Destined For Retirement

Destined For Retirement

Brian Auer | 07/11/2007 | Independence, MO | 15mm * f/6.7 * 1/30s * ISO100
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This photo was taken at my Grandfather‘s house in Missouri while my wife and I were on our move from New Jersey to California. His brother stopped by to visit, and he happened to be driving this big ugly rusted-out beast of a truck. He's kind of a character, so something like this wasn't totally unexpected. He's actually very good at restorations and building custom vehicles — he just happened to be on a “rust rod” streak at the time (I think that's what he termed it anyways). Here are some photos of the entire thing — no joke, this is what he used as his daily-driver… though I'm not sure if he's still using it or if he's moved on to another project.

The photo I shot for artistic purposes was the front driver's side corner of the vehicle. I got in there real close with my 10mm lens and got some of that neat rust and paint texture. I processed the photo to focus on some of the colors and tones while making those textures and contrasty areas stick out. All in all I'm pretty happy with this one.

Destined For Retirement Post-Processing

I actually took most of the processing steps from Jake Garn's Tutorial Video: Everything Old is New Again — and I tweaked it a bit for this image.

  1. In-Camera JPEG
    Not really much to say about this one, but it wasn't much to look at either.
  2. Processed RAW
    I actually processed the contrast down a bit because I knew I'd be using the technique in the next step as soon as I got in Photoshop.
  3. Hard Mix Layer Blend
    I duplicated the base image and set the blending mode to “Hard Mix” at 43% opacity and 29% fill. This boosted up my contrast and saturation while giving it a little bit of a hard look.
  4. Black and White Adjustment
    I used the Black and White adjustment layer with a green filter in Photoshop CS3. I then set the blend mode to Overlay and dropped the opacity to 65% to de-emphasize the effect.
  5. Saturation Adjustment
    To wash it out a bit more, I used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and set the saturation to -36.
  6. Warming Filter
    I added a Photo Filter adjustment layer set with a Warming Filter (LBA) at 40% to give it the final tint.
  7. Sharpening
    I sharpened with the Unsharp Mask at 86%, 2.0 pixels, and a threshold of 0 to help make the textures more pronounced.

Enjoy!