temptation

i've posted this truck before. it really is extraordinary. paint, pinstripes, and engraving. really interesting airbrusing.

this was last month at the viejitos show. then i ran into it again earlier this month at the latin gents show. second time i've spoken to the owner, though i doubt he remembered the first time out at santa ana the previous year.

anyway, at the gents show, he asked if i could take a picture of his truck, specifically from the side and above. best i could do was get up on a curb. he and his buds were sitting in chairs in the sweet spot for taking the shot from, due to the location and sun angle.

i've said before, that i shoot them as i see them, and i didn't feel like getting a bunch of guys to move out of the way, even after they asked for the shot. if they can't think of it themselves, i'm not going to bother to tell them. they did move a little bit out of the way, but i still wasn't going to be able to get the shot they asked for.

should trust the photographer's eye, and even then, they don't always get the perfect shot. because he asked to see other shots, i'm posting a few here. i've got a few more, but not liking them enough to post, which i could say about most any of the cars i shoot.

hoodies

i was going to post this chevy last night and include some pithy comments about wtf santa was already doing at the mall, but my blog provider seemed to be having some issues. still is, and they're working on helping me out. meanwhile, i'm in a less pissy mood, and trying to post from my ipad.

love the hood ornaments on these chevys. simple. classic. golden. the car ain't bad either. found this one at the oldies san fernando car show. i remember this one well. so freekin hot that day. didn't stay long. was waiting for my better half and his red-haired nephew, outside the main field of cars under a tree. they got there, offered me a bottle of water, and i asked if i could take a few minutes to walk down this inner lane of cars before we go. sure sure.

this chevy was down at the end. next to the entrance to another whole field of cars. damnit. i've mentioned in a previous post, that all i could do was quickly stumble around the entrance of this field, as i had no energy or time left to shoot more. eeeefffffff!

we're already planning how we will manage to stay cool when we go next year. he's thinking umbrella hats. i'm thinking bathing suit and shorts.

i'd trade my honda

busy day, busy week. another quick post. still running low on computer space.

this is more like it. nice oldie. i'd totally trade him for my stupid honda.

sun kissed

i am still wrestling with space issues on my hard drive. thinking i'll burn off  stuff back to earlier than 2009, stuff i hardly ever look at. just makes sense.

meanwhile, i was bad and attempted to hit up three car shows today. apparently a mistake, as it being veteran's day, they were mostly canceled. drove out to torrance. cadillac show at the dealership there. they had them parked in the service tunnel, and didn't seem to be much parking nearby, so i didn't stop. i know, i know. probably were more hiding on the inside, but if i don't go looking for other pics online, i won't miss them.

then tried another show that should have also been out there, but nothin was there at all. i did pass a park that seemed to have an informal muscle car show going on, but you know those don't really get me going much, so i drove on by it. fortunately, my backup planned worked out...my little bro lives nearby, so i hung out over there for a few hours.

on the way home, i took a quick swoop by the fuddrucker's in lakewood. must have been cancelled for the day, but there were still a couple of diehards sitting there polishing their cars. didn't stop there either.

so nothing for today, but long overdue family time. so win anyway.

i've been pondering which version of a temptations truck i should post. still haven't decided, so i'll put up this lovely viejitos chevy. probably should have waited until the sun had gone down a bit more, but still nice.

was that your club i saw cruising down whittier blvd today?

watch yer back

mostly cars are viewed from the front. you can tell by the way they get parked, that owners think that's the thing to see; that's where the money is...in the engine. and i would agree for the most part, that the front is the ticket. depending on where the sun is in the sky, i sometimes curse the angled spaces, jacking up the good side with my awesome shadow, forcing me to shoot from the other side, missing the turn of the wheel. same issue shooting a motorcycle. hate when they are parked wrong for the lighting conditions.

but the group of cars with distinctive backsides, tail lights, fins, are all equally in my crosshairs. not quite like bubba in the prison shower, but i do like to get down low, catch a shot of where the sun don't shine—mostly because you guys back them into the shrubbery (a shrubbery!). ya, thanks for that. i'll back up into the bushes too, and chance the occasional spider or sharp sticks (pointed sticks!). ahh, i have to go pull up a monty python flick now...

