After driving by a trailhead a million times, I finally decided to stop today. Overall I wasn’t impressed. The forest appeared tired and worn out after what must have been intense logging over many decades. There was little species diversity and it was dry and quite bare of undergrowth, especially flowers. But I went off trail and did some wandering and found this car. Not sure what kind it was, but it’s clearly been here a long time. No idea where the wheels were, but the trunk was nearby. I fantasize it was a bootlegger’s car, but it probably wasn’t.
Specific Feedback Requested
Anything to improve the shot is welcome.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Handheld
Lr processed to tone down colors and do some lens correction. Clarity and contrast added and green luminance dialed down. Adding dehaze really made the bare metal become more intense. Sharpening and a little NR. Crop to 2:3 and a graduated filter used to tame the background.
Nice shot! I like to play with circular filters in LR to highlight the subject and darken the background, especially when it’s a forest with a lot of texture. Also, if you can, come back at dusk and get a really moody/spooky shoot
Kris this is wonderful and mysterious. I love old rusted out vehicles. I am working on a series of images of a rusted sea shipwreck on the Oregon coast and hope to post it soon.
As for the vignette, I think somewhere between yours and Harley’s would work best.
Thanks @David_Bostock - I love finding stuff like this, too. The more unexpected the better. Can’t wait to see your shipwreck series. Apart from some places on the Great Lakes I suppose, we don’t have much of that here, although I have spotted the occasional abandoned canoe or pontoon boat stranded out in some backwater.
I posted another version w/a stronger vignette that is between my original and Harley’s.
Kris, what a great find! I love old rusty cars and trucks, but this one is even more interesting with it sinking downward into the ground. It definitely has been there for a very long time. I like your imagination though, that it could have been left by bootleggers!
Thanks @David_Bostock & @Shirley_Freeman - I love finding stuff like this, too. Cars end up in the oddest places and sometimes when there has been enough tree growth between the time the car was put there and the time we discover it, it’s impossible to get another one there. Almost seems like a giant hand reached down and put it there, but no, it was driven. And left for whatever reason. Once I found one up to the door handles in a swamp. Weird.
Thids is a great image, since visiting the car graveyard in Ryd, Sweden, from where I have posted a lot of images I love this type of images. I like your image with more intense vignette the best. Maybe in addition you could darken a tad the the green wood in the BG (the part without dark trunks).
I went ,perhaps a tad too far, but more for emphasis as to what I think is missing in the image, than to see how far I could push a saturation slider. We have several car graveyards around here. My next door neighbor owns a large salvage yard and while it is not in a nice woods scene as this, still provides some interesting shots. The ones we do have in the area that are nice resting places for a variety of cars and trucks are in a setting much like this. What strikes me when I visit, is how vivid the rust is, even the crud encrusted blacks and dark reds.
In your shot, I am missing that vividness - or dare I say, that which draws the eye in for a closer look. The emphasis has been more on vignetting than on making the rusted heap the focal point (though Harley was on the right track). What I have found is that once you get past the overall setting and just look at the vehicle, you start to see the greens in the molds, the depth of the reds, yellows and whatever residual paint may be left and the deeply affected areas of lights and darks. So, of course, me being me, I had to have a go at it. As you can see from the dialogue to the left of the image, I made a fairly tight selection of the rusted hulk and then added a multitude of different HSB layers all done via Channels and on some layers (though not shown on the layers palette because they were made directly on the channel selection) I did some exposure adjustments.
What I wanted to show was the beauty of the rusted car and to a large degree, omit the BG as another focal point.
