A pot of gold In honor of St. Patrick's Day and the ATF.

SD8A1411-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

SD8A1424-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

SD8A1413-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Those look like the Nikon P223 mounts.

In my opinion, and from a technical standpoint, the best work I've seen in this thread in a while.

Incredible!

Thanks man. Appreciate that

I'll have more of it this weekend. Still wiping up the oil that was shipped on it. Thanks.

Those are amazing Sully!

First few pics using DSLR... Ever. Cross posted from the MK12 forum.

Thanks man. You will become addicted. First advice I can give is to learn lighting. Whether it's natural or studio, learn it and take advantage of it.

Mags-1188-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

SD8A1523-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

holy shit...

Amazing pictures, Dsully.

Thanks guys

What did you have for breakfast?

breakfast-1235.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Well…this is the best I could muster with my mediocre camera…

Heckler & Koch USP & Axis 14175 with "Backup" (fade) by Staufhammer, on Flickr


Heckler & Koch USP & Axis 14175 with "Backup" by Staufhammer, on Flickr

Which one is better? I kind of like the faded one because it covers up some of the flaws I should have fixed by adjusting/adding/fixing my lighting, but this was from a 5 minute shoot the night I brought the USP home.

SD8A1668-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Pretty pieces there.  I'm fond of the USP pistols

Dat PPQ.

Would you mind telling me about this case?

Case Cruzer's Magnum 6 Pack Shooting Range Handgun case http://www.casecruzer.com/gun-cases/shooting-range/magnum-handgun-6.html

SD8A1058-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Need more info on carrier, pics and stuff. Thanks

Need a quick opinion from you guys;


Spike's Tactical Stripped Lower Receiver by Staufhammer, on Flickr


Taurus TCP PT738 by Staufhammer, on Flickr

Are those really, really dark?  On my MacBook Air (where I edit my photos), they look great, as they do on my phone, a friend's tablet, and another friend's iPad. But on my desktop PC the lower receiver shot is almost completely black.. I'm wondering if they look that dark to everyone and I need to re-edit them, or if it's just my PC being special.


This isn't firearm related but I really liked how this one turned out:


Kershaw Cryo II Blackwash by Staufhammer, on Flickr

iPhone 5s here, and yes the receiver picture is almost black.  The one of the Taurus (lol) looks fine to me; yeah it's a darkish photo but I think it's to good effect.

Yes they are dark. I would recommend buying a color calibrator. The Colormunki Display by X-rated is a good value.

Yikes; thanks for the heads up. I'll have to revisit tonight and try to fix it.

And yes, lol @ the Taurus.  That was one of the photos I took to sell it.


Someday. It's on the 'wish list'.   I'm currently unemployed though, so $170? No way, unfortunately.

EDIT: Fixed it? Ish? I hope?

Looks much better on my PC at least.  


Spike's Tactical Stripped Lower Receiver by Staufhammer, on Flickr


Now I need to redo the Taurus pic and fix the blue WB and brighten it a bit.

Still under exposed.  Are you familiar with reading a histogram?  I'm assuming you aren't taking the pictures with a camera phone but I could be wrong

The histogram is a little left-heavy, but it's a black receiver on a black background; IMO that's where it should be, no?  I don't want the black receiver to be bright or grey/silver, that would look strange/wrong.

I have a grayscale gradient chart, sort of like this, but with more steps and all the way to pure white, at the top left of my Lightroom bar. With the screen adjusted so that all steps clearly visible/distinguishable, the photo looks natural/correct on my display (2010 MacBook Air 13" if that matters? Are these notoriously bright/wrong? My brightness is only 1/2 way up.):


If I brighten the image and shift the histogram to the right, it looks unnatural/fake/wrong/etc.  Here is a quick edit (curve, highlights, and exposure) to have the histogram more centered... Maybe it's my monitor(s), but it looks far too bright IMO? Opinion(s)?


On my MacBook, this version looks pretty much horrible.  On my PC, despite the monitor brightness being at 100, it doesn't look quite as bright/bad, but it's missing the shadows that I thought made the other version 'interesting', and now just looks like an HDR snapshot.  If my screen is really that out-of-whack, I'd really like to know so I can stop producing horrible pictures.



I know I'm no pro, but I'm a little insulted by that.

