John’s Truck

Some time back, my friend Brian Matiash came up to Truckee for a visit… and we went out in search of some fun stuff to shoot. He’s known for his Urbex style photography, but also his gorgeous landscapes. Since we were in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I took him to some of my favorite landscapey spots. He wasn’t entirely impressed… until we happened by John’s Garage.

John lives near the summit of the Donner Pass… and has a garage in which he rebuilds vintage cars. In this case, the doors were wide open and there sat a fabulous 1937 Ford pickup. Brian shrieked “STOP!!”, which I did out of sheer panic from his shrieking – and we whipped a U turn back to this beckoning garage.

We introduced ourselves to John – and asked how he felt about us doing some photographing in his garage. He was such a sweetheart and let us have at it.

For this one, I set up a tripod in the back bed – camera aimed forward through the back window. Fisheye lens. Brian did it first; I poached his shot. hahaha!

I shot this as a multiple exposure HDR image… and applied various post processing, er, processes to get it looking sufficiently vintage with the right kind of tones.
I wish I’d done a couple more exposures stopped WAY down, since the outside got pretty blown out … but it didn’t take away from how cool this truck was!

I guess the moral of the story is: keep your mind and eyeballs open when scouting locations… you might stumbled upon something that makes the day awesome in completely unexpected ways!