Automobiles come in many different sizes, colors, and shapes making them ideal photographic subjects and on almost any weekend day—weather permitting—you’ll find a car show in your area. Then there’s impromptu shows not associated with any organization and are staged on a regular basis at a local donut shop or burger joint. Look for flyers about these kinds of show wherever you see cool cars parked.

In addition to having blog posts about car museums that you can visit, my goal for the 2022 car season (partial schedule shown below) is to visit local car shows and write about them here, including some photographs and tips on how I made the images. I also plan to post what car shows that I will be attending in the hope that you can join me in an informal photo walk through the show as we make some fun photographs together.

2022 Show Schedule

Saturday May 21: Supercar Saturday. Mike Ward Automotive in Highlands Ranch!

Saturday, June 11, 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Classic Car Show Cherry Hills Community Church, 3900 Grace Blvd., Highlands Ranch 80126

Sunday June 18: Classic Rock Cruise In, Castle Rock, Colorado

Sunday June 26: FOMOCO Car Club’s annual Ford Show, Arapahoe Park, 4450 Indiana St. Golden

August 7, 2022 Chenango Car Show, 17450 E. Long Ave, Centennial, Co 80016

Be sure to make images of parts of cars. Don’t be frustrated by the lack of space and crowded conditions that can be found found at shows or car museums too. Instead use this liability to your advantage by finding small details, such as the delicate nature of a Bugatti’s grille or the sensuous lines of a street rod’s fender and capture them in sharp focus. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re using a one-time use camera or the newest digital SLR it’s a simple tip that can create some interesting images.

Get close to the car. Begin by working in close and gradually back off until extraneous non-car details or if you see that people start appearing in the frame. Wide-angle lenses and wide angle zooms let you fill up the frame with part or even the entire car while making sure distractions are eliminated. Make sure your zoom lens allows close focusing. I once purchased a wide-angle zoom lens only to discover it didn’t focus close enough to do me any good when photographing cars—or much elese. On the other hand, my old Tamron 11-18mm f/4.5-5.6 Di lens focuses as close as 9.8- inches. Since I purchased my lens (admittedly a while ago) Tamron has replaced this lens with the SP AF10-24mm F/3.5-4.5 Di II that focuses even closer at 9.4-inches!

Explore unconventional views of the car. Why not tilt your camera to provide a more dynamic image than shooting it “straight ahead.” The crowds at most car shows—although they are some of the most polite people you will find anywhere—make it almost impossible to use a tripod (and some venues prohibit them) so I seldom bring one.

Monopods can provide a steady platform for low light conditions, such as end of the day shots or you can use a tabletop tripod or on-the-ground low angle shots.

Dress for success. Dress comfortably and wear the kind of clothing you won’t be afraid to get dirty when trying to get an interesting camera angle. For outdoor shows, be sure to wear a hat to keep the sun off your head and like the song says, “be sure to wear sunscreen.

to be continued…

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, many thanks.

Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography is available from Amazon for $21.50 and used copies starting at around nine bucks!

I’ve shot infrared photographs at car shows before but usually at events that were held on grass with lots of trees to add to the whole IR effect. Inspired by a friend, I decided to take my Panasonic Lumix G5 that was converted to IR-only capture by LifePixel to a Cars & Coffee event… and I had fun.

Parker, Colorado’s Cars & Coffee events are sponsored by the Vehicle Vault and are held year-round on the second Saturday of each month from 9:00AM to Noon, at which point it’s peak infrared shooting time.

My rule of thumb for shooting infrared is that the worst time of day—high noon and thereabouts—to shoot traditional photos is the best time to shoot IR. Shooting at other times of the day can create problems. Depending on the lens, images shot with IR converted cameras as well as those made using infrared filters can get flarey (as you can see on the image at right) when the sun is not directly overhead. This can especially a problem when shooting with wide-angle and wide-angle zoom lenses. You’re also more prone to get shadows in the shot, which don’t enhance the image much either.

For some reason, Panasonic doesn’t make a lens hood for the Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH lens that I used to make these photographs but there are some available on Amazon at affordable prices and while this particular hood is not 100% effective, it’s better than nothing.

How I made this photo: Exposure for the photograph of the hot rod below was 1/50 sec at f/11 and ISO 400.

I shot all of these images using my standard approach when shooting with an IR converted camera. I set the camera to capture RAW+JPEG files with it also set in Monochrome mode and use the LCD screen and the viewfinder to get a preview of what a finished IR image might look like after processing the RAW file.

The images that you see here were processed using Silver Efex Pro, with me occasionally dipping into the  Color Efex Pro and Vivenza plug-ins to, you know, kick it up a notch.

