Dang, you even got the plane in there!
This past weekend at Magfest I got to play with Canon’s 28 - 70mm F/2 lens. It is huge and heavy! But so cool… but huge and heavy (apparently over 3 pounds)! My feet were hurting so much at the end of the day and I always wondered how much that lens could have contributed to that. It’s hard to say because I usually have a few lenses in my backpack whereas with this lens I only had to carry the one lens, so I feel like the weight difference should have evened out. Unless having all that weight centered on a single lens on the camera that’s slinging on my shoulder makes a big difference.
It was instructive in a lot of ways. I’m so used to using zoom lenses with built-in image stabilization or really small primes that I’m only just now noticing, while reviewing pictures after the event, how much blurring there is on my photos taken at under 1/100. I need to be way more concerted in holding the camera steady. The wide aperture and slower shutter speeds were great at picking up the dim environment of the night time convention center, but so many of my pictures have blurred out the subject more than I’d like. Sharpening isn’t really going save them enough.
It was nice being able to rely on a single lens for both daytime and nighttime, crowded and sparse areas, indoor and outdoor. Before, it was a real challenge having to constantly switch between two or three lenses in the middle of the convention floor, so I ended up having to forgo certain types of shots for half a day and just stick to a single lens for the sake of convenience. But with this 28-70mm f/2, I could treat it as three primes in one- 35mm f/2, 50mm f/2, and 70mm f/2 (70mm isn’t quite as good a zoom as a 24 - 105mm, but it helped a decent amount). It was nice being able to try each of those focal lengths back to back on a single subject and get something decent out of them, but also be able to see how different those focal lengths looked. Like, now I know not to use the high end of the zoom on someone who poses in a such a way that it thins their body line out, because boy did they get flattened in an unflattering manner.
But dang, it is so heavy. You can’t move nimbly, you can just shoot quick spur of the moment shots. Lifting the barrel, rotating it to the desired focal length, and putting it back down to your side afterwards is not a simple mindless task. Taking vertical shots is a little awkward due to how big it is. I still don’t know if it’s worth pursuing or if sticking with a regular 24 - 70 f/2.8 would be a better goal, despite its smaller aperture (and having bad experiences with it in the past, but it might have just been the specific lens I was renting each time).
Personal details that I thought about deleting but decided maybe I can just hide it in a details box instead of wasting all that time:
Summary
I got home and had like 830 photos to filter through, whittled them down to around ~215 acceptable ones, and maybe two or three that I actually feel came out pretty decently. I never expected to get this mindset, but after taking hall shots at conventions for so long I feel like I am getting the itch to do something more creative; where I have some creative control and can actually make considered composition and lighting choices. I enjoy taking pictures at cons, but it’s apparent how limiting that practice is in giving me room to try new things and grow. I think I might have to do the unthinkable and look into practicing actual photography.
Anyway, a few people asked me to take photos of them at an upcoming convention as photoshoots on location, so I guess I need to learn actual portrait photography fast. It’s been difficult trying to figure out how to effectively practice that on my own though.
I guess these are a few shots that I think came out relatively okay, but I feel like want to be able to take pictures that tell an actual story rather than just these quick 10-second shots in the middle of a crowded convention center floor. So they all feel a too similar, too disposable. I also forgot David Lynch’s wise words on the horizon, but I’m also not sure how to integrate that advice into a convention center hall shot.
I think I want to process this one a bit more to dim the image, to accentuate the lighting from her lamp.
A test shot from a photography lighting workshop held at the con. I've never used anything other than on-camera flash so it was good exposure to actual lighting setups.
Managed to actual utilize the lighting from a nearby ornamented tree (like what's seen in the background) to light up the subject's face, rather than using an on camera flash and getting flat lighting. This was actually a really dim night time environment and I brought up the exposure in post to compensate, but I'd like to experiment a bit more to see what I could get naturally from that environment.
In retrospect I really needed to just have the subject here turn her body towards the light, but I instead took the first picture, noticed how dim she was coming out, and then turned on my on-camera flash. I think I must have stopped the flash down though, but somehow the resulting image still preserved at least some of the contrast between the bright light and her flash. I could not figure out how to make my flash strength even lower than this though, which made me constantly light up subjects way may than I wanted to.
