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FredRod Classic Car Show 2025

Sealed Beams and T-tops, harsh light and good vibes

By Ash Furrow

August 15^th, 2025

When I started taking photos again, in here in Fredericton, I set a goal to check out some of the events around the city for photos. I don't need to necessarily be interested in the event itself to have a fun time taking photos. And so last weekend, I checked out FredRod, a classic car show that closed off a chunk of downtown.

I've never thought of myself as a "car guy" – or paid a lot of attention to cars much at all – until I moved home to New Brunswick and had to own one. What I've come to appreciate is the high level of design in cars. They need to safely perform a function, but a lot about cars is more than utility. It's like how smartphones, that need to do certain tasks but different phone makers have different designs. Care are subject to fashion and, just like smartphones, all contemporary cars basically look the same.

So despite not being a "car guy", I did have a fun time seeing such a wide variety of cars from the last hundred or so years. Classic cars have so much more variety than contemporary cars. I did bristle a bit at the 2006 sedan I saw in the a "classic car show", but there's not much I can do to stop the march of time.

Seriously though, why did we stop painting cars fun colours??

I've also been trying to speed up my photo editing flow. I've made two trips around the province for photography but I still haven't posted any photos because they need to be edited first. I normally shoot raw, and that needs a large amount of editing.

Why do I shoot raw? I don't really know at this point. When I first learned digital photography on my Canon XSi, the received wisdom was to shoot in raw to give you the most flexibility in the edit. I think that's still generally true, but that flexibility comes with the tradeoff of having to edit at all.

Fujifilm has a bunch of "film simulation modes" and I've been using Pro Neg High, which emulates my favourite colour firm, the discontinued Fujifilm Pro 400H. I didn't shoot on a lot of other Fujifilm stocks so I'm not familiar with the other simulations. I reckoned since I was at a classic car show, I should use a classic film simulation. I set my camera to "classic negative" and reset my exposure compensation to zero.

I shot JPEG and hoped for the best. And honestly, I'm really happy with the results!

The colours really pop and I loved how the bright sun gleaning off chrome accents blows out the highlights. It was fun to shoot colourful subjects without thinking about the hassle of having to tweak colour settings on a raw file. Giving control over to the camera almost gave me more confidence to shoot saturated photos – I don't have to worry about being over the top with my edits because I'm not editing the colour.

In fact, almost all the edits I made were cropping. A few are "extreme" crops (that's a benefit of using a modern high-megapixel camera). I also used a few masks for tone curves. But I didn't touch a colour slider at all. I didn't have to.

My camera has a "bracket" drive mode, for taking multiple photos at different exposure settings or focus... or even film simulations. I literally laughed out loud when I read that in my camera's manual – I was so raw-pilled that I initially brushed it off. But actually, I see the appeal now.

Film simulation bracketing only takes a single exposure, unlike exposure bracketing that takes three separate photos. But it applies three different film simulation modes to that raw data in camera. This let's me compare the different film simulation recipes with photos I take myself. I'm aware that Fujifilm has a (free) raw editor for computers that lets you apply a film simulation mode, but the whole point here is to do less editing. And if I could commit to a single film stock, I think I'll be able to commit to "only" three film simulations.

I'm also excited to find simulation recipes online that photographers have created themselves and shared. There are recreations of some of my old favourite film stocks, like Kodak Ektar and Cinestill bwXX.