While the tilt-shift photographic technique is a lot of fun, you can't beat the infinite depth-of-field you get with a good ol' pinhole camera when it comes to distorting so-called reality! Here's a shot of my weathered '70 Impala model parked next to an avocado, done on a homemade pinhole camera. Actually, this image is half of a stereo pair from a homemade 3D pinhole camera.

Image source: Los Angeles Times, UCLA Library

[UCLA Library Digital Collection, via BoingBoing, via Save Vs Death]

Photography: Alex Conley

I am a huge fan of Jalopnik in general and of the DOTSBE in particular. I accidentally began a photographic project in a similar vein in 2004 which I current call "Typology of Street Parking" but it has become a little unwieldy so here are a few favorites instead of the whole shebang.

I am a big old petrol-head now living in San Francisco so most of the pictures are taken there but some are from the rest of the Bay Area and a few from the UK (from my last visit back home). Although the project is ostensibly about cars it really is more to do with photography - the cars are sometimes less important than their backgrounds or environments and how the compliment and juxtapose each other.

There's some Bechtle in there but more Bernd and Hilla Becher (I even borrowed their word "typology"). I've also found that someone in the art photography world has also done something similar as my wife bought be this book for Christmas: Bernhard Fuchs: Autos - it's crazy expensive now it's out of print but it is a European art photographer who took pictures of parked cars - of course there is also Martin Parr (I am a big fan) with his "From A to B" and "Parking Spaces".

Glad to see I'm not the only loon out their who thought photographing cars parked on the street was interesting.
Regards - Martin

with a member of Belvedere Adrian's LeMons team, to help them pull some B-body suspension parts for their bent Belvedere race car (yes, I'm helping a competing Thunderhill team... or- heh, heh- so they believe), and spotted this engine block sitting on the ground with the pistons stuck upside-down into the cylinders. The question is: why? It looks like the person who pulled the engine just wanted the crank and head, so why take such care to keep the pistons all together if you're not going to buy them? Bonus points to anyone who can identify the engine; it came from the car next to it. Hint: American car.

It's a good thing Photoshop didn't exist when I was a kid, because if it had, these images would have blown my fragile five-year old mind. Cedric Delsaux adds Star Wars characters to otherwise mundane cityscapes, highlighting their alien nature and in the process combining my two biggest adult childhood obsessions: cars and Stormtroopers. The only thing more, you know, Jalopnik would be if he'd included either a DAF or a FAF. Still, an Imp isn't too shabby.

[Cedric Delsaux via Lost in a Supermarket]

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Knight Rider, the made for TV movie, airs Sunday night on NBC, starring our friend KITT here and a cast of no name, blandly good looking actors. Val Kilmer provides KITT's voice. David Hasselhoff will make a cameo appearance to smooth the transition from 25 years ago to today. It's rumored that should the movie prove successful, we should expect a spin-off series some time in the near future.

In person, KITT is little more than a prop. It's roughly finished and beat to hell. We're some of the first people outside the show, after Jay Leno, to get our hands on the car. We're not NBC employees like Jay, so we couldn't drive the vehicle for liability reasons, but we were able to hop in for a short ride. It felt like a Mustang, one with loud pipes, a plastic interior and lowered suspension; it rides rough as hell. But that's the adult in me speaking. The five year old that still exists somewhere deep inside me is positively giddy with excitement at finally getting the opportunity to ride along with Michael Knight, or at least one of Ford's delivery guys who looked just a little bit like him. NBC's hoping a lot more people's inner child won't be able to resist KITT either.

