My Ongoing Love Affair with Buicks

by | Jul 20, 2021

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Even though I have never owned one of these cars, I’ve had a long-time love affair with Buicks. Not so much the newer cars, especially after they broke my heart in 1999 by discontinuing the Rivera and I’ve found it difficult to get excited by their more recent and I think boring—SUV—offerings.

My Buick passion began sometime in the late ’40’s or early ’50’s, I’m not really sure exactly, when my Uncle Harry paid me one dollar every Saturday to wash his yellow 1948 Buick convertible. Nobody in my family owned an interesting car like this; heck, my Dad didn’t even own a car.

I have never owned a Buick but ended up loving all kinds of Buick automobiles. I would really like my next car to be a Reatta, a sport coupe and convertible that Buick made from 1988–1991, but I have a feeling Mary wouldn’t like that much. (She doesn’t have the same passion that I have for these automobiles.) My love affair with Buicks also covers all of the classics to the Skylark to the GFX and especially the Grand National, including the very special Buick that’s shown above. This beautiful old Buick was reportedly custom built for the former Shah of Iran—that ain’t chrome trim, it’s silver—and now resides in a 300-vehicle private collection here in Colorado.

How I made this photo: This special Buick was photographed using a Canon EOS 50D and Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 EX DC OS HSM lens at 17mm, using the camera’s Landscape mode Picture Style with an exposure of 1/50 sec at f/3.5 at ISO 800.

Picture Styles: Many digital SLRs have built-in effects and some even have other kinds of capture modes. In addition to the Picture Styles built into Canon DSLRs, you can download others from the company’s website and load them into internal slots that are reserved for “user defined” styles.


light.bookIf 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 Photograph that’s now out-of-print but new copies are available from Amazon for $21.49 with used copies starting around five bucks. For some reason, the Kindle price is really high, not because of Barry or I.