Foo Photo - 1964 Ford Falcon

1964 Ford Falcon, originally uploaded by KDavidClark.

Sherry's first car was a 1964 Ford Falcon Futura. It was a light blue two-door hardtop, with a V8 engine and automatic transmission. She sold the car a couple years before I met her, and to this day she wishes the car was still around. A few years ago we happened upon a 1964 Falcon two-door sedan for sale, but the car lot wanted way more for it than we felt it was worth so we didn't buy it. Probably better that way.

On our recent camping trip to Lynden, Sherry and I came across this Falcon stored on a backlot in Lynden WA. I had to get some pictures of the thing, because it had the perfect level of crustiness to be an interesting model. But circumstances at the time of the photoshoot meant that the pictures I got don't seem to have a decent level of quality. So I thought about what I could do with the photo, and came up with an alternative.

What you're looking at here isn't merely a point and shoot moment; a good amount of technology went into creating a photo that looks like it sat around on a dresser for a two decades. First, a series of the same picture was taken from a tripod with our Olympus Stylus 410 4MP camera, each photo with a different light setting. Then I combined four of them in Picturenaut and created an HDR photo that took colors and exposure from each shot. The trees to the left did not align well (they were waving in the wind while I took the shots), so that meant they were a bit fuzzy in the final photo. So after editing the colors and straightening the horizon, I used Poladroid software on it and created something that looks old.

See how complicated it can be to create something that looks like it uses zero technology? It's fun, no matter what is used to capture the moment.