I decided to mount the camera (a CHDK-hacked Canon A460) up on one of the metal pillars that supports the roof over the BS Inspection area, but I had no camera-mount bracket... until I stopped by the paddock space of the F-ING Fromage1 Renault Alliance team and picked up a shard of Oregon license plate and some random fasteners. Worked great!

That's the Murilee Arraiac song "Pancreas," which really had 'em dancing in the streets back in 1988. Enjoy.

The EYSH is a haunted-looking Victorian that hasn't seen fresh paint since Lyndon Johnson was president, and the endless yard sale represents the efforts of the owners to get rid of the stuff left behind by the long-deceased compulsive hoarder who once lived there. Mostly crap, but a couple bucks is a decent deal for a pair of photo albums (one entitled "A Child Becomes A Woman," documenting the life of a girl from her birth in the mid-1930s through graduation from Alameda High School, and the other a 1942 "Service Album" chronicling a soldier's experiences in various Army camps in New England).

I'll probably drop off these photos at the Alameda Historical Society, but first: Ennui Countermeasure! We've got five photographs, each with a car in the background. You must identify all five.

A couple are slam-dunks, but the blurry 1930s sedan might prove a challenge. A copy of the Standard Catalog Of American Cars 1805-1942 will help here. OK, you want to prove your Detroit Iron expertise? Here's your chance!

Here's proof that we're looking at some very early Alameda DOTS photos: using an address on a school ID card taped inside the photo album as a starting point, I was able to do a little Google Maps sleuthing to find the location of the scene in the previous photograph. Fast-forward 70 years and go about a block away and you'll find a '66 Mercedes-Benz 200D!

I spotted Mr. Hall's photography displayed in the windows of the abandoned Good Chevrolet Ron Goode Toyota building, downtown in the Island That Rust Forgot. Once you're done checking out these highlights, you can view many more from the Girls With Cars series here.

Ms Shuweet
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Caught In A Dream
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Manders At The Duel
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Mercedes 300SL Wrong Turn
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Monika Road Devils
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Pheenix Van Sparks 2
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Rebecca With Witchcrafty 6
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Roxy
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Sarah Strangers
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Shaelynn
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Sugar And The Grand Inquisitor
© Philip Hall Images 2009

Sugar Ready For Her Closeup Mr Deville
© Philip Hall Images 2009

The nice folks at MSR Houston allowed me to suit up and strap into the passenger seat of the Pike's Peak-winning Rally Ready Evo, enabling me to get some great on-track shots of the Yeehaw It's Texas '08 24 Hours Of LeMons. Unfortunately, I won't always have access to a 600-horsepower race car with a pro driver who's willing to risk his high-buck machine on a track full of $500 heaps. What I needed was a cheap digital camera with a timelapse feature- just bolt it onto some sucker's volunteer's LeMons racer and let it capture action shots at regular intervals!
A bit of online research led me to the Kodak DC290 Zoom, a late-1990s-vintage 2-megapixel camera that bears about as much resemblance to current cameras as the Dynatac "brick" cellphone does to modern-day phones. It's a real antique, but you can get one for dirt cheap and it has a timelapse feature that will make it take a photograph every minute.
Once my new camera arrived, I spent several minutes making a crude bracket out of a slab of 2x4, some drywall screws, and a handful of zipties. At the track, I convinced the guys on the Mustard Yellow V8olvo to let me bolt this contraption onto their car's rear bumper. A couple of 3/8" bolts held the bracket to the bumper; the zipties around the bumper were just insurance. When the race got going, I started the camera and hoped for the best. Would the batteries last long enough to fill up the camera's 256MB CompactFlash card with usable action shots? Would the camera refuse to function after a few minutes of bumps and vibration?
LeMons races have been quite clean in the post-Altamont era, so I wasn't too worried about the camera getting bashed by another car… but that's just what happened, just a couple of hours into the race. Some driver whacked his crapcan's snout into the V8olvo's bumper, and the camera disappeared somewhere near the section of track they call the "Bus Stop." When the V8olvo rolled into the Penalty Box after the incident with the camera bracket empty, I was almost too distraught to dish out appropriate justice to the miscreants.
With 7 hours left to go in the race, I wouldn't be able to hit the track and search for the camera for quite a while. I didn't care about the camera, which I assumed would be run over several thousand times as it baked on the hot tarmac all day, but I figured that the CF card might survive such abuse. Once the day's race session was over and the track was empty (save the usual mini-junkyard of bumpers, fenders, connecting rods, etc. you always find dumped on the asphalt during a LeMons race), the LeMons Supreme Court hopped into the LeMons Highway De-Beautification Department's F250 and headed for the Bus Stop. Would we find the camera?
Yes! Obviously, the fact that you're seeing these photos indicates that our search was successful. LeMons Supreme Court Justice Lieberman spotted the Kodak in the weeds about 50 feet from the track. The camera hadn't been run over, still powered up (though the LCD display was broken), and had some decent photos on the card!
What's next for LeMons BumperCam technology? For LeMons South next month, I've picked up a cheap Canon A460, and I'll be installing the free CHDK software created by some firmware hackers for Canon Powershots. CHDK uses simple scripts written with a version of the BASIC programming language, and it's pretty easy to get an intervalometer feature going on the A460. This time I'll put a little more time into camera mount construction (no 2x4s this time), too. We'll see how well my new setup works in the real world!

