Serge.D's photos.

[Serge.D]

I use two cheap digicams to make my photos,a Sony DSC-S650
and a Traveler DC7900.

 

[tait]

Are these attempts at photography or just snapshots of cars?

 

[Turbo Lag]

I think the latter

 

[Alex.]

I think the bottom 3 are pretty nice actually considering the cam he uses.

 

[Dougboy]

Are these attempts at photography or just snapshots of cars?

Yea thats what i thought at first. But i just didnt want to come across as being rude

 

[Beerz]

I like them. Most of them just need a crop to make the composition a lot better, and they're pretty good sharp photos, considering the camera. 👍

Only thing I see that could very easily make them more "photographic" (apart the already mentioned cropping) is the shooting angle. They're all shot from the POV of a passing person. Just a simple crouch would work wonders on those pics.
And don't say you can't, I've already seen pics of you crouching.

 

[Speedster502]

No offense Serge but as others have said they are snap shot like. To improve try using some different angles, try using the rule of thirds. Also with cars try getting lower to approach the car from a more intresting angle, take a look at Exigeracers thread, some great examples of automotive photography from what he sees just laying around on the streets, just like you! Sure at the moment you have a not brilliant camera but that doesn't stop you from trying basic techniques like changing angle, all those basic skills can be transferred to any camera. Hopefully that can help you, and remember to get that focus point correct as well! The 2nd GT3 RS picture looks slightly out of focus, however in comparison the M3 is sharp.

Hope this can help you improve instead of just telling you that they are "snapshots".

 

[exigeracer]

Start off with resizing your photos with a different program. All of your shots are always terribly pixelated which will ruin any photo, no matter what.

 

[BonzoHarry]

If you don't mind PM me #4 in full size, I want to see what I can do with it.

 

[Beerz]

Start off with resizing your photos with a different program. All of your shots are always terribly pixelated which will ruin any photo, no matter what.

I have to agree there too, lots of jaggies everywhere.

 

[Serge.D]

Thank you all for the help and the comments guys. 👍

Start off with resizing your photos with a different program. All of your shots are always terribly pixelated which will ruin any photo, no matter what.

What program would you recommend me?

If you don't mind PM me #4 in full size, I want to see what I can do with it.

I think the bottom 3 are pretty nice actually considering the cam he uses.

Thanks Alex.

Some other things that I tried.

 

[Dougboy]

I think the leaping jaguar shot has potential. But once again, you snapped from standing up POV (resulting in boring angle and reflection of you).

Try shooting lower.

Oh the guy in the last one is distracting

 

[Serge.D]

I think the leaping jaguar shot has potential. But once again, you snapped from standing up POV (resulting in boring angle and reflection of you).

Try shooting lower.

Oh the guy in the last one is distracting

What is POV?
That's not a guy in the last picture,that's my oldest sister.

 

[Syntax error]

I think he was refering to Point Of View.

Personally, I'm not too keen on the colours (tone range) the camera is producing, but that's more of a camera issue than the person behind the lens.

The mastercard ballon shot is really quite good actually. I like that one.

 

[Serge.D]

Thanks for telling me what POV is and for the comments on the balloon picture. 👍

 

[Dougboy]

That's not a guy in the last picture,that's my oldest sister.

Oh woops, my bad

 

[wfooshee]

The one thing that stikes me is losing track of horizontal/vertical. I "adjusted" a couple to demonstrate.

That's why I like viewfinders instead of screens. You can look at the edges and corners in a viewfinder in a way that's just not easy to do on a tiny LCD screen.

Edit: Looking at it again, I think I went a splat too far with the white building. I leveled the walkway, but the windows lean the other way now just a little. Ooops.

As for the jaggies, look at the power lines over the train. Geez! I don't really know if that's your camera or your reduction of the picture size.

 

[Serge.D]

Oh woops, my bad

You could not know that.

The one thing that stikes me is losing track of horizontal/vertical. I "adjusted" a couple to demonstrate.

That's why I like viewfinders instead of screens. You can look at the edges and corners in a viewfinder in a way that's just not easy to do on a tiny LCD screen.

Edit: Looking at it again, I think I went a splat too far with the white building. I leveled the walkway, but the windows lean the other way now just a little. Ooops.

As for the jaggies, look at the power lines over the train. Geez! I don't really know if that's your camera or your reduction of the picture size.

Thanks wfooshee. 👍















Some pics that I made some time ago.

 

[Turbo Lag]

The mastercard ballon shot is really quite good actually. I like that one.

Seconded 👍

 

[BonzoHarry]

Your camera settings are off, most of your shots are under exposed. I don't think you can really adjust anything on your camera except the ISO, but it looks like you're shooting at 100 and they should probably be upped to 200 or even 400.

for pictures like the very first one in this thread, try and shoot the side of the car with sun on it.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

The best shot in this thread is the one of the MasterCard balloon. By a mile.

