Great shots Jason. One thing I like about the Nikon cameras is their color output. Seems much nicer than the canon's.

 

I wonder how much of that comes from the post processing? It seems that I tend to have less intense color saturation during my workflow because it looks more natural to me then...but then I see great pictures like William's and Jason's and then wonder why don't I do it too!

 

Nikon cameras have great color output especially when working with the RAW file. That in addition to the sharpness just blows me away every time. The lens I used that day, 105mm VR micro is easily one of their sharpest lens to date.

My goal when it comes to post processing is to make it look as natural as possible without being "overdone" which I often see elsewhere. I don't really do that much, just tweak the images to my tastes and do a few color corrections here and there.

 

BTW, sorry to have missed you guys last weekend. Heard that the weather was great and a lot was happening here. I was at Laguna Seca Raceway for the season ending ALMS races, and very busy learning about tires amongst other things...


Will try and post better pictures later. It was a great event!

 

Jason, are you linking through flicker or other or directly embedding the images here?
Do you see much degradation from Flicker or this site when the images are compressed.
I like the color balance on Nikons, especially when discussing reds, which are usually over saturated in a bad way on some other brand cameras.

 

Vic,

Yes, I'm using Flickr to host my pictures. I tried a bunch of other sites and ended up liking Flickr the best even if they had a few quirks I'm not too crazy about. Their image quality is well worth it though.

You're right about the "red" issue. Canon especially has a hard time capturing "red" accurately. Nikon however tends to be more on the blue side which I think is not as bad.

 

Really great shots Jason and James. You guys get better and better all the time. I love seeing your stuff.

 

Prime lenses tend to be a lot sharper than most zoom lenses anyway. I've got a 100 Macro as well and it rocks.

What are you using to process your images. I use Lightroom 2.5 to import and do any lighting and balance issues, then into CS3 for any final sizing and touch ups. One thing I don't like with LR though is that it loads presets for the images when you pull it up to adjust it. It'd rather start with just the raw file and go from there. Not what LR things the JPEG should look like.

 

You're right, prime lenses do tend to be sharper but there are still some exceptional zoom lenses out there such as my f/2.8 24-70. I use it most of the time.

I've avoided using Lightroom exactly for the reason you stated, I don't like the presets. I process everything individually in Photoshop CS4. I find that yields the greatest degree of control for my needs.

 

I'm really struggling to get my workflow down with Lightroom. Part of it is that I love "crunchy" images so you can really go too far with Lightroom very quickly. I may switch to just using Lightroom to fix any exposure issues and then pop into CS3 with the Totally Rad action sets and go from there.

 

It's an Ultima GTR. I've convinced my brother to help me build one in 5 or 10 years. :-)

http://www.ultimasports.co.uk/Default.aspx

 

Thanks for the link. I like how you can buy it in stages and build it over time. I'd like to ask the owner a few questions if anyone can get him on the board.....