You can try shooting infrared photography for yourself at car shows and everywhere else by having one of your old cameras that’s sitting around gathering dust converted to IR-only operation.

I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR con-versions and they’ve done most of the conversions for my Canon DSLRs and all of my Panasonic Lumix G-series cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.

My book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography is available from Amazon with new copies selling for $45.12 and used copies starting around nine bucks as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography with new copies selling for $23.50 and used copies starting around eight bucks as I write this.

The weather for the past several Cars and Coffee events in Parker Colorado has been a combination of really cold—single digits F at the last scheduled event—and snow. The truth is I didn’t even head down to the events; I just looked out my living room window and said, “hell, no.” I am optimistic about March’s event. It can’t possible have bad weather again, could it…

Part of my affection for Cars & Coffee events has nothing to do with coffee. Those who know me well (and now you) also know that I don’t like coffee and never drink the stuff. I drink tea. Maybe it’s part of me being an Anglophile, which doesn’t explain the German car in my garage—it’s really Mary’s, I still don’t have a car after two years—or maybe it does.

The main reason I love Cars & Coffee is that you not only get to see the most interesting cars but get to meet the most interesting people too. Like, Ziggy the owner of the above 1954 Holden 4-door (at left) that he brought to the event. Note the New South Wales Holden Car Club badge in the grille. It was Ziggy’s car back in Australia and when he moved to Florida ten years ago he brought it with him. How hard was it to import? He told me that nobody said anything and nobody hassled him in Florida, he told me. And when it came to registering the car in Colorado, it was no problem here either.

Maybe things are loosening up when it comes to registering cars that are a bit out of the mainstream. One of the two Nissan Skylines (below) at the show is owned by an Aurora, Colorado policeman. And yes, I do have a thing for Skylines that appears lost on my wife who doesn’t get the whole JDM thing. But that’s a topic for another post.

Trivia: Holden was a GM subsidiary in Australia and built many interesting cars and trucks there, including the El Camino-like vehicles they call “utes” down under. In Australia, the Chevy Colorado isn’t a pickup truck but was an off-road-capable SUV called the Holden Colorado. Australia’s near 100-year automotive industry ended in 2017 when GM Holden Ltd. closed its plant in South Australia “to move manufacturing to cheaper locations.” Which meant the end of the Australian-built Chevrolet SS as well..

I love Cars & Coffee because you always learn something at these show. At this particular event, I talked with the owner of a Pontiac Solstice coupe. Yes, a coupe. When’s the last time you saw one of those? I never had seen one before, except in photographs. The coupe version of the Solstice was unveiled at the 2008 New York Auto Show and while the roof can be removed it doesn’t fit in the trunk. In a wonderful stroke of GM design, there’s not enough room for it—anywhere. An optional cloth top is available that can fit into the tiny trunk. The car went on sale in early 2009 and was the last new Pontiac model before the brand went down the tubes, sadly creating yet another orphan marque. There were a total of 1,266 Solstice Coupes manufactured before the production line in Wilmington, Delaware was shut down.

But that’s not all I learned. His son has a Land Rover 90, “a Defender,” I asked. “Nope,” he replies “until the Discovery was introduced in 1989, they were all just called Land Rovers.” And were only named Defender in 1990. All of these are just a few of the reasons, why I love Cars & Coffee.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to buy Joe a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, thank so very much.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve had a love affair with Italian cars ever since the early 1970s when I purchased a 1969 Fiat 850 coupe (great car) and then, later a 1970 Fiat 850 Spyder (not so great) that came with all of the problems  people often think of when they think Italian cars. With Fiat’s re-entry into the US (and maybe its imminent departure) I wanted to share one of my favorite car photographs that I call Dreaming of Fiats.

Every year the Italian car owners clubs in Colorado gather at a show called Automezzi where there are lots of exotic, interesting and beautiful cars on display including Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lancias, Panteras, Maseratis, Alfa Romeos, and Fiats. While at the car show a few years ago (and before they discovered their latest and best venue) I saw this little red car that captured my imagination but there was always a crowd gathered around it. When leaving the show, I took one last look and there was this kid—dressed all in black—standing in front of the car and I made a shot using a Leica Digilux II. (I said it was several years ago…)

After I made the photograph I looked back again and the kid had left so I made a second exposure (below.) At the moment of the second exposure I knew two things: I was going to combine both images on different layers in Adobe Photoshop and I was going to change the opacity on the “kid” layer so he showed through the car in a ghostly way.

