Life Observed

Once upon a time it was difficult to start the average family car. There was a special procedure in winter and a different method in summer. You needed to pull out the Choke knob just so far and no further. You also needed to have a plan if this method failed to start the car. You needed to know when it was safe to push the choke in, because doing this too early could cause the car to stop in the middle of the road. Worst of all, you would not wish the choke knob to spring back into place before you were done with it. The safest approach, and the universal one, was to pull the choke out, and fit a peg behind it to prevent any such problem. It is nice to see these old traditions still upheld at classic car shows.

There is a strange attraction about a deserted place of work. Secret urbex  photographers seek out decommissioned factories and power plants. It is there we find discarded time sheets, and dusty knobs that have not felt the hand of man for years. Here we find ourselves observing a motor mechanic's workbench . However, I suspect this is a confection of leftovers put together by the Earl of Carnarvon's staff for the benefit of visitors to Wilton House. The tin cans, old side valves and car horn are in stark contrast to what sits just outside the door.. A fine collection of motoring exotica featuring a Bugatti Veyron.  See: Work hard and this kind if thing could be yours.

There was a big get together at the weekend. Prodrive at Banbury are moving factory and loyal Subaru owners turned up in quantity for one last meet up.  Prodrive made Subaru famous in the last millennium with their remarkably successful rally cars.  One thing about Subaru drivers: They sure can park accurately. There were several hundred cars there, most of them surprisingly, worryingly clean. Perhaps I need to raise my standards and buy a bigger sponge.

Look: I made my car lighter, stiffer and faster by sticking this fake carbon fibre over the excessive Japanese chrome.. Awesome.

After failing to fix the annoying satnav fault, I washed the car instead. Then I decided to take it to my favourite car photo location under lowering skies... I've used this location before to get a shot of a Mercedes SL500

You can see the British legacy all over the Greek part of Cyprus. They drive on the left, use our power plugs, many signs are also in English. Every now and then you come across some leftover from the past: This old Standard Vanguard parked in the central square at Polis has featured on these pages before. I think they keep it there as a shabby tourist attraction. (They must welcome shabby tourists, they let us in). But round the corner and out of sight you can find sights like this Austin Cambridge van.  This isn't placed on view as a curiosity. It was used for shop deliveries at one time and has merely retired to the shade.

After twenty years off for good behaviour I found myself working on the car again.  Ah, those lost weekends changing the clutch, fixing the rattling exhaust, changing plugs and points. These days the contents of the engine compartment are far too complex to tinker with. However I think I can still change anti-roll bar bushes with the best of them. Strange though: My perfectly good Whitworth spanners don't fit these modern cars very well.

Don't know your side valve from your starting handle? Worried about your Tappets? Should you be attracted to a Magneto?  Fear not, all the motorist needs is cloistered away in this excellent tome. Ah, those heady days of the remould tyre, Radweld and the feeler gauge. 

Apologies: No posts recently, dear reader. I have been kept busy with the new motor... This is t he interior view of my three year old Subaru Legacy 3.0R Spec B (yes, that is what they are called).   I am happy with it mechanically, but the electrics have a couple of gremlins that need sorting, so it has to go back to the dealer for 48 hours. They say that every second hand car has something wrong with it. That's why the previous owner finally sold it. Tediously, the sat nav reverts to it's default settings including Km and European time overnight, and the reversing sensors barely work. I would have a go at both of these but it has a warranty and I'd hate to break something.

A visitor at work arrived in this. Now that's a no compromise car, next only to the Aerial Atom I guess, and it made an interesting counterpoint to our 18th century barn and Saxon church opposite. One thing though: You will never lose it in a car park - unless it gets hidden between two vans.

Do you remember the fun of motoring. Getting in the car and just "going out for a run".. That was when petrol was five and six, and a spare set of plugs was five bob*. Here's a couple of guys who still seem to enjoy their motoring *Essential items in the boot: Plugs, points, oil, wheel brace, jack and some water.

If you want to photograph a car and make it look good, then I say you should wait until dusk. There's something about the colours and reflection of the sky on paintwork that shows off the shapes and curves particularly well. Here's an example from last year. We took the big Merc SL500 to a corn field on the top of a hill one evening. There were no buildings or trees nearby so wall to wall sky shows off the shape quite well.  I suspect a clear sky would have worked more effectively, however the clouds add a certain drama. Here is another (rather humble) subject photographed against a cloud free sky at dusk. Here the gentle graduation of sky colours work their wonders on the painted steel. In this case I was lazy and left the car near the local trees, which add and subtract from the image in my opinion. Reflections of trees and buildings do give important visual cues in these circumstances, but they can also be distracting.  

Here is a little blast from the past, or is it...? This new old Morgan is one of their re-issued designs. This is a faithful recreation of the 1966 car, in an original '66 colour. It runs with a modern Ford twin cam engine, but retains the wood frame and sliding pillar suspension. Something for the enthusiast....

This splendid late 1950's Standard Vanguard has been standing guard and occupying a perfectly good parking spot in the village square at Polis in Cypus for at least five years. I wonder if it has been adopted as a town mascot. This is the real deal, the genuine item, not some carefully restored fiction. Round the corner you can find a Vauxall Victor FB - a strange lumbering item - covered in dust. Note how well rounded and aerodynamic those 50's cars were. It took another forty years of rectangular boxes before cars became this smooth again. I salute it, and I do hope it stays right where it is, casting its disapproving gaze over mankind's modern madness.

Warning. This post is all about cars, so if you are not a car nut you'll be bored, dear reader... There 's a nice picture of a horse in this post instead. Right. where were we. Ah yes, rewind three decades. In those days I was an avid car tinkerer. and bought cheap old cars and generally sold them at a loss or scrapped them. after a year. I'd had four BMC 1100s, then four Fiat 124s of various states of tune, then finally five Alfa Romeos. I think that qualifies me as a bona fide petrol head. Well, I spent weekends with a mate who had the bug worse than me, and helped him with getting this thing back on the road... This is the noisy end of a Porshce 911 2.4E coupe with the early Bosch mechanical fuel injection system. If you drove it carefully it would return eighteen miles to the gallon. If you  thrashed it you would get fifteen to the gallon. We figured you may as well drive it quickly in that case... ( There is no legal proof that we got 140mph out of it...

Taking pictures of stuff that moves: The gentle art of panning. The theory is that you select a shutter speed that is low enough to get the background blurred but high enough to make the target reasonably sharp. It might be wise to use manual focus so the camera doesn't waste time with Autofocus, depending on lens and camera. Here we are in mid Wales last year. We arrived at Presteigne on the same weekend as the Vintage Sports Car Club's meeting... The owners and their co-drivers spent the weekend charging around the narrow streets, up the local hills in an orgy of mud and Castrol "R"... It was great fun to watch even if it did mean that Bed and Breakfast was hard to find and consequently expensive... Now, many years earlier, we have the Patrouille de France flying their 1950's Fouga Magisters at the Greenham Common Air Tattoo in 1977. This was back in the metal manual camera days. No motor drive and 4Gb memory cards then. You had to make every s...