Turner Locker Barnfield Revival is an annual event held in one of the wealthier business bits of Exeter, next to Princesshay shopping centre. There’s a surprising amount going on in a small amount of space. Lots of vintage cars and motorbikes, multiple bands, and a variety of food stalls – like a little festival going on in a car park outside an office building.

We didn’t know too much about what to expect when we went, as we hadn’t been before, but we needed to go to Exeter anyway. Entry was free, with donations to Help for Heroes.

At the entrance was a man selling coffee from a bike, which was new to me, though Sam had bought from him before when in Exeter.

There were a lot of cars crammed into a small space, and most of them were interesting ones in some way or other. There was a tent for live music, and another band wandering around and playing in various places. Add in a few food stalls, and you have quite a decent little festival.

The Best Photos

The Cars

This was what we were here for, and for a show in such a small area, it really didn’t disappoint. OK, it’s not much of a replacement for the sadly ended Castle Hill Car Festival, but what was there was good and interesting.

I always tend to end up photographing small parts of cars, and the badges always tend to appeal to me:

Unusual details are always good, though, like the exhaust pipes leaving the engine on this old car:

And it’s always good to photograph a Mini:

The People

At any busy event, the people can be just as interesting as what they’re wanting to see. A bit like a ‘Crikey It’s Vintage’ event, quite a few people had dressed for the occasion in vintage (or vintage-style) clothes, which made things all the better.

Sometimes, like with cars, just a detail is good:

And there’s always something appealing about happy people laughing:

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Turner Locker Barnfield Revival had the advantage of a couple of musical performers, too, which are good to photograph:

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Oh, and I can never resist a selfie when there are shiny surfaces:

Gallery of the Best Photos

Here’s the best photos I got – or at least, my favourites from them, including those above:

Panography

A car show in a compact area doesn’t sound like much of a place for panography.

(For what? Oh, sorry. Big photos made of a number of photos. I stand somewhere and take a whole bunch of photos, then stick them together in some way later to make one big image. It’s not too far from what David Hockney used to do many years ago, which he called Joiners. Some people don’t like using that term for anything that doesn’t follow exactly the methods Hockney used, and after a bit of poking around, ‘panography’ seemed to be a fairly happily general term. Then I found a Flickr group dedicated to it with a long list of rules you must follow, or you shouldn’t call what you do panography. This time, I decided not to care, and to call it that anyway. It’s most often used for big landscapes, urban or rural. Anyway, where were we?)

Yes. Panography. I actually ended up with three panos from this event, which was a little surprising to me too. The first was a couple of motorbikes near the entrance. This could easily have been a single shot, but I’d put the 90mm lens on at that point, and changing it seemed like too much effort:

With any of these inline images, you should be able to right-click them, and view in new tab, or view just the image, so you can see them larger – these panos are quite large images so you can zoom in and scroll around them.

The next is a little Land Rover next to a big (well, normal-sized) Land Rover. I have no idea why there was a tiny Land Rover, but there was. It had its bonnet raised, and appeared to be an actual functional small car. And one of the Rules of Cuteness (defined by Cute Overload) is that anything with a small version of itself is cute:

The last one is actually the first I made when I arrived, before we even had coffee. That can be my excuse if it’s no good. This one was stitched automatically by PanoEdit, then had several images overlaid on top of that manually, using Affinity Photo. Partly this gives a rougher look, which I rather like, and partly it lets me cover up the places where auto stitching has made a mess, which is bound to happen when there are people moving around in the source photos:

Some of the source images here were processed and had filters applied, to make things more messy. I like messy panos.

Tech Stuff

As with most events, I only had what basic kit I can carry, but this one was a bit more interesting from the lens side of things, because it was my first outing for a new lens – I’d just bought a Leica Elmarit 90mm. The first few shots were with my Voigtlander Nokton Classic 40mm f/1.4, then everything else was with the new Leica. It worked really well, though f/2.8 doesn’t give a lot of depth of field, and I lost a few shots to bad focussing on my part.

The Voigtlander Nokton Classic 40mm f/1.4 lens – only used for the big panograph at the start of the show.

The Leica Tele-Elmarit 90mm lens used for most photos at the show.

For some reason the only focus problems I had were with shots close to infinity, so I think either I was pulling back too far from infinity, or perhaps more likely, I had my close-focus adapter turned a little way out from infinity. A couple of examples that came out blurred. The first one (wicker rugby ball, before we got to the event) was a shame – a nice moment that just didn’t quite get caught.

The other problem was one I’d heard wasn’t much of an issue with this lens (the new Leica) – flare in sunlight. It was very sunny, though. A few shots lost contrast from the flare, but this one was rather spoiled, and I think it’s just because the sun was getting into the lens.

All in all, it was a fun event, and we’ll be keen to go again next year. Lots to see, in a handy location, and without costing much.