1966 Ford Mustang. Photography by the author.
We occasionally tell the owners whose cars we shoot that Hemmings is a gift that keeps on giving. What we mean is this: We usually shoot photos for one of our monthly glossy titles (Hemmings Classic Car, Hemmings Muscle Machines or Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car), and those photos end up, unexpectedly but regularly, in the pages of Hemmings Motor News. With monthly stories on dashboards, grilles, engines, and any of a dozen other sections from which we can extract images from our mandated array of detail images, it’s inevitable that someone is going to choose a particular car for discussion, and when we do, we reach into our considerable-and-growing files and (re)use photos. That being the case, even we get surprised sometimes.
Back in 2010, owner Vern Pfannenstiel contacted Hemmings Classic Car editor Richard Lentinello with word that he had an original-ish early Mustang coupe. Richard was tickled by both its cleanliness and the idea that it wasn’t a V-8; he passed it on to me to make contact. Time conflicts, work travel, and a winter in Flagstaff that resembles winter in many other parts of the country – i.e. snow – meant that it wasn’t until the summer of 2012 that I made my way from Phoenix to Flagstaff to photograph it. Part of the issue was economy: To help justify the trip, a second car from Flagstaff would be needed to shoot. (This would come later, once I heard about Suzanne Edmonds’s original-family-owner Rambler up in that same neck of the woods.)
I wouldn’t know Flagstaff from Fairfield, New Jersey (though I suspect one is more mountainous than the other), so I relied upon Suzanne and her family to organize a meet-up, so that we could investigate locations and take some shots. A spot near Bonito Meadow worked for our detail, engine, and interior shots, and then I set off to figure out what to do about the exterior shots.
There was a bit of a panic as I drove with Suzanne’s husband around the nearby Sunset Crater park loop; it took about 45 minutes to traverse, and offered beautiful vista after beautiful vista, none of which I could take advantage of without blocking a road and raising the ire of traffic, park rangers, or both. So much lovely around me, so inaccessible. (Sounds like my social life at college, come to think of it.) And so we settled upon a spot just a couple of miles in from the State Road 89 entrance; it was one of the first spots we’d seen.
While waiting for the sun to drop on this July day, I did some car-to-car action photos on Vern’s Mustang; the freshly-paved arrow-straight road went on for more than half a mile, which, when driving 15 MPH and shooting at 1/30 of a second or slower, is more than enough time to get a hundred shots or more. Once the sun was low enough, we returned to our chosen spot and got going. I shot Suzanne’s Rambler first – it was a sort of dusky rose metallic, and because Vern’s white Mustang was brighter I shot the darker color while I had more light. The two were in the same spot, at the same angle, same everything (a move I usually explain away by claiming “it ain’t clever, but it works”) – I may have adjusted the car’s angle slightly because Vern’s pony was smaller than Suzanne’s wagon – and away I snapped until it was nearly black out. Such is the joy of a tripod and a camera shutter that will stay open for 30 seconds or more when you ask it to.
And in the moment, I must confess, I felt that there was nothing overly remarkable about the shoot itself; nothing to do with the cars or people involved, mind, but in the moment, I felt as if the shots had a corner-cutting hallmark about them. There are times when I can sniff out perfect locations in five minutes, and other times when I can search for an hour or more, and come up with almost nothing. This one fell somewhere in between. We were at the entrance to a parking lot adjacent to some native American ruins – and I had to position the cars just-so in order to avoid painted street lines and the inevitable end-of-parking-lot tree trunk that makes it impossible to drive headlong into the desert. The sun was off to the side, rather than directly behind. What little grass was visible was dead and brown. The wispy clouds above failed to reflect low-sun light onto the top of my photo, and the sky was a yellowish grey. And in a place full of gorgeous mountains and breathtaking topography, not a single one of them was in my viewfinder. All those mountains around me, and my background was dead grass and a low hill. The photo read “hot” to me – not sexy-hot, but I-could-use-a-cold-drink-because-I’m-parched-hot. I put a brave face on it, but in the moment I thought the result was, as they say, “good enough for government work.” I managed to remember the parking lights, but not to line up the logo on the hubcap on the front wheel, such was my panic.
So you’ll forgive my surprise, then, when Vern’s Mustang popped up on the cover of the June 2013 issue of Hemmings Classic Car . It scarcely looked like what I remember shooting; the Mustang really popped! The shot looked very desert-y, a look that I know is of interest to at least one editor who would be very happy if he never saw another green tree in a car photo again, and far less dodgy than I had remembered it in the moment. And once again, the indefatigable Hemmings art department nipped and tucked and tweaked and made it look good.
That issue had barely gone off sale when I saw that Vern’s Mustang would be on the cover of the 2014 Hemmings Cars of the ’60s calendar (still available!); I knew that an early Mustang coupe would speak to vast swaths of our readership, but seeing it front the calendar so soon after the issue was out (though now with a bluer sky added in) was a surprise. And the Edmondses are also to thank: I never would have found this location without them. (Suzanne’s wagon ran in the December 2012 issue of Hemmings Classic Car . Doubtless we will use images – many taken and unused in the restoration profile story, eagerly awaiting the light of day – of her Ambassador Wagon again.)
Now I see that Vern’s Mustang once again graces a Hemmings cover – this time the May 2014 issue of Hemmings Motor News , on newsstands now – in a montage with another early Mustang or two, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the vaunted ponycar, now just weeks away as this is written. I haven’t seen a final copy as I write this, but I’m pretty sure the background has been stripped away – thus removing my largest initial reservation about the photo in the first place. Even so, that makes a trifecta for Vern: the cover of a calendar and two Hemmings magazines inside of a year. A record of sorts; he made the cover three times in less than the time that it took for us to get our act together and meet to shoot his car in the first place. And it seems likely that, even after this, you’ll be seeing Vern’s Mustang again at some point.
Just probably not on a cover.
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