Images Of A Vintage Triumph Car To Soothe A Terrible Experience
Last week was a really bad week.
While stopped at a traffic light with my 2002 Mustang convertible, a car hit me from behind and pushed me into a third car. I was sandwiched, all three cars were terribly damaged, and at the end of the week the Mustang was officially a 'total loss'.
A 2002 Mustang V6 convertible is not a vintage car (yet), but I liked this car very much. It is not really a muscle car like its newer versions, but it felt more like the American version of an MG, or other small sports car. It rattled, made noises, and was quirky.
And now it is gone...
Luckily my oldest daughter finishes her last week of technical college this week, and we are able to shuffle cars until she goes to university in August. My wife now drives my daughter's car, and I drive my wife's Kia Sorento. Not a bad car, but...you know...
To soothe the pain a bit, I went back to some images of a vintage Triumph I created in 2014.
I made these images at the Gallabrae: the Scottish Games that each year are held on the grounds of Furman University. Besides the games, the music, the food, and the Border Collie demonstrations, it also features a British Car show. The smooth lines, shining paint, and gleaming chrome of the vintage British sports cars on display provide great photo opportunities.
The 2014 Gallabrae was the first time I took the Mamiya RZ67 Pro II outside to shoot handheld. Although this is a heavy camera (aka "The Beast") with a mirror slap that equals the recoil of a small rifle, the mass of the camera dampens the mirror slap sufficiently to allow handholding with shutter speeds as slow as 1/60 of a second.
So this month's "Image of the Month" actually is a set of several images.
The film I used that day was Kodak Portra 400. A very versatile color film, which in 120 size and with the Mamiya creates about 6x7 centimers size negatives. I like this format very much, because the 6:7 aspect ratio of the negatives can be resized with almost no cropping to the 4:5 aspect ratio which I prefer for my prints.
But "wait!" you will say, "you mentioned you used a color film, while the images I see here are black and white?!"
That is correct. While most of the images I made that day look great in the colors Portra creates, for the car images the colors in the backgrounds and reflections were too distracting. I converted them to black and white in Lightroom, which resulted in more balanced images focusing on the details of the cars.
I am very pleased with the final results of the images above, and other images of cars I made that day, which are included in my Vintage Cars portfolio.
And looking at them today makes me forget, at least for a moment, the loss of the pony car.