Parking lot car photography...get close.

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com

  Hi Pentaxian friends.

Every Thursday during the summer, local car enthusiasts gather at the parking lot of the FarmerBoys restaurant. It's a very crowded area, having the Best Buy store sharing the same parking area. It's practically impossible to capture an entire car without having a disturbing background. So my solution was to get very close and only photograph portion of cars. I used my Pentax K-5 and the Pentax DA 15mm limited. That way, I was able to get really close to the cars, while capturing as large of a portion as possible, without "fish-eye" results.

It worked okay, you can still recognize the cars and there absolutely no people or annoying buildings in the images.

Of course, I like to over-saturize this kind of pictures. I didn't use the HDR approach. I just pushed the saturation, clarity, vibrance, and luminance sliders, within Lightroom 3,  almost all the way to the right.

There are really no rules in photography, except maybe in photo-journalistic images.

Thanks for reading and visiting,

Yvon Bourque

Today's photographs tend to be a little over saturated...but most people see that as clearer photographs.

 Email: brqyvn@gmail.com

Hi Pentaxian friends.

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems that photographs are, more often than not, over saturated these days. It is so much that way that camera makers over saturate their JPEG images right out of the camera.  To top it off, reviewers praise manufacturers for doing so and condemn the brands that produces natural looking images, calling them soft. I think they confuse natural looking images with soft looking images. If you read this, you likely use Pentax equipment which has always been accused of producing soft images in JPEG mode out of the camera. (We, Pentax users, all know that the saturation and clarity and numerous other presets are left for us to change... to our taste.)

Who am I to make judgment on what the general public like or perceive as being a great image or clear image? I look at images on various forums and some of the pictures are so over saturated that they look like someone poured varnish over them. I find myself doing the same at time. Images should look like our human eyes see them. If the real world would look like some images posted on various sites, we would have to wear shades all the time.



As captured by the camera



Over saturated

Under saturated

As captured by the camera

Over saturated

Under saturated

That said, if over saturation is viewed as an artistic expression, maybe you should try under saturation for a different artistic expression.  The images herein were taken with  Pentax cameras and each set has an image as produced by the camera, one over saturated and one under saturated. All images are good images in my opinion, they just convey different feelings. What do you think?

Best Regards,

Yvon Bourque