Dripped Dry #13216

The Story

Here’s a black and white replica of an old Esso gas pump which was found at a country general store that closed long ago. The place stood quietly as a cemetery marker along the main road into the Outer Banks in North Carolina, out of both business and gasoline. Nowadays, this gas pump sits with a look-alike twin offering premium grade and together in rust they have been watching the traffic go by on the new road out front for a few decades now. A small but interesting tidbit about this dated roadside relic still shows on the pump face: sixty-one cents a gallon!

I wanted to make this image look like an old print from the film days that had been at the bottom of someone’s sock drawer for a few decades. Black and white would be a good choice too, I thought. This image seemed a good one to add some weathering for a change instead of clear, crisp, and colorful.

To visually rough it up and weather it down, a few modern digital tricks were used to age this photograph without the help of time and wear. The original color image was first converted to black and white. Still working with the computer, some of the colors were borrowed back and selectively hand-painted in at reduced strength. This is called hand tinting and different techniques for it have been around a long time. The red Esso label and a little of the rust were good candidates to bring forward. Finally, a distressed and gritty digital overlay was added to the edges to make it appear to be an old worn and scuffed print. There you go…a weathered old Esso gas pump aged to perfection…and that’s how we step into back in the day.

Another full-color frontal view of this place called American Gothic #14041 can be seen, just click on the link.

Don’t care for Esso? How about some Atlantic gas at a station in Pennsylvania in a picture called Roadside Sentinel #05520.

Location: near Jarvisburg, Currituck County, North Carolina. Picture and story ©Andrew Dierks