The Last Turn – Reflections on Strange Things

I had a birthday this past week, one of those somewhat rare ones that comes every ten years and ends with a zero. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it did cause me to eventually muse on the strange idea that I am older than the oldest, most vintage Porsche car. That has always been true, of course, but for some reason it seems stranger now, probably because some of those cars are pretty old.

Strange, or at least unusual, things happen, though. A good reflection shot is not an everyday occurrence, and it helps to be on the lookout for them. I found this one, oddly enough, on the lawn in front of the National Corvette Museum where we visited in 2002 in the reassuring company of a number of Porsche friends. It turned out that then-museum director Larry Hayes, a knowledgeable and affable PCA member, owned a 911 Turbo and was kind enough to let a flock of Porsches park out front, some on the lawn, while we visited. This beautifully reflective old 356 was in our group, and Kentucky provided the dramatic buttermilk sky.

Shot on film and subsequently scanned, the image that I wanted to use was flawed by a multitude of tiny spots; dirt, film damage, processing error, I don’t know what, but I deemed them beyond my patience and ability to clean up at the time, and the image of the car that I had scanned into my digital files sat around for years. Revisiting the situation and rescanning this year, I’m now much happier with what I have. Moral: never throw an image away. You don’t know where technology and life will take you, and photographic trash may become treasured. Second moral: given enough time, strange things occur; watch for them. On this already wholly unlikely day, there was even a Beutler a few feet away from the old coupe, waiting for its time to be photographed. Not the sort of day that you would expect, not even every ten years.