Press junkets and stuff...adventures galore

Fog rolling in at Carmel Valley Ranch Lodge

This summer has had some fun press junket adventures.  I blog with integrity and include a disclaimer on the posts advising who sponsored me.  The words are always my own, in my own conversational tone, as if anyone can make me say something I didn't believe in the first place.  Its a fine line being diplomatic when there's something you don't care for yet not offend your hosts...after all you want to be invited back again for another event!

One of the best events ever that I have been on was host by Nissan as part of their #NissanAdventureDrive and #NissanYearoftheTruck campaign.  It was held in Big Sur country up on the northern end of the Central Coast.  Nissan hosted us at the Carmel Valley Ranch which has got to be one of the nicest, poshest resorts I've ever stayed at.

Fireplace in the guest suites at Carmel Valley Ranch Lodge

The event itself was a ton of fun.  Even with a wild fire in Big Sur that forced us to change the route and off-roading course for the Nissan Armada Platinum didn't really put a damper on things.  Smokey yes, but not a damper on the 3 days worth of activity.  

We had 3 vehicles, half day in each to test drive on and off road.  Each vehicle had a unique route so  you got to see tremendous cross sections of what the Monterey peninsula has to offer.  The off roading routes were fun as well. 

Nissan Armada Platinums at Laguna Seca off road course

With the aforementioned wild fire our course for the Armada was changed.  WE got to use a specifically designed course at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, yes that Laguna Seca that I've always wanted to visit got scratched off the old bucket list and added to my bucket of adventures!  Yes, it was fun putting their trucks through their paces in the mountains, but this was the icing on the cake for this adventure.

Formal dinner in the Organic Garden at Carmel Valley Ranch

Of course a good host, and Nissan excelled at this, made sure your meals were fun and memorable.  First night at the country club was a 13, yes thirteen course, tasting menu.  Very nice and really a tremendous meal.  The final night of the Adventure Drive was a sit down dinner in the Ranch's organic garden featuring farm to table fresh produce, herbs and meats from their.  Amazing meal, great company and so much fun to watch the sunset from atop a hill overlooking Carmel Valley then watching the stars fill the darkening sky.  This has got to be a memory I won't soon forget.

Carmel Valley Ranch is on my return destination list.  Their concierge services are top notch as are all the facilities and the staff is uber friendly making your stay oh so very pampered. I'm telling you I didn't want to go down the hill for the return trip to Los Angeles.

The return trip started out normal enough.  We got a notice our flight was delayed 45 minutes from Monterey airport.  No biggy right, still ample time to get to SFO and make our connections home.  We're sitting at the gate and we get another message...flight delayed as United couldn't find a plane.  This time I'd miss my connection, as would others sitting there with me from the event.

Nissan went out of its way to reroute and re-book tickets.  For those of us that wanted to, and I did, make the SFO connection they provided a driver to take us there (hour and a half drive) and we were rushed off to SFO.  What an interesting ride that was, great conversation with my fellow adventurers and we were at SFO in time for our connections.

I got to SFO and United struck again.  They were prepared to bounce me from my flight as the flight from Monterey was delayed past my flight to Burbank departure time.  They ignored the confirmation of the flight done by the good folks at Nissan and put me on stand by...why because they were oversold by 9 passengers for the SFO-BUR flight.  Grrr...long story short I was able to get on and got home in time for the Grand's first concert in the park with his pre-school!

some folks can sleep anywhere...like the carpet at SF

I'm working on my next adventure or two before summer is out.  A road trip to Las Vegas is part of the scenario.  If I can squeeze in a trip to Palm Springs yet I'll do that too...I have Hilton points to burn so that's a cheap trip if I can make it happen.

Cars...how to shoot 'em in the wild

Cars can be, but shouldn't be a challenge.  Picking the right lens helps if you are DSLR enabled, adjusting zoom if you use a point and squirt.. I shot pretty exclusively with a wide angle Canon 20-35mm for this purpose with the 70-200 zoom reserved for the detail shots.  Why this combo? A variety.

Cars benefit from the exaggerated perspective that only a while angle lens can bring to the table. With a point and squirt you have zoom ratios, move in close and zoom out to get the same effect.  It makes it all look longer and wider emphasising the lines.  The wider angle view also enables you to shoot in crowds without having to back off and wait for  a break in traffic to get your shot.

