About the Image: Auto Repair

“Auto Repair” is a fine art black and white photograph by Edward M. Fielding showing an old vintage car inside a cluttered auto repair garage.

To capture this scene my wife and I traveled two hours from Phoenix to Jerome, Arizona on a cold November day.  It was of those situations where we kicked ourselves doing something stupid.  We packed our New Hampshire winter jackets but foolishly thought the temperature would warm up as it had back in Phoenix.

Well, Phoenix is 1,086′ above sea level.  The old mining town of Jerome is at 5,066′ above sea level.  We ended up putting on every thin layer we had.

What attracted us to Jerome is its interesting history.  It started out as a copper mining town.  Jerome, Arizona was built on Cleopatra Hill above a vast deposit of copper.  The rich copper veins were discovered in 1876 and future claims were made as more copper was discovered.  What started out as a tent city quickly became a full blowing mining town with churchs, schools

Originally the ore was transported out of the area via oxen cart over miles and miles of rough terrain.  Eventually railroads through the Verde Valley were build to extract the billions of dollars of copper ore being produced by the mines.

In its heyday Jerome was home to more than 10,000 people in the 1920s, it was the third largest city in Arizona and had the first JC Penny’s.

The town saw its up and downs.  Fires ravaged the town’s buildings on numerous occasions and even the mines themselves were on fire at one point.  The town is build on a shifting pile of rock that can been carved into, drilled and dynamited. 

Over time many buildings have collapsed or slid off their foundations including the famous sliding jail which started off on one street and ended up on another.  Today walking around you’ll see the cracked retaining walls, stucco chunks that have fallen off sides of buildings and the ruins of misfortune building that slipped and slided away.

 By the 1950s the mining operations had fallen off and the town was on the edge of becoming a ghost town.  By 1953, less than a dozen businesses were still open in Jerome, Arizona.  Two bars, one Chinese restaurant, two small grocery stores uptown, a mortuary near the elementary school, a small grocery store and gas station in the Gulch, and a pig farm out on the hogback was all that was left.

Then the state stepped in with an offer to try to save the town.  The buildings could be yours if you paid the taxes.  Hippies and artists moved in attracted by the cheap spaces and amazing landscape.  Later the whole town including the mayor was busted for pot.  To pay for their legal fees many sold off their properties to a new way of small business as the almost ghost town became a tourist destination.

Restaurants, art galleries and gift shops are all well and good but what I really wanted to see is the collection of old junk on the outskirts of town.  The Gold King Ghost Town and Mine is partly a real and partly constructed attraction that was the work of a collector of old stuff named Don Robertson who died a few years ago.

Known as the little town of Haynes Az . this “suburb” of Jerome Billion Dollar Copper Camp started as a pursuit of copper but when they dug the shaft, gold was found instead of copper. They mined gold here from 1890 to 1914.  Don Robertson was both the source of and a large part of the main attraction. A tinkerer with a knack and an enthusiasm for all things mechanical, Don purchased the site of the abandoned town and turned it into his own gearhead paradise.  

The property is littered with old buildings, old things and lots of old cars and trucks.  It’s a photographer’s heaven if like to photograph old rusting vehicles, dusty relics, and treasures from the past.  Enter through the gift shop and pay an entrance fee of seven dollars which is reasonable for wonders to behold! 

About the Photograph

We didn’t get to the Gold King Mine until about an hour before closing and November sun was already low in the horizon.  We didn’t have long to take it all in and had to move quickly – compose, expose and move along. 

I found this great scene of an old vintage automobile in a state of repair in the old garage.  The amount of detail was incredible.  My Canon 16-35mm lens on my Canon 6D was perfect for the task of setting the car in the scene with all of the delicious detail.

I chose a center composition for this shot.  I often go with center compositions despite my art school son’s scolding because many of my images end up in my book cover portfolio.

Back home in New Hampshire I sat down to evaluate the image and do the post-processing.  The Canon 16-35mm did a great job in capturing all the sharp detail but I wanted to highlight the car as the main subject.

The highlights from the sunlight streaming in from the roof openings were blown out but easily corrected on the RAW file in Adobe Lightroom.

To simplify the scene and remove some distracting elements I converted the image to black and white.  I also added some vignetting to darken the edges and which further emphasizes the main subject – the old vintage car.

Then in Adobe Photoshop I removed a distracting rope that was put across the garage bay to keep people out.

Next in OnOne I increased to the vignette a few times and used their chrome black and white filter to make the scene a bit more dramatic.

Purchase a print of “Auto Repair”

“Auto Repair” by Edward M. Fielding can be purchased as open ended edition prints, museum quality framed and matted prints, canvas, wood, acrylic and metal prints.  https://edward-fielding.pixels.com/featured/auto-repair-edward-fielding.html