The light wasn't in quite the right place, but this profile shot of a 104 caught in a Frankfurt Stau captures the line of the car. The car was newly introduced to the market, a four door super-mini at a time when Renault and Fiat had defined the category as one that did not extend to providing a second set of doors for the people in the back seat. It was one of the first times I had seen a 104. Often the first version of a car, before the marketeers have decided that an improved version needs to be distinguished by more elaborate external decoration, has the "cleanest" shape. I think that was the case here.There are Wikipedia guidelines that favour car pictures from the front three-quarters. That's generally a good angle from which to photograph a car, as here. Though it would have been better with a bit more sun on the side when compared to the amount on the front, and maybe, in a perfect world, fewer "interesting" reflections on the car's rear haunch.It is difficult photographing cars indoors. The Peugeot Museum at Sochaux is - in its newer parts, unusually well lit for photographs - at least when the sun cooperates - though the lighting balance here is still far from ideal. This, again, is the 104 as it looked at launch, before the facelifters started to improve itIt costs as much to develop and almost as much to build a small car as a big car. The trick that several automakers are becoming increasingly good at pulling off is to persuade customers to pay bigger car prices for smaller cars. That is the trick that Peugeot tried in the 1970s with shortened sporty versions of the 104. This one was photographed in 2012 at an old timer rally near Diest (east of Brussels and west of Hasselt).Those of us with the good fortune to you live long enough tend to end up wondering, from time to time, what happened to our childhoods. I think that may have been what had happened to my father when he sold his four door Peugeot 305 and replaced it with this.The 205 set out to redefine the super mini class in Europe for the 1980s, and sales statistics - and the new models launched by competitors as the decade progressed - suggest that they succeeded. Initially the 205, like the 104 from which it was a step up, was offered only with four doors. This is an early one photographed in the Dordogne - I don't recall exactly where - shortly after the model was launched.The early 208s, built in Slovakia, all came with two doors, but around the time the car started to be assembled at Mulhouse and Poissy in France, these four door ones started to appear. I like this picture, taken on the roof of a Belgian supermarket, because the angle of the sun highlights some of the interesting creases. The designers made much of the moulded form of the car's panels in company press releases, and as we all know steel creased panels are stronger (so for a given strength specification can use thinner and therefore lighter and cheaper) sheet steel than flatter body panels.It's generally hard to get the light right when photographing cars indoors unless you have time and lighting equipment to turn the place into a temporary studio. But here, with a little help from the architects of the Peugeot Museum at Sochaux and the location of the sun when I was there, things seem to have worked out ok.If the 403 was the archetypal respectable French family car in 1960, by the end of that decade the role had been taken over by the 404