LeMons BumperCam Images, Part 1:


LeMons BumperCam Images, Part 2:

We provided wallpaper images for your phone, but there was a troubling lack of junkyardness in those choices. So, I've picked out some of my favorite rusty, crusty junkyard shots and resized them to fit the most common monitor resolutions (you guys running OS/2 on CGA monochrome screens are SOL, sorry to say).

1974 Toyota Corolla wagon
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1965 Mercedes-Benz 190c
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1967 Volvo Amazon
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1966 Dodge Monaco
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1966 Dodge Dart
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1978 Dodge Magnum
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1982 Volvo 244
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1949 Ford
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1972 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser
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1968 Mercury Monterey
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Junkyard Monks
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1967 Mercury Cougar
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1969 Renault 16
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BMW 2002, Toyota Corolla GT-S, Triumph Spitfire
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1970 Triumph Spitfire
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1965 Dodge Custom 880
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1974 BMW 2002
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1974 BMW 2002
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1968 Jeep Gladiator J-3000
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1968 Oldsmobile Delmont 88
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1961 Citroën ID19
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1975 Triumph Spitfire
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1976 Peugeot 504
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1990 Jaguar XJ-S
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1968 Peugeot 404
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1973 Dodge Coronet
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1972 Ford Country Squire
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1972 Volvo 145
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1971 Cadillac Eldorado
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1988 BMW 750iL
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1963 Volvo 1800S
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1973 Plymouth Satellite
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1974 Ford Gran Torino
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1966 Ford Galaxie
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1963 Dodge 880
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1978 Peugeot 504
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1971 Honda 600
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1964 Rambler American
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1963 Rambler Classic
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1978 AMC Concord
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1959 Ford Thunderbird
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1959 Ford Thunderbird
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1974 Datsun 610 wagon
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1969 Saab 99
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1978 Pontiac Firebird
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1976 Ford Capri
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1975 MG Midget
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1979 Jeep Cherokee
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1998 Chrysler Sebring
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1980 Datsun 280ZX
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We're happy to add Mr. Gray's shots to Jalopnik Car Photography Canon, which includes the work of such photographers as Dave Glass, Martin Taylor, Andrew Bush, Troy Paiva, and Paul Novak. Here's what Mr. Gray has to say about his American Cars project:

As the project grew, I realized I was approaching the parked cars in the same way a photographer would shoot a portrait. Whether gleaming and restored, or beat-up and deteriorating, each car had its own character and story. The American landscape serving as backdrop is also part of the story of these cars, which were mostly produced here in the U.S. before the decline of Detroit's big automotive companies. I photographed the cars as I found them, using mostly medium format cameras, as well as some large format and digital cameras.

[Kevin Gray Photography, Order prints from Etsy]

József Erdősi was an exchange student at the University of Bologna, following in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and Nicolaus Copernicus. Unlike the millennium-old university’s famous earlier alumni, he was not studying to be a poet or an astronomer: József’s future lay in agricultural engineering. He spent some of his practice time at Lamborghini Trattori, the tractormaking giant founded in post-war Italy by the man who would go on to give Enzo Ferrari bad dreams.

