As part of part of Mary’s personal physical therapy regimen, she’s decided that walking around a car show is better than just walking…And so on a recent Saturday she drove us to the First Saturday Lone Tree Cars & Coffee event, which is where I made these images.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
The half-frame (18 x 24 mm) 35mm Olympus Pen F was introduced in 1963 and featured none other than the late W. Eugene Smith, cigarette dangling from his lips, in photo magazine ads of the time. The Olympus E-P3 was, introduced in June 2011 and is a Micro Four Thirds system camera that uses a chip size of 17.3 x 13mm squeezing a miserly 12.3-megapixels out of it. Like the original Pen F, it’s an extremely sophisticated camera wrapped in a compact interchangeable lens body. Mine is Chrome-finished body that Mary customized with a tan leather skin from a kit I purchased in Japan, giving it a retro look.
For thia car show, I decided to use the Olympus E-P3 with an Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens aka “worst ever Micro Four-thirds lens,” because I don’t believe that statement and it makes a compact and pocketable package with the E-P3. The downside of the lens is that its scale focusing manual controls makes focusing hit-and miss and I’ll admit to sometimes missing focus at lot during this show. Because it’s a 15mm lens there is some barrel distortion when you tilt the lens up or down but you can correct it in Photoshop or Lightroom or it might not even bother you.
The show itself was fairly well-attended with a more diverse lot of mostly foreign made cars except for some Corvettes, a few Mustangs and for some reason two rows of Ford’s latest Bronco incarnation. There were more Bentley’s—mostly Continentals—than normal at a Cars & Coffee event and I was admiring one particular GT Speed model when the owner invited me to sit in the car. It was heavenly. Alas no photos; Mary has not mastered simultaneously using a camera and a cane.
How I Made this photograph: There was even a bright yellow Noble at the show. Noble Automotive Ltd, is a British sports car manufacturer based in Leicester. It. was created in 1999 by Lee Noble in Leeds, West Yorkshire, to produce high-speed sports cars that have a rear mid-engine, rear-wheel drive layout. This image was made with the Olympus E-P3 and Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens with an exposure of 1/1250 sec at f/8 and ISO 400, with a plus one-third stop exposure compensation.
How I Made this photograph: I call this Citroën, Maigret’s car since it looks a lot like the car Michael Gambon drove in the 1992 PBS series based on Georges Simenon’s books. Citroën is a French automobile brand. The “Automobiles Citroën” manufacturing company was founded in March 1919 by André Citroën. Since 2021, Citroën has been owned by Stellantis having previously been part of the PSA Group after Peugeot acquired 89.95% share in 1976. In 1934, the firm established its reputation for innovative technology with the Traction Avant, which I believe this car is. It was the world’s first car to be mass-produced with front-wheel drive, four-wheel independent suspension, as well as unibody construction, omitting a separate chassis, and instead using the body of the car itself as its main load-bearing structure. This image was the shot with the Olympus E-P3 and Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens with an exposure of 1/1600 sec at f/8 and ISO 400, with a plus one-third stop exposure compensation.
One of my favorite books—and maybe the best one on the subject—about photographing cars is James Mann’s How to Photograph Cars. It’s available on Amazon for just $22.95 with used copies starting around fourteen bucks.