I started the process by opening the photograph of the car without the kid and saved it as a Photoshop (PSD) file. I was ready for the next step. Since the background was so busy I applied Color Efex Pro’s Old Photo: Black and White filter to it. I thought the effect was perfect because it makes it look like a diorama, which many people believe it is rather than a real outdoor car show.

Next, I used Photoshop’s Eraser tool and erased holes in the duplicate layer where the car was located. Tip: I usually turn off the other layers so I can only see the one that I’m erasing. Next, I dragged the file with the kid atop the original image, automatically creating another layer. I made sure that the kid layer was the topmost layer. Using the Eraser tool, I erased everything but the kid from that new layer. Since I wanted the kid to be “ghostly,” I set the Layers palette’s Opacity control to 70% in the Layer’s palette.

Even though the car itself is really an Autobianchi Bianchina, it does have a Fiat engine, so I call this image “Dreaming of Fiats,” and feel that unlike most of my car photos that are just pretty pictures, this one tells a story. I know what my story for this photograph is? What’s yours?

Copies of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects is available from Amazon with new copies selling for $30.90 with used copies starting around two bucks, way less than your next coffee at a Starbucks drive-through. No Kindle version is currently available, sorry.

..at least this one.

Today’s post is entirely a “how I made this shot” post:  I made this photograph of a limited edition Jaguar with a Canon EOS 1D Mark IIN and when I showed it to my friend Steve who had borrowed my camera to make a few shots of it for his club’s newsletter. While looking at it, he said, “I just don’t see like that.” So I thought it might be fun to give you some idea of how I came to make this particular image.

A Colorado Springs dealer was celebrating the groundbreaking of its new Jaguar dealership and invited people to bring their cars to the site for an informal show. All kind of interesting cars showed up including a Sterling Moss limited edition XK-R Jaguar coupe. (At the time, Mary and brought our now former XJ-6.)

I was planning on making a few snapshots and only brought one lens, a Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM zoom, which based on the 1.3 multiplication factor that this camera produces, might have been a better choice for an indoor show.

The first image I made was just a “walk up to it and click” shot and shows the lines of the car and a few of the XK-R’s distinguishing characteristics (stripes/wheels) and a whole lot of stuff around it. I walked around back and made another uninspiring image of the XK-R’s back. Then I went back to the front and made a shot similar to the first one but from a lower angle; I didn’t like any of’em and walked away.

Later on after I was thinking about the XK-R, remembering that it was such a unique car (there’s less than a dozen in the world) it needed a shot that made a statement. Two things stood out for me: the red fender strips ala Corvette’s Grand Sport and three-piece racing wheels atypical of the standard luxo Jag. With the camera in P mode, I racked the lens out to 16mm (effective 21mm) and started looking at the front left wheel because I liked the lighting on that side of the car.

I knew I had to shoot from a low angle with the camera pointing up to minimize background clutter, so I’m knelling down to get this low perspective. While composing this shot, I saw those two little powder-puff clouds in the background and damn near yelled “Eureka” when I clicked the shutter. I made only one exposure. I had been shooting all day and found that exposure compensation tended to be the standard stuff: underexpose black cars, overexpose white ones but this silver car was as Goldilocks once said “just right.”

The image was originally shot as a horizontal and I opened it later in Photoshop, I preferred a vertical orientation better. And no I didn’t crop anything. I seldom do preferring to get what I like in the viewfinder and since the EOS 1D Mark IIN shows 100% of the shot, what I saw was what I got. There is little or no tweaking other than processing the RAW file using Adobe’s Camera RAW. Some people tell me that, “it doesn’t look a Jaguar,” but they are missing the traditional “growler” cap in the center of the wheel.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, many thanks.

Car show season may be over but Cars and Coffee events remain a popular year round event for all of us car enthusiasts. The Vehicle Vault in Parker, Colorado partnered with Cars and Coffee to host this popular social gathering series that is held at their location on the second Saturday of each month, including this coming Saturday.

Since Parker’s Cars and Coffee is a only a short drive from home, I try to make it to the show every month, emphasis on try. I was at the jam-packed event last month where I made the photographs shown here using a Canon’s mirrorless EOS M6 Mark II with a Sigma 56mm F/1.4 lens. You can read more about the lens here and see an image I made of a new Toyota Supra at that same show. Exposure for the above shot was 1/640 sec at f/7.1 and ISO 320. If you’re interested in the camera as well, you can read my Shutterbug review of the camera here.

How I made this shot: I photographed this one-owner first generation VW GTI at the December, 2019 Cars & Coffee using a Canon EOS M6 Mark II and Sigma 56mm F/1.4 lens with an exposure of1/800 sec at f/8 and ISO 320.