Photography: Ray Wert and Wes Siler

If you're like us, you've been playing with Google Maps Street View for the past week instead of working. But if you've also spent too many hours wondering, while picking lint off a throw pillow, how they created all those street-level panoramas, you might want to leave the day room for a few minutes. For much of it, you can thank Immersive Media, whose Beetle-mounted Dodeca camera provided the 360-degree shots. Arranged in a dodecahedron, the camera's 11 lenses and sensors produces 11 video streams of 100 million pixels per second. Pretty sneaky, goog. – Mike Spinelli

Google Maps, Immersive Media Offer Street Level View [Media Post via Carscoop]

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Playland Speedway 1974 at Modernica [Modernicaprops.net]

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Don't adjust your rods and cones, this Smart Fortwo really is actually glowing like dandruff particles in a blacklit nightclub. It's part of an art project headed by Katharina Sieverding, whose large-scale self-portraits from the early 1970s convinced artsy types that photographs could succeed as legitimate conceptual objects (as well as being pretty creepy). Two of Sieverding's master-class students shot the Fortwo, which had been covered in luminescent green paint, in a series of photos that will be shown at Galerie Viaux in Berlin in March. The proceeds will go to charity. – Mike Spinelli

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Aiming to portray the "enveloping stillness and silence one experiences underwater," says Forbes, photographic conceptualist Michael Muller submerged a new, $63,000 GL 450 in a water tank. Muller then used the sunken GL as a prop in a series of photos, pairing it with model Eva Mendez (in a gown, natch) and synchronized swimmers in red bathing suits. Initially, Muller had asked Mercedes-Benz to provide a 1950s-era 300 SL — which, irreplaceability aside, would probably have been a more appropriate aesthetic choice — though they declined the invtation. The photographic prints will be sold for charity — the GL likely for scrap. – Mike Spinelli

How to Sink a $63,000 Mercedes-Benz in the Name of Art [Forbes]

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Our Flickr buddy Djivy, a photog par excellence, took some clutch shots of American muscle cars last weekend. Problem is, as a poor peasant boy from Belgium whose existance relies solely on huge waffles and pints of H egaarten, he needs help identifying the cars he shot. Won't you please donate some of your valuable time and car-recall expertise to help keep American muscle free for Europeans to ogle in beautiful slide-film cross-processed in C41 chemicals? Thank you and Godspeed. – Mike Spinelli

Project 16: Custom & Tuning Madness 2006 by Djivy [Flickr]

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Crash kills driver, engulfs Castro block in fire. Attempts to save victim fail; at least 8 vehicles burned [San Francisco Chronicle]

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"I kicked the shelf at the junkpile, one big crash/Sluggo's collection of broken glass/I said, 'Every time I take my shoes off/Someone's gotta come along and try them on'/You know what I mean/It could've been such a wonderful year/I wonder what went wrong?

-Aaron Cometbus

Aaron Cometbus, of Crimpshrine, Pinhead Gunpowder, Cleveland Bound Death Sentence, and Cometbus fanzine fame, may well be one of the greatest living American writers. And reader Curtis just posted a gallery of rad shots he took in a junkyard. Since we're so not gonna post on Brian Baker's fall from grace, we swapped "yard" for "pile" and rocked the Pinhead instead. Now go buy their entire discography, check out Curtis' pix, and leave us in peace. Danke.

Junkyard [Coitustrek]

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Yep, sad to say, we missed the 2006 Antwerp Classic Salon in Belgium earlier this month (well, we can't be everywhere, yet — mwahahah). But lucky for you, the secret, mystery Belgian autoblogger and photographer known only as Dijivy was there with a camera, and something previous civilizations knew as "film." It's a novel approach to taking pictures, we know, but those ancients may have been on to something.

More at Flickr

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We've actually known Dave for years. We'd hang out at parties full of punk rockers who worked in the tech industry and talk about rock 'n' roll and photography, but somehow cars never came up. We just knew he loved women and whiskey and he just knew we loved the Clash. Then one year at Billetproof we ran into each other, and both of us said, "Dave! I didn't know you were into cars!" Since then, Dave's photography career has really begun to take off, so in the spirit of the season of sharing, we thought we'd toss y'all a slice of cheescake and some serious hot rods, courtesy of Mr. DeLuxe.

Dave DeLuxe

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