jimmytango00

thanks man im trying.. hehe.

TheSquidd

Lighting is great on #1. The stars almost seem to "come off" the tree as leaves in the wind.

I like the composition on #1 better than #2, there's a definite "subject" in #1, the tree. Where as in #2 I am kind of lost as to what the focus of the image is. I like the exposure on #2, but you could easily make #1 on that exposure with some curves or levels adjustment.

#3 the lighting above the fence is cool, but your subjects are dim and unclear. I feel it's always a good idea to have your subject clear, maybe not clear as in, in focus and well lit (though that usually helps) but just looking at the image, what is the subject? Obviously it's these two people, but you can't see their expressions in that light, you can't see one of their faces. You're getting there, I would just do a little more composition for a set up shot like this, beforehand. Really get a message, or subject, across in the image.

#4 I almost like better. It gives me the feeling of solitary, or yearning to be on the other side of the fence, where the lights and maybe people are. This back yard is a dark place, there are no plants, no lights, nothing but a simple table and a wooden fence. Meanwhile the other side has lights and trees and all kinds of wires/lines leading the viewer's eye to it.

#5 I just think is funny. The dog has a great expression, and the way you exposed the image really makes it feel like a light-hearted theme. The color is good, but maybe a little on the cool (blue) side in some of the highlights such as the dogs fur. The leaves are almost teal when they could be a lush green. Giving the image a much warmer (yellow) feeling of warmth and comfort as it appears the dog is experiencing.


Ta da. My reviews. You appear to be improving by leaps and bounds with each photo set!

My only recommendation is that when you're composing your images, think about the subject, and build everything around that. Kind of the way the dog photo works. Obviously this is a picture of a dog smiling and enjoying the company of some sweet ass leaves. The rest of the image really isn't very important, it's out of focus in the background, drawing the viewer's attention SOLELY on the subject at hand. The message is clear, the simpler an image is to "read" the easier it is for a viewer to enjoy.

EDIT: Crap page two now you can't see the images. Quoting for effect sorry.

EDIT 2: Don't know if you know this or not, but when posting images to the web, always remember to save the images as an sRGB profile. This may be default from your camera. But open the image in photoshop, goto edit: color space setting (or something like that) and make sure the profile is set to sRGB. Otherwise when displayed in web browsers the colors get heavily distorted.

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2iv0 sx

I'm going to you for reviews!

Shots seems to be improving, nice work.

I like looking at #4

jimmytango00

Thanks squidd! sweet review. You have to teach me about lenses and filters man i dont know shit.

exitspeed

The pic in your sig looks good. Except the car is too close to the bottom of the frame. Especially because of the large amount of neg space on the left/ upper left side of the pic. It feels like it's being pushed out of the frame.

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Pank

also, familiarize yourself with your cameras white balance settings. They're tuned to different kinds of light sources (tungsten, flourescent, day light, etc) so that when you're in a parking lot, not everything is yellow. or shoot in raw and fix after you shoot!

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TheSquidd

Don't worry about any of that yet. Work on composition, then start getting technical.

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jimmytango00

I'll worry about that later then. The picture in my sig was not taken by me, it was a guy i met on the g35 forums who shot my car for $20. I took a few more tonight of luisgonz's car.. i'll post them up later tonight..

jimmytango00

more pictures... excuse the dirty and shitty car..this is all i have to work with .hahah fuck you luis

KwKouki

the fucking Kouki rocks, he also has a OG penguin as well WOOT

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TheSquidd

Damn that is a dirty, shitty car. Hahah JK Luis! Let me shoot it too!

1. I like it. Good composition, decent lighting. Your color is a bit washed out, probably from a bit of over exposure.

To combat a lighting situation like this (hot lights on the hood, dark on the front end) take two exposures while using a tripod. Take one exposure that gives you good color and light for the hood, and one for the front end. Then in photoshop you can combine them in a number of ways, look up HDR images on google or you can layer them and erase way parts of whatever image you don't want.

Other than that, no complaints. Strong image.

2. Something's a bit off on this one. I like the bricks in the background but they aren't level, seems like it's two things, a non-level horizon, and lens distortion. You can't really help the lens distortion, but a more centric composition, and some leveling would help.