Depth of Field.  I've talked about it in the past in prior posts.  In short the greater the lens the greater the depth of field, or area of focus you get an any given aperture (f-stop to us old schoolers).  At 20mm my wide angle lens is pretty all encompassing focus which you need when up close and personal with a car.  The shot of the Thunderbird at the lead to this post if shot from a distance to fill the frame would have not only compressed the car to make it look short and squat but would have run the risk of having the front corner in focus with the rear out of focus.  Not a good thing when you are shooting something this big.

Get down low and up close and personal.  That means drop down to one knee, bend over or do what it takes so your camera is level to slight above the fender peaks.  It will yield a dramatic image every time showcasing the lines and curves that some designer spent hours at some point drawing out.

Anecdotally yesterday I was at the 23rd Annual Street Rods Forever car show here in Monrovia.  There was an old dude (isn't that the kettle calling the pot black) who had a DSLR on a tripod.  With a moderate length lens.  He would go from car to car and set himself up for his shots, not unlike what I did here, but at a distance of maybe 10 feet and would sit on a stool crabbing at people to get out of his way.  How rude, gives photographers a bad name.  In a crowd you gotta be mobile and as unobtrusive as possible.

Don't be afraid to take multiple shots of the same car from different angles and perspectives.  Don't be afraid to deviate from straight on.  Stand up tall, shoot with the camera tilted to fill the frame, this view can add a feeling of movement and power to the car.  Try to get from behind as well for pictures, its not always possible because of parking or thats where the owner stashed his chairs and cooler to sit out the show, but try.

Take several shots of the car, not just the big picture with the whole machine.  Zoom in for details.  Those details are what add character to a car. Either it was done by the designer back in the day when it was just a dream or by some customizer who thought it would add something to the character of the car.  Could be the logo in pot metal, the arc on a fin or wheel well or a sticker added by the gear head at the end.  Its a signature piece that makes up the whole.  Those details also make interesting images.  Those details were sweat at the design stage, show them off now.

I rarely shoot a car head on unless its part of a series of images to illustrate the entire car.  Often I grab 3 shots with only 1 at the head on level.  I find the images that illustrate the dimensionality of the car as a sculptural piece are much more effective.  Varying angles and frame just add to the story of the car and goes beyond mere documenting what it looked like.  

My only gripe here is that owners of hot rods in particular, but nicely restored car owners do it too, is that so much was put into the mechanics of the car they want to show off the engine.  To do that they show the car with the hood up!  Nice for detail pics of the engine, but that gaping maw sure ruins the looks of an otherwise nicely sculpted machine.  You can ask them to drop the hood and some may do just that, others will look at you like you are speaking in tongue.

The big tip here is to shoot lots from a variety of angles so your photo sets tell a story of the car(s) you chose to focus on.  Even if you are taking a couple of some generally interesting cars using these tips you will have stand out images that are different than simply cataloging what you saw.  At yesterdays show there were over 200 cars there, I shot maybe 3 in depth as outlined above, the rest that got my eye, about a 3rd of them I took a couple of shots varying perspective and angle so I would have enough to remember the basics. 

Enjoy these images, they do get larger if you click on them.  If you want to see them in their jpeg large from you can check out the entire set on flickr.  

HDR and the OC Auto Show...'nuff said

Love them cars. Enough to start an auto blog. Naming it is the question. "FrazGOES" is used over at metblogs and already has a snazzy logo. I considered "auto meanderings" and decided that wasn't quite right. Suggestions from facebook friends suggested "frazgo-agogo", and "frazgo goes". Ideas from you?

Cars and HDR are a good combo

I like HDR work and cars. It lets you tame the demons of highlight and shadow so you see the whole car and nothing but the car, turn it surreal or who knows what via the simple magic of a PC, and an HDR/tonemapping program.

I still prefer Photomatix as the program of choice for both HDR Generation and tone mapping. In particular the HDR files are much better aligned and easier to work with than those done in Photoshop using the "merge to HDR" function.

The car you see isn't available for sale in the US yet. Give it another 6-8 months and you will see it. It is the 2011 Ford Fiesta slated to fill the sub-compact gap in the Ford line up. It will be a premium small car, IE High content, good quality materials and workmanship. The prototype I drove is near production ready so I think if the driving feel transfers with the great design of this car they will have a hit on their hands. I'll reserve final judgement for when I get my hands on the real deal next year.

