Posted June 29, 2023
Buckle your seat belts, folks -- this is going to be a long ride.
Last weekend I attended the annual Greenwood Car Show, which is staged on what feels like ALL of Greenwood Avenue, though in reality it's but a single mile closed off to traffic, wiped clean of parking, and gauntleted on both sides, angled-in-parking space by angled-in-parking space, in vintage, classic, antique, modern, sporty, racy, goofy, cutting-edge, nostalgic and otherwise jaw-dropping vehicles sparkling in the sun.
I lie. It was a cloudy day. That put a bit of a damper on my photography, but the sparkles were in my eyes as I slowly ambled the entire length and back in an Avenue-filling mob of people doing the same.
I actually arrived on the scene with two competing agendas: car photography and street photography. One color, with a wide-angle lens (the Olympus 12mm f2), one black-and-white, with my favorite short telephoto street lens (the Olympus 45mm f1.8). I had tried to choose between them in advance but couldn't, with the result that I tried to do both at once, each interfered with the other, and I wound up not doing either very well.
But I tried to organize my neuroses. I started out (it was early morning) by buying a 16oz coffee, and decided that I would do car photography for the duration of the coffee cup, street photography from there to the end, then back to car photography on the return leg to get the cars I'd missed. And I basically stuck to that plan. Fortunately my (new!) camera, the Olympus Pen Ten (E-PL10, officially) was good at being operated one-handed, because I nursed that coffee a good long hike up the hill, past very, very many photo-worthy cars, of which the following is but a sample.
Yes, it was a darker day than I'd like, at least until the sun started peeking out toward the end, as you see. In one way the clouds gave a nice, even exposure; I shot this same event last year when it WAS a sunny day, with some cars neatly bisected by shadow, which was worse to untangle in post. The challenge on a cloudy day is that high, white, glary sky, which makes your camera throw everything below it into darkness and tempts you to overexpose; until I got the hang of it I DID, and my edits had to start with a half-stop underexposure (then a Lightroom "Sky" mask, again and again).
At one point, frustrated and wanting to capture the bright colors of the cars, I decided to have fun with Olympus' "Pop Art" JPG Art Filter. I maintain that there's a time and a place for it, and this was probably not it. But it was close!
It was with some relief, then, that my empty coffee cup went into the trash, I found a spot in the shade to swap lenses, and I forged back into the sea of people to see some people.
But street photography was if anything more difficult. Taking black-and-white photos on a flat grey low-contrast day is hard enough, but I don’t think I’ve ever made the jump from the 12 to the 45 (24 to 90mm equivalent) and it took a dizzying moment to adapt. The other mental gear change was to react at a higher speed, after meticulously framing my car shots; in the thick crowd of people surging in both directions I was often a beat behind the moment, or snapped the moment just as a fat belly moved between.
Then there was the issue of what I was after. Car guys doing car things around the cars? Okay, but those photos all hang on grabbing the right interaction. Average Seattleites out having fun? Yep, I got some of those, with and without their dogs. Weird characters? Check. Cute kids? Check, multiple times: there’s something about the way little kids interact with cars that’s irresistible. I think what I wound up with was a set that works to capture the feel of the car show, but without any great standalone pics.
The car show finally petered out and returned Greenwood Avenue to locally parked, ordinary cars, so I got a pastry at the Petit Pierre bakery for breakfast and began to retrace my steps. This was an interesting time, as my two agendas kind of mingled. I wound up doing some color street photography, which is very unusual for me, and some black-and-white car photography, some of which turned out to be my favorites of the day. So I'll wrap up this long entry with a footsore medley of photos that are neither fish nor fowl.
The Exposure Triangle
