Please tell me that you're not referring to me and my money pit photography habit that hasn't netted me $.01.

Yikes, that hurts! Love the reflections and lighting, but makes me want to rush over to push Swifty back upright. Lose the horizon and people would think you're at the Nürburgring. Go Swifty Go!!!

Yup, there are lots of old backcountry logging roads here in the South Bay. This one turned into a nasty rocky dirt road a few miles later (think Cypress Rally conditions). Didn't stay on it for long with the questionable puncture.

Your camera doesn't matter. FWIW, I've been in the same boat as you based on your other posts. What I've found is that a single camera isn't ideal for all types of photography. My first DSLR is a full frame sensor because I have a significant amount of wide angle glass for landscape photography. It's a nice camera, but completely sucks if the subject is in motion. Picked up a sports photographer DSLR when Nikon had a fire sale (a F6 body with a build in digital sensor for less $ than a F6, hell yeah!). Great camera, but sucks for landscape. You also had asked about MP and print size previously. My experience is that photos from my sports 4MP camera can print at Costco in 12"x18" and look great, but requires some scaling. I haven't tried pushing it further. Photos from my 14MP FF camera have been professionally printed from Calypso at 20"x30", no scaling and have unbelievable detail and sharpness. Someday I'll print something larger. What I'm getting at in a long winded way is that you may not be able to find a DSLR in the current market that will do everything well like you had with film. IMHO you'll have to compromise and figure out what's the best tool for you right now while spending gobs of $$$. I look forward to you making a decision so we can enjoy viewing some of your photographic work.

"Twiggy" says thanks for the compliment. I agree with you on the composition. I set up the tripod at least 5 different places trying to eliminate distractions and optimize the car placement. Was worried about the ditch on the lower right, had a cliff edge on the other side of the ditch, wanted the sign over to the left in front of Twiggy, but wanted more of the road twist, etc, etc, etc. As Motor On is showing in this thread, you can push yourself creatively, but sometimes the environment just refuses to cooperate.

As another example, I'm not 100% happy about this photo below, but I had a lot more room to work with in this setting. I moved the car twice and lost track of the number of tripod movements. Ms. Speednut patiently sat inside reading a book.


So Motor On, care to give us some hints of what you have in store for this month's contest? Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

 

Daves... I don't like the tilt either, a bit extreme too. :impatient

This road is so cool! I like this shot better because of less background clutter (fence, pole), the car looks like it's driving it (instead of looking totally lost and trying to turn around). The other thing that bugs me is I can't read your plate. BTW: There have been years where stages on the Prescott Forest Rally put Cypress to shame.

 

Well then we can say you reminded us of a technique that is in just about every photography book on the market, but is all too often overlooked as to time consuming or tedious.
Well I can say I've posted similar technical photos recently, I've got several decent ones, but nothing that hasstood out as a winner in my mind, yet so I can't give too much detail cause I'm going to be working on this one down to the wire; and not having a properly functioning tripod or in car mount isn't making things any easier, I may be doing a little more bracket making before all is said and done.

Here are a few quick PS jobs that I think make it a little less extreme, but I second speednut I just want to go overthere and straighten up swifty. But the good thing is you're trying new things and exploring things further, so you are still learning from what you try.
Still a bit extreme.


And firmly planted.


I'm not a fan of tilt for the sake of tilt but I do like to arrange the car in a manner that isn't always straight on or perpenicular as many can grow boring.

 

Speednut.

I think you misinterpreted the reason I asked. As you say you read my other posts so I'm looking for my first DSLR. I was only wondering what Motor was using.

As to the rest, Excellent Info.

The URL you mentioned is, of course, "mostly" on the money. In particular "Photographers make photos, not cameras" If you read what I've been trying to tell Motor (maybe not all that well) in critiques is all about composition. You need to see the picture in your head ... its just practice. A good photographer will always take good photos.

I will disagree about lens ... in that a quality lens will take a better picture in terms of resolution or less distortion than most cheapie lens. You can see it in the pic below. Look at the gravel. BTW, that is zoomed in or cropped on the original pic





From what I understand, the Sports bodies have a bigger buffer for faster shooting.

I've taken tens of thousand of film pics. In the beginning, I'd get 1 good shot out of 100. Over time, 10 out of 100. Now maybe half. Unfortunately, I've taken VERY few digital photos the last five years but the wife many. Now its time to get back into it.

I also love landscapes ... I've got many 16 x 20s on my walls and some 20 x 24 (or some oddball size), all done with Ektar 25 ... tripod a must and a real pain back then. Done many wildlife photos.

But everything you wrote is true ... its all in the photographers eye. I will dig up some scan I've made of old prints and post them.

Will post when I find them

Sorry motor for the hijack ...

 

Hey, Chowsie don't feel the need to apologize, this thread is all about making photos better, what you use to get there plays into that. I'm int he same situation as I was when I was new to MINI, where my talent isn't yet lmited by my equipment. So I've been focusing on the composition aspects for my personal devleopment, for you to not have your creativity limited, your making the jump to DSLRs it's all the same how I see it.

 

Thanks Motor,

 

Cool photos Chow! Now hurry up and get a camera ordered so we can see more. Yes, get your wife a micro lens and a lensbaby too. She'll love the shallow DoF from those for the flower photos.

Motor On, thanks for the hints. FWIW, search this forum for my last DIY camera mount that was effective, KISS, and cheap. I'm going to try using it again this weekend on the Maverick MINIs club run. Not sure if I'll get any good photos, but it's worth a try. I did pick up some flash gels which I've never used before, so that's a different avenue I might try.

