You Have to See It to Believe It

The Tinkertown Museum has buildings constructed out of over 50,000 bottles.  It has animated displays featuring thousands of hand-carved figures.  It has scraps and junk that has been reassembled into objects of beauty.  When you think that you have seen everything, you enter another room and are amazed all over again.

Tinkertown is the life work of an eccentric folk artist named Ross Ward.  He began his art career travelling with carnivals and painting at each stop.  He carved as a hobby for most of his life and started to exhibit his creations at each carnival location.  Eventually he created Tinkertown to showcase his work as a roadside attraction near Albuquerque.  When Ross died, his attraction became a museum.  It has been rated as one of the top 10 small museums in the United States.

The photos above and below show portions of Ross's car.  A sign nearby said that he turned his Jeep into a Lincoln by gluing thousands of pennies to the outside of the body.  That is an example of the subtle sense of Ross's humor that lives on in the museum.

 

I used a Canon 5D Mark III and a 24-70mm zoom for these images.  I used HDR and Photomatix Pro for tonemapping.