Try using the Measure tool in photoshop, draw two points with it along a straight line in your image, then goto edit>rotate canvas, and select the option "arbitrary". It will automatically rotate the image to level out whatever line you have drawn out with the measure tool. Then crop off the outside edges that will now be apparent.

This image isn't as strong, your subject just doesn't stand out as much due to lighting and size in the frame.

3. A cool composition, this is always an excellent angle to shoot on a car that is "flush".

To make it even stronger, park the car further from the surrounding walls, and zoom in as much as possible and (if you know how) use a "wide open aperture". If you don't know about aperture, now would be a good time for some Google. I could explain it but I'm sure there are millions of articles explaining shutter speed and aperture FAR better than I can in a little forum post.

Example (think of it reversed to match your positioning):


One thing that stands out is the orange piping. It just kind of breaks up the scene in a bad way, I find my eyes drawn to it. Another learning experience though, you can easily use the "clone stamp tool" here to get rid of it. The clone stamp tool is a photographers #1 BEST friend.

4. I see this angle a lot, and I like it, I like your background, and your lighting is cool (you could lighten up the car a little bit, try an HDR multiple exposure here too).

One major problem though is the car is cut off. I find myself wanting to see what the rest of the car looks like here. Use your widest angle possible, shoot low, and get the whole car in frame.

Example:

Shot at 18mm, tripod close to the ground. This way, when you're looking "up" at the vehicle, it gives the object "mass" it appears large and intimidating, like a car should.

5. Another good angle. You've definitely got the eye for this. These are almost text book good shots with just a few tweaks.

Main problem, too much space off to the side. The middle of the car should usually be present in this type of shot. Just feels easier on the eye.

The yellow poles are distracting, they're almost brighter than the car itself.

The wheels are dim, but this is probably because they're dirty. The lighting doesn't really make the car POP. This is hard to do at night when not really much of anything POPS because it's all dim lighting. If you're clever with photoshop, hue saturation, curves, and shadow/highlight you can salvage lighting fairly often.

I hope you don't mind I touched up 3 of my fav's from the photos.

Remember, photoshop is the digital shooters dark room, it's 50% of what goes into a good photo. GREAT photos never look the way they do straight out of the camera, there's almost ALWAYS post processing going on. So take your good and bad photos and just try and do what you can with them in photoshop, it's fun once you get a hang of all the controls. Use filters, use tools, use adjust and edit and highlights and burn and levels and curves, slide every slider to see what it does, they are ALL useful. It's fucking AMAZING how much you can do with Photoshop. EVERY time I use it I learn something.

Anyway here goes:

1. I loved this shot, but I just wanted to brighten up the front.

I used a single pass of "Shadow/Highlight" on almost their default settings. This DID introduce a lot of "gain" or the graininess to the shadow areas of the image. This is what happens when you try to revive shadows from an image, it's like jacking up the ISO on your camera, you're going to get noise. This is why it's best to do HDR multiple exposures. But for the sake of the image I think it came out just fine. The grain gives it a kind of, film look.This brought out a lot of the "dark" areas on the front bumper. But it also brought out a lot on the background.
So I took the "burn" tool, set it to burn "Shadows" at 10% and burned most all the background, giving it a more contrasted, dark look to draw the focus away from it.
I also did about 10% highlight reduce on the lowest range setting. This made the hood a little darker and brought out a little detail and color.
The headlights still weren't "bright and staring into my soul" like I like headlights to do at this angle, so I took the "dodge" tool, set it to highlights at 10% and ran it over the headlights a couple times. This made them pop more.
A final "curves" modification, one click on the center point of the curve, one point midway through the top 1/2 of the curve, and then one point on the bottom half. I pulled the bottom half down a little tiny bit (brings the "shadow" areas a little darker, giving more contrast, I like contrasty images, it's just my thing).

2. I like this image, it really shows off his wheels well. So I cropped it even tighter to make the subject even more "substantial", also it got rid of that pesky pipe and made for a much cleaner background.


