Help with still gallery

I have no idea if I have support for flash, I am using Dreamweaver CS3... btw, that looks great, something like that would be perfect.
 
I've never been a big fan of pictures with out of focus trash cans in the background ;)

If you're going to push yourself as a photoshopper, you should really pump those images to 11. Right now they look a little gritty and flat. Are you shooting with a dSLR?
 
I am shooting with my personal P&S a Canon A630 which makes it a PITA to set shutter ISO etc and a complete royal PITA to focus. That is my current 11... but I am getting better every week. I am not planning to push myself as a Photoshoper for big jobs just hoping to score some Zed Cards and Headshots... I am slowly putting this page together so that once I get to shoot some people I can have the page ready to go up.

I see what you are saying though... I might want to have a few pictures that just SCREAM photoshop...

I agree that many of these look flat... I just started trying to mess around by setting exposure for each "segment" of the image to bring out contrast... I thought I did an OK job on the picture of the duck in Central Park... but sometimes I just dunno... any pointers on how to get them not to look flat? Am I on the right track based on what I just said?

What do you mean by gritty? Do you mean noisy? Like the picture of the moon? I really need to replace that one I think...

BTW I obviously plan to rent an SLR for jobs.
 
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Take my comments with a grain of salt, as I am a very amateur photographer myself. I meant to make this much shorter but a lot of ideas kept getting added on:

Get some photos of people up there. They are by far nature's most challenging subject.

Your pictures look like they were taken with a point and shoot, and that's what first stood out to me. The grittyness is part of that, and a SLR would give you a cleaner image. Even in shots like the ladybug the image looks really grainy considering it's probably downrezzed quite a bit. You'll also get more control over depth of field and greater latitude which will help your shots look much more professional.

I have taken a few shots I took with an a540 that I really like, but every time I see them I wish I had used something else. That series of camera is simply not designed to get professional-looking results. When I have to clean up my shots from that camera, I usually use modest noise reduction, smart sharpening, and bump up saturation about 10 points. I also shoot with manual aperture so I can keep it wide open (which is still only a 5-something on the long end of the lens). My camera always seems to tend blue but yours looks to be about right with white balance.

Photoshop could help when the exposure, color, or zones aren't quite right, but I think the biggest weak spot of the pictures is composition right now. Many subjects seem unnaturally low in the frame or too far from a rule-of-thirds intersection. E.g. the duck, the flag, the white house. The ladybug seems too small to be really impressive. With a SLR you can use DOF to reinforce the composition and help the eye find its first place to land.

If you don't want to rent to build up a portfolio, maybe you can borrow a 35mm SLR. It cost me about $200 to get a K1000 and some nice lenses, and it can outperform a $1200 dSLR. The economy of scale doesn't kick in until you take thousands of pictures.
 
I couldn't agree with you more... but since I don't have money coming in I don't want to spend the money to rent for that... this is just a little side project that I hope will justify getting myself a D90 and make me some extra cash.

Composition is KILLING ME... I like centering things too much... :( the duck was framed for the buildings and I can't shoot whenever I want cause the darn thing won't shoot whenever I want half the time... so it was very hard to get the duck where I wanted him which was about a foot to the right. The water had too much detail for me to think about messing with it. For the building I really liked how the flag felt more powerful in the middle, which is what usually makes me frame centered...

I hope I can get something together soon... I am shooting people soon too but I wanted to get some practice before I did that.

I hardly ever center motion... I never go there, only for very specific shots I guess... but I also guess I still have very bad habits for stills, maybe developed while I was still doing accounting a long long time ago? hahaha... maybe if I hold the still camera like I am filming it will go away :)
 
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