Photo cropping help

I drove my car to a park yesterday and ended up in front of this tree before heading home.  Someone told me at sunset was the best time to take pics so I snapped some quick ones.  But I am not expert and I think some need cropped but I'm having a hard time getting the cropping where I think it would make a nice photo.  Can someone with a photographic eye help? 

First, this will be difficult because you were holding the phone wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA&feature=g-u-u

So the resolution will be greatly reduced. Next, which pic do you want cropped? Here's the one that I thought had the most potential:

Edit: I tried to correct a bit of apparent tilt in that pic, I may have made it worse...

Do you know about the Rule Of Thirds?

Imagine drawing a tic-tac-toe board on each of those pictures.  That divides the picture in thirds in both X and Y axes.  The basic idea is that you want to crop the picture with standout elements along those lines, or focal points at the intersections.  That tends to avoid the static "main object is centered in the frame" look, and gives some dynamism to the image.

You've got it about right in this image - the car itself hits the lower right focal point:

In this case, it would probably work better cropped down to a square, starting from the bottom.

I learned something by the video link...  That oughta tell you what I know about taking photos. 

Like this:

Note that the left headlight is centered right at one of those nexus points.  Also, the RF corner of the car ends just about on the left third line, and the headlights pretty much lie along the bottom third line.  The canopy foliage rests nicely on the upper third line.

It's not the Absolute Truth of image composition, but it's a great rule of thumb to start with.

Here ya go:

just eyeball it till it looks right

In reply to Dr. Hess :

Beat me to it! 

In reply to Dr. Hess :

Feel free to use this one for craigslist:

You forgot to put your finger in the CL picture.

It's covering up the expensively damaged right fender, just off camera.

A couple other random thoughts on car photo composition:  cars have a front and a back, and are usually seen moving forwards.  Generally they look better if the photo is composed to put space in front of the car for it to visually "drive into".  Cars also usually look better if you get down to their level, hold the camera roughly level with the top of the hoodline, rather than just up at eye level.  This often requires kneeling to shoot.  Unless you're trying for a specific effect, it's also almost always better to have the camera level. :)

Finally, and this is difficult if you're just using a camera phone, IMHO cars really benefit from the perspective shift of using a longer lens.  Cell phones usually have a fixed focal length which ranges from standard to moderately wide depending on the phone.  30-ish to 50 mm focal lengths in "full frame" 35mm terms.  I find that I usually want a focal length of at least 100mm if I'm doing a full car shot -- the longer the better, but 100mm is my rule of thumb for minimum. 

A quick edit on the first photo, this is just a crop and a little straightening to bring the car more level.  I'd prefer to tilt it a bit more, but there isn't enough space on the right side to do that without cutting off the trunk.

Other composition rules:  look behind the subject at the background.  Try to line things up so that you don't have a tree sprouting out of someone's head (or out of the targa roof, like this shot has).  Shoot the image slightly wider than you want, modern cameras have tons of pixels so you can afford to crop the edges off in processing, but it's hard to put them back if you didn't shoot them in the first place. :)

Don't be afraid of radical or unconventional crops. Here's a couple quick ones (with a few other adjustments as well). They're slightly over-sharpened, but with the low res originals it was a trade-off between that and losing some useful small detail lines.

While "golden hour" shooting can be rewarding, note that with a bright yellow car, the very warm light is going to reduce the color contrast between the car and the surroundings, which may make things look muddy. This is particularly true with cell phone cameras, which tend to boost saturation; I dialed it back in the edits above.

So how do I make the car look as bright as it normally does? 

It's not bad, but you have a ton of light on the left side with the rest essentially in shade.  I might have moved the car around a bit, it would have helped with the color.   Keep in mind that light is everything in a pic, and different times of day the color of the light is different.  And in different color light, the color of your car will be different.  you can change it in photoshop, but I like the sunset effect, it warms everything.  

I cropped it slightly and bumped the contrast and tone a bit also.

Thanks racerdave,

I should have been clearer, the next time I try taking pics, when would be the opportune time to take pictures of a bright yellow car.  For example, I have one from the middle of the day at the beech l’ll try and post if I can find it. 

So it turns out that converting the signals received from the imaging sensor into a jpeg is not a straightforward process.  The raw data by itself isn't suitable and a number of decisions need to be made about what data to keep, what data to throw away, and how to tweak the various light and color levels in order to render a JPEG out of the sensor data.  Cheap cameras do all of this processing when you press the shutter button, saving a jpeg to the flash memory.  Sometimes the decision process is fixed and unchangeable, sometimes they offer different "picture modes" to allow you to influence how it makes those decisions.

Higher-end cameras (not just SLRs, but some point-and-shoots and even some modern cell phone cameras) also feature a "RAW" mode.  In RAW mode, the image data is saved in a different file format , essentially without having made any of those decisions.  The RAW file takes up more space and isn't directly displayable, but it enables the photographer to make those decisions later on his PC using photo editing software.

If your cell phone's camera supports a RAW mode (or if you have access to a different camera you can use that does), then you can combat the oversaturation of yellow in the image by turning down the saturation.  If that side of the car is "blown out", you can also turn down the exposure after the fact and still be able to recover detail that wouldn't have been visible after the JPEG was rendered.