Spent the day Saturday out in West L.A. and going to the awesome Petersen Automotive Museum. The brainchild of the Late Robert Petersen, founder and publisher of magazines like: Car Craft, Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Petersen Photographic and many more, he was the ultimate “car guy”.
This is a great museum competing with the likes of the fabulous Nethercutt museum in the valley.

If you like cars, this is the place to go!

The first-floor of the museum has cool diorama displays including this replica of the Bull-dog cafe. This helps place the cars of the period into their environment.

On the second-floor are the more exotic cars such as the beautiful Ford GT including both the new version as well as the version made in the 1960s.

An alternative-fuel car display included this Hover-car…

A Nissan electric-car…

and a very early version of an electric-car.

It also included a Chrysler Turbine powered car from the ’60s which looks like a cross between a 1964 Dodge and a Thunderbird.

Movie cars abound including the likes of Herbie the Love-bug and the Hannibal Twin-8 from the movie the Great Race with Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood.

Also starring are the longhorn Cadillac of Nudie the Taylor…

..and if Longhorns aren’t enough, get a load of Leo Carrilo’s Cadillac with an entire cow’s head on it.

The scarce Ford Fairlane Hardtop Convertible is seen here.

as well as an assortment of open-wheel race-cars and hot-rods.

One of the featured displays this time was of the cars and designs of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, California Monster Shirt creator and Hot-rodder extraordinaire!

Here’s his “Beatnik Bandit”.

The cyclopian “Mysterion” is a cool machine.

A portrait of Big Daddy hisself and his creature-invention “Rat Fink”.

Mysterion throws it’s eye at you.

Roth’s Rotar, built entirely by him like all his cars, actually was able to hover above the roadway.

Another featured Marque was the awesome Ferrari exhibit, here showing the cool Daytona Spyder.

A killer F-40 (as well as an F-50) were on display.

A beautiful 250 SWB lightweight was also on display.

This is just a small fraction of the vehicles on display, and as the exhibits on the second floor are constantly changing, you’ll never run out of new things to see.

So go check it out when you’re in the Los Angeles area.

Now for some photo info…

How’d he do it?

All photos were taken with my Nikon D-200 camera, a Nikon 12-24mm lens.

Since the lighting in most museums are both very dim and, quite often, mixed light sources (incandescent , halogen, flourescent etc), I knew that color-temperature was going to be an issue.

So, being forced by the low-light levels to use high ISO settings ( ISO 800 and higher),I knew I wouldn’t have much color-adjustment range available (especially since I was shooting JPEGs and not RAW).

Knowing this before I left for the museum, I decided to use my camera’s “Preset” white-balance. This allows me to set a color-temperature at each display so I could get the color-temp as close to correct as possible in the mixed-lighting environment.

This necessitated having some means of consistently reading the available light. Knowing that devices such as the “Expo disc” are designed to help with this (but not wanting to pay the amount of money they charge for these) I decided to make my own.

I took the glass out of a spare 77mm filter I had (I did’t want any tint on the filter to effect my color-balance), and I combined a 77mm section of a coffee filter (to diffuse the light) and a 77mm section of bubble-wrap (the domes help gather and mix the diffent light sources). I then adhered these 2-materials together (with a clear, colorless adhesive) and sandwitched them into the filter-ring.

Using this to pre-set my white-balance in the varying display areas gave me almost 100% perfect colors on my exposures. A couple came out a little cool (only very slightly) so the next time I build a “light-disc” I may add a little tint to warm-up the photos a bit.

But, for about 35-cents, it worked very well and allowed me to hone my color-temperature skills!