I'm going to be mean now, but it's about the camera, not the shooter. The rest of the pictures seem horribly murky, compressed, and not clean. The dynamic range of the shots (the amount of tones between black and white) is, frankly, terrible. Look at the first shot of the Z4: almost all of the detail in the flame surfacing on the car is lost, but yet the sky, and all the highlights on the other cars, are flat white (known as Blown Highlights, because the brightness is beyond the sensor's ability to measure). In the second Z4 shot, the car is overexposed - making it a murky grey - and there are really only a very few tones between that and the blown reflection of the sky in the top of the front wing.

Some suggestions then:
- JPEG compression is the work of the devil: this is a gallery you're presenting, so save your JPEGs at full quality, with the long edge no more than 900px. 56K viewers shouldn't be coming into image gallery threads anyway.
- Clean your lens with a soft, lint-free cloth, such as that you would use to clean eyeglasses. You know someone with eyeglasses, yes? Borrow their cloth. Don't be afraid to lubricate the cloth with condensation from your breath.
- Compose your shots. Don't just slap the subject in the middle of the frame and snap.
- Don't try to make picture-postcards, especially not of cars: they've all been done a billion times before.
- Try to tell a story with the shot. (Note: you almost got this in the shot with the Mustang in the foreground and the Zafira in the background)

 

[Serge.D]

 

[GilesGuthrie]

New pics are suffering from the same issues as detailed in my previous post, plus terrible camera shake in shot #2, #7 and #8. Counting the repetition of shot 3 as two shots. Also, watch your horizontals and verticals. Shot #1 is off by about 5 degrees. I would recommend you crop it so that the parking line goes into the corner of the frame: this will give the eye a 'lead in' line to the shot.

 

[Serge.D]

Thanks to everyone for the help and comments on the pictures,but can someone please translate some of the technical details.
I dont understand everything,I just learned English from books,TV and music.
Never had English in school.

 

[BonzoHarry]

1, 2, and 3 are horribly under exposed. Can you adjust shutter/iso/aperture on your camera?

 

[wfooshee]

I think the brightness near the center is fooling the camera's exposure calculation. #1 is very very dark in the grill of the car, no detail at all, yet the windshield, hood (or bonnet) and roof are white-out. #4 and #5 don't have that extreme highlight at the center and are much better exposed.

There's still the problem of tilting. Serge, you gotta find some way to check that the camera is level.

Everyone's telling you your ISO settings are off, but I disagree. You have bright highlights in the center of some images, which fools the camera into darkening the picture. Your camera's lattitude (the range of exposures it can present on a frame, dark to bright) is apparently quite low. In the film world using a slower film (lower ISO) would help, but I'm not sure that applies to digital. Try it, though. If your camera is set at ISO 400 or 800, drop it to 200, or even 100 if it will go that far. Explore the menus, it's probably in there somewhere. Regardless, avoid extremes of exposure near the center of your frame.

There may also be an exposure compression in whatever image software you are using for your pictures. We don't know what that is.

I'm thinking #1 is a crop of #2, not a different shot at a different zoom, because there's absolutely no change in perspective. Your lens tends to push the corners away at wide angles, meaning that what should be a straight line curves out or up at the corners. Nothing you can do about it except avoid extreme wide angle zoom. Try zooming in and stepping back to eliminate that. It'll be hard to pick up on the LCD screen or viewfinder, but if you look at the pictures carefully you'll see what I'm talking about. For example, the white wall with the flowers in the windows that I "levelled" you can see that although the walkway is level and the door it leads to is vertical, the window at the right of the frame leans out. In your original shot that window is only slightly left of vertical while the corner past the walkway is very far left of vertical. That's the distortion of your lens, and like I said, you have to live with it, or avoid it by not zooming out all the way if you can help it.

 

[Serge.D]

I use ArcSoft photo Impression 4 to rescale and other things on
my pictures.
Is that a good program or not?

 

[BonzoHarry]

Rather than resizing them and then uploading them, try uploading the full version to imageshack and then letting imageshack resize it for you.

 

[tait]

Aside from the technical stuff everyone has mentioned; you really have to work on your composition. I suggest reading up on the rule of thirds or the golden ratio in photography. A lot these pictures still carry a very snapshot feel; it doesn't feel like there's any thought going into them. You need to be cautious of how the image moves your eye across the picture. Rhythm, line, pattern, symmetry, and a lot of others all equate into the manner. Do some google searches on composition and read what you can. An image can be technically well done but if it's overall boring to the viewer than no one's going to pay attention to it.

 

[Serge.D]

Original photo.


Photo that I did with ArcSoft photo Impression 4.