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Rosie's green car

The car

A 1995 Dodge Neon Highline two door coupe with about 163,750 miles. Dark metallic green with light green pinstriping; gray and black interior

The Good News:

• New 2007 license tabs
• 195/55TR15 Yokohama Avid T4 tires mounted on 15"x6.5" wide Valore "Sport Edition" aluminum wheels; a Plus One sizing tire package from TireRack.com
• A full set of four Dunlop Graspic DS-1 studless snow tires; 175/65QR14's mounted on the original equipment Neon steel wheels; comes with the four stock hubcaps
• Full RX-300 Euro-style exterior lighting package: headlights, front turns, front marker lights, taillights, high-mount rear brake light
• Indiglo (blue and green) dash lighting package with a carbon-fiber dash overlay
• An Alpine CDM-7833 AM/FM/CD player four-speaker stereo, wired to a Sony XM-D400P5 "Xplod" "800 watt" (200 watts at 4 ohms) monaural power amplifier driving two 10" Infinity 1020w subwoofers. Professional amplifier/subwoofer installation at Best Buy
• New timing belt, cam and crank seals, water pump, belts in May of 2001 at 126,100 miles
• Regular oil changes, air filter changes
• Factory shop manual
• Most records and receipts

The Bad News:

• Needs new shocks
• Despite several tries (new O2 sensor, etc...) over the years, we've never really been able to get the "Check Engine" light on the dash to stay off. Mostly now we ignore it
• um... it's got 163,750 miles on it...

The photography

These are some photos I took of my daughter's old green car, her first car, a 1995 Dodge Neon Highline two door coupe, as we got ready to sell it.

Most of these were shot very late in the day in December with the sun already down but with a (pretty much) cloudless sky overhead.

ISO 1600 and 3200, shooting Aperture-Priority (AV) auto-exposure at f5.6 for the long shots taken with my Canon 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, and at f4.0 for the inside and final outside shots taken with my 16-35mm f2.8L wide angle zoom.

The interior shot of the carbon-fiber dash overlay was taken with my Speedlite 550-EX flash off-camera and hand-held back up over my right shoulder, and was triggered by my on-camera ST-E2 Speedlite Transmitter.

Post-processing: RAW conversion by BreezeBrowser with a little plus exposure compensation as needed to plump up the histogram and run it off the right end just a taste; digital noise reduction for the 1600 and 3200 ISO's by Neat Image.

I cropped these in Photoshop Elements to the proportions that Craig's List seems to defaut to; adjusted Levels to 1.1 and roughly 245 for most; and on one or two added a Fill Flash of 3 with Saturation 25 to 50 to keep the colors juicy.

Finally, add an unsharp mask at 50%, 1 pixel radius, 0 threshold, and save as a tiff. A second copy was saved as a jpeg when I was all done fiddling and I finally had what I wanted.

Photography copyright (c) 2005, 2006... John Sage/FinchHaven - http://www.finchhaven.com/digital/

Photo album generated by album_frames from Daves MarginalHacks on Sat Dec 30 10:02:40 2006