In 2020 I visited the Art Cartopia Museum in Trinidad, Colorado where I was treated to views of the most creatively decorated cars you can imagine. One year later I was back in Trinidad, and just happened to be there the very day that these cars and many more took part in ArtoCade ArtCar Festival 2021. Seeing the cars out in broad daylight and in motion is a very different experience than seeing them parked in a dimly lit museum. This was the way these artcars were intended to be seen! After the parade, they parked on the closed off main street so you could go and get a closer look and see all the details that went into making each car a unique expression of automotive art in motion!
Atlas Obscura is a great website for finding hidden gems and odd places when traveling. This is how Art Cartopia Museum came on my radar on a recent rural land photography shoot in Trinidad, Colorado. This museum is free (though donations encouraged) and dog friendly indoors and out, and open during Covid-19 for guests wearing masks. What can you see at this museum? Art cars of all kinds, styles, and designs! A van covered in eyeballs? Yes. A huge skeleton driving on top of a car? Yes. A dentist’s dream (or nightmare?) car? Yes. Oddities abound in car form. The owner as one would expect is friendly, a character, and makes you feel like you are the very first visitor ever to the museum, which to me is always a sign of a great host, making you feel like you are the first visitor ever!
The BMW Car Club New Mexico Chapter got invited to a very unique car show right at the top of a mountain at Santa Fe Ski Resort! We actually drove from the Sanat Fe BMW dealership on to the foot of the ski slope itself! Yes, that means my M3 along with a host of other sports cars and classic cars actually went off road. This could not have been a more stunning setting and a fantastic day overall. It felt like a whole different world up there. We capped the day with a hike up to the summit of the mountain, some 11,000+ feet of elevation! To top it all off, they had great veggie burgers grilled right before us with green chili and homemade cookies. In a side note, from the photo below you can see that Jessica and I are living in two totally different temperature zones!
There was a time just a few years ago I was quite taken with the BMW M3 E46. It is a hardcore sports car that can be had on the used market for the price of a regular new car, but maybe just for now as it will only start to go up in value for low-mileage examples like the one pictured here. The original owner is selling it via bringatrailer.com so I traveled up to Santa Fe, New Mexico to photograph it for him.
If you watched Magnum PI in the 1980s, like I did, and revisited it on Netflix in recent times, through all those years I thought the only thing you needed to thwart bad guys in Hawaii was your wits, and of course a Ferrari 308 GTS! So when Bring A Trailer contacted me about photographing this supercar up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was very excited!
My first car photography shoot in Albuquerque, New Mexico was for a new client, Rohana Wheels. I was only contacted by them just last month so I was very excited to already have a shoot for them. My excitement was doubled to get to shoot with a New Mexico background too, although the owner of the car suggested an industrial site, there were still Sandia Mountains in some shots.
Ferrari F430 Spider with black & white filter from Silver Efex Pro 2 entirely changing the look of the car - Tampa Car PhotographyConverting a color photograph into a black & white photograph is not a one result affair. There are many, many possible results of black & white conversion. A program like Silver Efex Pro makes this conversion process easy in addition to producing the best results. Starting with a yellow Ferrari F430 Spider, applying a pinhole black & white filter makes the Ferrari appear white while darkening the entire background and foreground. The supercar appears to now glow in its setting.
Using a different filter in Silver Efex Pro 2 makes the Ferrari F430 Spider look black - Tampa Car PhotographyStarting with the same yellow Ferrari image, choosing the full spectrum inverse filter in Silver Efex Pro flips everything, so that darks appear light and vice versa resulting in the yellow Ferrari looking like a sleek black exotic car. The neutral colored existing background is little changed with this filter, especially since no vignetting is applied either.
The actual yellow color of this Ferrari F430 Spider - Tampa Car PhotographySo starting with the yellow HDR image of a Ferrari F430 Spider seen above, it is possible to make radically different looking black & white versions of the car photograph. Which is your favorite look--white, black or yellow?
