Roadside rust

If you’ve been hanging around this blog for a while, you know that after the leaves drop and before the snow flies, I often hit the road in search of abandoned stuff. It can be hit or miss, but when it hits it’s great. Check out these cars and trucks.

Strictly speaking I don’t think they are abandoned. They were by a house that was clearly occupied and there were some tattered and faded For Sale signs about so at one point someone thought these rusting hulks could be restored or at least used for parts. Alas, I think it’s too late.

No one came out or stopped to see what I was doing so I got to spend enough time to find some really great details. I love this early F-1 badge. I think the Ford F-100 truck is the best-selling vehicle in the US, if not the world. Here it is in a couple of early iterations.

One thing I tried to do with this series is keep the processing look and feel the same across all the shots, but especially the shots of the same cars or the same details of the cars. Lightroom makes this very easy with the Previous button in the Develop module, but I used Luminar for these after a few clean up tasks in Lr. It’s a little harder to do since there isn’t a digital asset function in Luminar, but by creating presets you can apply the same settings to new images.

That’s assuming you have roughly the same light across all your shots. When things change completely though, you have to shift gears to bring out the best of that shot, too. The light and dark was so extreme in this one that I did a lot of fine-tuning to bring out the drama.

I think that’s my favorite of the series. I love the soft light on the springs and leather. The way it shows the deep rust and decay. And wow, the frozen energy of that cracked window. It’s great and I’m glad the light cooperated.

There were more great finds when I was out on this day, but I’ll save those for another post.