Paul, After your build-up (build-down?) I was pleasantly surprised at how nice both the shots are. It's not at all the disaster that you prepared us for.
The profile looks a touch over warmed to me, but not so much as to be objectionable. What really does pop out to me is the colour of the bitumen. It's not wrong, but it's not grey either, and in peoples' imagination bitumen is grey. My years on the payroll of a rurally oriented employer taught me that bitumen comes in many unexpected colours, mostly caused by non-specular reflection of the sky but the colour of the aggregate that topped the bitumen was also a factor. Pink and purple were two of the most bilious examples, but in the predigital early 80s we just had to live with it. If they were my shots I would put a mask around, and very moderately desaturate the road. Not fully desaturate to grey, but just enough to knock out the obvious excess yellow of 809. 802 is not too bad and the road might just need that little bit of colour to match up to the skylight reflections in the chromework. Just my 2c. regards, Anthony Farr > -----Original Message----- > From: Paul Stenquist [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > 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
