Ghostbusters is one of my all-time favourite films. It has been for as long as I can remember – probably because it came out a few months before I was born, so I can’t remember a time before Ghostbusters, or the first time I saw it.
The Ectomobile from the film is also one of my all-time favourite movie cars, competing only with the Ford Explorer from Jurassic Park for my affections. I have photographed Ecto-1 before, but it was a bit smaller and made out of Lego. So when the Bluebell Railway announced that a replica would be visiting one weekend, I jumped at the shot to go see it and take photos. Luckily it turned out to be a lovely day.
As you’d expect, I spent some time photographing it from a variety of angles.
Including one of the iconic angles.
I only faced a couple of problems. The first was the light. We were there in the mid afternoon on a mid-October day. Normally this brings the best sort of light, one I love to shoot in, but it was not in the best place on this day – it was behind Ecto-1, and the car itself was parked where it was half in sun and half in shade. Occasionally I was shooting straight into the sun.
The driver’s side window was rolled down so I could get a shot inside.
I continued to take pictures from a variety of angles.
I moved round the back, and in this shot you can see the problem with the light – not helped at all by the fact I was photographing a white car.
The other big problem I faced was other people. Echo-1 understandably draws a small crowd, so there was often people around in the background of the shot. I did make a few attempts to use Lightroom’s Generative AI to remove them, but they were often poking out from behind the car in front of a busy background, so it struggled to achieve a decent result. In the end most of the time I left them in place, even if they made the shot a bit busy, because I simply didn’t really have any other choice.
As you can see they had a full set of proton packs too.
But as you can see, I was still struggling with crowds and light.
So it was time to head into the station and look at trains. After spending a bit of time at the railway I popped back out for another look at Ecto-1. By this point things were a bit quieter, and the sun had moved such that the whole car was now in shadow, making whole-car shots a little bit easier. So of course I started with an even more extreme closeup than before.
By this point there were less people hanging around cluttering up the shot – and at least a few of the people were in Ghostbusters garb.
I tried to fit in a full-length shot on the quieter side of the car but I couldn’t quite fit. In hindsight, and if I had the patience (or perhaps more accurately, if my wife and toddler had the patience) I’d have switched to a wider angle lens.
By this point the rear hatch was shut, allowing for some cleaner shots of its back.
With the car in shadow, the chrome was reflecting nicely.
As things quietened down I was able to get a decent clean shot of the whole car from the ideal angle.
As you might have noticed in one of the pictures further up above, there was a Spider-Man Ghostbuster present as well, for reasons I can only assume are related to cosplayers gravitating towards each other (there was also a Deadpool Ghostbuster too, although I didn’t get his photo). Spidey Ghostbuster offered to pose for a photo and I couldn’t say no to that, so I snapped a few shots of him.
I also grabbed a shot with a more traditional Ghostbuster in the background.
I quite liked this angle for photographing the front of the car too.
I also snuck off a shot of the Ghostbuster – although looking at this photo he might have spotted me.
With a family eager to get home, I squeezed off a last shot before calling it a day.
As I often do when I take a whole bunch of pictures of the same thing, I’ve only included a selection in the post above. Below is the full set of images.
