HDR Photography
I’m on a roll with Datsuns lately. The crash protection and the reliability of a modern car may not be there, but what a face! Particularly when sitting on wider-than-stock tires and hiding out on some side street in Berkeley, this car has the potential for fun.
I’ve had an attraction to Datsun Z cars since I read Wangan Midnight as a teenager and first encountered the “Devil Z”. Around the Bay Area, plenty of these cars are still running, and those that have survived this long come to resemble the style goals of their owners. That might be the “rough style” Z I photographed in Berkeley, or this super-clean example that was kind enough to park in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco.
The Bay Area seems to experience seasons at a different pace from much of the rest of the country. Summer is a month-long period from mid-August through mid-September, fall lasts from October through March, and the summer goes from April until August. Winter (as the East Coast understands it) isn’t a part of the equation. Being back in fall, then, has me reminiscing about fall in the North Country, with leaves starting to dot the ground and the Blue Hour arriving sooner.
Berkeley’s undergraduate student population is still mostly gone for winter break, leaving UCB’s campus to resemble St. Lawrence’s during Fall Break in October. The empty-ish parking lots might be bleak, but at least it’s easy to get a table at lunch time.
And one final bonus from that fall weekend: a most dramatic and exciting picture of a most unexciting car. I present to you: the World’s Most Interesting Toyota RAV-4.
Christmas, back in the Bay Area! Up on Berkeley’s Grizzly Peak, alongside the tuners and drinkers and stoners, the clouds rolled over the hills and the whole bowl of the Bay lit up. This is a weird and special place.
Since moving from places like Hartford and Oakland to Small Town America, I will admit that I’ve become a bit spoiled when it comes to traffic. Anything less than an open road now feels like a traffic jam. The reality turns out to be just a little different.
I’m not in the market for a hypercar (like the Bugatti Veyron below), nor a supercar, nor even really a car, at this particular moment. When friends and family heard that I had attended the New York International Auto Show last month, the response was often in the range of questions about what kind of car I planned to buy. I’m not planning on replacing the Mini just yet, I love the combination of graphic and industrial design on display at a show like this—not to mention the mix with civil and mechanical engineering. Cars have their costs and benefits, but it’s tough to wanter a place like the Javits Center and not feel a little bit of awe.
Porsche’s eternal and outwardly-unchanging 911 (like the R version here) is suprisingly subtle by the standards of similarly-performing vehicles, but it fit well into the classy setting of Porsche’s display: red and white matching perfectly.
Acura’s new NSX is a monster (in performance, engineering, and cost), and joins a category of hybrid hypercars that transform the environmental technology into a performance booster. Sure, the numbers are impressive, but the design just has so many creases and parts. Overdesigned?
The real star of the show (for me), however, was this humble Mazda MX-5 Miata. I might have some bias from owning a 1995 Miata in the past (in this same white paint/black top combination, even). This is a driver’s car for the masses. It’s light and fast and efficient. Shame about the trunk space…
The year has nearly come to an end, and winter has finally arrived in the North Country, but before I look to the future, I wanted to take another look back at my summer travels to the West Coast, and particularly to Seattle.
An early morning stroll brought almost-empty streets and golden hues.
The standard trappings of city life are a little surprising after a year spent in rural New York. Even this mild-mannered cab (particularly a Crown Victoria) looked like it had been placed by the crew of an about-to-begin film set.
The cheek-to-cheek connection of port and industry with everyday life surprised me the most. Ferris wheels and giant cranes share the water.
A driving range isn’t complete without a car husk at 200 yards. There’s some sort of great driving/driving range pun to be made here.
The VW Bus is an icon of mid-twentieth-century America, and the surviving examples dotting the West Coast (like this one in Seattle) recall those times. (Given their current emissions issues, that’s perhaps a time for which Volkswagen is a bit nostalgic themselves.)
So much of this interior—the wheel, the gauges, the radio—look to be stock that the subtle additions stand out. The nav/cell holder suction-cupped to the windshield is pretty subtle, but the plastic demon/ghost/goober on the dash is an ethereal addition.
This street scene from my trip to Seattle jumped out at me because of the shift in tone: As the cars drive around the corner, they drive from the last dark, street-lit parts of the dawn into the full light of day. The passage of time is mapped onto the transition of light.
The Lamborghini Murciélargo is an all-wheel-drive chunk of octane and gloss and “DA BULL.” That aesthetic and attitude might fly in New York or Los Angeles, but I’m not sure what to make of it all in a friendly city like Portland, Oregon.
Seattle’s Pike Place Market has a lived-in, European aesthetic. Tiny stairways and doorways peak out from beneath railings and walkways. I half-expect to see a secret agent carefully eluding his pursuers in the complicated structures. Early on a Saturday morning, however, events seem just a bit calmer.
Completing my week of cars on Decaseconds is this image of my colleague, Sam, with her 1969 Chevy pickup. This could also be considered another entry in my occasional focus on small-town Americana: between the grill, the back yard, and the pickup , it certainly fits the bill.
Continuing my week-long digression into automotive photography, I brought back this older shot from the damp streets of Berkeley. The glow of the apartment buildings, the light trails, and the older cars on the street all form the backdrop to this murdered-out Subaru Impreza WRX. (Murdered out, meaning black rims and a dark black window tint—though I always thought this look worked better on Cadillacs than Subarus…)
So this is it: Commencement was yesterday, the graduated seniors are gone off to their lives, and my miniature project to document the end of the school year is coming to an end, as well. The seniors graduated, packed, and evacuated in a single hectic afternoon. The strange calm when the dorms are emptied and the cars hit the road and vanish into the distance is what really gets me. (Though, of course, I’m very proud of my students, going out to begin their “real world”/grad school lives.) Over the course of this week, I’m going to translate those thoughts on “moving on” to a few other pictures of cars and trucks that I’ve taken—recently, and in the past. Consider this shot of my Mini as the first in the series.
Behind that car, positioned at the edge of Canton, is a view across the valley—a view of my surroundings that (in its own minor way) mirrors the equivalent shot I took two years ago of my surroundings from that time period. Though less dramatic, the North Country has its own summer vibe going.
Decaseconds 