But it’s a dry heat they say. Yeah, right 115 degrees without a cloud the sky is hot. I don’t care how dry it is – it’s hot!
After ten minutes of my camera sitting on the tripod, the black plastic was too hot to touch! If you picked up a rock, your skin would be burned.
Driving around the barren landscape of Nevada, about an hour outside of Las Vegas, it would take a lot to get me out of my air conditioned car in this heat.
But how could I resist the beautiful patina of an old period cars baking for decades in the relentless desert sunlight? I pulled out my tripod and hiked over to the relic for a multiple shot high dynamic range photograph of this fine old car.
Recently sold as a 30″ x 20″ print of “Vintage Car In The Desert HDR” to a collector from Piedmont, OK, this photograph is a look back in time as well as evidence of the ravages of weather on painted metal as an automobile that outlived its usefulness lays abandoned where it gave its last gasp.
What the story behind this old car abandoned in the desert? Getaway car from a casino robbery gone wrong? Seems too high end to be a car that would have carried migrant workers in days of the Grapes of Wrath.
Maybe the staff car for a gold or silver mine owner? The area is well known for mining way back to the days of Spanish explores looking for pools of gold.
I found a few more abandoned cars in the area. This classic old Metro delivery van was shot using the Canon EOS 24mm Tilt-Shift lens.
The tilt-shift lens allowed me to take three overlapping images, panning from top to bottom. The images were later combined in Adobe Lightroom for a resulting highly detailed photograph.
I’m a big fan of the Metro Van. In my fantasy world, I’d be driving around from photo shoot to photo shoot with one of these awesome vintage vans. Today many of them are turned into food trucks. The original design was by Raymond Loewy of Studebaker and Coke bottle fame. Metro bodies were built by the Metropolitan Body Company on Grand Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the overall design of the Metro vans remained somewhat unchanged from 1938 until 1964.
Here is another HDR photograph I took in the desert on this trip. Outside of this old vintage cars slowly aging over decades in the desert the cloudless sky was eye blinding bright. Inside the car were deep shadows.
The only way to capture the full dynamic range of the scene was to put the camera on a tripod, compose the scene and then take a series of photographs exposed for different light levels. For example one exposure for the shadows, one for the mid-range values and one for highlights.
Later in post-
I wish I had brought a raw egg with me on this photo shoot just to demonstrate how hot it was in the desert. No doubt I could have cracked an egg on the hood of one of these cars and made myself an omelet.
All during my trips to the American Southwest, I never fail to stop and photograph old, well preserved, relics of vintage cars that seem to die and simply be moved off the road where they took their last sip of gasoline. From scrap yards in Utah to the middle of nowhere, I just can’t resist these old cars.
See more car photography from across the United States here – https://edward-fielding.pixels.com/art/car