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Just shoot photos everyday and don't feel the need to post a photo if you didn't shoot anything worthwhile. I know when I was still a student in college a few years ago I was shooting virtually everyday because I had a lot of free time and most days I didn't take an interesting photo but I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. It's kind of dumb to force yourself to post photos everyday because you "have to".
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Jan 4, 2014 06:23
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 17:33 |
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Shoot when you want to shoot, don't when you don't. I didn't pick up my 60D for almost two months. Shot some cool poo poo last night. No regrets.
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Jan 4, 2014 07:03
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I spend most of the time I think about photography thinking about a new shot I want to take. Just one. It takes days, sometimes weeks to think of a cool concept. It usually takes a drive and a few tries to get what I'm looking for. My days of spamming the shutter are almost over (I'd still shoot a wedding like an idiot).
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Jan 4, 2014 07:53
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All right, I won't bother the thread with my dumb and probably fruitless experiment any more. On an unrelated note: I've been trying to figure out exactly what "reportage" photography is, but how does it differ from candid or street photography? From what I can tell, it seems to be street photography style but not necessarily on the street--it seems to come up in the context of wedding photography, in fact.
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Jan 4, 2014 11:07
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404notfound posted:All right, I won't bother the thread with my dumb and probably fruitless experiment any more. On an unrelated note: I've been trying to figure out exactly what "reportage" photography is, but how does it differ from candid or street photography? From what I can tell, it seems to be street photography style but not necessarily on the street--it seems to come up in the context of wedding photography, in fact. For photo-a-day, the vast majority of them are dweebs on flicker shooting their lunch every day, which is why it gets such a bad rep since its far too easy to half-rear end. I've seen several people who have been going for years shooting things around their house on full auto, without any improvement, because they are purely motivated by the flickr echo chamber. For a good example find Dustin Diaz, whose PAD turned into a book, This Is Strobist Info. Reportage is shooting things that are newsworthy for a newswire, aka actual photo journalism, unless I'm mistaken. Wedding photographers will claim whatever style makes them seem unique in order to book more weddings. When 'reportage' becomes blasé, like typewriter-in-a-field-with-balloons Vintage Style Photography, someone will make up a new style that will be all the rage for a season. What I'm saying is, you can safely ignore most advice from wedding photographers.
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Jan 4, 2014 17:04
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Here's my next dumb question. I have a powershot s120, and it has a bunch of extra modes (portrait, fisheye lens, HDR etc) along with the usual P/Av/Tv/M and auto stuff. It'd be correct to say that anything those other modes do could be replicated with manual mode and lightroom/photoshop, right? Obviously things like the portrait mode just set a wider apeture and maybe change the white balance to better suit skin tones (guessing there), and stuff like sepia is obviously post-processing, but there's a mode called "handheld night shot" or something very similar. When I took a shot in that mode, it had a wide apeture, high ISO and slow shutter as I'd expect, but it took multiple shots and then did something to combine them into a better shot than I could get by going into manual and using the same exposure settings to take a single shot. I'm guessing it used the multiple images to better decide where the stars were, what bright/dark bits were actually bright/dark and not just noise etc. Does that sound correct? Thanks.
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Jan 5, 2014 20:30
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megalodong posted:Here's my next dumb question. I have a powershot s120, and it has a bunch of extra modes (portrait, fisheye lens, HDR etc) along with the usual P/Av/Tv/M and auto stuff. Pretty much never use any modes on your camera other than P/S/A/M (and probably not even P), or full auto if that's how you roll. Anything it's doing in-camera can be done easily in post, the difference being if you don't like the result, you still have the original image. If it took TWO shots, not multiple, it was probably dark-frame subtraction, which helps with sensor noise for long exposures. If it took more than two, it was probably some kind of gypsy magic.
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Jan 6, 2014 00:35
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A lot of point and shoots have a "night shot" mode, it really does take a bunch of pictures at once and just sort of take the best bits from all of them and combines it into a composite image.
