Posted on February 2, 2014
by Russ Widstrand 
1 Recent Posts
Vibrant Room
“While walking along the street one day…”. Pretty sure that’s a song...
Shapes n Light
A modernistic capture of an aviation-made 1952, Boles Aero, in my backyard.
White Shasta
From my "Trailer" collection. The classic "canned ham" trailer design. Shasta...
mangled car
Super Bowl Sunday. I thought the preoccupation with cars in the game could use a different direction. I like cars as much as the next guy, perhaps less than my fellow gamers. But I am less interested in them as the showy display of shiny metal and power. For photography, I like them as concepts, so my take on cars leans toward the pop art side of the spectrum.
As is my way, I awoke thinking of how I would respond to the previous image in the game… cars, toy cars, shiny cars, I fell back to sleep. Hmmm, I thought as I awoke, instead of more shiny cars, what about crushed cars. I liked it, so the hunt was on.
Luckily it was a stellar day here in Portland, and Google helped me find some likely areas in North Portland to go stalk the wily and elusive crushed car. And elusive it was, remember, it is SuperBowl Sunday, no self respecting owner (male) of a metal salvage yard is likely to be around on a Sunday, especially not on SuperBowl day. So again I am left with guerrilla photography, sneaking into wrecking yards and making pictures. I felt 20 years younger, HA!
On one particular felonious adventure I had to actually climb over a 7′ fence topped with razor wire. There was an wall next to the gate that looked like I might be able to climb and squeeze through. Sucess. This is where I made my picture for today’s game. Wisely enough I was shooting constantly in the first 5 minutes, knowing that I could be busted at any minute.
Sure enough, a security guard showed up in 6 minutes and politely asked me to stop shooting. She was nice enough about it, and after explaining our visual game of telephone, she smiled and said “cool, but you still have to leave”. Thankfully, she unlocked the gate to let me out as I exited, no climbing involved.
The resulting shot was pretty close to what I had envisioned, though in playing with it in Lightroom, I messed around the Camera Calibration panel and was immediately drawn to the pop colors that came out. There you have it… “Pop Cars”.