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The thing bugging me is my phone camera pictures are lacking. I thought the phone pictures were fine until now. Other forum members post their pictures and it looks like their cars are going to drive off my monitor. If you have a camera your happy with please share. Pictures I took last night, too dark and they don't capture the colors in the sky right, the pictures are not vivid. I like them but I am disappointed they don't "Pop" like other pictures on the Forum.
A lot of it has to do with angles and lighting. Try taking the picture from below the cars center line on an up angle. Cars photograph much better this way. Theses aren't the best but both were taken with camera phones.
I second Modshack's recommendation of the dpreview site, it is very useful.
Photography is a hobby of mine so I use Canon 1 series cameras and that is overkill (and overweight) for a lot of folks. Good glass is the most important component of any camera which is why phone cameras fall short, you just cannot make a great quality lens that is light and tiny. Of course the digital sensor is also important HOWEVER sensors and image processors will continue to get better but if you buy good quality glass and stay within the same manufacturer's family you can later use your quality lens with a new camera.
If you go with a quality camera get in the habit of saving your files in RAW format for later processing in the computer instead of going direct to jpg files in the camera. You can recover from pretty serious under/overexposure with a RAW file (which basically stores the original data from the image sensor without loss) and you never know when you are going to catch that perfect shot except the exposure was bad. Although JPG files can be adjusted/manipulated the fact that the data has already been "crunched" is a strike against recovery from the wrong setting.
Final word, be careful who you order from because the online camera sales world is full of questionable business practices with some outright scam artists mixed in. I don't think we are allowed to post references to non-car businesses here on the forum but I have long dealt with a major New York firm that is large and provides excellent service and although at first glance at their name you may think movie camera they didn't get their initials from the old Bell and Howell corporation.
You're doing the right thing by getting a "real" camera rather than just relying on your phone. I highly recommend an SLR (camera with interchangeable lenses) rather than a point-and-shoot. You'll have a lot more control and in the end will be happier with the photos.
Yeah. Phone "cameras" are killing photography. It doesn't matter that a phone camera has 18 megapixels. The photo is taken through a $0.49 plastic bubble they call a lens. A single DLSR lens will cost from a few hundred to many thousands of dollars. Which do you think is going to yield a better image?
It's probably both you and the camera if you're using a cell phone.
I have the equipment, full frame DSLR and good glass, but almost all of my "bad" photos are my fault. Not the camera's.
Take a basic photography course, get a decent camera, and start a new hobby! The equipment is nice, but good photography is mostly the person's "eye" and artistic ability.
I found that neither my iPhone camera or an older Olympus captured the LRG very well so I bought a Fujifilm F900EXR based on multiple good reviews and a great price for the Japanese model on Amazon. That was months ago, and I haven't gotten around to taking any pictures of my car. lol
I do a lot of car photography. You have a very difficult case of a white car with black wheels. If you see a good picture of a similar color combo, I can almost guarantee that the picture was run through photo editing software. It doesn't matter what camera you use, the only way to get it to look good is to work the file. Most photographers, including me, use Adobe Lightroom. It only takes a minute or two with each photo. Black wheels where you can see detail in the black is a dead giveaway that the photo has been edited.
I'm out of town right now, but when I get back home, I'll post before and after images. For now, here is an after that I took of my car.
If you have a recent iPhone, you can actually get some of the same results by selecting the photo, choosing Edit from top right, and then clicking on the dial button on the bottom right. Then select Light. Adjust the highlights down and the shadows up. All you're trying to do is lower the reflection on the white paint (so it's not just uniformly bright white) and brighten the black wheels (so they are not just pitch black).
I took some pictures at the Tudor race a few weeks ago, and they are probably better examples. It literally does not matter what camera you get though. You can't get pictures like you see in the magazines without running the photo through an editor. You establish composition, motion blur and focus when you take the picture. The details of exposure in the high and low end have to be done in post. These images have compression artifacts because of the way google plus compresses images.
Canon digital rebel. They make a number of models. All excellent. Go to B&H wed site, they are the best. I teach photography. Recommend these cameras for fire investigation use. Very rugged. Outstanding results.
The thing bugging me is my phone camera pictures are lacking. I thought the phone pictures were fine until now. Other forum members post their pictures and it looks like their cars are going to drive off my monitor. If you have a camera your happy with please share. Pictures I took last night, too dark and they don't capture the colors in the sky right, the pictures are not vivid. I like them but I am disappointed they don't "Pop" like other pictures on the Forum.
You need to go to the internet and look at the manual of your cellphone and see what features the camera has and take some trial pictures changing lighting ---white balance ---exposure--etc !!! Wayne
Most photographers, including me, use Adobe Lightroom.
There's a lot of truth in what Austin says. If you take a bad picture, it's a bad picture and you can't rescue it in post. Specifically, that means composition and to some extent exposure; the latter can be rescued a bit.
Here's a non-car example of what you can do with Light Room on the iPhone, no less. I subscribe to Adobe's entire Creative Cloud suite, so I have access to LR on the phone. My little buddy Hercules, as of a couple of weeks ago. I told the iPhone: Meter off the dog! What did the phone do? It metered off the bright spot where the sun was hitting the carpet, resulting in a very dark dog.
Into LR it went. Now, this was a bad photo from a metering and composition perspective. Specifically: I still had that bright spot on the carpet to deal with and it's tough to brighten up the entire photo without blowing that carpet spot out. The pic is a little washed out in total, but you can still get the idea. Someone way more skilled in LR than I (I literally just started using it) could do way better, I bet.
10-09-2014, 12:46 PM
I need a better camera. Is it just me?
that's a nice point-n-shoot. Great pics.
