These photos were taken at AMVIV in the parking structure on Friday night.

Similar equipment and settings were used in this shoot and the Classic Mini Photo Shoot

Nikon D70
70-200 F/2.8 VR (Tripod Mounted with VR off)
Nikon SB-600 triggered via Commander Mode

 

Not only is this car amazing, the photography is absolutely incredible!

 

just beautiful! oh to have your equipment!!!

 

That first pic is gorgeous. They're all great, but that first one... absolutely beautiful...

 

Thanks guys. The car looked great in person.

The Palace Station parking structure had the ceiling and posts painted white. That made it very nice for bouncing the flash around. :smile:

 

Very Nice

 

I should have more photos up later today. There are two other cars I did photo shoots of at AMVIV.

 

Awesome work, Dave!

And, nice ride to the owner of the car! Love that CooperS side stripe.

 

Thanks Dave for allowing us to raffle off one of your photo shoots at the c3/AMVIV Kick Off Dinner !!!! I'm sure the winner was very pleased!!! I really love that shot of the yellow mcs from the front!

 

Richard: Not a problem. I was happy to offer it up for C3. I'll probably do something similar for the club in the future.

 

Randy Webb's Mule (previously posted in the classic Mini thread)


The newest edit


There is one last set of photos that have been edited. I'll post those soon.

Dave

 

Dave,
Sorry friend, but the editing on this one doesn't quite match up to your usual excellence. Maybe it's my miscalibrated iBook's LCD screen that's misguiding my perspective here.
On my monitor it appears that the lower portion of the passenger-side door looks "dirty" rather than smoothed out, like you've shown us all you've been able to master. Also, the lighting on that half of the hood has a line connecting the headlamp with the grille.

The composition is great, don't get me wrong. I'm getting accustomed to your powerful style. And, I've been in awe of many of the photographs you've given birth to, especially with your use of creative lighting. But . . .

Am I wrong or was there quite a bit of backlighting?

On a different note, here's a pic I was working on tonight that I haven't yet posted- with plenty of photoshopping. Be honest and tell me what you think.



Going to bed now so I'll read tomorrow.

 

Hi, Juan! Clo here. I LOVE this piccie! Is this from the Palace Station lot? Beautiful, saturated color! The purple clouds and the BLUE MINI in contrast with the rose-colored wall and ground is lovely. And the chrome and white clouds add to the great textural feel. Love the horizontals, too. GOOD JOB!

Clover

 

Juan,

No offense taken.

A large portion of the problem with that photo stems from the fact I had my ISO cranked up way too high for that whole shoot. All of the images were pretty noisy. Actually the one of Randy's car suffered a similar fate, as did some of the photos I haven't posted yet. My take is the high ISO helps explain both the noise, and the blown out background. As it is, I already did a lot of noise reduction with Neat Image, so that's about as good as it's going to get. Randy's MINI reacted a little better to the Neat Image processing.

Regarding the backlighting: That corner was actually fairly dark with just one set of overhead lights to the front of the car. I used my SB-600 fired remotely to illuminate the wall and left side of the car. The SB-600 was tilted up and to the rear of the rear corner of the car with the 14mm wide angle shield lowered to spead out the light more. If I had been more diligent about reviewing my histogram at the time, I should have dialed the flash down a bit.

Thanks for being honest about your reaction to it. I do appreciate that. It's part of the reason I posted it, to see how glaring the short comings were.

I need to go to bed now too. I'll post my thoughts on your photo in the morning.

 

Is that an 02-04 or an 05? Aren't the headlights an 05 addition and the front bumper an 02-04?

 

My impressions of the photo:
I like the composition and saturation looks good, particularly the the adjustment you've done on the sky. The little conduit pipe running accross the wall adds a nice touch too.

A couple minor items you may want to consider since you're in photoshop anyway:
1) Due to the tint on the rear window there seems to be a bit more green tinge on the sky. You might try just adjusting that small section of sky.
2) I'm thinking back to that parking structure shot were you asked me about removing that section of the pillar. In kind of that same vein, this image *might* be helped by trying to remove the concrete parking blocks out of the background.