What is so wrong with the photos that warrants that comment?

No no please don't take that as an insult. I see a lot of outstanding pictures taken with a camera phone. I don't assume it's one or the other anymore because sometimes I can't tell the difference.

As for the histogram, your adjusted picture actually looks better. Not sure what program you are using but you can use blacks and shadows to compensate a bit to tweet it to your liking. I'm viewing your pictures on a Macbook pro and iPhone 6.

Again, please don't take what I said as an insult. I just said something because if you look at pictures I took a year ago, I always leaned toward the darker pictures. It wasn't until I just trusted the histogram to really get the exposure correct. I actually shoot a couple stops higher because I'd rather push the exposure down then up to keep the most detail as possible with less noise.

Sorry bro, that took a wrong turn

Here's a picture I obviously took with my camera phone. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether that was taken with a phone or the camera besides the fact that the camera is in the picture.

I guess I jumped to (the wrong) conclusions; my apologies!



See now I'm very worried. If I adjust my monitor so that that latest picture looks 'right' to my eyes, the rest of my Flickr looks like a poorly lit blob! So now I can't tell if I've been ruining my pictures all along because of the screen differences, or if I'm just going crazy and wanting this picture to be too dark.  Is there any way to 'rent' a screen calibration device?

I'm using LR5; just recently had the chance to upgrade from 3 that I've been using for a couple of years, so I'm not completely used to the new (to me) whites/black/shadows/highlights sliders yet versus the old way, but if I mess too much with Blacks, it ruins the 'pure black' of the mirror/background (though I guess I could just go back over it with a brush to fix it again), and if I run the Shadows up any more, it starts to look like an HDR, and I wanted to keep certain parts of it in shadow, and the whole thing to still look like a black piece of metal.



I took this particular photo a while ago (beginning of Feb?), but part of my inspiration when editing this photo last night was actually to try to get the sort of tonality out of it that you have in these images:


SD8A1424-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

SD8A1413-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

SD8A1411-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Now, I realize I did a poor job, and granted, the last one isn't black-on-black, but they're all so smooth, and in the top two, they aren't overly dark, but the blacks still look black! Unlike some others, like my latest edit (on my screen at least). I still can't figure out how you get them so smooth looking (I've tried  -clarity, -sharpness, and +noise-reduction brushes in various combinations over the 'flat' portions of the parts, haha, and still can't get near that nice of a look from any of mine), but I guess I should revisit the photo paying more attention to the histogram while still trying to preserve a true-black look, and also pay more attention to the histogram in future shots, and less to the photo on the screen.

Also, now that you mention the technique of purposely exposing to the right to avoid noise; I reverted back to the original imported image to check and the histogram was pretty poor straight out of camera; very compressed and to the left. I didn't even notice when I was taking the picture because my display is set so high on the camera since the last time I used it before that shoot was outside in bright sunlight, and I was in a hurry, but that could be part of why I can't seem to get a smooth look, since I'm trying to really stretch out a full image worth of detail from a tiny compressed original histogram.  Dammit.



No worries. I'm just too sensitive/defensive, I guess, haha.


Nice gear!

Better? Worse? I basically started completely over (minus dust removal), and tried to edit it on my screen turned way down while keeping an eye on the histogram.


Spike's Tactical Stripped Lower Receiver by Staufhammer, on Flickr

I don't even like this picture anymore, ha.

And so no one kicks me out for having the same crappy picture over and over again, here's a new one.  Please let me know if this is also underexposed??  I had edited this one a few days ago, but given the recent discussion I brought it up a bit brighter than it originally was. Histogram already looked pretty good (since it's not black-on-black), but we'll see.


USP & AR-15 Field Strip and Cleaning by Staufhammer, on Flickr

P4R4d0x I sent you a PM

Mags-1157-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Mags-1166-Edit.jpg by clicksully, on Flickr

Solid picture BBTrading

Thank you, Sir

Here's a shot from my range trip the other day.

Remington 700 SPS AAC-SD
Vortex Viper PST 6-24x50 FFP

Operate? by clicksully, on Flickr

Not sure which Thread to put this in so both.  Haha

Rapidly approaching Duke Nukem.

Haha

"It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all outta gum!"

I wish I could take pictures like some of you guys, but here's a couple of my attempts.