Through the right connections with the right people, József was allowed to transfer for a few weeks to Lamborghini’s other factory—Automobili Lamborghini—in the village of Sant’Agata Bolognese, a hamlet in Emilia-Romagna province between Bologna and Modena. It was here that Ferruccio Lamborghini had founded his sports car manufacture in 1963 to take on Ferrari in neighboring Maranello.

As an engineering student, József spent his days in the brake and engine assembly areas. He was also granted access to the room where Miuras received their scheduled maintenance.

It was not all work and no play for Mr. Erdősi. One day, an enigmatic question came his way about his cardiovascular health. Upon replying in the positive, he found out what it was all about. The young future engineer was about to receive a ride in the fastest road car of its day: a Lamborghini Miura.

“The seat was extremely low. I buckled up with a four-point racing harness. Then, as we rolled out of the factory, the test driver floored it. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. He switched to second gear at 90 MPH, third gear at 125 MPH, fourth at 140 MPH and went all the way to fifth gear at an astonishing 160 MPH,” he recalled in a recent conversation. “A field then approached at great speed. I was bracing myself for the inevitable ride through rows of corn when the driver flicked the wheel and took a corner at an unlikely speed. This went on for another forty minutes.”

By József’s recollections, the test driver he rode with that day had been the racing mechanic for Lorenzo Bandini—Ferrari’s Formula One and sports car driver—until Bandini’s fiery demise at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix.

An avid photographer, József took a number of pictures on black and white Ilford film. His photos offer a unique glimpse into a nascent Lamborghini factory in its 60s heydays. Four years later, Ferruccio Lamborghini would be gone as the factory’s owner and car manufacturers everywhere would be face to face with the incompatibility of monster V12’s with the 1973 oil crisis.

Lamborghini would survive this all in the coming decades until it came to rest as a subsidiary of a German giant, producing fabulous modern cars in a brand-new Audi-built factory on the same spot.

The Miura production line in all its high-tech 1969 glory.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Parallel to the Miura was built the four-seater Espada, both Marcello Gandini designs using the same 4-liter Giotto Bizzarrini V12 engine.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Another shot of the Espada line shows a distinct Espada feature: the huge pane of glass on the rear hatch.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

This is a Miura S in for regular checkup. It had been shipped to Italy from California.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Miura being serviced, with the engine cover taken clear off.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A finished Espada with old-school Italian license plates. In the background, you can see the open door of a Miura, which, when viewed from front, resembles a bull’s horn.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Lamborghini V12 engine on the test bench, with twelve polished velocity trumpets capping its Webers.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Another shot of the V12 in the test chamber.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

This is a complete engine-transmission assembly. You can see from its longitudinal setup that it’s meant for the Espada: in the Miura, the same engine is mounted transversely behind the cabin.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Miura stripped down to the bare chassis as it is being serviced. For the sake of everyday usability, the velocity trumpets are replaced with common air boxes.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

The Swiss and their trains are more than the stuff of metaphor. The Schweizerische Bundesbahnen—abbreviated as SBB-CFF-FFS to reflect three of the federal state’s four official languages—is indeed a slick, elegant and most of all, punctual way to criss-cross Switzerland’s mountainous countryside.

Those of you who read that aloof slice of typographic and layout heaven known as Monocle magazine have probably noticed all the little things which make SBB so good in Issue 23, including the beautiful Schweizer Bahnhofsuhr, designer Hans Hilfiker’s 1944 Swiss Railways Clock. And to add insult to capitalist injury, the whole shebang is owned and run by the state.

Employing a load of high-end Canon gear, Dutch videographers Andi Leemann and Jeri Peier have created a six-minute homage to chocolate-land’s rolling clockwork. Mounted on 1080p-capable Canon EOS 5D Mark II bodies were tilt-shift lenses: a short telephoto TS-E 90mm f/2.8 and a wide-angle TS-E 24mm f/3.5, the latter with a 1.4× teleconverter.

They filmed the trains that move between the villages of Sisikon and Göschenen. Do click through to Vimeo to see it in 720p HD glory—which, unfortunately, cannot be embedded here.

