PESO: Fighting Bad Light and Needing Some Help

[Paul Stenquist]

I had to shoot a car this morning. It was a "64 Dodge with a 393 and a 
4-speed manual trans. One of only three made with that engine and 
transmission combination. It's a survivor, with only 18,000 miles on 
the odometer, so it's worth big bucks and is a suitable subject for 
collector car magazines. i set out to shoot it this morning for a 
magazine that features older Chrysler Corp. products. At dawn there was 
beautiful light, but my location was too low to get any of it due to a 
tree line. By the time I had any light at all, a heavy cloud cover had 
moved in. So I shot and made the best of it. The sky was gray/white so 
the reflections in the top of the car were horrendous. And the light 
was muddy. I shot RAW and pumped up the contrast and saturation while 
warming the color temperature before conversion. After conversion, I 
went to shadows/highlights to kill some of the white light on the roof 
and hood. It's not great, but I think it's okay. We'll see. I put two 
shots on PhotoNet. The head on is with the A 400/5.6, the profile is  
with the K 135/2.5. These two shots are radically different. That's 
partly a function of the changing light. But also the position of the 
car in respect to the brightest part of the sky. Most of the shots I 
took resemble the profile. But I could move them more toward the long 
lens head on shot. Which do you prefer. (I'm really hoping to get some 
feedback here. In other words: Help!!)
Paul

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2816809
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2816802