New Bandit pics

[solman]

A friend of mine got together with me and got some sunset shots.

[Vidrazor]

Nice. Your camera's auto white balance is killing the sunset effect, tho...

[solman]

Nice. Your camera's auto white balance is killing the sunset effect, tho...

Not sure I understand...

[Vidrazor]

You said SUNSET...



 

[solman]

Still don't understand what you are talking about.  Whatever you did to edit it doesn't look right to me.  It looks too orange on my screen.

[SteelD]

Good shot but there's nothing wrong with the colour balance. What was needed was a better exposure for the sky to capture that sunset glow. Either use a grey grad filter in front of the lens or expose for the sky and use flash to light the bikes. You should, then, get something like this:



BTW, a lower viewpoint with a wider-angle lens to make the bikes look large in the frame is also a good technique.

[solman]

I know what you are talking about, but I don't have a SLR camera, so I am still limited. 

[ippo]

I used GIMP.

[PitterB4]

Cool shots!  I have never been a huge fan of that paint scheme (no offense intended to Jay and others!) but I LOVE it on the nakeds.  Sharp lookin' bikes!

[Vidrazor]

Yes, I exaggerated the color, but it was merely to illustrate what I was trying to say. If you may remember from school science class, what is known as "white light" actually consists of all the colors of the spectrum that we can see. At sunset, what is known as the the higher frequency colors, greens, blues and purples, are filtered out of the sunlight.

A digital camera's "auto white balance" will compensate for this (to a certain degree), as it's striving to give you "white whites", gray grays", etc. In other words, a neutral color balance. Normally this is what you want, but in a sunset setting you COULD opt for the warm color of the filtered light of that time of the day in your photos.

One way to accomplish this with simple digital camera is to manually set the white balance to a fixed setting, in this case "daylight", usually indicated by a sun symbol. This setting is optimized for midday sun where there is a balanced distribution of the colors in the sun's "white light". Using this setting at sunset will create the warm, late sun colors of that time of day.

If you are curious to try this sometime, don't forget to set the white balance back to "auto" when you're done so you get balanced color shots in your normal shooting.

But anyway, nice pics. 

[Russtang]

Great looking paint scheme Solman!  Love the new look.

Just to expand a little on the whole exposure subject...I've been messing around with something called "high dynamic range" (HDR) imaging lately. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging 

What basically happens is you take a bunch of pictures at different exposure settings, and use a computer program to stitch them all together.  The best parts of each picture are used for the final image.  The effect can be pretty cool.

Here is a pic I took from my last hunting trip.  It's a series of 5 shots I took of the same subject.  It is seriously overexposed.  Notice the bright areas (the sky) are washed out, but at the same time, shadow details (the rock area) are captured.



Here's the last pic of the group.  It's underexposed, so the rock details are pretty dark, but the sky detail (and the mountain in the background) is captured.



Using a program called photomatix, I imported all 5 pics and created this final one.  I tweaked some of the settings to make the colors more vibrant (less natural), but I think it came out pretty neat.



My camera has an "automatic bracket" setting that takes an underexposed, a regular, and an overexposed shot when you press the button.  It also has a manual exposure capability that lets you take 2 above and 2 below normal exposure shots.  Might want to try it out, if your camera supports it.  I'd never touched the manual controls on the camera before a couple of months ago.  It's been pretty fun playing around with the technique.  :)

Russ

[solman]

I got a better angle and did it a bit earlier this time.  The first group was a bit of experimenting with light and location.  I knew that they could be better and I believe that we just got out there a bit late.  This one came out better this round.

[Vidrazor]

>>I got a better angle and did it a bit earlier this time.<<

Nice! That's more what I was referring to. Another nice effect is if you set your camera to underexpose a bit (usually there's a +/- setting somewhere), you can get some more saturated color, something like this:



The bike's looking great. 

[solman]

I did saturate the color more, but it didn't look right on my computer screen.  I just took the picture a bit earlier and from a different angle.