How did I come about this chance to photo and blog the car. I've got connections at Ford's Premier Auto Group based in the OC. I contact them and when they have a free car they will let either deliver it or I will pick it up. I get free acess to cars and share my images with them for internal publications only. A win in terms of portfolio building and networking that I hope to parlay into photo for money of automobiles somewhere along the line.

In the interest of integrity I do have to acknowledge that for this shoot the Ford rep did pay for lunch as the shoot went into the lunch hour. (Great conversation, learned a lot about Ford and the direction it is moving).

HDR and cars are a good combo

2010 Mazda 3 Grand Touring

2010 Volvo XC60

2010 Ford Taurus SHO

2011 Ford Fiesta (Pre-production prototype)

I'm not quite sure why, but the auto manufacturers tend to love to give you either red or silver cars for their ride/drives at press events. Arrest me red, perfect for a performance car especially when a member of the press is trying to get a feel for its potential while running it through its paces. Especially on marked routes where you can't deviate cops love to sit and wait. No, I didn't get nabbed but is a concern when in a red car with MI MFG plates on it.

The other color they like to give is silver. Looks great, but it is hard as hell to photo without completely blown out highlights on large expanses of the car. IT also picks up the "blue sky" too well in the shadows which makes color balancing a bugger. The latter you can only do so much with a photofilter in CS2. The former, you can actually do a lot with by bracketing your shots and generating HDR images. At that point you can get shadow detail back, but more importantly control the white clipping and keep the all white highlights smaller and more natural in apprearance.

Of course being able to control the contrast and micro contrast makes it possible to highlight the cars much more differently than a straight image. Gives you the chance to drift into the surreal too which I like to do to make the car stand out more in an illustrative manner.

All of these images were shot with low ISO (200) for minimal noise and maximum detail. They were bracketed +/- two stops from average. The RAW files were run through photomatix for the HDR file generation as well as tonemapping. The final image was put through virtual photographer to clean up the cyan hue (some were shot on an overcast morning) and give them the punch of the old uber saturated contrasty Cibachrome print material.

'Nuf said, enjoy the images from a day with Ford/Mazda and Volvo and their LA 2010 Model Reveal.

I gots me a logo, a really cool professional logo

As the resident carnut-gearhead-lover of all things with 4 wheels, rubber and chrome over at Metblogs they decided rather than dissuade me from doing more on cars make me the defacto car guy, or at least LA car-guy.  I am totally jazzed and humbled that they thought enough of my stuff to give me this privilege.  The logo frazGOES itself is kinda neat and a fun play on my screen name and what one does in a car.  

To that end Lucinda Michelle our city captain hooked me up with her significant other Seth Dowling for the log design.  The results are awesome.  Seth does all sorts of very slick graphics but he Blogs as well at Unventure.  If you want to talk to him about your own logo and graphics contact him directly at seth@unventure.com .

Back to the logos themselves.  Both are similar.  The lower has a little smoke and flame action on the "fraz" part whereas the top its all flames only at the "o" or tire.  Upper or lower which is your fave?

Of course at the end of the day what I get out of the deal is more photo ops with cars and a chance to annoy the metblogs readers one keystroke at a time.  

wide angle perspective distortion...

...and pretty cars make for a fun Saturday afternoon!



"If it has balls or wheels it means trouble" is the phrase I've seen on a few bumper snickers over the years. For me its wheels, add lots of chrome then I'm in at the expense of common sense. Its how I'm wired, can't help it and don't want to change it.  This weekend was close to nirvana when the 18th Annual Monrovia Hot Rod and Custom Car show hit town.

Which lens one chooses can greatly affect the final image and how angles and distance are compressed or exaggerated.  Understanding how focal length affects the final image is one more tool in the bag for a photographer who wants to do more than simply record the world around him.

A wide angle lens is a way to make things look bigger through elongation of the subject.  The also make for very pronounced convergence of lines.  This good for buildings looking up, head on, well they look like the are tilting to the center.  The ultra-wide makes it even more pronounced.  The photographers angle of view and the lens you can emphasise and exaggerate the perspective is probably one of the most important tools one needs to understand as you control your image results.

American cars of the from the mid 50's to early 70's in particular were all about lower, longer and wider.  The ultra-wide lens will emphasise the the width up close and really exaggerate the length.  The car didn't change, the lens changed how the angles were viewed by altering the perspective or horizon point where the angles converge. 

