Vintage Car: 1927 Bentley, 6.5 Litre

A few days ago I mentioned that Steve and I went into town and I brought along my camera. While we were walking back to the car from a warehouse store called Costco, Steve pointed at a fabulous old car as we went past it. I was thinking about macros though, and it was parked around a bunch of cars, so I quickly forgot it. We got to our car, started putting stuff in the trunk when Steve said, "HEY! THERE'S THAT OLD CAR!!" I turned, crouched, and quickly took three pictures as it went by. I was totally amazed when I saw this one because it was all in the frame and the focus was great! I think that sometimes our best pictures come from situations like this--don't think, just aim and shoot! (A huge thank you to Martyn Gavan for identifying this car for me: 1927 Bentley, 6.5 Litre!!) (And if you'd like to see a page about this particular car, clever and awesome Keith Burton found this page! Vintage Bentleys: 1927 Bentley, 6.5 Litre [owned by Ron Rezek]) (Additionally, I found a page in one of the local area's website's here! Ashland, Oregon's Local's Guide: 1927 Bentley 6.5liter Yf4648)

I had other pictures to process that day, but yesterday I was looking for my pictures of Portia and I remembered this image. Another look convinced me that I really did need to process it.

Here's what I did!
First, I opened it up and clipped out the car, put it on another layer and then began playing with various ideas. Although this car is a nice forest green, I wanted this image to convey its gorgeous old-time style, so I dove into Topaz Labs Black & White Effects and wallowed in a sea of glorious mono and duo tones, settling finally on a beautiful sepia + selenium blend that gave rich chocolate tones and kept all the detail. The background got the same treatment, with an additional copy of the background receiving a 30% opacity of a filter called "Milk Memories" which gives a lovely white vignette and a wash of white over the whole image. (Hence the 30%--I didn't want to have a strong effect). Then I realized that I wanted some texture to add age, and where better to go than to Jerry Jone's amazing texture sets! I ended up using two of his textures in different opacities: Aborigine and Notaclue1.
Thanks Jerry! :)

By the way, if you would like to try using textures in your images, I found a very nice tutorial here: Digital Photography School: How to Use Textures to Enhance Your Photographs. Have fun and let me know if you create your own! :)