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omg that Spike and Jet are so good
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I know, right? Apparently they were a father and son pair. Cowboy Bebop is an evergreen show.
You know what else is evergreen? There were at minimum two Bible Black cosplayers there.
There was also someone else who also looked pretty young cosplaying another old hentai anime called Euphoria. I guess that stuff is still memed around kids circles, or the modern h-anime industry is just in that bad a position that they don’t care about anything newer.
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;_;
the euphoria thing could be related to the vn. seen the title mentioned a couple times when people talk about fucked up vn’s, so i assume it has a little bit of fame/notoriety in these scenes
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it is!
thinking about getting a used aps-c dslr under $400, first real camera. thinking pentax for the price and weather sealing , or sony cuz gf has a sony a200 and we could share lenses. but some friends are trying to sell me on a canon rebel
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I had a Canon Rebel T3 back in the day as my first prosumer camera (that’s the term, right?), and I haven’t used another brand so I can’t directly compare. But every time I see a Sony camera it looks really nice and slick.
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This seems like a good reason to go with Sony.
You can also use old Minolta lenses, which gives you a good way to build up a good lenses collection at affordable prices.
I’m a big Sony fan. I shoot their mirrorless cameras.
Mirrorless is better if you shoot manual focus like I do because it really opens up what systems you can adapt. DSLR might make more sense if you’re using autofocus.
I shot this with a Sony aps-c camera
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I can vouch for Pentax. I’ve been working with a Pentax K-5 for a long time, never really lets me down
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At this budget have you considered going full-frame?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/802869409-USE/canon_0296b002_eos_5d_digital_camera.html
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/802788722-USE/nikon_25488_d600_dslr_camera_body.html
A nice thing about cameras is that all the main brands are good.
Sony
Canon
Nikon
Pentax
they won’t steer you wrong.
Before I went digital I used to shoot a Pentax k1000.
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Same, my first “real” camera after years of shooting point-and-shoot film cameras, disposable cameras and a brief period of playing around with a Polaroid
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i had a canon rebel for a few years that i liked a lot and i always shot it in manual mode which i think taught me how to shoot a film slr later
even the rebel cameras can take amazing stills and i think the video is beautiful too… i think these are some of the cheapest cameras that can take video that feels “cinematic” personally
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My friend/lover asked me to do a nude modeling shoot for her. She felt it would be empowering.
I was asked to relay this message as a part of the series by her:
Be proud of your body y’all
My first time ever doing serious modeling work, let alone nude. I think either I underestimated how much shooting at a high ISO in shitty lighting affects your photo, or the sensor in my camera is degrading really badly. I had to do quite some heavy touching up to reduce the graininess, and it still feels a bit off… but I think I got some good ones, and it’s what I could accomplish given the environment. Maybe it’s time to buy a new camera body…
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It’s got a neat retro feel (is that the term people use) to the aesthetic thanks to the graininess, blurring of fine details, and desaturated colors. I like it.
I’ve messed around with the AI denoiser in Lightroom recently and that thing can do some real wizardry to save both noisy photos and also extreme crops of images that have a lot of noise at those zoom levels. It’s still a bit of an art, though, to figure out how much grain to preserve to keep some texture (at least for me- I like some grain). It the AI denoiser takes a long time to work though, so I can’t easily just try different options and see what I like best.
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I did see the new AI de-noiser feature, but I figured it was still using the same sliders that I would be, and so I could just push them back and forth until I got what I like. Maybe I underestimate how much more “on point” it can achieve results than my human hands though.
Nah, I think it’s a completely different methodology that can do a lot better at preserving details than the regular slider can. At least through my experiments that seems to be the case. I never really thoroughly learned how to use the noise reduction sliders effectively though. Here’s an example from a pretty noisy photo I took at Magfest. ISO 6400, 50mm, f/5.6. I think I ran the AI de-noiser at too high a level and it made the picture too clean, but it’s a good example of what it can do (and also the perils if you prefer to save some grain).
Another photo here, which was also really noisy. ISO 6400, 70mm, f/5.6.
If you’re image is lacking a lot of fine detail due to really excessive noise, the AI denoiser will still output a fairly blurry image though. I’m still curious what about the image makes her hair looks so grainy and “dotty” in general though. Not sure if it’s just the texture of whatever material the hair is made out reflecting my flash, or if it’s something about my photo.
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