All three of these cars were shot with a Canon 20-35mm lens at the 20mm setting.   This allowed me to make them appear much longer and broader than they would have been with a "normal" 50mm lens.  Even the old Chevy looks longer and more streamlined than it really is. 

The tech bits for those of you who care.  The final images are HDR images generated from 3 raw files bracketed +/- 2 stops.  They were done mapped for detail enhancement and run through virtual photographer to clean up some haze and purify the colors.

Enjoy the cars a 1949 Chevy Sedan, 1960 Cadillac Convertible and 1961 Ford Thunderbird.  You will need to click the image to get to a larger size as they are "clipped" to fit the columns. 

keeping in the spirit of the season

This weekend was busy, not sports but auto show and the parents in town from Las Vegas.  The 18th Annual Monrovia Hot Rod and Custom show was on Saturday.  I can appreciate the customs and all the work that went into them, however the decidedly low brow aesthetics and unpolished presentations of the Hot Rods I seem to gravitate to more.  I love their use of chrome as that is the shine on the cars, the old matted paint seems to serve as the backdrop for those delicious bits of chrome. 

I've also decided that I like use of Orton a lot on the chrome bits.  The process makes the chrome richer and chromier helping it to pop even more from the blacks or washed out bits of a scene.

This image was post processed from the raw images with a bump in saturation for the blur layer.  Once it was all taken down to 8bit I ran it through virtual photographer to remove some of the cyan haze from the sky reflections and saved it as a jpeg.   A larger version can be found on my flickr page.

Surreality Check...get back to work
The holidays are over and I'm finally getting some free time and get back to working through what I shot the last few months. In early November I walked through Duarte meandering about and just shooting. Interesting community, very old and busily going about reinventing itself. Among the oddities is they used ficus trees, sculpted to all look the same instead of the traditional LA Icon...the Palm to line the main boulevards.

I was out shooting with HDR post processing in mind. The goal...old timey postcard looks and a little of the "predictors" where humans are moving about.

The bracketed photo's were post processed to start with using Photomatix Pro to do the HDR generation from the RAW files then tonemapped. From there I did the final clean up with CS2 and Virtual Photographer.

Enjoy "Old Chevy Life Support" and "Bug Found on Road Alive".

Cars, Cars, Cars....found on road alive.

It's no secret I love cars. Mostly those old beasts prior to 1970 before they had their compression cut way back in the first effort to control what spewed out the tailpipes. I do like a lot of the very early 70's cars, at least the big blocks as even with the compression drops they still put out tremendous tire smoking torque.

In So Cal we are in a unique position in that they cars really get run to death before they die. Unlike the rust belt where they are just a corroded hull in 10 years, our cars last several decades. Many old 30 years or more and still intact and running. I call those "found on road alive". I have have a page in my Flickr account named just that.

This last week I stumbled across a bunch of guys working magic on old car with HDR Digital Photography and taking the old beasts into the surreal. I too am starting that trail too. Where was this brilliant idea last month when I was cruising through the Monrovia Hot Rod Show!

So just wandering about town the other day spotted these 3 beasts in various states of being. The last is an old Riv' that falls in to the Predictors realm I blogged about the other day.

Stay tuned for some more pics here and on my flicker pages.

Turns out that I got invited by GM as a blogging.la writer to attend the LA Auto Show 11/14. That should be a hoot. Me considered a writer, but it should be fun. Getting in and shooting without the masses of strollers around should be even better than public days.

Art deco influenced everything!


The Art Deco period was amazing. Born of the glitz and excitement of the Roaring 20's it lasted up until the start of WWII. The industrial arts and design didn't escape and influenced many a car design.


In the early 1930's Edsel Ford saw the need to have a bridge car between the Ford and Lincoln line. The Mercury line was devised as just that bridge in the products to make them a full line auto manufacturer.


The Mercury started its life in the early 1930's as the country was beginning to come out of the depression and was started with a clean sheet. It borrowed design themes from the two existing divisions with a look to more luxury and drew heavily from the Art Deco movement with its flowing lines and heavy use of chrome to set it higher than the basic Fords of the time. It's best illustrated in the details such as the hood ornament and grill from this 1941 2 Door Sedan spotted at a recent car show in Monrovia.

Enjoy the bits.