This Saturday I’ll be parking my —Mary’s car actually— and hope to see you at the show as well. Special Note: I will be having a free giveaway at this coming Saturday’s Cars & Coffee event; don’t miss Friday’s blog post for details.

• Cars & Coffee Parker
• Times: 9:00 and ends at 12:00 pm
• Location: Vehicle Vault, 18301 Lincoln Meadows Parkway Parker, Colorado 80134

One of my favorite Colorado car shows is the annual Classic Rock Cruise-In in Castle Rock that’s held on the streets of this charming town. This year the show is on June 17 and runs from 10AM to 3:ooPM. Location is on Wilcox Square area and surrounding streets but it’s hard to miss since it takes over the entirre downtown area.

Castle Rock was founded in 1874 and is located just off Interstate 25 and  28 miles south of Denver and 37 miles  north of Colorado Springs, making it easy to get to from anywhere in Colorado’s front range. Part of the charm of this show is due to the ambiance of the little town that throws it’s doors wide open to the automotive community.

There are several things I like about this show: One is the wide diversity of cars both domestic and imports. What other show are you able to see a pristine bug-eye Austin Healy Sprite parked near a classic Gull Wing Mercedes-Benz. Or Shelby Mustangs—new and old—alongside classic Lincolns and Packard at the same show.

While people who show their cars at events such as this are almost friendly there is something about this venue that just brings out the “nice” in people. At a previous show, Mary and I had a wonderful conversation with a couple who wanted a project they could work on together to create a car for her. And what a car! It was first generation Mazda Miata MX-5 with a Mustang Cobra engine in it, wrapped up in a body kit painted a lovely shade of bronze.

But the highlight of one show was when the owner of a Ferrari Dino GT—152 were built in total during 1968 and 1969—asked if I would like to sit in his car. This is one of my dream cars and over the years I have only seen a handful of these cars in the flesh and now I was able to sit comfortably inside one of these rare cars. And both of these incidents are perfect examples of why you should attend this year’s car show.

Mary and I hope to be there, so please stop us and say “Hi!”

Other than a few year-round Cars & Coffee events, the local car show season is over. And so is most motorsports, even amateur events, especially here in Colorado where we’ve already had some snowfall in the mountains.

Nevertheless, I hope to attend the LA Auto Show and we also hope to be at the Vehicle Vault’s October 8 Cars & Coffee event. I’m testing a Nikon D810 and AF-S Nikkor 105mm f/1.4E ED lens for Shutterbug magazine and will be bringing it along to make some phonographs—maybe some that will appear in the magazine.

As we move into fall, one of the projects I hope to get launched is the “Your Car; Our Website” concept. Staring in October I will be actively looking to interview the owners of interesting cars and feature them on this site throughout the Winter.

And before you get to thinking that this is just for owners of Duesenbergs or Lamborghinis the answer is no. All you have to do is look at John Larsen’s RX7 (featured) and read his story and you’ll know what we are looking for—and interesting car with an interesting story

I would like to feature your car in the same way we did with John’s. Click on the Contact button and tell us about your car in a sentence or too. We’ll make arrangements to photograph the car and sit down and talk with you about it and it will be featured in an upcoming blog post. There is no charge for this; this is just a way of showing the kinds of cars that readers of this blog drive.

There is one caveat—and you know there would be—and that is people living in Colorado will get photographed first. Your have two options if you’re out-of-state:

• It may take me while to get around to photographing you car but this is going to be an ongoing series. When I will be out-of-state, I’ll post a travel notice and make it easy for you to get in touch with me when I’m on the road.
• If you have a good picture of your car and can write your story about the car, we’ll treat it as a guest post. But, check first (click Contact) for details on how many words to submit and image file sizes.

My friend, Mark Toal, who works for Panasonic is in town and we will be at the Vehicle Vault in Parker, Colorado taking pictures of the cars in their collection.

The Gallery at Vehicle Vault houses a fabulous collection of rare and exotic automobiles from all over the world for Gallery members, guests and the general public to see up close, with interactive and rotating exhibit displays designed to educate, inspire and foster an appreciation for this key element of our past, present and future.

The next Cars and Coffee @ Vehicle Vault is on October 8, 2016. Hope to see you there.

• Starts: 9:00 am
• Ends: – 12:00 pm
• Location: Vehicle Vault 18301 Lincoln Meadows Parkway Parker, Colorado 8013

UPDATE: For the second time in a year, Mark and I showed up at the Vehicle Vault to get a chance to look at and photograph the beautiful cars on display and for the second time, the building was closed for a special event. We were told that “we apologize if you were inconvenienced by this.” Mark and I are going to have another shot at this and will keep you posted the next time Mark is in Colorado.