Looking For Mopar Show & Race Cars for 2010 Calendar

Every year I try to do a high quality wall calendar. Last year I did a couple.

click above to review calendar

This year I’d like to do several different calendars:

• Mopar Show Car Calendar. This would be some of the prettiest Mopars set in pleasing back and foregrounds. Spring has sprung up north — and there ought to be some excellent settings to use for a photo shoot of your car.

• Mopar Drag Race Calendar. This would be track photos of Mopars having front wheels off the ground.

• Forgotten B-Bodies. I need photos of Chargers, Sport Furies, Magnums, Coronets, and Cordobas/300s on the B-body platform with model years 1975-1979. I might consider adding some nice J and R Bodies if there isn’t enough variety of color in the Forgotten Bs, and rename Disco Mopars. Warning — I’m way too deep in great photos of White Magnums.

• Nostalgia Super Stock. I’m looking for great launch photos of NSS car — regardless of the make.

• Smokey Burnouts. I’m looking for both street and race Mopars doing Smokey burnouts.

• Superbirds, Daytonas, CHarger 500s, Mr. Norms, and other ultra low production Muscle Mopars.

This is the important part. Photos must meet all of these specifications for me to be able to use:

• Must be digital photos.

• They must be untouched (not cropped, color adjusted, brightness & contrast…) direct from the memory card of your digital camera 5MP or better. I have to have 300DPI 11.5"X9" photos after I have cropped them to fit. They cannot have been loaded up and resaved — as the compression from resaving as a JPG kills the hi-res of the photo and make colors (especially reds) bleed.

• The cars and scenery have to be looking their very best. Clean, no glares, and no huge shadows.

Tips:

• Plan your location in advance. Know what time of the day the sun will be at your back.

• Overcast days help reduce glare, long shadows on the ground, and dark shadows on the lower parts of the car. Evenings and mornings have less glare — but longer shadows. High noon — and when the sun is high and bright is the worst time — unless you have good cloud cover or a building at your back shades the entire frame of the photo.

• Takes dozens of photos and have a helper there to help move (rotate) the car so you get all angles.

• Turn the wheels slightly in the direction to see the wheels — not the tire tread.

• Light cars need colorful or dark backgrounds. Dark cars need light backgrounds. Thumb through some magazines at the one the pros take.

• Shoot some photos standing, and some crouching for different effects. Bring a ladder or look for a higher location to shoot down on to the car.

• Tire in the grass most often don’t work.

• Look at the entire location. Foreground, background, ground where the tires are. I can make telephone wires disappear, but not knocked over garbage cans, dead grass, a dog licking its boyz, a tree growing out of the roof, or other subtle problems that ruin photos. Look through the camera — and move the car and objects that you can around the car.

• The format size of your camera and the format size of the calendar page will be different — so I’ll have to crop. As such you need to make sure to leave me room to crop left, right, top, bottom. Don’t fill the whole photo with car — but center the car to use 2/3 of the photo.

• Slight angles are typically better than head on or side views.

• Give me a big selection. Take 50-100 photos of your car and send to me on a CD.

• Include your contact information and a little about the car — so I can correctly get your name, city/state, and the car yr/make/model the proper credit.

• Look for unusual backgrounds. Factories, flowering hedges, amusement park, grain mills, concrete pipe yards, mansions, statues, ……

• No people — unless topless hard bellies  for my personal collection.

• Rotate the car for photos at least twice to try to catch better lighting conditions. Glare and shadows make or break.

If you have a CD full of photos — you stand a better chance of having your car featured because of the great selection of angles and lighting. Send the CD to:

MoparStyle Racing

7723 FM 723

Richmond, TX 77406

On the other hand you only have one or two hi-res photos that meet the above criteria, and you’re certain that they’ll be a slam dunk — email to me (they better be well over 1MB) as a file attachment at: dave@oldhippie.com and have the subject say 2010 Calendar.

I will only do a Top Shelf Calendar — so I can’t use anything less than top shelf photos.

The weather, sunlight, and flora is just right tight now — why not make this a project for this weekend. You could use the photos of your car anyway.

NMCA’s Bowling Green Has Been Canceled

There will be no reschedule

We loaded up the stacker and the motor coach last week and left Wednesday for the 1000 mile trip to Bowling Green. We arrived there Thursday noon and set up the pits.

Thursday night and Friday morning it rained, and we took the cars to tech in while it was only sprinkling. We were the second and third cars to tech in. We immediately put the cars back in the trailer and wiped down. At about 3PM, they had the first part of the track dry — so the opened it up for 1/8 mile Time Trials — hoping the exhaust and hot tires would dry the top end enough to start qualifying at 5PM. The top of the track was seeping — and so they kept with the 1/8 mile until about 6PM — when everyone was warned that a major storm was coming in — and the track was closing at 6PM to batten down the hatches. We personally passed on making any of these 1/8 mile passes.

It rained like Hell all Friday night and was sprinkling Saturday morning. The weather forecast was for rain through Sunday — and I was expecting the NMCA to hold the race over to Monday. I rode the scooter up to the line at 10AM — and there wasn’t a NMCA official to be found. No doubt they would have been pummeled with questions they didn’t yet have answers for, so they hung out in Race Control. There was a rumor by someone who is a pretty good friend of the track owner — that Charlie was waiting until noon to see if the forecast would change — and would announce if they’d run, cancel, or reschedule. At 11:30, it was announced over the speakers that the race would be rescheduled. A couple of us NSS guys snickered that it wouldn’t be rescheduled — but if they announce it was cancelled, there’d be a run on people getting refunds, which the NMCA didn’t want to deal with at the moment.

We pulled out of the track and noon — and drove the 1000 miles arriving home at 3:30AM.

It was just announced on the NMCA forums, that the race will indeed not be rescheduled, and that racers will get their tech in points for attending (I assume even those who didn’t tech in — but were asked to bring their cards to the registration booth), and the 100 points at the end of the year if they attended five or more races. If that’s what you want — there will be no refund. However, if you are a racer wanting a partial refund of $85 and are willing to give up your points for that race — you can send a SASE for that partial refund before the points are calculated. Your crew members with a Purple ticket can get a partial refund of $35 — by returning the ticket and a SASE.

The official version of this summary can be found by clicking here.