy a lens or two.

I’m using a service called SmugMug, that allows you to order prints, mounted prints, and framed prints which will be shipped to an address of your choosing. You can pay online securely using a credit card, and select shipping methods and whatnot. Given that print sizes may not match the file size you are also given the option to crop the photo to fit. There are also a few bits of merchandise for sale with images on them, as well as digital downloads for use on screen and print

I’m still working behind the scenes to get the store ready, so the shelves are not stocked properly, and some items my not remain in the inventory for long. I suspect I’ll be thinning the herd soon. Captions and keywords need to be edited too, but feel free to wander the aisles and check out the merchandise.

Having purchased a few prints myself for office decor, I think the sweet spot for size is between 14″ and 24″ on the larger side of the photo. This will become larger as I populate the galleries with newer photos from my G1 camera. I enabled the “camera info” tagging on the photos so if you see “Panasonic DMC-G1” in the info area the images should scale quite large. My older Olympus cameras made images that will likely start falling apart quality-wise at anything larger than 20″. Eventually I’ll remove all but the best images from the older cameras.

Prices are largely determined by the costs, but I’m open to feedback, especially from my core followers here on my website. For you guys I’ve arranged a “Grand Opening Discount” of 33% off anything and everything (except shipping), just use the coupon code “CheapChuckPics” at checkout.

The URL for the store is: http://photos.goolsbee.org.

Let me know what you think.

Car Photo of the Day: This was once considered high tech.

Sure, this is not exactly a stunning photo, but I didn’t make it with art in mind. I was intrigued by this hanging bag on the firewall of this Alfa (sorry, no guessing games today… the answer is stamped right on the photo!) and had to capture it. Given the car Mitch Katz’ Alfa’s vintage is the same as my E-type, 1965, it is interesting to compare the industrial materials used for items such as this. In the years prior, Jaguar used glass jars mounted to the firewall, though in 1964 they changed to plastic (though the fuel filter bowl remained glass.) The Alfa engineers chose to make this funny bag to perform a similar function, complete with grommets for mounting. You would never see something like this, or Jaguar’s glass containers today. Sometimes it is the minor, behind the skin touches, that also lend charm to these old cars.

Here is a photo of the Alfa’s entire engine bay. Lovely little car!