try azusa canyon, minimal traffic and great backgrounds. also you can try the long beach ports, lots of industrial backgrounds like railcars with graf, refineries, bridges and stuff like that.

 

^thank you!

 

yea, definitely need to find a place with better lighting..yellow lights of death.

btw, for the rig shot, i'd try to keep the driver's face from reflecting into the side mirror...of if you can, just chop it out all together...it's kinda of distracting.

 

^yeah i wasnt thinking about the drivers face. lol. and its yellow because of my white balance apparently..

 

Yeah, background is just as important as lighting, so you should look for those two things first. If possible, opt to shoot at 6-8 am/3-5pm for better lighting.

About the white balance, I'm not familiar with Nikon's settings, so you'd have to search in the user's manual. Usually, it's as simple as: take a picture of a white object, go to settings and set manual white balance to that picture.

By the way, thanks for the picture comment, I'm confident you could achieve something like that. Just make sure you have a good subject, good background/lighting. I think if there's one area you need more work on, it'd be framing. Use that "rule of thirds" when you shoot, and you'd have a good foundation to improve on.

By the way, didn't I add you on myspace already after the Ktown meet with the other China Eric? I don't see you on my list....maybe got scewed that time when myspace gone mad with the invisible bud list.

 

LOL yeah. its
myspace.com/oppada

 

sometimes post processing does mircales on white balancing, even when the lighting is bad. Shooting RAW would let you adjust the setting even more.

I'm going to start shooting raw + jpg when i'm doing my "faux shoots" come spring/summer, so i dont' have to be constantly disappointed haha.

 

^ +1 what noodle said

Raw file mode is your best friend. While shooting, I'll try to get things as close as possible to how I want the picture to look with manual settings, white balance, etc.. Then once they're in the computer, I fine-tune it with software.

But don't rely solely on post processing though.... it's much better to make a habit of taking the best picture possible from the camera first, then fix it latter with software. That way, you'd have much better picture to work with from the start.

 

ah, the dreaded post processing vs correct settings debate! i'm staying far away from that one :P

 

^ I don't mean to start a debate just though it's good pratice thats all

 

I just worry about aperture and ISO... that's it. Serious.

 

Came up with that, hope it's good enough. Anybody else want one? You'll have to be specific on the name of the font... if possible, find a photograph with a watermark style you like. If you want, include a logo or pic you want included.

 

Thanks again!

 

Very nice pics! Black is definitley tough to shoot, one thing you might want to try is using a circular polarizing filter. You can rotate the filter on the lens to add contrast and enhance or completely remove reflections. If I'm in a hurry I will sometimes just shoot bursts on my 5d while rotating the polarizer, this way you can shoot the full spectrum of reflections and such in a few seconds. Hope this helps ( also make sure your shooting in raw )

 

Find a better lit area, if lighting is color white balance your camera. Best thing to do is avoid shooting black car in under lit area all together.