Cars & Iced Coffee

by Joe Farace | Apr 17, 2018

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

It was 35 degrees F with a strong wind producing a wind chill of 27 degrees, when I arrived at the now-named Exhaust & Espresso car show at the Vehicle Vault in Parker, Colorado. The highlight of the day for me was meeting fellow photographer Ken Nelson aka @phreddawg (on Instagram) at the show.

I normally don’t have any photographic goals when attending any car show but at the April event, I had three items I wanted to test and here’s how it went.

Test shooting my Olympus Pen F. As I mentioned in a post on my New Blog, I’ve always wanted a Pen F and for it’s first real test, I took it to Exhaust & Espresso. The weather may have been inhospitable but I must confess that unlike Ken, I was not properly dressed—not enough layers—so I didn’t shoot as many images as I may have liked. The photographs I did make did not dissuade me from my initial impression. I love this camera and look forward to shooting the First Saturday’s cars and coffee events in Colorado Springs, which kick off on May 5, 2018. The image of the Mercedes Benz is SOOC and shot with the Olympus 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens at 17mm with an exposure of 1/1600 at f/8 and ISO 250.

Test shooting my color IR-converted (by LifePixel) If you saw my post on converting a newly acquired Panasonic Lumix GX1 to infrared capture using LifePixel’s Hyper Color filter, I’m still experimenting with it, although the weather in Colorado this spring has been challenging. I’m looking forward to shooting it this summer but in the meantime I wanted to see what the camera/filter can do with non-traditional subjects like cars. The image here was from a RAW file tweaked in Color Efex Pro. Lens was an Olympus 17mm f/2.8 with an exposure of 1/1600 at f/4 and ISO 160 using one of the cameras custom settings that I want/need to tweak further.

Shooting Two Cameras. In the past whenever I shot using two cameras at the same event it always ended up in a disaster with the cameras banging against each other and in one case I ended up destroying a lens. (Yeah, I know I’m an idiot.) My plan was that using the GX1 with the sling-style BlackRapid Street Breathe strap and the Pen F with the better-than-nothing Olympus neck strap would make working with two cameras easier. Did it? Yes, up to a point. Did the cameras bang together? Yes, one time but I’m blaming the wind and will try again with next month’s show. There didn’t seem to be any real damage but there were some new, tiny scratches on the Lumix DMW-LVF2 viewfinder. And yes, that bothered me.

The next Exhaust & Espresso at the Vehicle Vault is on May 12, 2018. Hope to see you there.