amazing beautiful symmetric frontview of an old and rusty lady!
magnificent colours!
con grats my friend

Beautiful photo. Really like the colors

Dave,

care to examine why we take pictures like these? What is it about rusted out cars and tumbled town shacks, faded signs and the rest of it? I'm not sure I know entirely, but for me part of it is in the knowledge that someone once bought this car new, and was really chuffed about it. What became of that person? How did the arc of their life compare to that of this junker. What became of their dreams?

OK, I'll shut up now.

Neil

You've hit on a very interesting point Neil...

I know that I have an absolute fascination for the desolate and run down (as well as the shiny and new) and thinking about it, it dawns on me that when I see something old and faded, that I begin to think of the history that led to this particular moment in time...

... and it's in part this imagined story that brings me back, time and time again, to photographs like this. The other reason being pure aesthetics. There's something very calming about this photo that I just can't explain.

Neil and pixeldiva: I agree, part of the attraction of the old and desolate is something to do with their history – the stories that attach to these artefacts and how we/they arrived at this particular point.

For me I think that I partly referenced my feelings when I chose to title this image 'automotive entropy'; that there's an inevitable decline from order to chaos, that despite our best efforts all things decay and come to an end. So perhaps a part of this is that we're drawn to photograph such things as particularly salient reminders of our mortality.

This car, and the one I'll probably post tomorrow, were both parked at the end of the drive to an almost equally delapidated house – a completely overgrown garden, faded and dirty curtains part-drawn at the windows – and my impression was that someone still lived there. My thought at the time, or at least one of them, was that I was glad that it wasn't me – that the inevitable disorder and disintegration that we run up against at some point towards the end of our lives was sufficiently distant that I could push it to the back of my mind. The contradiction, I suppose, is that despite not wanting to consciously engage with those thoughts I photographed the car anyway. Perhaps photography, in this instance, permits us to engage with these issues in a way that's 'easier' to deal with (whatever that might mean). At which point, I'll shut up – I could probably ramble on about this for quite some time ;-)

What does everyone else think?

Calling this an entropy is a nice way to decribe what time can do.

i think this picture is too damn saturated. i think as you mature as a photographer you will probably go a little easier with the post-processing. this is a great composition with some great colours - i don't see the need to crank the saturation to sickly sweet level.

Disagree ap - I think the colors of this particular photo are exceptionally vibrant. It really draws you in.

I agree that photographing subjects such as this car are in a way like capturing a moment that was or is a part of your life in some way. We've all had or will have 'dilapidated car' moments in life - and we all know someone who exemplifies this life...

Great job.

The car looks foreign; the license plate doesn't look like an American make. I can't tell what the logo on the front says.

AP: Although the photograph is oversaturated, the effect isn't detrimental to the scene. Maturity as a photographer and maturity in the art form leads an artist to choose the settings that best exemplify the ideas and moods he is trying to express.

The increase in saturation brings out the richness of the rust, and how the the color of the rust and the color of the decaying leaves blend. Somehow the car looks like it belongs. Perhaps that is why this scene stands out to me. There is a blending of two very different dichotomies, that of nature and the industrial product of Man's invention.

Niel, Pixeldiva: I find your question and discussion intriguing. Following the train of thought above, I think part of what draws us to the old and rundown is the mystery that it represents. And somehow I find it comforting that nature will reclaim what is forgotten, and that we will be presented with a clean slate to start over with again.

And, I think partially, it is just the oddity of the design of old things that stands out. There seems to be such a departure from what we consider normal, and the newness of what is old is fascinating.

Well I love it. Saturation and all.

Yeah, I agree with the entropy thing.

If inanimate objects could tell their stories...

Chaos is also beautiful.

