Most of what I shoot on these Monday nights wears chrome and was built before I was driving. This one was the loud exception, the newest car in the lot by half a century, yellow with black racing stripes and a little bee on the flank, parked a few spots from a lime green Challenger like it owned the place. The Ontario plate read RUNINSCD. A 2012 Chevrolet Camaro RS.
The Newest Car in the Lot
A cruise-in like this takes all comers. The cars drive in under their own power and park wherever there is room, and nobody checks a birth certificate at the gate. So a 2012 lands between a 1958 Edsel and a row of Tri-Five Chevys, and somehow it works. The same night I shot a 69-year-old GMC truck parked next to a Tesla. Old next to new is half the fun of these lots, and the yellow Camaro was the car the kids walked to first.
What the 2012 Chevrolet Camaro RS Package Adds
Here is the honest part, because car people will ask. This is a 2012 Chevrolet Camaro RS, which is the LT with the appearance group and not the SS. Under the hood, which the owner had propped open all evening, is the 3.6 litre LFX V6, 323 horsepower, a genuinely good engine. The RS is a Rally Sport appearance group, and what it buys you is the look of the V8 car: the HID headlights ringed with those LED halos, the grille with the red RS badge, twenty inch wheels, a decklid spoiler and darker taillights. It is dressed to look meaner than it is, and there is nothing wrong with that. Plenty of the chrome around it was doing exactly the same thing sixty years earlier.
The Bumblebee Look
You cannot photograph a yellow fifth-generation Camaro with black stripes and pretend the Transformers movies never happened. This is the Bumblebee car, and the owner leaned all the way in, down to the bee on the rear quarter. The plate having a go at it with RUNINSCD only made me like it more. It is a car that knows exactly what it is and is not embarrassed about any of it, which is its own kind of honest.
Shooting a Car With No Chrome
I shot it the same way I shoot the old iron, with a Leica Q3 and its fixed 28mm lens in whatever light the evening gave me. A modern car hands you none of what the classics do, no acre of chrome to catch the sun, so you go after what it does have. Here that was the deep yellow paint, the halo rings in the headlights, and the engine bay sitting open under a hard blue sky. The camera details are on my gear page, and there are more of these nights in my street photography projects.
The classics will always be why I show up. But a lot that can hold a 1958 Edsel and a Bumblebee Camaro at the same time is the lot I want to be standing in.
