Heyo - noobie here Options

[Cleck]

Hey guys, my name's Matt and I drive a 91 Toyota MR2 Turbo. It's a fun project car that I use in the summer for autox, drag and track racing and just to have as a second ride when I don't feel like driving my Grand Am winter beater, haha.

I got pointed to this site by another photo guru on my MR2 forum and I could use some tips and direction w/my photography skills. He told us to check this place out and see what we can learn.

I got a D40 when Circuit City went out of business this year for like $350 for the total kit w/18-55mm lens. Since then I've been just shooting shooting shooting pics so I can get better. Along w/my camera I've got a crappy tripod that wobbles sometimes, a wireless remote and a circular polarizing lens - still learning that bit. I do pp with Adobe Camera RAW and Photoshop CS2.

Here's some I've taken myself recently (I like night shots), I don't even think I can bother showing my previous attempts, as they were pretty sucky.

Opinions and suggestions/constructive crits welcome

My car:


A friend's car from the same night:

[moe]

Welcome to DS Matt. That's a nice car, I've always been a fan of that shape MR2. No images in sigs btw...enjoy your stay.

[Cleck]

Hey, yeah I love this car it's so much fun and it looks awesome. It's currently getting a lot of work done as I go along with it, namely body work and paint. I'll also be doing the suspension and maybe tuning this winter, we'll see.

Why no images in sigs? It was just such a habit for me to put that in there, I basically copied my sig from other forums.

[clarkma5]

We like to keep the forums looking clean so we restrict sigs to text only, and short text at that. It's one of our few hard-and-fast rules. The rest are available here http://forums.dieselstation.com/index.php?showtopic=893 while the finer points come from experience, I suppose.

Anyway, welcome to the forum. I like your MR2 but I must admit I've been more of a AW11 fan than an SW20 fan over the years. As for photography skills, our photography forum is full of some of the best automotive photographers from around the world and is an amazing resource, but it's also a very separate entity from the rest of the forum.

[UserDrew]

I dunno anything about photography other than pointing and clicking. But I do like the location in the first image. I think you may want to pop that photo into photoshop and try to doctor out the dirt on the bottom of the fender behind the wheel and perhaps doing something about the power lines either make them more pronounced or taking them out all together. They seem out of focus and distract from the subject you are shooting. I can't help you with photoshop because I've never bothered (yet) to familiarize myself with it.


Oh, yeah! Welcome to DS.

[Razor]

Cyclone will love you and hate you for that MR2.

[Cleck]

lol thanks guys. Yeah I actually went out that night not expecting to shoot my car, hence the dirty. There's more pics from that shoot, I'll just have to find the link and post it up...

The MR2 needs work. Previous owners gradually crapped it out. I'm getting the body work done to restore most of the stock look, with the exception of the side skirts I'm keeping. The front bumper is also very crappy, I'll prolly replace it with something different, subtle, but different this winter. Right now the rear of it is sprayed in flat/matte black, and the car will get that coat as we do repairs, then the whole car will get a respray in it.

Here's my flickr from the last shoot I did. Screw it. Here's just my whole photostream for now. Last shoot I did was while autocrossing, so I was working on panning: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleck/