Features Random film, Random hot rods...

This was, without question, the finest hot rod film shoot I’ve ever stumbled into. 2016, somewhere deep in Canada—don’t ask me to pinpoint it, the details are foggy. What I do remember is picking a park at random off a map, blissfully unaware that I’d chosen a patch of urban wasteland that sort of separated the slums from the suburbs.

We rolled up to a scene straight out of a grimy pulp novel—stepping over the homeless and dodging the stink of despair to set up my tripod. The car owners, jittery as hell, kept glancing at the sun like it was their last lifeline. They were convinced that if we lingered past dark, we’d be swallowed whole by the shadows and whatever prowled within them. They weren’t entirely wrong.

For gear, I had my trusty Leica M6, the glorious Hasselblad X-Pan, and a smorgasbord of lenses rattling around my bag. Portra 400 was the only film stock in my arsenal—grainy, vibrant, and perfectly tuned to catch the grit and shine of that surreal day. The results were worth the chaos.

 

A little off-topic, sure—but screw it, let’s let this thing careen off the rails if only for a bit.

About ten years ago, some soulless ad agency suits came sniffing around, dangling a paycheck in exchange for a shoot to hawk some shiny new Yeti contraption. I’ll spare you the details—blurred out, because fuck them. The brief was predictable: “vintage feel, modern edge.” But I had an idea...

I hunted down a Cadillac. Well, not just any Cadillac—this one was a Frankenstein creation from the 1950s, a King Ranch special converted into a hunting rig. Pure American madness on wheels. Then I rounded up a few deranged buddies, armed them to the teeth, and dragged the whole circus out onto the ranch for a hunt.

Three days of chaos, burning through film like a cokehead at a slot machine—ten rolls of Portra 400. Leica M7 in hand, 50mm Summicron DR from the Eisenhower era... I bled for those shots, every frame a battle against dust, sun, and the creeping existential dread of selling art to corporate vultures. Out of the wreckage, I pulled maybe 20 images that I was happy with.

When I handed them in, the ad people sniffed and whined. “Too grainy,” they said, as if they’d never heard of film. Clowns. But the check cleared, and that’s the only part of the deal that ever mattered.

 

King Ranch built a number of them… if I recall, this one was built in ‘56 and has been modified a number of times since.

 

Fantastic shots. It always frustrates me to see photos from someone with a better eye than my own. This is one such example.

My favorite is the last one. I like the way the light is bouncing off the shoulders of the fellas in the foreground. So good. Think that's Portra?

I don't own a medium format camera, but have been looking for a Mamiya 7 as of late. Prices didn't stay low I'm afraid. I just sold my X-Pan for the price of a Honda.

 

It was 2008 and I found myself at Gary Howard’s place under the pretense of catching up—just shooting the shit, really. At the time, he was knee-deep in Dr. Dan’s Zephyr, a rolling testament to decadence... Gary, true to form, was folded up like some kind of twisted mechanic origami under the dash, muttering curses...

When he finally crawled out to greet me, grease-streaked and grinning like a man who knows he’s in the presence of greatness—his own—the Zephyr’s door swung shut behind him. That’s when it happened. The work light he’d rigged up cast this eerie glow from inside the car, a kind of ghostly halo that screamed shoot this now, you idiot. Reflex took over. I grabbed my “Mexican” M3, still smelling faintly of tequila and bad decisions, and fired off a few frames before the moment disappeared into the void.

This one shot—it stuck with me. A frozen second of chaos and light, the kind of thing you can’t stage, can’t plan. It’s one of my favorites.


For those of you that might be curious about the "Mexican" M3, here's the story:

https://www.gearjournal.com/2012/03/the-stolen-leica-m3/

I got the camera back eventually...

 

I find successful shots are often on the sudden.
Don't think, don't try - lift it, shoot.

Enjoyable shots / subjects.

 

More Portra through a Leica M6 with a 50mm Summicron DR mounted.

Bonneville, 2009—a blistering, white-hot expanse of salt and madness. I went there on a mission, armed with lofty delusions and a bag full of black-and-white film. The plan was simple: channel the ghosts of the 1940s and ’50s, the raw, gritty images that seduced me into photography in the first place. Slow shutter leans, motion blur, grain so thick you could chew it—visions of the past clawing their way into the present.

None of it worked. The sun was a merciless bastard, laughing at my filters. The salt reflected everything back at me like some hellish white mirror, amplifying every flaw in my technique. The whole scene was too chaotic, too alive for my carefully crafted nostalgia trip. I floundered, cursed, and eventually gave up trying to wrestle the light into submission.

And yet, somehow, irony threw me a bone. I left with a handful of color shots that, against all odds, didn’t suck. This one of Don’s streamliner isn't half bad. One frame from the only roll I ended up exposing. I switched to digital soon after.... Eventually, I'm gonna make it back and create the black and whites that are in my head.

 

Back in 2014, Lee Pratt was in the thick of it, thrashing on his Nomad like a man possessed, prepping for its big debut. At the time, he lived just down an old country road from me—a crooked stretch of Texas asphalt that felt like it hadn’t seen new pavement since Eisenhower. I’d drop by regularly under the guise of “helping,” which, to the casual observer, might’ve looked like an act of selflessness, a friend lending a hand. But let’s not kid ourselves. I wasn’t there to help. I was there to soak up the mythos of Lee Pratt, raw and unfiltered, in his natural habitat. The man is a legend, and I’m a sucker for legends.

