My driving question with this project is how can we use photography to preserve different kinds of culture? I aim to create a collection of photos of people's cars and people with their cars to reflect the many cultures that have existed in LA for so long. I want to focus on Night Rider cars, Classic Cars, and maybe try and capture the timeless Low rider cars of LA.

I am very much a person who likes cars. All kinds of cars. I think the culture that is involved with cars around the world is wonderful and tasteful and that it reflects the natural progression of the culture in our world. But specifically I think the car culture within LA is gorgeous and shows so much history of the city. Because LA was built with cars in mind it was a very prevalent topic and was quickly turned into cool, fashionable culture such as the Low rider culture being very prevalent in poorer LatinX communities and Night Rider car culture being very prevalent with counterculture and people of color. My plan is to go to different kinds of car meets and capture the livelihood of that culture from the car meet. I've already been to a car meet at night which reflected the night rider or tuner culture of cars and got good photos of people with their cars and people having fun looking at cars. I plan to go to at least two more to get photos of classic cars or mabye low rider cars. My two main inspirations for this project compositionally are Larry Chen, A renwoned car culture photographer, and Ryan Schude, Not a car photographer but has done an exposition on celebrities with their beloved cars.

I began my project by researching upcoming car meets that I could possibly take photos at. I found one that I thought sounded really cool, it was called “Night Riderz” and so I gathered my things and prepared to go there. Once I got there I realized that since it was 8 pm it was already dark and taking photos was going to be hard but I fiddled with my settings and turned on the flash and made it work. I got some really good photos of cars and of people with their cars but I couldn’t get up close to the cars because the flash would reflect of the paint and blow out the image and if I didn’t use flash it was too dark to see anything. Once I started editing I applied filters that used artistic noise and made the image brighter and a little more yellow to make the image feel a bit retro.

After this I felt like something was missing, I decided to highlight the cars a little more in my second shoot and get up close with the sparkling paint jobs and the interiors since it was day and I could do that. It was a really fun experience with lots of food and people at the second meet I went to which was a “Classic Volkswagen” car meet. I edited the photos to look a little more warm and golden since I shot my photos relatively close to but not during golden hour and I liked that effect. With this shoot, I sadly didn’t get as many photos as I hoped of people with their cars but I felt like I did still very much capture the essence of that culture and that community.

I’d like to believe that my Project was most definitely a success. I got lots of photos that I wanted to capture and I also got some that I love that I didn’t intend to capture. I think I definitely did address the driving question and actually discovered something that I wasn’t thinking about before my project began. During my first photo shoot I didn’t exercise the compositional guidelines as much as I would have liked them to since it was dark but I definitely tackled the technical with my night time settings and my editing in post. In the second photoshoot I ended up exercising the guidelines more and captured some beautiful images where I was changing my settings and my perspectives based on what I wanted for the specific photo. Honestly the project itself was a breeze. It was super enjoyable to get and go do something that I enjoy and use school as an excuse for that. I got to have many new experiences that I probably wouldn’t have had if I didn’t focus on this for my photography inquiry project. Although, I think the most challenging part of the project was carving out time to go out and actually take photos at meets and stuff while also balancing other homework and extracurriculars. I think with photography in general some of the more challenging things are literally just going out and taking photos. I am extremely proud of the finished product and I believe that I captured some of the beauty of the culture of cars in LA. I was really excited going into this project and I’m now even more excited coming out of it as I had many of my questions about this culture answered and finished the project with even more questions left in my mind. I think the thing that I am most excited about devleoping is my compositional and technical technique to make the photos follow the guidelines better. All in all my favorite part of this assignment was getting to see all the happy people who were proud of their accomplishments and were excited to show them off.