The Big Valley Car Wash

By Tom Paiva on

In January while driving yet again to the San Francisco Bay Area, I stopped in the late afternoon in the Valley town of Gustine.  I’m fascinated with the small farm towns in rural California.  You might recall a couple of months ago I wrote about this town and showed images of the agricultural section of town.

This time, I purposely planned my trip to arrive around sunset to shoot some twilight/night shots and had my 4×5 camera with me.  In the winter, the Valley is know for its dense overcast and Tule fog, making it cold and damp.  This evening was typical.

I rolled through town looking for an interesting place to stop and set up.  It was Friday night, and the cruisers were starting to drive around.  Some of the local farm hands were sitting in front of the convenience store next door drinking from brown paper bags.  There was quite a few people at the laundromat next door, bored to tears and I was giving them something to look at.  There was a woman sitting on a bench in front of the laundromat talking to herself the whole time I was shooting.

I scouted the area to figure out what I was going to shoot and in which order.  Things change, people come and go, and occasionally I get hassled by the local police, so one has to plan carefully, especially when shooting large format.  It’s hard to hide a tripod.

In this first shot, the sun has set, and you can see the dense overcast.  The advantage of the overcast is that it saturates the colors, especially on this highly saturated Kodak E100VS transparency film.  That turquoise colored cinder block car wash really caught my eye and I knew it would photograph well.  I knew the fluorescent lamps of the car wash would add more green to the turquoise.

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In this image, I used a magenta filter to balance for the green flourescent lighting.  It turned the sky magenta, but we took the liberty to de-saturate it in Photoshop.  The side lighting from the lamp coming in from the upper left give a nice texture to the brick wall.  In the orginal transparency, you can read all the fine print on the washing instruction placard.  The exposure is about 30 seconds.

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The dense overcast gave about a half hour of shooting twilight, which is much appreciated when shooting large format.  The long exposures quickly use up the “magic hour” light.  I let the fluorescent lamp burn out to get the tone in the sky and what the lamp is illuminating.  Exposure is about one minute.

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In this shot, the sky is quite dark, but I managed to get tonality out of it because of the dense overcast (and a little bit of dodging in Photoshop).  The 4×5 transparency has a lot of detail, and we can pull out quite a bit from the dark shadows.  All the lights are fluorescent except in the niche where there is a sodium vapor lamp.  Exposure is about 2 minutes.  I was lucky to get what I did, as all of a sudden several cars came in to get washed for Friday night.  That is part of why you have to plan your shots to get the ones you really want.  Situations change.  I’ll be visiting this town again…

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