When I snapped this photo, Lee was putting the finishing touches on his hydraulic suspension—a delicate mix of artistry and science that only he could pull off. By then, I’d burned through a dozen rolls of film, shooting casually, almost recklessly, with zero regard for posterity.

It might be the best portrait I’ve ever taken. If you know Lee Pratt—and if you don’t, you should—this photo captures the true essence of the man. No pretense, no posing. Just Lee, exactly as he is: a master at work, lost in the rhythm of his craft.

Leica M7, 35mm Summilux, HP5.

 

It was 2015 when Tardel stumbled across a Ford Galaxie marooned deep in crackhead country—a place where time stood still and common sense was a forgotten relic. I tagged along for the retrieval mission, more out of morbid curiosity than any real sense of duty. The Galaxie hadn’t run in two decades, and judging by the apocalyptic yard it was squatting in, neither had its neighbors.

Tardel, though, was undeterred. He moved like a surgeon in a war zone, coaxing the beast back to life with nothing but grit, greasy hands, and a toolkit that looked like it had survived a plane crash. Within hours, the damn thing roared to life—a feral sound, like the ghost of Detroit steel screaming to be free. He pronounced it roadworthy, though roadworthy in Tardel-speak is a loose concept at best.

We pointed the Galaxie toward home—300 miles of asphalt and prayer. The details of the drive blur in my memory, but the fear of that yard still lingers sharp. A junkyard of broken dreams, meth-warped realities, and a distinct sense that we were unwelcome trespassers in a world we didn’t belong to. Making it out alive felt like a cosmic roll of the dice.

What sticks with me most, though, is the photograph—alien, otherworldly, and perfectly bizarre. A snapshot of the day’s madness distilled into a single frame. It’s not the kind of thing you can explain, really. You just look at it, shake your head, and wonder how in the hell you ever made it home.

 

Boring goddamned nonsense from 2019. Shot this on my M6 with HP5 pushed two stops—a technical choice that gave me plenty of gray tones to work with, but didn’t do a damn thing to save the shot from the swamp of mediocrity it was born into. It’s fine, I guess. Decent enough if you squint, but it reeks of uninspired Texan bullshit. Flat. Soulless. A photographic shrug from a state I’m increasingly fed up with.

Maybe that’s the real problem: Texas. The endless sprawl, the oppressive familiarity of it all. It’s seeped into my bones, dulled my instincts, made the camera feel heavier in my hands. My shooting’s sporadic because I don’t care. I don’t want to capture this. I’m agoraphobic, sure, but only because my surroundings make me sick. Same skies, same landscapes, same dusty corners of a world I stopped loving long ago. Maybe it’s time to pack the gear, light a fire, and aim for something new—anything but this tired loop of Texan purgatory.

Either that or maybe I should MESS with it.

 

Confront your fears......

 

The indecision gnaws at me like a mangy coyote at a half-eaten steak. Should I keep spelunking through the cluttered chaos of my personal archives, or finally roll up my sleeves and commit to making some real goddamned prints this week? The existential question of the day, folks.

The irony here is thicker than a Vegas cocktail waitress’s mascara. This whole godforsaken exercise wasn’t supposed to be about developing prints or digging through boxes of old ghosts. No, it was about *writing*—letting the words spill out raw and reckless, free from the polite prison of an audience too genteel to handle the unfiltered madness. So, like a fool or a genius (the line’s thin as a razor), I dug myself a hole—this thread, if you will—and started throwing words in it.

Now here I am, up to my knees in developer fluid, fumbling around the darkroom like some crazed alchemist, trying to conjure meaning out of the mess. Go figure.

I’m gonna make some prints.

 

2017. The Atomic Lab. I shot Silva’s ’34 Ford—a car so pure in form it practically demanded reverence. Most of the session was digital, predictable and efficient, but I couldn’t leave well enough alone. No, I had to mess with the process, embarking on this half-baked experiment of re-shooting digital negatives onto film. Limited success. A flawed pursuit from the start.

But this shot? This one was different. Pure. Captured with my M7 and a 35mm ’lux, loaded up with HP5. No gimmicks, no shortcuts—just the unfiltered truth, burned into silver halide. It stands apart from the rest. Proof that sometimes the old ways still cut deepest.

 

You really nailed contrasting colors, shadows, light.
What caught me is look at all the the multiple angles, horizontal, vertical, slants.
A lot going on there.
Man....good.

 

Well, it took the better part of a day, but I finally burned a print. Nothing grand—just a 4x6 from a negative I’ve printed before. Familiar territory, but this time I went full mad scientist: dodging, burning, tweaking, and generally screwing around like a lunatic with too much time and not enough sense.

The result? Decent. Maybe even cool. This one could really sing at a larger size...

Here’s a shitty iPhone photo of a photo:

 

Insomnia has its uses. Woke up at 3 a.m., too wired to sleep, and wandered into the darkroom like a restless ghost. The mission? Get my black-and-white print process back in fighting shape. A noble goal, and after a few hours of caffeine-fueled trial and error, I think I’m there. Back up to par, at least.

But then I saw it—the RA-4 kit lurking in the corner, mocking me like some forgotten relic of better times. Why not dive into color printing at the crack of dawn? What could go wrong?

Turns out, not much... or a lot depending on how you look at it... My color balance is shaky, the shadows are muddy, and everything feels a little… off. But for a first effort, not half bad. Not bad at all. Enough to keep me coming back, chasing that elusive perfect print like a gambler chasing one more roll of the dice.