The March issue of Classic Motorsports is leaving the printer...

...and I think you're going to like it a lot.

The cover story is about the rivalry between Porsche and the Chevrolet Corvair. Is the 'vair really a poor man's Porsche? Pages 46-54 will contain our observations.

There's also a really neat story about a Cadillac-engined Vignale-bodied Bill Frick special; I'd never heard of them before reading it but it's a great story and a cool car. If it weren't completely unique, I'd want one just like it.

Other good stuff:

• Amelia Island Concours Guide
• Shelby project engine installation
• Classic Photography
• Tons of event coverage from the Hilton Head Concours, Texas 1000, Radnor Hunt Concours, VIR Gold Cup, and HSR Racing events.

Subscribers should start seeing this issue in their mailboxes in the next week or so, unless your mail carrier is an enthusiast also.

You can buy the individual issue HERE.

That classic photography story got me all excited; reminded me of processing photos in the darkroom back in college. Doug (the photographer featured) does fantastic things with his cameras. I think photos often look better on film, and he absolutely nails the aesthetic.

I busted out the old Canon A1 and I'm trolling the internets for developer. Then I need to seal up my bathroom door from light leaks, and I'm in business.

I miss film. Sold my soul to the devil years ago when I went digital. Once upon a time photographic documentation was pretty final. Yes with an exacto and some elmer's glue you could doctor a picture but for the most part, a picture did tell a thousand words.

Now if you want to and are good with Photoshop, you can do anything. ...I have this picture of me at Woodstock tuning Jimi's guitar, and and another of me being part of Ken Miles' Le Mans Pit Crew. (Honest, that's me changing the tire. They let me out of junior high school just to do that. Henry the Duce called my principal.)

In a way I miss film. It made you think before pressing the shutter button, because there was a cost associated with each press.

That said, I love digital. You can see your results, at least on the back of the camera, immediately. Adjustments and reshoots can be done real time, rather than next time. And I can often repair my mistakes with a few clicks in post processing. And pressing the shutter button is free, unless you decide to print something.

And you can, as a previous poster pointed out, create some photos that you couldn’t possibly take. Just for fun, of course. For a car club event, I’d wanted a picture of one of our cars in front of a particular scenic background, but on site, there was no way to get a car into position to do the photo without likely damaging the underside driving over stuff (it was not a Land Rover club), or attracting the attention of certain blue uniformed officials. When I got home I realized that I had separate photos of the background and several of our cars, all facing the same way so the light was a match, taken within a couple hundred feet and maybe 15 minutes of each other… It took about five minutes to produce the perfect “theme” photo for the event we were at, and it was published in a national magazine (I told them what I did). There’s no way an average hacker like me could have done that at home with film.

Stu

Another film - digital story:

I used to cover Pikes Peak for GRM and a few other magazines between 1986 and 2005. Back then the whole course was unpaved, and I'd have to shoot both B&W and slides - 2 bodies, switching lenses, etc. Because I HAD to have good photos of the overall and class winners, I always went 3 or 4 days early to shoot practise, where the drivers get 3 - 5 runs per day, rather than the 1 run on race day. Then I'd go rush the slides to a camera shop in Colorado Springs for same-day processing and go develop all the B&W in the motel or camp trailer, so I could see how the images turned out and adjust my shooting plan for the next day.

First time out with digital - click, got it, no worries. Second car, nope, that needs to be done over next run - real time feedback. Plus in the film days, because of the dust and switching lenses, I'd have to have the camera bodies professionally cleaned each year. Now I use a very good overgrown point-and-shoot, so I never change lenses and voila - no cleaning problems. Add in the easy lightening of shadows and softening of highlights in Photoshop - always problems with slides - and I was sold! And I can email the images to editors rather than snail mailing them.

I must admit I haven't shot a single frame of film since 2003.
Anyone want to buy some nice Olympus OM-1 bodies?

All true and valid points. Some of my best work is photographing Wild Horses. I had walked over 2 miles from my car over rough country and came across a family I wanted to shoot. This family had eluded me for weeks. For some reason they didn't mind that day. Then I got the bad news. Almost out of space on the chip and the spare had data I had not downloaded yet. Accidently had picked it up instead of a fresh one.... Nice to be able to run thru what I had shot and delete the "junk"...

Got a real nice Mamiya 645 outfit if you don't want Jim's Olympus...

I miss Jim's Pikes Peak coverage on film.

Margie

I can imagine something got lost when you went from getting an envelope of pitcures from a contributor in the mail vs. downloading an e-mail file or opening a link to an ftp site.

I use a camera for work all the time, although my quality needs aren't that high. As such, I don't even use a camera anymore. The 8MP camera on my Droid is perfectly adequate for my needs.

Film did teach us things, and the biggie was that you only had so many shots at your disposal so each one had to count. I had a super-small budget in school, so loading up a 36-exposure roll of color was a big deal. I do miss the darkroom, though, and it's been way too long since I have transferred film to a developing tank. I do have all of my old prints and negs at home and have scanned a few.

One of my photojournalism professors required us to print everything full-frame--she wanted to see the negative's ragged edges on the print. That forced us to compose everything inside the viewfinder. Know what? I think it helped.

I still have a ton of film cameras, from my first "real" one (Canon A1) to all of my dad's hundred-year-old folding Kodaks. I'd still like to find a metal-body Pentax K1000 like we used in high school. They're out there. I just need to decide if we need one more camera in the house. We probably do.

And getting back on topic, Doug's photo piece looks great in the mag. It was nice working with him.

Yeah I miss the darkroom - and black & white photography in general. Shooting in color and then processing in PS to black & white is just not the same thing as shooting - and thinking - in black and white.

Other than that I can't say I miss film except for nostalgic reasons. I haven't put a roll into one of my old cameras in years.

Great piece, too!

The only thing I don't miss about the darkroom is that smell. Fortunately in college I graduated from tray developing to a one-step machine: feed in exposed paper and 90 seconds later receive a print that was developed, washed and dried.

Processing film was still kind of stinky, but at least we had really nice labs for that. You got your own little room complete with sink and a film dryer--kind of like a hair dryer but for spools on film.

By the way, anyone remember transferring exposed film from the canisters to those spools? The metal ones were tricker than the plastic ones, but there was a definite sense of accomplishment when you got it right.