brown pride

proud ye may be, but damn, i just love impalas. this is a sixty. nice, but i like the fins on a fifty-nine better, but this car is still pretty fine.

just another awesome car that packed the viejito's halloween show. the dj was playing better music this time, there was also a fairly decent live rapper guy who performed several songs. kids dressed in costumes. lots of cars.

raynbow was right...i used to show up at the beginning of the show, and was starting to lose interest, as there wasn't much there. he said i should come back later, when people are out after church, there'll be more to see. i've done that the last couple of times, and he is absolutely right. way more cars, way happier me.

gently into that good day

saturday was my better half's birthday. plan was to go to disneyland and ride stuff, and hang out until the evening to watch one of the bands that rarely plays there anymore.

all week, i'd been telling him about this car show someone told me about, hosted by the latin gents, before i realized it was happening the same day. so i had started tossing out other options for his birthday. mentioned that this show was not too far from dland, if he could spare about an hour.

so i kinda hijacked his birthday, at least for a couple of hours. he said he mostly just wanted to hang out with me, and if i was going to be hanging out at a car show, then that's where he was going to be. especially since i was driving. sweet thing. he was bringing his camera to dland anyway, so he made the best of it, and took some shots too.

i had been told that there had been over a hundred cars there the previous month, and that they thought i'd really have fun there. all they had to mention was that it was associated with the latin gents, and i already knew that was exactly the type of cars that i would be looking for. i wasn't disappointed. though we did arrive at about the slated start time of two in the afternoon, there were already quite a number of cars there, with more arriving all the time.

i saw many guys i've met previously, and they came over to say hello, glad i could make it. quite nice of them, actually. especially some that i hadn't seen in a long time.

yes, to the dude with the civic, i did shoot a couple of your car. haven't decided if i'll post the better one here or not. to the guy with the yellow truck, the shot i took last year is here; i haven't decided if i like the shots from this show or the viejitos show last week better...keep checking...its a bitchin' truck, and i'll definitely post something soon.

yadda yadda. getting late, and there are plenty of other cars i can continue to blather on about. good show. hope to get there again in coming months.

liked this particular shot for a couple of reasons: first, i liked the car, of course. second, you need to know that the other two cars in this shot originally had their hoods up. that third one back has the two-sided type hood that opens.

well, i was setting up to shoot the green car in the front, and a guy casually walks over and closes the hood on the one next to it. i figure, well, he's going to leave before i can get to it, and mentally write that one off, and wait to take the picture until he's out of the frame.

but then he also goes to the split-hooded car, and carefully closes the hood on both sides, and walks away. that just makes me start to laugh on the inside. either he knows, or someone told him about my likelihood of shooting their cars when the hood is up is about zero. either that, or he was just being very considerate of me getting a better shot. makes me giggle to think its the former, so i'll just stick with that.

i'll throw in this shot, just because. its their show. they were representing. here was a whole row of them on the outside of the lot, though there were plenty more member's cars elsewhere. thought i'd give it a try to see what my camera could do with it. had to do three shot panorama to get this. kinda funky with a wide-angle lens, but it gives you the idea of what i saw.

sick of being sick

so right on queue, following a week long road trip vacation, comes the annual week long cold/flu thing. usually follows being stuck in the confines of an airplane next to patient zero, but this year my better half blames it on me out on the ferry in san francisco bay without a coat and wearing flip flops too late in the evening. pfft.

i blame it on the coworker calmly telling others about the cold that's run through her family, and she was still fighting it off, but was valiently slugging through a day at the office a few days before our trip. her, or any one of the thousands of people in the city that happen to sneeze or cough or hoick in your vicinity. but no, i don't think getting chilled for a couple of hours will do it to you alone.

whatever. thusly, with said illness, i am banished from the house, in the effort to prevent the mother-in-law from catching any respiratory bug, which at her age, may not be in her best interest, which also separates me from my computer and my blog. my kid is in my house, and i'm not going to get mr. law student sick. just spent my vacation fund, so not going to a hotel. end up at my parents house for almost a week. i think i heard my dad sneezing a couple of days ago, but mostly he's just a couch potato, asleep in front of the tv.

