The best of both worlds.

Take a suspension proven in British trials racing and drop in a huge Cadillac V8 engine and you have something both nimble and fast. That was the post-war Allard J2, a detail of which appears here:

Allard J2. 5D, 100mm Macro, ring flash, f/9.5, ISO 250.

Those air intakes mean business and the car was successful on both sides of the Atlantic, the big American engine proving reliable and easy to work on.

I took five pictures on my Helicon Focus Rig, as I increasingly think of it, the camera perched on a monopod. The Rig comprises a Canon 5D, the 100mm Canon Macro and an aftermarket ring flash, with a QR base mounted on my indispensable Manfrotto monopod. The monopod is not there to stop the shakes but rather to keep the camera more or less in the same position between snaps as the lens focus setting (on manual focus) is gently varied to cover the depth of the subject. I round tripped the image through Photoshop CS2 to remove the reflection of the circular flash tube – I find the retouching tool in Photoshop far subtler than the one offered by Lightroom.

At these close distances the 100mm does not offer much depth of field! In the event, I ended up only using three of the images for stitching in Helicon Focus for an overall result that is breathtakingly detailed. Helicon Focus can make amends for small amounts of camera movement between snaps, and a monopod is a whole lot less trouble in a crowded paddock than a cumbersome tripod. Images like these make for lovely garage art for like-minded friends.

Here’s a detail section – and this is simply a screenshot from within Lightroom! The original, if my printer was large enough, would come in at 30″ x 45″:

Allard – detail

As you can imagine, the original print in large format does not lack in impact. Snapped on August 13, 2009 in the paddock at the Laguna Seca Historics near Monterey, CA. My ‘rolled up on a PVC pipe’ black velvet backdrop keeps things simple behind the subject.

Now do you see why I refer to the Canon 5D as my ‘medium format’ camera?