Aside from these ideas of personal mortality, this image also references a broader theme. There are many possible contexts for such images. This one is among foliage. There are lush green living plants, and dead and decaying fallen leaves. For me this coupling brings to mind the cyclic nature of things. The plants grow, flourish for a while, and then decay. The car is right in the middle of this, and is unavoidably connected to it, as well as contrasted to it. The car, like the leaves, is part of a cycle. It appears, shiny and new, then gradually (or not ;-) declines. Perhaps like the plants, it will be replaced by a new one. But the car is different from the leaves, because it is man-made, so I am led to the thought that the man-made (i.e., all of human culture) will flourish and then decline, yet the plants will continue... Robert Frost has a tiny gem of a poem about this:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf —
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.

Neil

The first thing that struck me about this photo was the vibrant colours and I liked it ! I can almost feel the crumbly rust and paint beneath my fingers, I also think that the photographer is mature enough in photography to know what he was doing, but we are all entitled to our opinions and can't agree on everything :-)

Very nice - I think the license plate makes the whole shot. ;)

There's also a poem by Dylan Thomas that seems fairly apposite (the title is the first line):

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Thanx for your comment that you left on my photo, my Camera is Fuji S602Zoom, SLR-Type Digital Camera. You have a wonderful photoblog :-)

Ooh, I like that. I've somehow managed till now to miss reading that poem, although I've seen the first line quoted many times. Very apt. And while we're in a poetic mood, it's worth (for those who haven't heard about it) looking up what Eliot had to say about the "Objective Correlative", which is how I think the car functions in this image.

In a private email, Dave asked me for my response to the image itself, so here goes:

I like this image a great deal. In addition to the associations I've already described, I had a feeling response that was something like a sigh, like for example when you are in a building and the power goes out, the air-conditioning stops, and everything becomes quiet. For a moment, you experience your surroundings in a different way. That's what it was like when this image came up. Suddenly, everything went quiet (inside) and then the thoughts of decay, rebirth, etc. sowly began to arise. I don't find this at all depressing, though some might.

From a more formal perspective, I'm with those who find the color/tonality too strong. I don't think it's necessarily a saturation problem, so much as a contrast problem. In any case, I don't think it helps. It looks like it had an 'S' curves adjustment that removed too much detail in the highlights and shadows. One often gets this look after working on images that were underexposed, especially scanned negatives. But it's not a huge problem, really. Apart from that, it's a very static, balanced, symmetrical composition, a kind I very much enjoy.

You know what ... the comments make me think how on hell a simple car could make so many people analyse and try to read what is behind the car scene. The answer to me is that, you Dave made this car being far more than a car. The way you portraited it, the way you framed it, the colours, the nostalgia...you stopped it to be a car, it becomes an invitation to try to read what maybe was never wrote. Many times I feel it while looking at yours photos. Thanks for that! Thanks for showing that 'a car is not a car 'under your lenses ;)

Unusually, I'm not quite sure how I arrived at this final image as I worked on it in 16bit mode (PS v7) and didn't keep notes about what I'd done (at some point I'm going to get hold of CS and will be able to use adjustment layers instead, so this shouldn't happen again).

I do know that the 'overly' saturated look is a combination of two things. First, I did up the saturation a little, but as Neil notes the main change was via a strong 'S' curve. While this was shot on a bright, overcast day, the car was overhung by trees and the origital was very flat (rather than underexposed). I'll have another go at working on this shot when I have a bit of time to see whether I can come up with a more 'natural' version.

This picture is kind of creepy in a Stephen King kind of way. And I like it!

Made me smile, Thanks.

Hey, thanks for the link :) I didn't mean my comment to imply that you were getting boring - it's good if you've developed a style that's recognisably yours. I've been photoblogging for three or four months now and I've still not got a consistent style going. I just meant it's nice to see you break the mould a bit and come up with surprises, but if I've given you some extra creative impetus then that's good too!

I like the saturation David, there's something about cars in this state of entropy that make me want to do that to them ~ like here I wonder why that is? (sorry about this little plug to my entropic car heh looks like I'm playing that game eh?) *grin*
P.S. I too, like to be surprised by your work. The recent posting of photographs of people are a case in point.

hi
really nice photograph and great color I think this rusted car was the queen of his age.