What Might Have Been ...

You don't need to have spent a great deal of time browsing my photostream to know I'm daft about cars, especially when you see my username.

The fascination really kicked off in the late Seventies when I bought the first ever issue of 'Street Machine' magazine, which was all about the hot rod and custom scene here in the UK.

Ever since that day I've dreamt of having my own custom car or hot rod and for a while I hoped I might even become a mechanic, which would have made that dream easier to achieve.

Sadly, I've never been able to afford to buy that hot rod and I never did get the opportunity to become a mechanic. These days the closest I get to achieving either dream is working on my old Scirocco, but it's far from being a hot rod and my mechanical skills fall far short of what I'd like them to be.

Still, what is they say ... when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

I took this photo for the latest Sunday Challenge which had the theme Tools of the Trade ... using manual focus.

I found this week particularly challenging as being a short-sighted spectacle wearer I nearly always have to rely on the automatic focussing capabilities of my Nikon D90. Although there is a dial on it which you can set to allow for eyesight deficiencies, I'm afraid the adjustments are only minor and not sufficient to compensate for my own shortcomings in that area.

So for this challenge I had to use the live View screen mode, which meant I could supposedly wear my glasses and focus the image as seen on the screen instead of through the viewfinder. However, I have to say I still found this rather difficult and had to discard lots of shots, but I'm fairly happy with this one.

I resisted the temptation to do any sharpening or clarifying in PP as I thought that would kind of defeat the object of the exercise. All I really did in the way of processing was to tweak the Brightness/Contrast levels, before converting it to Black & White and then resizing it for uploading.