Greaserama 2019 through a classic cinema lens: Part 1

Note: I'm breaking this post into multiple part so I don't run into the the perfectionist trap and never get it published. I have too many drafts already.

The staying power of the Kansas City area Greaserama car show is impressive. The original founder passed away several years ago and a network of area car clubs just keep making it bigger and better, year after year. I spent a good portion of Labor Day weekend Saturday at the Platte County Fairgrounds and wandered with a Fujifilm X-H1 and a variety of vintage lenses.

Yes, I had even more lenses in the trunk. I picked four to carry and experiment with.

I vacillated between adapted Olympus PEN F and Pentax AR lenses and wasn't happy with the output on a cloudy day with on and off spitting rain. Then I tried the Taylor Hobson Cooke Ivotal 50mm f1.4 and fell in love with the previews.

Photographic perfection on a cloudy day would have been really boring.

For the sake of clarity, I'll just share out of camera images. Color and contrast are tough in deep cloud cover and aesthetic choices are personal by nature. The slightly funky bokeh is partly due to the classic Cooke triplet design and partly because the lens was designed for a smaller 16mm frame. It's a C mount with a larger than average rear element.

More than you ever wanted to know about Cooke triplets: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mechanical-engineering/2-71-optics-spring-2009/projects/design-of-a-cooke-triplet/MIT2_71S09_sw06.pdf

Patent information: https://patents.google.com/patent/US540122A/en

This early '50s lens came off a 16mm camera that was stored badly for decades. The old lube was so gummy that is was almost seized up. Fortunately, it was designed well and easy to tear down for a basic relube. I love the feeling of old-school brass and glass.

The triplet design patent is fascinating. Imagine thinking through how to bend light properly in an era where glass was shaped and polished by hand.

Honestly, 50mm is a bit long on an APS-C sensor when attempting to shoot large objects. That and a really shallow DoF make the process a labor of love. There are mistakes and I would not trade them for modern autofocus perfection at a vintage car show.

The Dirty Shame Saloon is a converted chicken display barn.

Cruising the perimeter dirt roads is an honorable pastime at Greaserama. It's also really hard to shoot manual focus. The old ways are still good ways.

At 70mm equivalent, life comes at you fast.

Earlier in the day, I shot a collegiate cross country meet. That's a venue where perfection counts and autofocus is my friend. I used the well-loved/abused X-T2 for that. There's no way to get accurate shutter actuation counts on Fujifilm cameras, but it's way over 200,000 after multiple events, street photography walks, cross country, and track and field meets. The X-H1 has great focusing aids and the leveling indicator is more reliable than that on X-T2. I know the sensor stabilizer has saved more than a few marginal shots.

One of the things I love about Greaserama is that people as old as me or older are just doing their thing. I started going grey quite awhile back and have taken to wearing a cap whenever I am at youth oriented street events. I ran into a couple we knew at church. I had no idea they were part of a car club. I could get used to this lifestyle.

Bike cruising has always been a thing at Greaserama. The background swirl is very dependent on distance to object and background. This is at f2.0

Teach your children well. Seriously, they were cruising at 5 MPH or so.

Back before the death of G+, I kept a collection of artist at work images. I met one of the pinstripers who has a great Instagram feed and had fun learning a little about his craft. Get this: the top of his toolbox is his palette and has layer upon layer of paint on top. His personal car is practically dipped in paint.

Neko Lynn's personal ride

Palette

A steady hand and untold hours of practice

Portfolio: https://motorheadfiend.myportfolio.com/paint

The build on this rat rod is truly amazing. The dashboard was a work of art.

It's solitary work. So is photography.

That's it for tonight. The next entry will likely focus on capturing some of the musicians performing in the Dirty Shame Saloon. As always, thanks for reading.

Yes, this circa 2008 lens carrier makes me happy every time I look at it.

Vintage Cars Through a Vintage Lens

"I'm not dead yet!" this blog, probably.

I have been AWOL for longer than I had recalled. Dang, the last post was from late 2016. Much has happened since then. Spawn the Younger has since graduated from high school after much success in Cross Country and distance Track events. She and her team broke every one of the girl's distance records at their high school in her last season. We went through the long and drawn out recruiting process (which will be blogged to help other distance runner parents) and tomorrow she is running her first collegiate meet with the NCAA DI UMKC Kangaroos.

Not a car. This is 3/4 a a Kansas State championship 4x800 team. The bouncy one is now a Kangaroo.

Yes, the last few years have been a blur. The blog needs to be brought back among the living since Facebook is a dumpster fire, Twitter is a burning dumpster sharknado, Instagram is getting spammed by Facebook, and G+ appears to have little to no engagement on photos posted there. Seriously, I get tons of engagement by posting decent photos on Google maps location reviews, but not on one of the last non-trolly social media destinations.

That's the long way around to the topic of the day. Several years ago, I made the switch to mirrorless camera bodies and fell in love with Fujifilm products. Mirrorless bodies like the Fuji X-T2 can be fitted with most lenses made in the last 70-years with relatively cheap adapters. The photos in this entry are out-of-camera using a 1960s era Olympus PEN F 20mm f3.5 lens.

The subjects were in seen at the Kansas City Great American Car Show, hosted on the Liberty Memorial grounds. There were a few garage queens, but for the most part it featured enthusiast grade and daily driver vehicles. Just super chill and pleasant.

Why use a vintage lens? Well, I'm lazy when it comes to post-processing. I do some PP with Snapseed, but beyond that I am bored with spending all my time behind a screen. I enjoy the natural rendering of a lens that delivers a period look on demand.

The Olympus PEN F/FT system was built to shoot on a 1/2 standard 35mm film frame. Conveniently, that's about the same size as a cropped, digital sensor. In theory, the Fuji X-T2 is using the lens as it was intended.

The system has some truly amazing glass, including the 40mm f1.4 that I often take on light travel excursions. The 20mm is kind of a mess. But it's a good mess with vignetting and out-of-focus areas one expects from a certain era. It's really soft under heavy clouds with a different character in hard daylight.

This car show is the second coming of the now defunct Art of the Car Conquers. Nothing lasts forever and that show took many volunteer hours to maintain. I hope to see that caliber of a show again, but enjoyed hanging out with people that drove their cars to this show.

Also not a car. Shhh... please don't hurt its feelings.

Which begs the question: could I become one of those guys that takes an interesting car to shows and drive-in nights? Maybe. But not until our adorable spawn are on their own and we have more room on the driveway. I recently came really close to buying a beautiful BMW E36 M3 sedan. I decided it would be a not-so-great daily commute vehicle and opted for a 2016 Lincoln MKZ Hybrid in the end. Luxury car depreciation is a minor miracle for used car buyers.

Vintage lenses are small, portable and fun. They take up a lot less space than a car. I am a car guy and love playing under a hood, but that kind of toy will have to wait. My hope is when I have the space and time that I can find the Datsun 280z of my dreams. I love pretty much everything about the 240z and 280z. They even have enough leg room for a six-foot tall guy. I can't say the same for old Fiats or the Mazda Miata.

This post is something of a beta test. Google profoundly screwed up their old photo catalog system when they dissolved the first iteration of G+. My Google Photos uploads are now working great in Blogger on a pure Android Pixel Book. I'll watch metrics on this compared to G+ posts. Likes and comments are free and appreciated by anyone in any social media space. I have to pick where to scream into the Internet void and appreciate the time you have spent on this humble blog.