Route 66 was commissioned in 1926 and taken off the federal highway map in 1985. In between, a couple of thousand motels, cafes, filling stations and curio shops went up along it, and most of them put a sign out front. Not a sign like we have now, a plastic box with a fluorescent tube in it. A sign. Sheet metal cut into an arrow or a star or a cactus, painted, and traced in glass tubes full of glowing gas, hand-bent by a man with a torch. At night, in a town of nine hundred people, that sign was the brightest thing for fifty miles.

Then the interstate went through, town by town, from the late 1950s into the 1980s, and the traffic went with it. The motels that didn't close mostly couldn't afford to keep the neon working. A broken tube costs real money to replace, and a lot of the men who could bend them are gone. So the signs go dark one tube at a time. VACANCY loses its V. The arrow flickers and quits. Somebody buys the lot and the sign goes to the scrapyard on a Tuesday afternoon and nobody takes a picture.

I'm trying to take the picture. I'm not a professional. I sell insurance in Flagstaff and I've been doing this on weekends and vacations since the summer of 1996, when I pulled into Kingman at dusk and a motel sign lit up in front of me, pink and green and humming, and I sat in the car and just looked at it for ten minutes. Then I went and bought a tripod.

Every sign I've shot, with the date, the film, and what shape it was in. "Lit" means the whole thing was working the night I was there. I include the dark ones too, because a dark sign at dusk is still a beautiful thing, and because some of them have since come down. Those are marked. Newest at the top.

Also in the box but not written up yet: five signs in Barstow, three in Winslow, two in Joplin and one in Litchfield, Illinois, which I shot on a business trip without a tripod and am not proud of.

People expect it to be more than it is.

• Camera: A Pentax K1000. All manual, no batteries except for the light meter, which I mostly ignore at night anyway. It was my dad's. It has been dropped twice and works fine.
• Lenses: The 50mm f/2 that came on it, and a 28mm wide angle I bought used for the big signs on tall poles.
• Tripod: A heavy aluminum one. Heavy is the point. The wind in Amarillo will tip a light one over, sign and all.
• Cable release. Two dollars. The most important two dollars in the bag. Pressing the button by hand on a 6-second exposure shakes the camera.
• Film: Kodak Ektachrome 64T. That's tungsten-balanced slide film, made for shooting under ordinary light bulbs. More about why below. 64 speed, so it's slow, but you're on a tripod anyway.
• A small flashlight for seeing the f-stop ring, a notebook for writing down every exposure, and a folding chair, because the best light lasts about twenty minutes and the waiting before it lasts an hour.

What I've figured out in three years of trial and (mostly) error. If you know better, e-mail me. I'd love to know better.

1. Don't shoot at night. Shoot at dusk. Full dark gives you a bright sign on a black nothing. What you want is the twenty or thirty minutes after sunset when the sky goes deep blue and the sign is already lit. The sign and the sky are close to the same brightness and you get both. Get there an hour early, set up, and wait. Bring the chair.
2. Use a tripod and a cable release. Your exposures will run from one second to ten. There is no holding a camera still for that.
3. Use tungsten slide film. Daylight film shot at dusk turns the sky an ugly greenish-gray and makes the whole thing look orange. Tungsten film is balanced for warmer light, so it renders the dusk sky a rich, clean blue, and the neon colors come out about the way your eye sees them. This one change made more difference than anything else I've done.
4. Meter the sky, not the sign. If you point the meter at the neon it will tell you to underexpose everything else into black. Take the reading off the blue sky next to the sign, then bracket.
5. Bracket like crazy. Shoot the reading, then one stop over, then one stop under, then two over. Slide film is unforgiving and film is cheaper than driving back to Gallup. I usually end up somewhere between 2 and 8 seconds at f/8 with 64T.
6. Mind reciprocity. Past about a second, film gets less sensitive than the meter thinks, so a long exposure needs even longer than the math says. The film box has a little table. Roughly: at 4 seconds or longer, give it a half stop to a full stop extra.
7. Watch for flashers. Some signs blink or chase. On a long exposure a blinking tube comes out half-bright. Sometimes that's nice. Sometimes you want to time the shutter to catch it on. Either way, know before you press.
8. Write it all down. Sign, town, date, f-stop, time. When the slides come back from the lab two weeks later you will not remember which was which.
9. Ask. Go in the office and tell them what you're doing. In three years nobody has said no, several have turned on the VACANCY for me, and one lady in Clinton brought out coffee. These are people's businesses, and their signs. Be a guest.

I know. A page about photographs with no photographs on it. Here's the situation: everything I shoot is on slides, and to get a slide onto the web you need a slide scanner, and a decent film scanner still costs the better part of a thousand dollars. The flatbed scanner at work won't do slides, and the "slide adapter" I bought for it made everything look like it was shot through a screen door. I'm saving up. My goal is a scanner by spring, and then the log above turns into a gallery, one sign at a time, sized small enough for a modem.

Until then, the words will have to do. I've tried to describe each sign well enough that you can see it. Close your eyes. Pink. Green. Humming.

A little bit of preaching, and then I'll let you go.

These signs are not coming back. Nobody bends a ten-foot neon saguaro for a motel anymore, and the ones that exist are forty and fifty years old, out in the sun and the wind and the hail. Every year I go back through the log and a few more are dark, and one or two are gone. The Tower Cafe in Elk City was there in October and gone by spring, and nobody I asked could tell me where it went.

So, if you live in a Route 66 town: notice your signs. If one's dark, ask the owner what it would take to light it. Sometimes it's one transformer. If a place is closing, ask what's happening to the sign before it's on a truck. Some towns have started collecting them. Some museums will take them. A sign in a museum is not as good as a sign lit up on the highway with a car pulling in under it, but it beats a scrapyard.

And if you're just driving through: stay at the old motels. They're cheap, the rooms are clean more often than not, and the money is what keeps the tubes lit. Pull in at dusk. Sit in the car a minute. Look at the sign.