On June 8th and 9th 2026, Kingman, Arizona had the pleasure of welcoming Anthony Schmidt of Anthony Schmidt Photography. A very special and gifted young man who has combined his love of old cars and photography. Anthony has this unique ability of combining 1/25 scale miniatures with real backgrounds and vehicles through a Hollywood effects technique known as forced perspective in which the foreground miniature is set up in front of the camera to seamless blend the foreground with the background to appear as one image.He takes great care of these cars, making sure to handle them only with gloves to keep them free of smudges.

Anthony first came to my attention many years ago when I was just getting started in photography. We both have an affinity for the vintage aesthetic, that being old things and black & white. For the centennial year it was time to take things on the road. Keeping true to the nostalgia of the mother road, Anthony decided to take the trip in a 57 Ford, accompanied by his mother in an air conditioned support vehicle, stopping at many places along the way to take pictures for Anthony's new book, the release of which we are looking forward to. Maybe some of the work we watched him do will make the final cut.

We at Mother Road Media had been tracking their progress and looking forward to their arrival in Kingman. In typical small town fashion we arranged a welcome consisting of a few enthusiastic fans and some old cars for them. Fortunately they decided to stay in Kingman that night and we were able to escort them out to Cool Springs Station to see him work the next morning.

As luck or fate would have it an assortment of vintage cars also made Cool Springs their destination that morning and were quickly incorporated into the photo session. It ended up being quite the gathering which included local legend and author Jim Hinckley of Jim Hinckley's America, representatives from the Big Texan Steak Ranch, Rhys Martin of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association, Nikki Terlesky from our own Route 66 Association Of Arizona, the Route 66 Association Of Texas, and the Route 66 Centennial Caravan traveling the historic highway west to east rolling in from Oatman.

The Schmidts had initially decided to skip the Black Hills portion of the route, but fortunately, after having come all this way, and with a little convincing from the locals, they completed what is probably one of the most challenging stretches of the Mother Road, the portion of the highway nicknamed "the sidewinder" which features dozens of hairpin turns. They spent some time in the historic old mining town of Oatman, AZ, then ending their day in Topock to rest up for an early start toward California.

They have since made it to Santa Monica and completed their trip. They flew back home to Georgia on Friday, June 12th while Anthony's car was shipped home. See more of Anthony's work and pre-order his upcoming book documenting the trip at www.anthonyschmidtphotography.com