March Mashness

Sorry folks - in addition to being the creator of digital mashups, I'm also a college basketball fan, so I couldn't resist the obvious pun with the title of this post. It seemed appropriate given that a recent trip to Arizona coincided with the start of tournament season, and since I spent a good part of my time there taking more source photos for my Driven series.

Desert Valley Auto Parts (DVAP) has three different locations in Arizona and it turns out one of those is in Casa Grande where my brother-in-law and his family live. We had been there several times before to visit them but never aware until recently there was a treasure trove of junk cars there waiting to be discovered. Almost 9000 cars are kept at this location across three large lots, with the majority dating back to the classic era (late 1950s, 60s and 70s) that I most like to photograph. We were out there for a week so I ended up spending several mornings there, usually wrapping up around noon each day when things started getting really hot.

Stack Overflow

One of the features of DVAP I had not encountered yet at other junkyards was the stacking of cars to conserve space, as seen in the intro photo above and the ones below. This made for some interesting shots as well as silhouetting car bodies against the clear blue sky, for easy selection later in Photoshop.

And if you really want to conserve space, how about crushing cars before you stack them?

Rim Shots

Wow - more creative titling that combines basketball and photography analogies. Anyway, another pleasant surprise at DVAP were bales of crushed tire rims - the white pasty substance apparently being wheel weights paste or tire mounting lubricant that got compressed along with the rims. Some great textures to play around with.

Very A-peel-ing

Speaking of textures, as always with these junkyard trips, a primary goal was to get more close up shots of peeling paint and rust spots on the cars to use as backgrounds in the mashups. Below are some beauties that have now been added to my textures library.

Just Nuke It

Another on-site discovery was seeing the potential of zoomed-out shots, given the multitude of cars and expansive real estate. This got my imagination going around a Driven spin-off theme with the title "Junkyard Apocalypse." A couple of initial explorations below, showing the primary source images and corresponding mashup drafts.

Time now to continue sorting through the several hundred photos I took on the trip and see what other new mashups emerge! Watch this space as things develop.