Cars, Cars and more Cars

Today I visited the LeMay Car Museum – officially known as the LeMay –AMERICA’S CAR MUSEUM® with a small photo group from the Tacoma Mountaineers. Though I’m not sure if I actually visited the museum or not, because according to the guide, the LeMay car collection I visited and the new museum being built next to the Tacoma Dome are not the same organization due to some sort of falling out. Regardless, the LeMay car collection is amazing, and I don’t even like cars that much!

We spent over four hours photographing cars (the typical tour takes about 2 hours, but it is up to you, as each group gets their own tour guide). I shot way too many images, it is going to take me a long time to edit these, but I wanted to blog about it and show a few shots. The car collection is housed on the old grounds of the Marymount Academy – a former Catholic school for boys. Harold LeMay was the garbage man for the nuns that ran the place, and after the school closed its doors and the nuns couldn’t keep the place up, LeMay bought it. The collection has thousands of cars, though most are not on display. Don’t despair though, there are more cars there on display than you can look at in a day, or even a weekend.

I found myself mainly photographing details of cars rather than shots encompassing whole cars. One reason – the cars are stacked in there bumper to bumper, and it is nearly impossible to get a photo of a single car without a lot of clutter in the way. Shooting a lot of detail shots, I found my macro lens came in very handy. While the macro lens was nice to have, my tripod was essential to photographing there. The collection is mostly indoors, though not all the buildings are heated. So, it was fairly dark (especially on a winter’s day), so without using a flash, either a tripod or a high ISO setting is required. I’m not a fan of high ISO noise, so a tripod was necessary. I also shot in RAW format. The lighting conditions were odd, mostly a mix of daylight and fluorescent.  Shooting RAW will allow me to adjust colors when I process the images. I hope you enjoy the few sample images I’ve included here. The upper photo is the hood ornament from a 1939 Pontiac DeLuxe Eight Convertible. The center photo is from, what I call, the “expensive car room”, which includes a Tucker worth over $1,000,000. The last image is the front end of a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible.