Quote:
Originally Posted by needforspeed
1. Lighting is excellent, the reflections on the car lift it from the slightly darker surroundings. It's picking up the warm sunlight that you can see on the hillside.
2. The focus is perfect (this is why I thought DSLR) The stones on the roadside are really crisp as is the car AND the hillside. Even the road in the distance seems ultra sharp (without any nasty artifacts).
3. Rule of 3rds composition. This can be replicated, but you have the car spot on 1/3rd of the way from the right and botton of the frame.
Question is ... how did you manage it?
Was it luck? Did you use manual settings ... if so what? How do you get that DSLR feel with the focus?
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NFS, sorry for my tardiness in getting back to you. To answer your questions in order:
1. Lighting was largely just luck; I picked early evening on a (rare in W Scotland) sunny day. The car was facing NE so the sun was behind the hill on the nearside rear quarter.
2. Focus was auto via my little Olympus Mju 720SW (the waterproof one - and this is after a day in my boardshorts pocket at Wild Wadi waterpark a few months before!!). I think the results with my Nikon D50 may have been even better. Don't forget the photo isn't blown up; I think you may see some noise if you did.
3. Composition was achieved because that was the way I was taught at school in art and later at college doing graphic design (including photography). I usually compose photos in this way, especially 'still lifes' like this, it just makes them more interesting, and in this case I wanted to get the road in addition to the car in the frame (see below).
A lot of this photo was luck and inspiration from someone else. I had seen a similar viewpoint in a photo in a magazine a few months back and it looked great. They should take full credit for the inspiration for the photo, I just experimented with angle of view (standing, kneeling, lying down etc) with my car in the frame, to try and make the composition look as good as possible. The fact that I used the road often (I worked nearby) and had my then brand new car was an opportunity too good to miss; I wanted to put my car into that setting. Though I'm hardly a 'photographer', the fact I used to study photography means I have got a lot of my ideas from others' work that I like and it's fun to try and recreate some of their magic. I don't have the creative spark to really do things that haven't been done before - I just obey the general rules. I experiment with lots of things after seeing others' photos - they're my inspiration usually. There was a UK4 photo that I thought was great in terms of exposure that I've been trying to recreate since (really light light areas and deep, deep blacks, the lights bleached out a bit and the colours saturated - I'll try and find it later....). I think that my 'apprenticeship' using film and manual SLRs paid dividends in that I (normally but not in this case - technically it was simply point and shoot with the flash disabled) always think about lighting, shutter speed, aperture and composition as a matter of course. And I rarely think of post-processing in PS or whatever as the means of getting a good result because of my using film in the past; my way is to try and get the best results in the camera in the first place.