While I was out yesterday, I spied an older DeSoto sedan on the side of the road that I’ve been meaning to shoot for months now. Pulling a highly illegal U-turn, I stopped in and took pictures until the battery on my Canon died.
This particular model is a Fireflite, first released in 1955 as the flagship model, and cost $3,544 new. It’s a huge four-door sedan featuring a V-8 engine with a lever-controlled automatic transmission. With styling featuring a grille full of chrome and a beautiful hood ornament suggesting a pair of wings bent back in flight, DeSoto sold 114,765 of the model in 1955.
Unfortunately, the DeSoto name did not last beyond the 1960 model year, a victim of Chrysler’s machinations (it competed directly with the Dodge and Plymouth brands as a mid-priced offering) and the recession of 1958.
WOW. This is so awesome, it gets a full-page post. An SD memory card with built-in wireless capability, so that pictures taken on a camera can be uploaded to a computer or a Flickr account (or one of 14 other online photosharing services). Still using CompactFlash (like me)? They’re testing CF adapters for the SD cards, and expect to have them ready in a week.
That’s some cool shit, there.
It’s been a busy, strange week here at Lockardugan Central, so we decided to have some drinks and dip into the Halloween candy reservoir last night to, uh, test it for quality. It’s funny how Dark Chocolate Twix make everything so much better so quickly. Jen just came back home with a pile of decorations for the house, so we’re going to close the studio early to get the house ready for the kids this evening.
Addendum: The photo above was taken hand-held in exceptionally low light, on manual settings. I’ve made a breakthrough with the D70 since I got the new lens, and suddenly everything makes more sense. I’ve been shooting everything manually since the Oyster Festival, and now the F-stop/shutter speed combinations are drilled into my head in a way that I could not learn on film cameras. I’ve also learned to use the ISO settings to my advantage, and I’ll be getting into the intricacies of metering next.
Jen and I needed to get out of the house this afternoon, so we checked out the Elkridge Flea Market on Rt. 1. After navigating a highly chaotic parking lot, we found the pickings to be slim, unless as a shopper you’re interested in cowboy boots, secondhand tools, kung-fu DVD’s, or cellphone holsters. As a slice-of-life destination, it’s hard to beat, however.
We’re driving north on Saturday with Jen’s father to check out the Collings Foundation fly-in, where there will be three 1940’s era bombers parked for the public to see. I’ve been wanting to do this since I found out they were touring years ago, and I plan to stay as long as I can, bring as many cameras as I can carry, and spend as much time as possible in each plane.
In preparation, I bought an inexpensive but valuable tool for my D70: a F/1.8 50mm Nikkor lens. I’ve read several articles in the last couple of weeks touting its power and simplicity and when I put it on the Nikon I was transported back to my first weeks of photo class, using a Minolta with an identical lens: the view is the same and the camera weighs the same (maybe a little lighter, actually). Using it to snap some basic photos, I remembered how much more it made me work back then—in order to frame the photo correctly, the photographer is forced to move, making the process that much more intimate and engaged. In the short time I used it, it made me think harder about how I wanted the photo to look and where I needed to be instead of simply zooming in to compose. I spent a lot of time habitually tugging on the focus ring trying to get closer…oh, right.
The other great feature of this lens is manual exposure setting. Most of the kit lenses shipped with new DSLRs are auto-exposure only, which means a whole measure of lighting control is lost. Both of my current lenses are auto-exposure, unfortunately. This one takes me back to the basics, which I’ve forgotten completely, so I cracked Jen’s copy of Horenstein’s Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual this morning and started reading up on my basic camera theory.
What’s funny is how boring I thought depth-of-field exercises were at the time (and how expensive they proved to be) but how fascinated I am about getting the theory down today. I’d like to get to the point where I can shoot manually without stopping to remember if F/1.2 is wide open or closed down, but I think that’s probably a long way off. (Tom Baird, I hope you read this someday and reconsider the low grades you gave me in theory class.)
I’m also going to take my through-the-viewfinder rig and hope that the event staff doesn’t think I’m shooting lasers at them or something. I’ve been perfecting my setup for that rig for a while now, to the point where it has a preset on my Canon and shoots with excellent results about 90% of the time. The only thing I wish I had for it now is a macro lens for the Nikon so I could get larger-quality originals; I’m at the limit of what I can do with the pairing of the Canon on the rig, and I’d like to be able to expand the possibilities. All in good time.
The Mobile Chapel is parked at a rest stop in southern Pennsylvania, and it’s open for business at 6:30 on a Monday evening.
A beautiful Pontiac conveniently parked aross the street from my parents’ house yesterday afternoon.