The Old Truck

We spotted this old truck parked in a little meadow alongside a county road outside La Veta. I’m fascinated by photos of old abandoned vehicles, but I haven’t come across many that were in a photogenic location like this. It’s almost as if the owner parked it here to be photographed. On this particular day, I was carrying my infrared-converted Sony a6000 camera. I hadn’t thought about capturing a scene like this with the infrared camera, but I love these images.

The first image at the top of this post is a color infrared shot at 470 nm, the so-called Hyper Color filter. I really like the way that the colors of the truck and bumper have been accentuated and contrast with the purple-magenta aspens in the background. At 470 nm, the camera is capturing part of the visible blue spectrum of light and all of the visible colors with longer wavelengths (cyan, green, yellow, orange, red), but it also captures infrared wavelengths that overlap with the visible colors. The result is not really a “false color” image because these are the colors straight out of camera; however, they certainly are not “real” colors that we see with our eyes. Many times I shoot infrared photos with the 590 nm filter on my lens and don’t bother to remove the filter, but in this case I’m really glad that I did.

The photo below was taken with my phone, and I’ve included it here to show what the scene actually looked like. I have to say the infrared photos are a lot more interesting!

I also captured this scene with the 590 nm filter. I thought it might look good as an Aerochrome image (red vegetation and blue skies), but there was really not a good color separation of the pickup with the grass and trees. So I decided to try a black and white conversion, and I really like it. I’ve decided that I like the Hyper Color image the best, but this black and white is a close second. For both of these, I added a shallow depth of field effect in Lightroom to make the truck really stand out from the surrounding scenery. This effect really makes me want to go back and try shooting this scene with my medium format Yashica-Mat TLR and a roll of black and white film! Leave me a comment and let me know which one is your favorite.