Sunday Photographs

Warning: Long post.
It was pretty quiet today, and I decided to take Apollo on a jaunt around my neighborhood. I'm not happy with these photographs. But the later ones I took of Apollo make me smile, so let's start with these first.

Because my little sofa is more or less on its last legs, I've been letting Apollo get up on it. He made himself very comfortable today.

(I was fiddling with the white balance in this last picture.
That's why it's got a weird pinkish pepto-bismol tint going on).

And now, the bad...I always critique my own pictures. I'm pretty hard on myself because I know I need to improve if I want to compete with the pros. Here's some thoughts I have, looking at these.

This isn't horrible, overall, but the angle of the sign isn't quite right-on, so it gives me the feeling that the overall picture is askew, even though the pole is almost perfectly straight. That said, it's not a very interesting picture. The wires draw your eyes away from the sign.
This is a little better...The wires and the pole draw your eyes to the sign. But still not very interesting.
I like the "wideness" of this picture, but the second horizon (the treetops) is cut off. It's a poorly framed picture.
Here, I was trying to capture the 2nd horizon (the first is where the road "ends"). Lost some wideness in the picture by making this a vertical picture. I think this is worse than the above, because the other details distract you from the road. In hindsight, I should've shot as close to the road as possible, and eliminated the sky altogether.

Someone in my neighborhood has a few awesome classic cars that he leaves parked out on the street. This is a Chevrolet, I think. Not sure of the make - I'm not familar with early models.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get a decent shot of this one...Foreground is distracting with the shadows. The background is distracting with the houses and trees. I cropped what I could. This first one is a bit truer to colors (see the white exterior of the right house? - compare it to the second one...the second has a greenish tint).
But this second one is slightly better because it's not so dark. You can see some features in the shadows, like the grille. I'm splitting hair though...These two are nearly identical pictures.

What would I do to fix this? I'd come back at a time when the shadows wasn't hanging over this car, and shoot a couple feet closer - then the background would be a bit more blurred, using some field of depth trickery.

One more picture!

This is an awesome looking truck though. I remember riding in the back of my neighbor's pickup truck that looked a bit like this - but was yellow-ish. Anyway...Again, we run into the problem of distracting backgrounds. I'm baffled at how to fix this other than using field-of-depth to my advantage to blur the background a little. The light is not horrible - a tad overexposed.