These are the months when photography is challenged by bad weather. I took one of my new-to-me old cameras out the other day, a fine Pentax H3 SLR. It didn’t even occur to me that this might be a bad idea because temps hovered around freezing. Predictably, that 50-year-old camera locked up tight after one shot. (Fortunately, after warming up inside it worked again. Whew.) Three other cameras have film in them, all waiting for days warm and dry enough to be taken out.
So meanwhile I’ve been looking at old photographs, seeing if I can punch them up with creative Photoshoppery. I came upon two photos I took of a 1946-1948 Dodge sitting placidly in a narrow land strip formed where I-74 diverges from the Michigan Road’s original path near Pleasant View, Indiana.
I took these photos in the spring of 2008 while touring the Michigan Road through Indiana. My main camera then was the Kodak EasyShare Z730 Zoom. It was a decent performer for a consumer point-and-shoot camera, and I was glad to have it during those lean years, but it wasn’t hard to reveal this camera’s limits in Photoshop. I cropped to improve composition, and tweaked exposure and contrast a little, but only conservatively to avoid revealing the noise and blotchiness this camera’s sensor delivers.
Still, these are placid scenes, and this old fluid-drive Dodge looks stately on its perch. It overlooked I-74 here for a few years before disappearing. I hope it went on to a full restoration.