As I'm looking at this more there are a couple other things that strike me about the composition. The mirrors are nicely placed just above the wall, so there is a nice little piece of sky all the way around them (i.e. they aren't half on and half off the separation line between the sky and the wall). The painted lines for the parking spot also nicely mirror each other.

 

DiD, what was the focal length setting on your 70-200 for that first shot of the LY MINI? Thanks!

 

Lens Settings
Focal Length: 160mm
VR: OFF (tripod mounted)

Camera Settings
ISO: 200
Aperture: F/2.8
Exposure time: 1/6 sec

 

Clo, yes, this was shot at the Palace Station's parking structure. Thanks for your kind words.

Dave,
I was kind of wondering about that section in the rear window. As I was burning in that area, it'd get even greener- I didn't think about desaturating.
The concrete blocks? Oooh, no that's going to take some time. I've added/lengthened blocks to an image before, but never attempted removal.

Thanks for the suggestions.
-Juan

 

I wouldn't desaturate that section of the rear window.
Editing suggestion: Throw a lasso around that section. Then adjust the levels for just that section once it's isolated (maybe just the green channel)

 

Well, maybe you can add a block behind the driver;'s side. Copy/flip the one on teh passenger side? and then add another in the space beside the car. Then it would all be balanced.

Awesome look though.

I am realtively new to digital photography. So the first picture in the thread, how much editing in PS did you use? Your settings did not seem crazy or anything so can mere mortals get great looking shots without retouching?

 

For that one, I probably spent about 15 minutes with it. Keep in mind that I shoot RAW, not JPEG. JPEG takes the RAW camera data and overlays the white balance information and sharpening settings from your camera automatically. Since I shoot RAW, I need to go in after the fact and select all of that. It is more time consuming, but ultimately the flexibility of RAW makes it worth it to me.

That said, it isn't uncommon for me to spend a lot more time editing a photo. That particular one just fell into place quite quickly.

Let's take a look at this next photo.



I love this photo. I have played with it a lot trying to get it "just right." I finally came to the conclusion that there were two ways of editing it that I liked, and after spending considerable time fighting to make one photo do everything I wanted, I came up with a second clean edit.



On that one photo I have invested easily over 20 hours of time editing (over several different editing session).

I present these photos as kind of a compare and contrast. The first one (back to the MINI at the top of this post) just came of the camera very close to what I saw in my mind's eye. The Pier shot I saw what was there and it didn't quite fit with what I thought was possible to bring out of it.

Putting that much editing into a good shot is very rewarding to me. Unfortunately, sometimes like the case above (the black MINI), I wind up spending a lot more time trying to clean up an image that "shouldn't have been that hard" if I had realized my mistakes at the time I was shooting the picture and corrected them.

I'm going to break the answer into two parts.

1) Before we even get to editing discussions, we all need to work at getting a good image in the first place. Read this post: How-to: Making better MINI Photographs for some tips and things to think about.

2) Let's assume you now have taken a photo that you like. Is it possible to get a great shot without retouching? Honestly, I don't think so. A "great" photo deserves to have the potential brought forward. Photo editing is necessary to get the most out of your image.

Let me pose the question a little differently: Is it possible to make a good photo great with minimal editing? My answer to that question is yes.

There are is one adjustment which people could do with not much additional time spent (1-2 minutes a photo): Adjust the Contrast and Brightness. A lot of digital photos could be helped out quite a bit with just that simple change.

If you want to go beyond that editing wise, the next change I would tackle is Un Sharp Mask (USM). When you resize a photo your image loses sharpness because of all the averaging that takes place. Therefore, to get some sharpness back, if you have Photoshop, you can go to Filters > Sharpening > Un Sharp Mask and return your resized image to a level of sharpness that was apparent on the full size version.

My general editing is a lot more involved than just those two steps, but those two simple changes do make noticeable improvements to the image.

Hope that helps!
Dave

 

Nice lookin cars

 

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'm not a fan of obviously post-procesed images. Most of Dave's stuff doesn't scream "post-processed!". I think Juan's photo does. Not my cup of tea. There's a lot of "red" on the reflections on the MINI and on the wall / pavement, but much less red in the sky behind the MINI. Were the sky redder, I'd have an easier time buying into the red reflections.

Great composition, though.

 

Here are some shots from the final batch of editing from AMVIV.