Photography is complicated enough as it is, but when you add a lens that purposely manipulates the plane of focus or meddles with parallel lines, full comprehension will require a trip to the Physics section of your local bookstore to familiarize yourself with the work of Theodor Scheimpflug. The lenses used to take these photos are highly expensive and the output they produce cannot be used for straight news reportage, yet a handful a sports photographers employ them to capture the visuals of Grand Prix weekends in ways impossible with other equipment. And no, not every tilt-shift photo is a a fake miniature.

Click through for a distorted trip of the past three years of Formula One.

2008 Japanese Grand Prix

Here’s the Red Bull team having fun at Fuji Speedway. This is perhaps the most optically complex photo in our gallery and not only because you are probably spectacularly uninterested in the subjects in the plane of focus.

It’s because the girl’s left cheek also appears to be in focus, yet a blurred field separates it from the Red Bull team members. Physics majors, please explain in the comments.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Kimi Räikkönen, 2009 Monaco Grand Prix

This is classic tilted plane fake miniaturization: the chap in the red car is Kimi Räikkönen, on his way to Ferrari’s only podium finish this year.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Jenson Button, 2009 Turkish Grand Prix

A tilted focus is great for portraiture: photographer Mark Thompson can direct our gaze to Jenson Button’s left eye at the exclusion of everything else. Button here is consulting with his teammates at the 2009 Turkish Grand Prix, before his crushing victory on race day.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Jenson Button, 2009 British Grand Prix

If you tilt your plane of focus to a narrow vertical field, you can isolate a race car with sudden clarity. Jenson Button is seen here during free practice at last weekend’s British Grand Prix, where he lost by a wide margin to Red Bull’s flying Sebastian Vettel.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Felipe Massa, 2007 Monaco Grand Prix

Let’s see some Ferraris: Felipe Massa is seen here sharing a plane of focus with a bunch of yachts in Monaco harbor. He is on his way to finish third behind the twin McLarens of Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Michael Schumacher, 2008 German Grand Prix

Ferrari personnel in their red getups make for great photos: here’s Michael Schumacher at last year’s German Grand Prix, looking very excited as he’s sandwiched in between two aesthetic crimson blobs as the sole punk in blue jeans.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Kimi Räikkönen, 2009 Turkish Grand Prix

Ferraris may suck this season, but even parked and hooked up to computers, they look gorgeous. 2007 world champion Kimi Räikkönen is about to go for a practice run at a race he would finish outside the points. Notice how the tilted plane renders everything but Räikkönen’s head and the yellow Scuderia Ferrari badge out of focus.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Kimi Räikkönen, 2007 British Grand Prix

Last Ferrari photo, but look at the fancy British clouds, sharp only where they line up with the starting grid of Silverstone, which photographer Clive Mason chose as his plane of focus. Kimi Räikkönen is seen here in happier times: he is about to qualify second in the 2007 British Grand Prix, a race he would win on his way to claim the 2007 championship.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Timo Glock, 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix

This photo captures like no other Mercedes-Benz’s renowned racing manager Alfred Neubauer’s observation that the racing driver is the loneliest creature in the universe. Neubauer invented pit signaling to remedy this, taking his Mercedes-Benz team to a hail of victories over three decades, while photographer Fred Dufour used a tilt lens to show Toyota’s Timo Glock practicing for the 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

David Coulthard, 2008 German Grand Prix

It’s Mr. Jawbone right there in his Red Bull, in the waning months of his long career. Wearing a flameproof balaclava, he is a lone white human figure in a scaffolding of wire and carbon fiber suspension parts.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Sebastian Vettel, 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix

Contrary to what you can read on the pit wall, this is David Coulthard’s successor Sebastian Vettel in the Red Bull RB5 car, leaving the pits at the 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Hamilton, Heidfeld, Fisichella and Alonso, 2009 Spanish Grand Prix

You can also use a tilt-shift lens to cut through the clutter of people at a press conference, picking out those that your viewers are probably most interested in: bitter 2007 rivals Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, shown here at a press conference three days before the 2009 Spanish Grand Prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Red Bull’s Guests, 2007 Italian Grand Prix

