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Rangefinder Magazine Archives Archives: September 1999 :Junk Yart 09/01/1999Junk Yart euphemistically called today,“salvage yards.” Good old-fashioned junkyards, where cars are hauled and gutted of all useful parts, and then crushed, are—alas!—disappearing from the land. Too many regulations, too many rules about oil leaks, too many complaints about the unsightliness of all those wrecks defiling the landscape. A stroll through a junkyard inspires ruminations about what those cast-off vehicles may have witnessed. For here are the rusting, worn-out hulks that once carried people to work, to school, to Little League games, to lovers-lane trysts, to supermarkets, to hospitals, to parties, family reunions and funerals. As a photographer who likes to shoot in junkyards, I lament their passing. All that discarded metal and chrome present opportunities for unusual compositions, and a palette of colors unavailable elsewhere. It takes time to get the feel of a junkyard. A really good one (the less organized, the better) can be bewildering. There’s so much to look at, and the challenge is to find, in all that jumble, bits and pieces that work as strong compositions. At first, the temptation is to shoot the larger scene—perhaps a clutch of cars leaning against one another. But I’ve learned that the most interesting compositions are to be found in the details of the individual cars themselves. For shooting such details, I use my Nikon 105mm lens, often adding the Nikon P11 ring. Aiming for maximum detail, I usually set my aperture at f/22, or even f/32. Those openings call for long exposures (often one or two seconds), so a rock-solid tripod and a cable release are essential. At least your subjects stay still, so once you fine-tune your composition and get your focus tack-sharp, there’s no waiting for the wind to settle before releasing the shutter, though you do want to lock up your mirror for optimum stability, if your camera allows you to do that. I also carry a small light disc. On dull days, it comes in handy for reflecting a little light onto the small patch of the wreck you’re shooting, and on sunny days, it’s handy for shielding your subject from harsh light. And to capture the rich colors of the junks, Fuji Velvia is my choice of film. 1. The flaking red paint of this small section of the hood of a car, the chrome bumper laid across the hood, reflecting the vent openings, and all those diagonal lines, curvy and straight, combine to make this abstract design. 2. In the far corner of my favorite junkyard, I came across a car sporting this bumper sticker. The grimy sticker, and the weeds growing up around the junked car, made Operation Desert Storm seem like something that happened long ago, and not in 1991, just three years before I took this . 3. I spotted these weeds growing up around the engine of this car, reaching for the light through a gap between the hood and fender. It is these living weeds (and their colors and textures), yellowing in the autumn, against the fading man-made red of the car, that make this shot. 4. This image challenges the eye. First we see the two leaves. Then we see that what at first appears to be ice, with other leaves and forest detritus caught beneath, is really slabs of glass, with water trapped below. These colors are dazzling. The blue of the car could be the blue of the sky—the background against which we often see autumn leaves. 5. Here is an image of simple composition and few colors: the brown of the oak leaf with its mildly disturbing oak leaf gall, the blue of the car, the green of the two blades of grass slicing diagonally up from the bottom, and the lacy white of the cobwebs. 6. You never know when you might come across a junkyard. Tearing around the Arizona landscape a couple of years ago, in search of landscapes to shoot, I spotted a nifty place—not a car junkyard, but a fenced-in lot crammed with bicycles, all neatly arranged in rows with narrow pathways in between. I spent four hours shooting in there, under the blazing desert sun, while a steady stream of people came to buy parts. This , taken with the PN11 ring between the camera and the 105mm lens, is of a tiny section of the fender of a kid’s bike. 7. At the far edge of the bicycle junkyard, up on a flatbed trailer, was a sorry-looking jeep that the yard’s owner—between customers—told me had been in a fire. I got from him a rickety five-gallon plastic pail, turned it bottom up, and stood on that, thrashing around precariously, my tripod half on, half off that flatbed, until I got this image: a very tight shot, taken as close as I could get with my macro lens and ring. The result is a pleasing, dynamic, painterly composition of dreamy pastels. | ||
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