As a culture, we value travel–New vistas! New perspectives!–and there’s certainly something about being in a different place to make me look at things–and things on cars–a little differently. Sometimes it’s enough to just be in a different parking lot.
There’s an artform here, I think, and I can imagine a serious photographer setting up shots for the greatest effect–selecting the “thing”, positioning the vehicle (heck, selecting the vehicle first), timing the light–and then printing the best resulting shots on huge pieces of canvas. It might even be fun.
Maybe next year. This year, I am content to enjoy these chance encounters, these ephemeral images, as the small miracles they are.
These pictures remind me of the experiments with polaroid cameras, maybe in the 1970s? The photographer took the partly dried paper print and squished it to distort the image. Sometimes the result was stunning — like looking through water. Other times, the distortion was just, well, distortion.
Jim T – I don’t remember those Polaroid experiments (sometimes a few years difference in age is telling), but it seems like a good comparison. Some reflections in car and building windows are just blurry messes; others are stunning (IMO). I love the ones where a small curvature in the reflective surface (especially of a car hood or body) twists a reflection by some large number of degrees, like close to 90. I might have paid more attention to basic optics in school if I had thought about this.
Neat reflections. Bottom right one is very intriguing
Jim R – Many thanks. The one on the bottom right is a reflection of an advertising sign over a cart corral.