Like any other photographic technique, a tilted plane of focus can be used to capture gratuitous shots of young women. These blondes are guests of Red Bull at the 2007 Italian Grand Prix and judging solely on appearance, they are hopped up on the team’s signature soft drink.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Jenson Button, 2009 British Grand Prix

And we’re back to toy cars. While photographer Fred Dufour probably did not know at the time he took this picture, Jenson Button’s usually dominant Brawn would actually be relegated to toy car status during last weekend’s British Grand Prix, as Red Bull’s upgraded RB5’s stormed the field, taking their second 1–2 victory of the season.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Sebastian Vettel, 2008 German Grand Prix

Black and white? Art! Focusing in a slanted plane on Sebastian Vettel’s face shows just how young Red Bull’s superfast German really is: he was born on July 3, 1987. When this photo was taken, he'd only been old enought to have a beer in America for less than two weeks.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Fernando Alonso, 2009 Monaco Grand Prix

For a final tilted image, here’s one for pure aesthetic awesomeness. Fernando Alonso is taking the Grand Hotel Hairpin of the Monaco street circuit in the Renault during free practice at this year’s grand prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

I found the shot, all right, but I forgot all about my Island Auto Movie 1984 piece once I took a look at the rest of the photographs in the set. San Francisco native Dave Glass has been shooting cars down on the street since the late 1960s- mostly in the Bay Area, but he's hauled his camera to such places as Mexico and Louisiana as well. This is some amazing stuff, and I think I may have to buy myself a print or two from the Automobile As Landscape series. Send him an email if you're interested in any for yourself. And now, a couple of galleries:

I went to college in SoCal during the mid-to-late 80s and often took the 430-mile drive back to the East Bay, nearly always on Interstate 5 (rather than the slower, prettier Highway 101 or the stuck-behind-'66-Dodge-pickup-full-of-refrigerators Highway 99). In those days, most people died of diptheria by age 30 and cameras depended on toxic silver salts to capture images; I was doing a lot of photography at the time and generally dragged the ol' Canon AE-1- and occasionally a thrift-store Kodak X-11 shooting 126 cartridges- along on my trips. I posted a few of these back in '07, in addition to the MGB-GT I-5 adventure slide show. Many of these shots were taken from the passenger side of my then-girlfriend's '78 Olds wagon, while others were taken from the driver's seat (yes, operating a full-manual SLR while driving isn't such a great idea) of the MG or my '65 Impala 4-door.

Use the arrows and the plus signs to click around the image at various hot objects—LucasArts style—and discover people doing, well, things. Many of the people are well-endowed women. Make sure you click with the sound on as the creators have made an excellent effort at depicting audio depth.

Warning: While nothing explicit happens in the pictures, there is enough implied seediness to make this potentially NSFW.

Source: Qinetiq

You’ve already seen what the Red One can do with Megan Fox, and you've probably already seen what Canon’s 5D Mark II camera—which shoots HD video at 1080p—can do in the hands of Vincent Laforet, one of the world’s best photographers. His short video Reverie, shot entirely with the camera, is a sight to behold.

It was also shot with $30,000+ of Canon lenses and ample helicopter time, so it’s probably not going to replace the Flip for shooting impromptu driving videos. On the other hand, the camera itself only costs $2,700—and when you consider that camera development proceeds at a speed the Large Hadron Collider would be proud of, we will probably have 1080p video in an entry-level DSLR camera in a year.

As a preview for the beautiful videos you will be able to shoot while driving, watch this short clip by Apple interface designer Mike Matas, who shot this from his 2005 Audi TT with “one hand on the wheel and the other out the window holding my Canon 5D Mark II.”

He didn’t say what lens or filters he’s put on the 5D but let’s hope it wasn’t one of those multi-thousand-dollar monsters, however delicious the images they capture.

Source: Mike Matas Blog

As VR says:

We race a Datsun 510, and the 510 has a great race heritage, but I do like the 356. The only problem is that there's just so many of the damn things!

While we're in a Porsche frame of mind, how about a couple of 935s? Here's VR:

Both of these cars will be at the Historics - the featured marque is Porsche). The white one is owned by Woody Perkins, the yellow by Tom Hedges (who also owns Hedges Winery up here in Washington). If I remember correctly, they both bought them around the same time - roughly 3 years ago. They run them up and down the West Coast.

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