pie eating contest

From my recent work picnic. After some feedback on what you guys think I'll reveal more about what I had to do with these in PP but want to gauge how well I may have done first.

http://www.metallic-raven.com/picnic1.jpg

http://www.metallic-raven.com/picnic2.jpg

Wow are they really that bad? Lol, figured someone would have commented by now.

The really big problem with that first shot is there are no faces!
I don't know how to solve that completely, because the pies are set well back on the table.
But I think it would be better shot from lower down.

Then there's the cut off feet and table edge, and the elbow close to the edge, and the slight right to left slope - all minor things, just watch around the edge of the viewfinder to see what's not in the picture :)

You probably had to recover quite a bit from the shadows, I'd have used a low power fill flash here on maybe -2 stops. But that assume you have a flash attached to the camera all the time.
It may have looked odd, but while I was at the last Indy race in Miami Homestead I had fill flash on all the time. Bright sunlight and a flash, I wasn't even shooting in shadows!

Thanks for the info about the flash. Yeah I realized after that I definitely should have been using that after as much "fill light" adjustment as I had to use to get the shadows fixed. Unfortunately the angles and my shooting position are something I had not much control over. As soon as it started there was about 10 other people crowding in.

For reference here's the original completely untouched raw to .jpg conversion just sized down. One thing I'm really interested in is whether the white balance looks ok. This was shot around 12pm but I based the white balance correction off of a white balance card that came with my CS3 for Digital Photographers book.

http://www.metallic-raven.com/picnic1_2.jpg

I felt that both photos would've benefited from tighter cropping, or a tighter original shot. The space around the subjects gives some context, but it doesn't add enough here to keep so much of it. For example, getting in a bit closer to the faces/upper body in #2 and eliminating the random elbow, table, and boxes would've been good.

Oh and the wb in your subsequent post (the untouched raw > jpg) looks too cool to me.

Thanks :) Yeah on wb I posted the second post to show the original, so the wb looks good on the two I originally posted right? I haven't gotten around to getting the spyder to calibrate my monitor yet and I think the colors are pretty decent right now on the monitor but would like it a lot better if it was calibrated. I figured it was the photos that were too cool right out of the camera and not my monitor but wasn't sure until you mentioned it.