Kurt, I've been on some of those Prescott dirt roads and yes, this one was just like those.

 

 

 

Motor On: I stole the best sunset one and pasted it in the proper thread.

 

It was a killer sunset I just missed getting to the parking lot on time by about 5 min It seems like we may be moving out
of our perpetual rain spell so the oppurunities for sunsets should be mroe common soon.

 

Hey Motor on, there are some very interesting shots on here. I have not had any time to play with my new toy. I have been searching for some additional lenses and an external flash. I am thinking christmas! what part of your photo's grab your interest the most? In the end, what do you want to see?

 

Took this/these after detailing this afternoon.

Climbergirl, those are some tough questions, I've been bouncing them around in my head a good chunck of the day and I still can't answer them.

 

Also took this today


Along with other Exige photos

 

And just in case the Exige wasn't enough, I was shooting my MINI and spotted a 355 F1

 

Sorry Motor, I've been so busy looking at equipment, I didn't have time to look at your pics this week but right now I am VERY full and before I fall asleep




to dark for me




ditto



ditto



More interesting. I bet you could photochop some of this.



nice, I just hate white skies because thats all we ever have around here.



Now this one is underexposed because of the sky. maybe change the metering or use a spot meter on the car?




ditto, underexposed on the items of interest. Try the spot meter in your camera.



ditto



very nice. You could highlight the car better in photoshop but excellent



Crop out the bottom and then you got an excellent photo


maybe dodge the car, make it ligher, stand out more?





excellent composition

very nice highlights!

so so

so so

I'll take that one!



cropped, added fill flash, and some burning

BTW, how are you saving these pics? are you keeping the full resolution of changing the size by sampling?

I ask because it looks like the original had 2Mb

I found out I had been saving them the wrong way and loosing a LOT of resolution!

I had been just taking the pic, changing it to say 4 x 3, resampled, and set dpi at 100 (yours was at 180). Turns out you should never do that.. Your supposed to never resample on downsizing, just set the inches, let the dpi go up to whatever. When saving, just use a lower ,jpg compression setting to make it small for the web. There is a difference between two pics done this way.

 

Thanks Chows, I messed up a netering option somewhere in the Custom functions that are in the background of the
memory, I usually set and foreget but I need to read up the manual figureout what I changed and get back to the
spot metering that I'm used to, my night shots are usually much more technically sound.

I save full size, new file everytime I change something minimal compresion on jpeg, then up load to a photo hoster,
and use the hoster's options for resizing so I can easily link to the full scale images.

 

Cool. I think spot metering would be a lot better at night.

That might be the problem, your using the host server to resize.

I assume you got something like photoshop elements or Photosuite? If so, its easy to do, just open the file, and save as jpg but do not resample the photo. Then save using a high compression ratio. Don't rely on the host ... they are most likely doing something weird.

Or does you ISP have free web space? If so, just put your pics up on web pages.

Does your camera save in .raw format? If so, Canon got a tremendous free raw processor that comes in the sw bundle. I got to wait until XMAS but thats the first thing I intend to use before processing in photoshop!

 

I use PS CS I use .raw sparingly as I cannont convert direct to Jpeg with it, only tiff or png; I had several photos I wanted to enter tot he calender contest, all no joy because I couldn't upload the photos to NAM

My Canon software started acting up this week, I can't even download off the card reader with it anymore.:impatient

I've compared jpeg fine and jpeg normal and notice no differance at "actual pixels" so I generall shoot in the 6.3 MP Normal mode to take my photos, can do 500 or so at a time. Which helps when shooting events.

 

That is because you need the adobe plugin. You can get it free here http://www.adobe.com/support/downloa...jsp?ftpID=3560

Just download the plugin and move it to the right folder.

Then you can read and process the raw files from your camera and I see yours is listed

 

Cool, I'll have to give it a shot as tonight is my last outing before the photo contest deadline.

 

Train?

 

 

Ok here you go, all the photos that didn't make the cut this month. (many where simply too blurry these are top out of litterally hundreds)

 

This was my favorite of this set, very nice! Think I'll be able to spot your entry? I picked up some gel sheets to learn about them and used one for my entry. I was thinking about taking a photo of the clown face in the headliner, but didn't get to it. I'll post in another thread my other photos that I considered entering. They came out really good, but were better for a theme of "motion".

Please do install the updated PS RAW module as it will make your life easier.
My typical work flow is open a RAW file with PS ACR, tweak settings and use 8bit sRGB color space output (for web images). In PS, crop (typically set to 800 or 1000 pixels wide for landscape photos). Apply smart sharpen to cropped photo (~35%). Save for web (with one hand, press ctrl + Alt + Shift + "S"). Use 2-up tab to see original image and preview of exactly what the jpg file will look like. Adjust compression as desired and save into a upload folder. This is a terse overview, let me know if anything needs more details.

Chows, be careful when you talk about changing dpi settings. dpi is only a convenience for a printer to know about your intentions of a final print size and has nothing to do with a digital image size. Pixel count is everything. Ignore a values and instead scale your photo to what the printer requires. For example, Costco uses a 400dpi printer, so I simply scale to 1600x2400 pixels for a 4"x6" print. The printer only looks for the pixel size info when printing. Some printers will take your dpi information and scale the image for you, but do you want control over the process or an automated machine taking a "best guess" approach?