squid42

I know it was Monday but hey you stood up without the humor chip

What I am saying is that for somebody who wants to geek out about photography a TS-E lens is a really nice thing to explore. It is more useful for trains than cars but still. You learn about focus plane, focus control and you are forced to think about what you are trying to say with that photos, where to lead the viewer.

Dewinator

Haha I'm sure most people are just as disinterested in my long exposure stuff as am about tilt/shift.

...Max...

@siitech & Dewinator: and yet, with your crops the visual effect of the original picture is lost! There definitely was drama in the bright car far in the back of a grimy garage, especially with parking lines in the foreground leading to it. The effect might have been entirely unintentional of course, but it caught the eye.

Dewinator

You could still do that with the car on the 2/3 line though. My main point is that centered subjects look a bit off on a 2:3 ratio picture.

...Max...

Yeah, I guess I'd move the camera down well below roof level and split 1:2 vertically with car being in the upper third if I was doing this intentionally. Maybe. Can't do that with just a crop of the existing image though.

Potsnu

How do you guys figure out what is the right colour balance? That's the challenge I have with post editing. We know what looks good in a car photograph and the basics of it, but when you're making the adjustments how do you know what "looks right"?

...Max...

Personally - I eyeball it on my (not at all calibrated, alas!) monitor. And my wife never agrees with the result. That's why I never ever touch the hue controls, or God forbid the channel curves -- only brightness/contrast.

If you wanted to be more technical, you'd take a picture of a white (or is that gray?) card in your lighting (could be challenging if the lighting is not uniform throughout) and set color balance based on that, either in the camera or in post if you're shooting raw. If you wanted to be really thorough you'd take a picture of a pantone card or something like that, then tweaked your channel curves until the card came out true on a calibrated monitor. Or so I think -- being a humble former amateur, I never got that far.

squid42

Put a white color balance card into one of the pictures. You only have to re-do it when the light on the object changes (which includes if you aim at a part that get different light).

In a pinch you can use a white sheet of paper but only if you push exposure so low that no color channel is blown out (means it must appear a little bit grey).

https://rennlist.com/forums/987-981-...k-warning.html

pfbz

OK, I'll probably going to sound like a bit a dick for being critical, and am only offering this up because you did ask for advice... Don't take the criticism personally, use it if you wish as motivation to improve your work.

First, I'd consider most of these to be snapshots rather than quality images or photographs, and not very good snapshots at that.. Forget what camera and lens you are using, you can greatly improve the quality of your photographs (using nothing more than a decent phone camera) working on only two aspects of photography... Composition and light.

Again, not trying to sound like a dick, almost all of the images you listed score fairly poorly in both of those areas. For composition, I won't try and replicate what scores of other resources can tell you, but simply google and study 'photography composition' for lots of advice like 'rule of thirds', 'background', 'depth', 'cropping', etc. Most of your photos could be made much better with nothing more than some serious and well thought out cropping.

For light, it's very difficult to take great photos in extreme lighting conditions, and most of your images have exactly that problem. Your outdoor shots are in severe lighting that gives huge dark shadows, no detail in the dark areas, and washed out highlights. Your garage shots are the opposite problem, simply not enough light. While it's possible (though difficult) to get great pictures in low light, yours have the dark parts of the subject (the car) blending into the background. Images lacking interest are the result. Many notable photographers like to say that photography is nothing more than the capture of light, and when you have crappy light, it's hard to take great photographs.

If you did nothing more than retake some of your existing shots in better light (google 'magic hour' or 'golden hour') and with more interesting and aggressive cropping, you would dramatically improve the images. No new camera or lenses needed... Just some patience, studying, and practice.

niche

Take pictures on overcast days. Take lots of pictures. You'll develop your eye.

pfbz

Even with my previous comments on improving your images without spending a dime, if you do want to spend money on some new equipment (and who doesn't like to spend money on cool toys), I'll make a couple of suggestions for that as well.

1. Skip Telephotos. Medium and long telephotos aren't going to be very useful for static car photography. Unless you plan on doing track photography, don't worry about buying high quality long telephoto lenses (which is a good thing, because really high quality long telephotos are really really expensive!)

2. Get 'Fast' Normal and Wide Angle Lenses. Wide angle and 'normal' range lenses with wide apertures (eg 1.4, 1.8) will allow you to explore some creativity and achieve some nice shots a very low depth-of-field and natural background blur (not photoshop!) . Fast (large aperture) high quality primes (single focal length) are usually much less expensive than fast zooms.

A good example of a cheap but super high image quality prime lens is the Nikkor 35mm 1.8 DX. Under $200, tack-sharp image quality, great for lower light. Still a mostly plastic consumer build-quality lens, but fantastic optical resolution. Remember that on the D5500, a 35mm lens has the equivelant focal length of more like 52mm, considered a normal lens.

Harder to find good bargains on truly wide angle primes, and super wide zooms are pretty slow or extremely expensive.. If you don't already have a lens that goes down to 18mm (27mm equivelant), get something like theNIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6GVRII or Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VRII. A 3.5 aperture is not fast, but at least you get a good focal range.

I've heard good things about some of the import super-wide primes like the Rokinon 16mm f/2.0 (24mm equiv). It's under $400 which is ridiculously cheap for a fast prime super-wide! Haven't tried one personally. I think it likely make an awesome car photography lens.

3) Buy an off camera flash. Not to take indoor pictures at your nephews birthday party, but for fill flash. Something decent, that integrates to the computers in your camera, and that has a tilt head like the Nikon Speedlight SB 500 or 600 or 700. Fill flash has a definite learning curve to it, but it will allow you to get high quality images in a wider range of lighting conditions.

4) Buy a tripod. For longer exposures without camera shake, angles that are uncomfortable to shoot hand held, etc. Something sturdy and with a ball head. If it cost under $50, it likely isn't worth buying. Dolica tripods are often decent and inexpensive.

Dewinator

Do you have the camera set up to shoot in RAW? I don't know about the 5500 or whatever you said but on the D800 shooting in 20bit/channel raw I can solve a lot of shadow issues with a single exposure just during the Photoshop import. Often I try to adjust the shadows and highlights, watching the histogram so I just barely use the whole range with no peaks at either extreme.

t0mas

+1 on what pfbz said! bang on!