DeSoto Suburban

The used car lot has a 'new' old car. This is a Desoto Suburban. It's the forerunner of all those boxy SUVs cluttering up parking lots everywhere. This is a beast of a car. It's gigantic.

I played with the high dynamic range gadget on Zoner Photo Studio this week. The shot above is a normal exposure. The one below is a composite of three exposures: the one above, and two that were under and over exposed by one stop. I like the way it brings out shadow detail.



I reshot the locomotive over on the west side, too. I was there about mid morning and the sun was already high. Contrast was high too. This first one is the HDR image.


These two look very similar, but when I set them up in a viewer and switched back and forth between them, it appeared that the HDR image had the sun coming from a lower angle than the 'straight' image. Still, this one appears fairly natural, and in all fairness, the Desoto verges on being cartoonish. But I still like it.

Old cars

Almost every Sunday morning, Wade and I have breakfast across the street from this used car lot. I'd noticed a few old cars over there, but who wouldn't notice a Jaguar XKE or some vintage Detroit iron?

This morning, however, I decided to take a closer look. There's a whole series of photos over on my Picasa web album, but I've included a few here.



Way back in the Pleistocene, when I was in high school, these were the cars in the parking lot.

This is a Cadillac convertible about the size of an aircraft carrier. I think it would be too big to fit in my garage. And it's a two-fer. Buy this one, and get another hardtop as a parts car! What a deal!


I think some of these will look good in black and white, so I may tinker with them as time permits. Actually, I've been thinking about photographing some old cars as part of the Route 66 theme, and since many of the images on the Tulsa City-County Library website are also black and white, it's fitting.



This is a Lincoln Continental from the mid-60s. I had a 1964 model in dark blue. It could seat 8 people! Notice the 'suicide doors' in the back and what looks like a trunk. It's not. That was actually the hangar deck of the Battlecar Galactica. Gas mileage was a paltry 3 mpg around town, but it soared to 8 on the highway! There's a 490 cubic inch V8 up front. It didn't accelerate fast, but it just kept going faster. I didn't want to find out what the top speed was. I also didn't like driving the car in the mountains when it was raining. It had vacuum wipers, so if you pressed down hard on the accelerator, the wipers all but quit. It's not a good feeling to be hurtling along while blind.