decided i was well enough to go to the office on friday. was about forty minutes from shutting down and heading over to ruby's last show of the season, when the boss asked if i could tweak a file and get it uploaded to a vendor before i left. spent over two hours trying to ftp the fricking thing, and it was the ftp at the other side that kept crashing. file too big to use dropbox.

ended up simplifying the file and sending it in parts, only to have the last piece get stuck. sent an email to the boss, who later responded that i hadn't been expected to stay, and the guy at the other end had left the office for the day. pissed that the traffic was too effed up to tackle and get to the show in time, headed back over to my mom's for another night. glad i'd kept a couple of extra sets of things to wear over there just in case. at least when the company moved their headquarters, it's only a five minute drive on the freeway to my mom's house.

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enough blathering. sick of it now. here's a car from the show in san diego i mentioned before. they block off about five blocks right near horton plaza in downtown sd. my better half didn't really see anything he wanted to shoot, and ended up being my bag boy the whole time, pulling my gear around, but i suspect mostly just checked out my ass when he thought i wasn't looking. he also made sure i was properly slathered in suntan lotion and that i didn't forget to drink water.

really expected a lot more there than there was. i mean, i've been to shows in rialto, riverside, whittier,... with blocks closed off and they get cars out the ying yang. this one mostly had blocks segregated, by decade or type. most crowded block was full of ferraris and lamborghinis...freakin teenie peenie club members. maybe i'll post a shot of those. nah. seen one, you seen them all. just imagine the show room in all reds and yellows and whites, and that was what was on the street.

then there were muscle cars <yawn>, too many with their hoods up, so buh bye. too few chevys and low riders. really didn't take so many pictures as i'd have hoped to. guess we'll have to make a point to go the show in chicano park next spring, to find the kind of cars we like.

i was only going to shoot the hood ornament on this one, when the owner walked over and asked if i'd vote for his car. they had awards for the different categories, but also a people's choice, so he was being proactive. i shot the car while he convinced my better half to also sign for it. it was a nice car, and i liked shooting a car in a different setting, so there you go.

new life

here's another of the few images i took from the showlow's st hilary show. don't really pay attention to low riders unless they have some exceptional, eye-catching something that compels me to stop.

there weren't too many at the show, at least that i noticed, being lost in a reverie of old chevys. i liked the artwork on this one, and that it was low enough i didn't curse the day for not bringing a ladder to get it. per their facebook, the club has reformed from a long ago disbanded group.

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so i took a week off with my better half, on a road trip from san diego to sausalito, with stops in between, celebrating our fifth anniversary. makes it difficult to post without a computer, and from an ipad or iphone, formatting is a bitch. i managed to only post once while on the road, and have since fixed what was screwy with the previous car post.

i did check for car shows, but only found one near us in san diego, and didn't want to drive over to oakland for another at the end of our trip. i'll post a few pictures from san diego soon.

taking the day off to sleep in and take care of laundry, etc., after the eight hour drive home yesterday. not looking forward to going back to the office tomorrow. it's always such a shock to get back into the swing of things, that we really only take time off once a year or so. i think they managed to get by without me, but hopefully they missed me anyway.

here's a shot from pacific grove, up by monterey, at sunset. nice, but needed some clouds or something. it was very windy, other than that, a pretty average sundown.

there is never enough time

i'm kinda bummed about this show in pico rivera. sponsored by the showlows car club, i had several people tell me about it. i was going to be out of town with my better half and miss it.

turns out, our plans weren't cast in cement, and we were heading out the day of the show. had a little time to spare and it was not that far out of the way to the freeway, so we swung by the show. my better half stayed out with the car and cleaned the windows, while i did a too quick run through.

so bummed i didn't have more time. there was a smorgasbord of exactly the type of cars that i love. had to just quickly pick and choose. it was around noon, also a hot day, which slows me down. and then in the midst of it all, one of my kids calls and wants to chat. so even less time available to shoot. ah well.

found this one in a line of pharaoh's cars. very nice line up. hope to see them again.

this show was a first. hopefully it will become an annual, and that i can drag my better half in there with me.