Shooting Stars And Wrecked Cars - Boston, South Africa

While out and about on the hunt for a new starscape image, fate led me to a rather unusual scene that I thought deserved a photo - or at least, a photo attempt. Tossed on the side of a rural mountain road were the rather crumpled remains of what used to be a Land Rover, seemingly forgotten by time.

Naturally, curiosity got the better of me, so I stopped on the other side of the road and pulled out my camera equipment to see what I could create - with the help of my "lightwand".

Does that mean it's time for some lightpainting? You bet!

Using an f-stop of only 1.4, all it took to illuminate the wrecked car was a few seconds of light from the light wand.

While this photo follows a fairly standard formula for starscapes, keeping both the car and stars in the focus wouldn't be possible, since not even the best camera can focus on two different objects that are millions of miles apart in the same frame. Figuring that I'd rather have a slightly blurred car instead of lots of blurred stars, I set my (manual) focus to one of the brighter stars you can see on the left side of the photo, waved the lightwand around the car a bit, and just like that - job done.

Being at the scene of what was no doubt a serious accident was making me feel a little uneasy, with the eerily silent surroundings not helping the mood much. A few photos down, I decided to call it a night for this particular location - besides, I think this photo was quite a fitting goodbye for what was certainly a well-used car that served a good purpose. May you live on forever in the heavens.

Fast forward 10 hours...

Since I wanted to examine the Land Rover in a better light and less creepy surroundings, I went back the following morning to see what I could find. As you can see, these old Land Rovers don’t have much in the way of structural integrity, and absolutely nothing in the way of airbags or safety features. The roof is nearly entirely gone, just hanging on by a thread on one side of the car.

Fortunately, I didn’t find any bloodstains in the car, which I have come across before while digging through wrecked cars. Regardless, I’m sure whoever was driving this car ended up with some pretty serious injuries. Not wanting to be disrespectful, I left everything as it was when I found it - I need good karma when it comes to cars.

What is it with this area and destroyed cars? Only a few miles away from the Land Rover I found this burnt out shell of a Mazda hatchback

As I didn't plan to have my mom’s new Subaru Forester end up as an unintentional sacrifice to the car gods, I decided to keep pushing on and headed back home. Suspiciously, there’s an area not too far from here that comes up on Google Maps with the name “Car’s End”. Coincidence? I think not…

Did you think I was joking?

Camera	Canon 6D
Settings	30 second exposure / f1.4 / ISO 800
Lens	Rokinon 24mm f1.4
Additional	Manfrotto tripod, Yongnuo YN360 lightwand
Processing	Lightroom CC