Now his wheels are dirty, there's no helping that. But a white wheel should be WHITE. So what I did here is took my "curves" screen, clicked the "sample highlight eyedropper" and clicked on an area of the wheel. What his did is set the images very brightest point, in full white, to that pixel on the wheel. So what was once a light grey wheel, now is bright white. This also brought up the exposure of the rest of the image as well.
After this I did the crop to what I believed to be best. This is just matter of taste, always up the photographer.
I then did a shadow highlights on the image, low range, high amount, this brought out some of the lighting on the rear bumper which was mired in shadow.
What this also did though is made the rear window bright, and you could see all the dirt and grime. Again, can't be helped, Luis doesn't wash his damn car.
To do what I could, I grabbed the "burn tool" again, 10%, and did a couple passes over the rear windshield. This made the window much darker, hiding the impurities, but it left the stickers (highlights) unaffected.
I then did some hue saturation to bring out some color for effect.
Did a slight curve adjustment as before, and then cloned out the black mark on the bricks.

3. I probably went a little too far on this image, it looks "processed".

But I like it.

Step 1, I cloned out the pesky poles.
2, I used "quick mask mode" to mask off the car. This creates a selection area where the car is out of the selection so I can modify the background separately from the car. In quick mask mode you use the brush tool to "brush" your selection. What is selected will appear as red and when you exit the mode, it will become a selection area.
With the background selected, I reduced the saturation. The car is not colorful, the background should not over power it.
I then did a "levels" adjustment and brought the midtones way down, giving it that dark look, further reducing it's draw away from the subject of the image.

Now obviously my mask wasn't perfect, you can see this around the base of the side skirt and rear tire, where the asphault is still moderately exposed, this is because I did it fast, when you do it take care not to leave this areas because it makes the image look sloppy.
As before the front end was too dark, I wanted it to pop, I ran a shadow highlight pass to bring it out. I forget the settings.
I then used the dodge tool, set to highlights and 10% to really make those white wheels pop. Still, they are dirty and that can't be fixed, but they are now bright white.
I also dodged the turn signal a bit and burned the black areas in the bumper to hide some of the metal and stuff that got brought out in the shadow highlight pass.
Also burned the windshield to hide more of that signature "Luis Dirt".

And thats that.

My edits are by NO means good, they're just what I came up with. Remember photography is different to everyone so by no means should my techniques be the same as anyones. But I think there are some tips in there that you might be able to consider when you're next processing your images.

I recommend you also try shooting in the daytime for some of these as well. I remember the first 2 years I did car photography I ALWAYS did it at night because it looked "cooler", now I almost always try to shoot at dawn/daylight/dusk, the sun gives the colors of the scene MUCH more pop and it usually makes for a less brooding image. Plus night lights are always fluorescent or something and it makes for a really crappy white balance and harsh shadows.

And this has been "Photography Review" with your host, Skylar. It's 1am now, and I must sleep.

Keep it up though, you're improving at a ridiculous rate and I can't wait to see more!

EDIT: GREAT THREAD for post processing examples:
http://community.automotivephoto.net...read.php?t=584

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TheWolf

for some of you looking to try out and learn some high end features with your budget camera.. the CHDK firmware will upgrade many canon cameras to have higher end features..

http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK/

I upgraded my S3is and have never looked back... it's hard for me to justify the purchase of a DSLR for hobbyphotos when the S3 will now shoot in raw. iso400 and 800 are pretty useless though. I'd love to get a better sensor but I rarely use them and CS3's new remove noise filter seems it was made for canon.

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jimmytango00

alrigt guys i have three new pictures i took at the Arcadia meet tonight of a sick ass s2000. I was only able to take like 5 or 6 shots since the cops showed up (right when i was shooting the front end and motor = () these are some of my fav. shots ive taken so far but maybe it was just cause of the nice car. I tried not to mess with them too much since i was happy with the way it came out straight from them cam... well check it out and squid i'll be waiting for the review hehe.

jimmytango00

some more pictures.. where the hell are you squidd!??? haha

TheSquidd

Well. It's official. You're a better photographer than me now.

I'll post something later but you'll see I'm full of shit.

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HyperTek

u could soo easily pose as a photographer and take pics of all the asian girls wannabe models and see em naked! i swear all the dorkass asian club photographers do it, then make a myspace and put all thier pics on it and not a single pic of u!! lol.. ok enough ranting.. i might go buy one so i could do this lol

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jimmytango00

Nah dude i still need a long way to go but i hope you didnt take the "where the hell are you squidd?" part the wrong way ...what i meant by that was where are you for the skylar review... not a "where you at? im better than you" type a deal.. but yeah im trying really hard man im getting really into this stuff.

tacotacotaco

Damn ive always enjoyed fine images im inspired to try to capture some now.

exitspeed

I got my eye on the 40D. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Good photo's BTW. That S2000 is just nuts-o.

