Long time readers are aware of my predilection for shooting Aston Martin bonnets. So here’s a curve ball for you. Can you name this car?
Think you’re good? Then name all four cars visible in this photo!
Car Photo of the Day: Name the car, from the engine.
It’s time for another round of “Name That Car” with the engine being the only hint.
Know this one?
Farewell Aperture, for now.
My 30-day Apple Aperture trial expired. I ended up deciding not to buy the software though. Why?
$199 seems steep for an application that runs like molasses on my fairly well-spec’ed machine; a MacBook Pro 2.53GHz with 4 GB of RAM. I like Aperture’s RAW editing features. Once I got the hang of them that is. But… damn this application is slow. This was with a library of less than 100 photos. I note that iPhoto bogs down once its library exceeds 5000 images. Aperture was dog slow right from the very first image.
Every once in a while I would see some moment of brilliance, and think I was falling in love with the software. Then it would smack me with a spinning cursor and drive me away. I would hope that a trial period would show you all the reasons to love a new product, but in this case it just drove me back to using iPhoto + Photoshop.
I’m open to being convinced otherwise, so feel free to chime in if you have a differing opinion.
Car Photo of the Day: Meteor Shower
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.
It is Official: I’m going to France for Le Rallye de Monte-Carlo Historique 2011
See these two guys and their Mini? I’m going to be their Service Crew Manager for the 2011 Monte Carlo Historic Rally. Yes that rally, put on by the same people who host the F1 and WRC events in Monaco, L’Automobile Club de Monaco. These two Mad Englishmen, John Morrow and Bill Richards have asked me to join their team and help them win their class at the 2011 event.
My duties will be wrangling the service team, and making sure we’re in the right places, at the right times, with tires, tools and fuel (for both the Mini and the guys in the Mini!), and documenting the whole experience via photographs, video, and the written word.
John sent me an invitation a couple of weeks ago, and we have been engaged in an email Q&A session for a while to determine if I am the right guy for the position. We met for a few beers last night at a spot in Snohomish, halfway between his home in Bellevue, and mine in Arlington, and I agreed to join this band of lunatics. Wish us well.
I started off the “documentation” part of my duties with a few photographs:
More news coming soon.
Car Photo of the Day: Domestic Affair
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?
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.