Huh, that is interesting, yea. Gonna go back and see how the AI de-noiser compares to my sliders
Edit: That is actually noticeably, much better and closer to what I was seeing/want to be seen. Thanks! I think I’ll edit my original post to include these versions.
Anyone have any suggestions for good websites for looking for photographs, or photographers who you can follow? I’d like to be more media literate- I want to see and study new ideas and compositions, because I desparately need to expose myself to new things- but searching for anything on google is a nightmare of SEO-filth.
its dying but flickr is still great for this if you don’t mind digging through archives for inspiration rather than having a constant feed of new things. search for a place or thing or camera or lens or film, find a photo you like, look through that person’s photos, see who they follow, look through their favorites…so much stuff on there going back to 2004, it’s one of my favorite places on the internet
Yeah, I use flickr to store my own photos (does anywhere else let you upload uncompressed photos anymore?), but every time I’d do a regular search for anything all of the results are 5 - 10 years ago. But you’re right, that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth going through anymore. But man, there are a lot of Second Life screenshots there now for some reason.
Does searching for specific camera or lens actually work? I remember searching for a lens and the results weren’t great. Googling around it sounded like even a long time ago people had been relying on third party sites to filter through flickr results for specific cameras or lenses. Being able to search by specific settings would be great.
Flickr rules. Searching for groups with the name of a specific lens rules. People leaving the platform en masse for stuff like instagram doesn’t rule 
I’ve been thinking about photography a lot again lately.
I haven’t been shooting but maybe that’s next.
I’ve always found the best size/performance ratio shooting rangefinder glass on my A7. I have some very small lenses that perform very well and feel really good to use.
There is part of me that wonders what it would be like if I just ignored size and based everything on pure performance. I have some Mamiya glass which outperforms my smaller lenses but is hefty to lug around, still feels pretty good.
I find they have a painterly quality to them
I wonder if I’d shoot more or less if the quality was higher but the gear was heavier.
Maybe it’d be stupid at any price, because it would be too bulky. An A7 and a few rangefinder lenses are small and easy to travel with. It’ll be a few years before I have money or travel again, so it’s all hypothetical.
Recently I’ve gotten some photography books to help myself learn a bit more on how to think about photography and composition, but I’ve also been looking up youtube videos for ideas. Youtube is a hellhole. 90% of videos sound like get rich quick schemes with the One Right Idea to make your pictures Perfect, or the One Thing You Need to Know to make a lot of money with your pictures.
I think the only reliably channel I found are these livestreams done by Adorama, a camera store of all things, that have good demos from a studio in their shop covering many topics, from composition, to lighting, to just demonstrating the effects of different kinds of equipment. They have a casual and down to earth vibe to them, which is the opposite of all the other youtube videos which try to present themselves as the Single Most Important Piece of Information You Need to Be Successful.
I really like Photography Online’s youtube channel for their beginner photography tips. Overall they are heavily focused on landscape photography, and I guess the show is kinda just an ad to sell their workshops and events, but I still get a lot out of it.
These thumbnails are terrifying, but I’ll trust you on this!
Superb
Yeah, these seem pretty good. Feels like I was channel surfing and stumbled on an old-school Discovery type of channel.
I finally gave in and shipped my broken camera back to Canon to be repaired. My specific model has been discontinued and the rumor is there’s no next generation coming. Apparently, a lot of compact cameras are being discontinued because phone cameras have become better and more popular. My cheap phone camera is very bad and even if I had an expensive phone I don’t think the camera would do what I want it to.
I’d hesitated for a couple months because the repair estimate was quite expensive. But finding even a used replacement would have been a lot more.
Things turned out okay because they sent me a new camera with a new warranty, which arrived today. It even came with an additional battery (those are expensive) and charger (I left mine in a hotel room last summer and have been using a third-party one that’s not quite the same).
Here’s my first photo with the replacement camera, of one of my cats using the packing materials as a bed.
How can taking pictures be so exhausting?
Oh event photography is a real beating, it’s why I never pursued it as a profession
Photoshoots in the middle of a convention are hard. The venue was a resort hotel and convention center, so almost every wall of the place looked nice and was being actively used by attendees to take pictures. So at the beginning of each shoot, we were walking around trying to find a place to take pictures, and I had to figure out ideas for composition on the fly. I think that’s something that will become easier with practice, learning what parts of an environment can work to make a pleasing picture, but I don’t feel like I ever really figured out the location for one of the shoots and I’m not very happy with how those pictures came out.
I also learned just how much of a difference the entire experience can feel depending on who the models are. I ended up having four or five photoshoot sessions across the weekend, with different people, and to be honest towards the end of the con I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do anything like this again until I was more comfortable with the process. But the last session I had had such a different energy from the previous ones.
The models for my first sessions always ran into issues right before the photoshoots, from time constraints to realizing they lost a personal possession right as we were about to start shooting, so it was difficult to get a sense of how much they were really in the mindset of doing the photoshoot. They kind of rushed right into starting (and out of it- I don’t think they even said goodbye!), and in retrospect I think they may have been new to the process themselves and were possibly as unconfident as I was. But I would try ask them what kind of photos they wanted and they didn’t have any strong ideas, which is fine, and I did my best to find references we could use for photo ideas. But it definitely felt like going through motions of getting photos taken and I couldn’t get a strong two-way communication going. They felt pretty reserved in their responses, so it was hard to get a read on how they felt a lot of the time.
I was wiped out by them and missed doing the regular hallway shots I used to do.
But the last session, which was also with a group that didn’t have photoshoot experience before, were way more chatty, lively, and had lots of ideas for the kinds of photos they were looking for. And it was such a widely different experience when everyone seems actively enthused with photoshoot. I felt a lot more comfortable trying out ideas when everyone seemed okay with some ideas failing, and I openly appreciated when one of their friends, who was just hanging around, figured out how to pull off a composition idea the models were requesting after I couldn’t figure it out*. So while the first shoots kind of demoralizing, this one was kind of energizing.
I was still really tired after the shoot, but I came out of it wanting to do more shoots like that. I now also know the importance of having tons of memory cards, as I used up all of the SD card space I had between my 3 cards (32gb, 32gb, 16gb). I’ve got around 2,800 photos from the weekend to sort through and process.
*I’ll probably come back and ask about this later, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get a shot of three people standing in a line, shooting at them from close range from one end of the line, and keeping them all in focus.
Oh, I should probably post at least a few pictures. These are from the first photoshoot I had.
Something else I forgot to mention- studying photography is very useful. Who knew? I had always thought the giant sunroof and the white walls and floor of the convention center made for an amazing environment, and it does, but now I was able to notice that it also turned the entire building into giant softboxes(?), flattening out all the lighting from multiple angles.
ok look forgive me if i’m condescending but i feel like that’s just a) close up the aperture real tight b) focus on the middle guy c) have a lot of light to work with d) be praying right?
also am i wrong in thinking it’d be easier to get everyone in focus if you took the picture from further away? intuitively it seems to me like that would be the case but i couldn’t tell you why
oh ALSO while i’m asking these questions: can you like, see through an SLR’s viewfinder what effect adjusting the aperture size will have? coz i haven’t noticed that yet but i could believe that i’m just not looking properly coz the viewfinder’s small
many slrs (analog / digital) have a stop-down button on the front that lets you see the like depth of field thru the viewfinder at the selected aperture
what!!! huge news thnku
