For Love of Cars
August 23, 2024
For largest display, click on the individual photograph.
For pretty much as long as I can remember I have been enthralled by design; in architecture, furniture, even stereo gear – Tanberg and Bang & Olufsen made great stuff. My favorite of course, as readers of Ramble would know, are sleds, whips, rides, wheels … AKA automobiles.
See my posts of January 3, 2022: Calder Art Car,
December 1, 2023: BMW Welt and Museum and
February 12, 2024: Seriously, More Cars?
This past week I was in Los Angeles and visited the Petersen Automobile Museum, 3 floors of beautiful space with sheet metal in every iteration I could imagine and a separate basement exhibit space, Hagerty’s “Vault” with 250 iconic and rare cars, including President Roosevelts mammoth bullet-proof limousine and President Eisenhower’s open roadster. The three floors are wide open with high ceilings and good lighting making them ideal for good photographs. Shooting in the basement vault however, is to say the least, challenging. Cars are parked close together, one cannot walk between them. It is hard to isolate them in a photo and the lighting is terrible due to the low ceiling and fluorescent tube lighting. You have to pay extra for the privilege of seeing this collection. It’s worth it for seeing these marvelous vehicles, not so much for photographing them.
The physical plant does not do these wonderful cars justice. I was able to isolate a few, and did as much after the fact processing as was reasonable to make them look good, but it is what it is (my wife hates it when I say that).
This is a small sampling of the 250 cars in the Vault. I would have to spend several days in this space to do the collection justice.
Notes on the photographs. Some cameras feature image stabilization enabling photographers to capture sharp images, at very low shutter speeds in venues, such as in museums, where tripods would be preferred but are verboten. All of the photographs in the series were taken with my favorite touring kit, the image stabilized Fuji XT-5 and two Sigma zoom lenses, the workhorse 18-50MM and the ultra wide 10-18MM.