Quote Originally Posted by Nemesis
Yo Jason, you know I like to stay honest about photos and stuff (since I expect the same in return, I like people pointing problems out with my photos since it makes me better). I like the photo and how its composed but the sepia tone drowns out the car too much. It just takes away from the beauty of the car itself and makes it blend it too much with everything else. Its just too brown. Even the amber in the headlamp is brown lol. Im sure you know what I mean. One thing I always like to do in my photos, no matter if I leave them white balanced a certain way or change the tone of my photo is to keep the subjects colors fairly true to the original. Keeping the ambers amber, the reds red, the silvers silver, etc. Maybe not 100 percent but just enough so it doesnt drown in a river of whatever color.


Now as far as your liking to 300mm? Man that should be an extremely sharp lens. F32 definitly wont be sharp at all. Think of it this way, squint your eyes so you can barely see. That's like shooting at F32. The sweet spot for most lenses are F7-8. Set up your tripod and take shots from F5 - F12. From there open them up at 100 percent crop in photoshop. Compare each of them and then gauge which one is sharpest. When not going for some effect, always shoot in this aperture and youll retain sharp photos with minimal photoshopping. Exposure time has no effect on sharpness of the photo, when shaking and hand holding is taken out of the picture. Remember when shooting on tripod you have that split second where your finger is pressing the shutter button. When shooting night shots I always shoot with a timer. Because believe it or not, any bit of vibration from your finger hitting that button will screw it up when you look at it on the big screen. Okay so nevermind, I just read your post and you were using a remote. :-p
It's 100% natural light w/ no color modification at all normally i'll add +10 to 15 on saturation to make the colors a little richer but if I did that here it would be bright yellow like a post-it note. I'm gonna put it in Lightroom or modify on CS3 and see if I can make the colors a little similiar to how they would appear in daylight.

I only went up to F/32 or really even above F/12 just to compare the sharpness of the rock wall behind the car...if I focused on the wheel at F/4 the rocks would be a solid blur and so would the back of the car, F/12 made all the car sharp but the rock wall was still blurred....F/18-24+ made the car and wall exactly the same. I just despise having the back of the car or outline of it not as sharp as the front on these types of shots but the background can go either way...this time i chose to have everything as sharp as possible.

As for comparing sharpness between shots i'll make the setting adjusts while the camera remains in the exact same spot, zoom in to a specific area, then i can scroll with the wheel through the pics and the zoom will remain the that exact same spot for each picture allowing me to easily compare sharpness.

I have yet to figure how shoot in mirror lock-up, it's a simple function on the XT but I have yet to do it on the XTI and still have the ability to take pics...it locks the screen so you can't do anything when it's in the up position on the XTI but you can continue as normal with the XT