Body By Fisher - A grease-free shine.

Back in Yore, people didn't just walk into a dealership and buy a car. (Note: The sales division of several auto makers now prefers you to call their dealerships "stores". It's more warm and fuzzy. I prefer if you call the sales divisions of several automakers "douchebags". It's more honest.) Instead, you went to a weird type of prom, wearing a dress that looks like a lampshade.

Go ask your mom and dad. (Or if you're sixty or so years old, go ask yourself.) They'll tell you stories about going to a car prom, hoping the car you like will ask you to dance. Or if you're a guy, you'd hope that the car you like would let you slip your hand under the hood during "Satin Doll". If things went well, you could hope to take one of the cars behind the gym and find out what's really in that trunk.

This picture was shot using a filter on the lens that makes bright spots "bloom". One hundred thousand years ago, when I worked at a corporate video sweatshop, we laughed about them, because clients would ask for them and we would have to comply, knowing that they're the height of cheesyness. How cheesy? Nearly every video in the eighties by a band with a girl in it (or any band with a guy that looked like a girl, which was all of them) was shot with a Pro Mist filter on the lens. It gives your footage that humid shot-in-a-swamp look, or the I-never-clean-my-lens look. Remember in Napoleon Dynamite, when Napoleon pulls out the fake picture of his "girlfriend" and shows it to Pedro? That photo had about five filters screwed on the end of the lens. In old black and white movies, they loved to shoot romantic close-ups with filters, or as was more often the case back then, by smearing Vaseline on the lens. Not kidding. The belief was that it looked dreamy and made flesh tones look more even - good for close-ups. Another way of looking at it was that the camera was so close, the actress's breath was fogging up the lens.

In this picture, they used the filter to make the cars look more sparkly. You can buy lots of different most filters that turn any sparkly glints into multi-pointed stars or whatever. But, at the time, all they had was a basic mist filter. Or, it could just as easily be the old Vaseline trick.

There's something weird about this lady's face. She looks stretched or something. The trouble starts just below her nose. I'm in a hurry this morning, so I'll just call her an alien and move on.