I particularly like the last photo. Composed very nicely.

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TheSquidd

No I got the meaning, what I meant is I have no review, because your latest set of photos are better than anything I can shoot. So I can't really review them. Color, exposure, composition, emotion, you nailed it all.

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Pank

The only big gripe i have in the squidds review/editing is that he blew out the highlights in the wheel. Its an expensive wheel, show off dem curvez!! Also, when shooting a car, its not always "best" to shoot wide open (biggest aperture/smallest f number), as this limits your FOV and usually gives you the softest focus, not that you didnt focus correctly. However, if you only want a portion of the car in focus, you can manipulate that by the aperture, and control the exposure by the film speed/shutter speed.

also, in your yellow brick photo, try to align the base of the bricks horizontally, or leave it out. if you took about 3 steps to the left and then realigned with that pole, it would have been perfect.

In the trophy photo, you cant really help blowing out the sky, but you can help blowing out the trophy. Expose for the subject, not the full scene

The dumpster photo is fucking 100% excellent and perfect. amazing job. the whites are a little warm, but i think it just adds to the look. you are improving at a ridiculous rate.


other tiny tips that may help you:



1.if you want to seperate your background from your foreground, get closer to the subject, use a slightly larger aperture. this will let the background slightly bokeh, and leave your subject sharp (again, depending on aperture)




vs.




2. lots of "stock" shots of cars (especially ones on the junction produce, fabulous etc sites) are shot from fairly far away, with a zoom lense. This makes the entire car the same size front to back, instead of having the bumper right in your face, with the back wheel 40 pixels tall. Just a tip if you like this look




3. LIGHTING, learn off camera lighting to make your day of shooting 1000% more fun. its not difficult and you can get great shots with it. Check strobist.com for tutorials.




4.learn how to use a histogram, learn how to use a histogram, learn how to use a histogram, learn how to use a histogram, learn how to use a histogram. Your camera should have the option to display a histogram with every image you review. read up on wikipedia or any one of the great photo sites to learn how to use this. it makes reading your curves in photoshop a trillion times easier and it will make sense.


6. barrel distortion/lense correction. on some (most) lenses, the edge of the image will be slightly stretched out. You can fix this in raw with the CS3 raw engine. Learn what configuration on your camera produces what distortion and then you can probably write a macro for it. Again, not a big deal, but it can ruin some pictures if you dont watch out for it. The kit lense you have isn't going to create a ton of distortion, but if/when you upgrade, it will be worth it to check out. check dpreview.com for examples.




7. not really even worth a number, but learn about and watch out for chromatic abberations. this is the purple or blue fringe that you see, for example, when taking a photo of a tree branch against a bright sky, and it makes your picture look like it was taken by a camera phone. photoshop can fix this and it takes about .00003 seconds.




8. composition
9. keep shooting
10. composition
11. listen to the squidd
12-20045. composition



damn that was a long post, you're doing awesome man, keep it up, digital photography is cheap, and a blast

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high performance driveway photography

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worangejuice

That Kouki looks even hotter in person, I rolled by him on Fairfax today, nice!

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HalveBlue

Oh, my bad.

I thought this was the "New to Pornography" thread.

Too bad, too, 'cause I was gonna hook it up.

Oh well, I'll be on my way then.

luisgonz

Whats up man?
Thanks Man.

jimmytango00

mr2 i shot tonight..

Phoenix_95

looks good

Pank

picture is busy, then dead in the top left. Crop a little tighter. great work!

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high performance driveway photography

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J-Style

Jimmytango00 - I just read through this thread and I wanted to say that you are doing great! I wish you were near me so you could snap a few picture's of my bucket. Way to go man!

The Squidd - I laughed myself stupid when I read this...,"Obviously this is a picture of a dog smiling and enjoying the company of some sweet ass leaves.", haha!

exitspeed

Werd. The car doesn't seem like the focus. If it wasn't black, it might be different. Also the way that it fits in with the backround because of the color makes it blend in too much.

Seriously though, your doing a hell of a job. God I can't wait to get my own DSLR.

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TheSquidd

Seriously. I should have you shoot my car since I can't bear to take any more pictures of it.

You should come to an event Jimmy, shoot some real pictures of some real cars driving.

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