auxr8220 wrote:ok ill stick to the 4 images only per post
You appear to be treating our rules here as a bit of a joke. Let me assure you that your respect of the rules is expected.
Please take this observation as your first, and your last, and your only, official warning. If you believe that there is a problem with the rules, or how they're applied, you are free to take this up, in a PM, with any of the
mods or admins. Failing that, your apparent level of respect needs to be improved, and to be made very clear, and your attitude needs to be left at the door, before you enter this forum.
There are a great many things that I am able to overlook. Disrespect towards other members of this forum, of which I am also one, is not amongst them.
these are just my 4 favourite photos from tonight, i have got more with the whole car in them but i wanted to include the blurred background in them aswell so that is why half the car is chopped off in a few pics.
Actually, that is not the reason. You could have taken up a different point of view from which the images may have been made, which would have included the the whole of the car. For instance, in any of the first three images, simply stepping back a few feet would have permitted this to occur. So too, you could have included the whole car in the first image had you used the camera in landscape
mode. I think that either of those options would have made this a better image: there is little at the top of this image that shooting in portrait
mode has added to it.
And clearly, all of this was possible: look at image #4 in this series.
The Canon 50s are very sharp lenses and offer good contrast, but I'm not seeing this in these images. For instance, the license plate in the first image - and the badges on the car - appear to be very soft. What aperture did you have set, and what were your camera settings?
Something isn't quite right in what I'm seeing in these images, because you state that you're wanting to see the OOF backgrounds that the faster lenses are capable of. To attain this, you need to have the lens wide open, or close to it, but to my mind, the backgrounds are not far enough OOF for this to have been done. That suggests that the lens was stopped down somewhat, and I then look at the license plate and the badges (as noted above) and there I'm seeing the opposite effect.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not even convinced that the first image is even in focus at all - please look at the metal plate to the left of your car: I would expect to be seeing some portion of that to have a plane of sharp focus at some point, but it does not. Yet parts of that plate appear to be in the same plane as the car's rear window, and the sticker, which does appear to be somewhat close to correct focus.
Let's look at your composition now (apart from shooting a half a car) ...you appear to be trying to get an urban or perhaps grunge type of feel to this image, but I really don't think that you've succeeded, but I cannot say why. I just don't think that this background helps the image, nor do the reflections in the side of the car (always something to look for when you're shooting reflective surfaces) nor does the fact that this image, too, is crooked (like the other images that you posted a day or three ago).
While this one is significantly less crooked than the earlier ones, that does not relieve you of the responsibility for looking through the viewfinder before making your exposure, and ensuring that the details are correct.
And those details include ensuring that the exposure is correct: I cannot help but feel that this image is also under-exposed. There's a reasonably large reflective section of the car in this image: the roof and the rear glass. I suspect that this may have affected your exposure settings, and thus the camera's meter has misread the light, and caused what I suspect I'm seeing.
That is where you, as the photographer, need to learn about such things, and to learn how to see and identify them, so that when you come across these instances, you can deal with them and override the camera's settings.
pics are straight from the camera aswell, i might have a go in photoshop later and see if i can improve the images.
Two points here ....
Yes, you could do some work on these images in photoshop, and yes, that might help improve them somewhat.
But I think that it might be a better goal, a more productive approach, for you to perhaps learn a little bit about technique, to pay attention to the details, to apply some thought to the photographic processes, and to then be able to achieve far better results straight out of the camera.
Do you agree?
Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 11:08 pm
) and please take it as read that they have the ability and the experience to read and understand the posts made here, and that they have the ability to discern when and if a post might not be kosher. 
