Sunday 15 February 2009

A Real Friday the 13th for the owner of this car

When I first started blogging last year I had some notes jotted down in case I had writer’s bloke, one of those stories to fall back on was “Shortage of Burnt Out Cars” because at the time this was a concern to me – my livelihood was at stake. But looking back over the blog it seems that they are in regular supply and I am just refining my means of sourcing them. This involves developing a 6 sense to anticipate where they will be and having the right people in the right places looking out for them.

Yesterday I got the wake up call from John the park cleaner about a burnt out car dumped at Fox Hollies Park in Acocks Green, Birmingham. This was the same location that I went to photograph another car a few weeks back but when I arrived it had been towed away. So off I went half asleep as soon as I could to investigate.

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I don’t think this car, a Fiat I believe will be moving so quickly because it was sunk in a bog, there’s a small fishing lake on a higher level not far away and with the melting snow it was overflowing down to the small river, the car was in the way. I had to go home and get my Wellington boots.

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You can see how I suffered for may art, the smell wasn’t too bad it was just hard trying to move around the car and concentrate on the shot when your feet are sinking, Also I didn’t want to fall over (nearly did) or drop any of my equipment I made sure there wasn’t even a nearly there, I remembered the date Friday the 13th, now I would consider myself not superstitious but it really made me focus my attention

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Sally will generally go searching nose down and then comes back to me and wants to be quite close, but I wouldn’t let her come near. Because she is now deaf I don’t like it when she goes off on her own because she wouldn’t hear me when I call out for her but how do you tell an animal you want them close but not too close in the end she was quite happy paddling in this part of the water, which is nice and clean.

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Although the markings on the car look quite colourful it wasn’t a particularly good specimen, I was so disappointed because the sun light and weather conditions were perfect, the position of the car relevant to the sunlight was perfect and it was so small and low the access around the car was brilliant. I didn’t have to climb to get on the roof it was just the right height for me to work standing by the side of the car but there wasn’t one single shot worth taking.

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With these perfect conditions I spent more time than normal examining details to try and get some pictures. Then looking through the lens I noticed the marks on the wings were quite good in fact with a small amount of water splashed on them they were very good and in the end I took over 400 pictures from different angles of these areas.

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An area of the car that I don’t normal bother shooting is the wheel arches from the inside of the of the boot, because they are generally in shadow and also have too much rust and a metallic look about them (which I aim to take away from my final edits). But these are quite good. We shall see, it’s a busy weekend taxing grandchildren to various activities oh yes Valentines too but I will try and do some quick edits of the pictures from this car for tomorrows post on “You Will Never Look at Them in the Same Way Again”.

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