The Classical Gas Museum was one of those happy accidents we sometimes encounter during our travels. We were leaving Santa Fe, en route to Taos via Route 68, and just enjoying the ride. We had the Rio Grande to our left, and beautiful scenery everywhere. And then … there it was. Ben first spotted a row of vintage gas pumps and wanted to pull over to see what it was all about. As he was puling over, I started to take in the rest of the place. Old cars, vintage signs, an old diner even! This place was heaven for anyone who was into vintage stuff. In other words, this was Ben’s version of Disney World!
We literally parked on the side of the road, grabbed our camera gear and ran. Ben found the owner, Johnnie, and he gave us permission to photograph there. The amount of vintage stuff this guy had collected was amazing. It’s the kind of place where you walk around with your camera, but don’t even know what to shoot first! I would start to list things, but it’s probably better to show photos.
The main building/store on the property.
I just loves this wall full of old signs. The textures here are just awesome! Later in this post, I’ll add a light-painted version of this same scene.
Indeed.
Ben struck up a conversation with Johnnie, and learned that he buys and sells all kinds of vintage stuff. (Though he’ll only sell something if he has a duplicate.) At the time of our visit, he had just recently acquired the diner and was in the process of fixing it up. We hope to return in the vintage bus one day and get a shot of the bus in front of the matching red and white vintage diner!
Ben also asked for permission to return after dark to do some lightpainting one night. Johnnie gave us the ok (yay!) and we came back a few nights later. Ben is a master of lightpainting (in fact, he just released an e-book on the topic) but I’m still getting the hang of it. I knew I would only get to shoot one or two scenes, so as soon as we arrived, while it was still somewhat light out, I composed my shots and then waited for dark so I could start shooting. The following is what I came up with, and I’m pretty happy with them!
You can see some of Ben’s lightpaintings from the Classical Gas Museum in his recent blog post HERE. I also found an article about the museum and you can read that HERE. The Classical Gas Museum is located in Embudo, New Mexico, right along Route 68.
More to come!
*All of the images in this post are Copyright © 2012 Karen Nace. If you’d like to use them on your site, please ask first. Be nice. Don’t steal.
“Happiness is a journey, not a destination.”
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