Couldn’t find Xzibit any­where to com­ment on this one, so I have to do it myself ;-)

This April I went to Phoenix, Ari­zona, to give a (small) talk at the INFOCOM 2008 con­fer­ence. As the dol­lar still had a ter­rific value com­pared to the Euro, it was pretty much com­puls­ory to buy some stuff while over there. So one night I went on a small shop­ping tour, and it was at the car park of some big elec­tron­ics store that I saw this car. Out I took my cam­era and bean bag, and popped a polar­iz­ing fil­ter on the lens. Yes, this did make sense: The sun had just sat in a per­fect angle to my pos­i­tion, that’s how I got this mag­ni­fi­cent dark blue sky (I took another shot where it was much more prom­in­ent, but the was car less “pimpy”, so I chose this one to post here).

Although I was using a bean bag, I increased the ISO and shot wide open as I didn’t want to spend too much time crawl­ing in front of some car whose owner I didn’t want to meet… it’s still unbe­liev­able how much detail I got out of the shot, again con­sid­er­ing it was taken at the shortest end of the lens, with min­imum aper­ture. You just gotta admire the work Carl Zeiss and friends are doing!

Any­way, I was being a bit lazy in terms of post-​processing and just used an (abso­lutely amaz­ing!) Light­Room pre­set called Sur­real Edgy Look, cre­ated by Matt Kloskowski (thanks!). It just worked out-​of-​the-​box.