Get Your Pics on Route 66

Rick Gerrity travels along sections of the historic highway with his Tamron 18-200mm Di III VC lens.

Article by Jenn Gidman

Images by Rick Gerrity

"My truck has 230,000 miles on it right now," Rick says. "It was a remarkable trip. What's intriguing is that if you jump off of the main highway and check out these towns next to Route 66, it's like a step back in time, like everything's been at a standstill since the 1950s. I was simply trying to photograph these snippets of Americana and enjoy the ride."

Rick used the Tamron 18-200mm Di III VC Sony E-mount lens to capture the sights along the way. "The 18-200 is the perfect travel lens - it's so versatile," he says. "I was able to put it on the seat of my truck and know that I could use the 18mm wide-angle end to get a terrific landscape shot and then zoom in to 200mm if I had a wildlife encounter or wanted a nice headshot of one of the locals. I had the Vibration Compensation feature on the entire time to ensure all of my images were nice and sharp."

Part of the fun along Route 66 is taking pictures of the varied road markers that have been restored and erected by the revival groups. 'It's important to look for different perspectives so you're not taking the same shot that hundreds of others have taken," Rick says. "If you just square everything up, it's boring. There was one sign I saw in Missouri, for example, that caught my eye. It had train tracks in the scene, so I knew that would add something to the composition. Skewing the camera slightly also gave it a little drama and more of a 'Hollywood' feel."

Rick was often able to incorporate his own vehicle into the bigger picture. "In Groom, Texas, there's a 19-story cross along the road that can be seen from 20 miles away," he says. "If I had just taken a picture of the cross itself, it would have been hard to judge how enormous it really is. But if you look really closely at the picture I took, you'll see what looks like a speck at the base of the cross. That speck is my truck. It was a great way to show scale in this particular photo."

Many of the photographic gems emerged before Rick's camera when he ventured off the beaten path. "I'd stop in these little towns off the main road," says Rick. "I was out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, heading out of Arizona toward Vegas, when I came across this old mining town called Chloride, which you could only reach on this dirt road off the main highway. About 400 people live there, but even though it's not a ghost town, it was a little eerie: As I drove past the houses, I could see people peeking out from the curtains, but no one ever came out."

Rick ventured around this 1870s town, taking pictures of the quirky road signs and the historic old cemetery. "All of the headstones and monuments in the graveyard were handmade," he says. "Some of the crosses were just a piece of PVC pipe, others were carved out of wood, and still others were just a piece of wood stuck into the ground. Cemetery plots would be outlined in little field stones, and the fences made out of some branches - it was real low budget."

Some of the highlights on Rick's driving tour seemed tailor-made for color, while others evoked a black-and-white feel. "One of my favorite places was the Cadillac Ranch, a public art installation located right off the highway in Amarillo, Texas," he says. "There are cars with their noses buried 4 feet into the desert sand and their tails sticking straight up at about a 75-degree angle. They're all about 6 to feet apart in a row. You can just bring cans of spray paint and add your own 'art.' All kinds of folks show up to paint the names of their favorite sports teams or whatever else they want to add. Obviously, because the colors are so vibrant, you want to shoot scenes like this in full color."

Certain destinations on Rick's route, though, called for black and white. "I converted to black and white for some of the older stuff, because it really lends itself to the feeling of those older time periods," he says. "For instance, there's a motel in Arizona called the Wigwam Motel. The motel rooms are all built as individual tepees, and outside each teepee is an old '50s or '60s car. I ride around a place like that and I feel like I'm 10 years old again. Now, you can shoot a scene like this in color and it will look fine, but when you convert it to black and white, it looks like you're actually back in the '50s."

In places like the Chloride Cemetery, converting to black and white allows a photographer to relay a real sense of place to his or her viewers. "Doing the pics of Chloride Cemetery in black and white, for instance, really gave my images even more of that creepy, 'Twilight Zone' vibe that I was getting," he explains.

Rick hopes to include some of his Route 66 photos in a coffee-table book on travel photography he's working on. "I don't like flying, I like driving," he says. "I'd rather take my time and be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, and really get to see the country. These images along Route 66 show how much there is to see right under our noses."

To see more of Rick Gerrity's images, go to www.rickgerrity.com.