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Jan 6, 2014 06:52
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How worried should I be about this:  That's a new Canon 8-15mm fisheye lens. I took it out of the box, out of its dryer-sheet wrapper or whatever, and then took off the lens cap and saw that set of little marks that looks like a scratch. I tried to clean it once, in case it was just something that would come off, and it made no difference. edit: VVV Thanks very much, both of you! Hydrocodone fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jan 7, 2014 |
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Jan 7, 2014 00:47
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Hydrocodone posted:How worried should I be about this: If you bought it brand-new from a store take that poo poo back.
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Jan 7, 2014 01:14
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Hydrocodone posted:How worried should I be about this: Return it. On a long lens it would never show in your photos, but something that wide it's gonna show every time
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Jan 7, 2014 02:08
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Two questions for all you knowledgable people (and Soundmonkey, too!) 1) If I use my wife's 5100 in Movie Mode and I'm alone, how can I have it focus on me? Is there a way to get it to focus automatically on me, or do I have to manually set it ahead of time? If the latter, any tips? 2) Will a Tamrom AF 17-50mm autofocus on this 5100? It works on my D200 but seems to not like being on the 5100. Pretty sure its the lens.
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Jan 7, 2014 19:58
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Oxford Comma posted:Two questions for all you knowledgable people (and Soundmonkey, too!) The 17-50 came in screw and non screw drive version for Nikon. I couldn't tell you which is which other than looking for an AF screw on the lens mount, but that would definitely be your problem.
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Jan 7, 2014 21:11
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Flickr's search engine is bugging the living poo poo out of me. It's overemphasizing of keywords in titles over tags in the default "Relevant" sort mode is loving infuriating. Say if I've taken images in town X and put its name in a tag but not the title, and then search for the town's name, your images will be miles down the search results, getting drowned by crap images with the town's name in the title. I don't even see how favorites may make a difference. Your picture could have a thousand favorites, it still doesn't seem to rise.
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Jan 12, 2014 22:27
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I'm kind of confused about infinity focus. I was looking to pick up a Rokinon 14mm, but a lot of the reviews say that focusing isn't accurate. One of the examples said that it focuses at infinity at the 3m mark, 3m at the 2m mark, etc. What happens if you put it past the 3m mark then? How do you focus past infinity?? I'm sure the concept will make sense if I read it written the right way but right now I'm still very confused about the concept.
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Jan 13, 2014 19:19
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GobiasIndustries posted:I'm kind of confused about infinity focus. I was looking to pick up a Rokinon 14mm, but a lot of the reviews say that focusing isn't accurate. One of the examples said that it focuses at infinity at the 3m mark, 3m at the 2m mark, etc. What happens if you put it past the 3m mark then? How do you focus past infinity?? I'm sure the concept will make sense if I read it written the right way but right now I'm still very confused about the concept. Many (most?) lenses are able to focus past infinity to account for heat or other factors changing the optical properties of the glass in it. It's not some mind-bending thing, it just means that you can focus past the infinity stop and poo poo starts being out of focus again. This is why when taking night sky pix or whatever it's usually best to focus on something really far away as opposed to just jamming the lens to the infinity stop, because the stop might actually be slightly past infinity.
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Jan 13, 2014 20:06
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SoundMonkey posted:Many (most?) lenses are able to focus past infinity to account for heat or other factors changing the optical properties of the glass in it. It's not some mind-bending thing, it just means that you can focus past the infinity stop and poo poo starts being out of focus again. This is why when taking night sky pix or whatever it's usually best to focus on something really far away as opposed to just jamming the lens to the infinity stop, because the stop might actually be slightly past infinity. Huh, that actually makes a lot of sense; I was taking photos of the moon and wondered why it was blurry at infinity, but in focus at slightly before.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:04
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SoundMonkey posted:Many (most?) lenses are able to focus past infinity to account for heat or other factors changing the optical properties of the glass in it. It's not some mind-bending thing, it just means that you can focus past the infinity stop and poo poo starts being out of focus again. This is why when taking night sky pix or whatever it's usually best to focus on something really far away as opposed to just jamming the lens to the infinity stop, because the stop might actually be slightly past infinity. This absolutely makes sense and explains why a few of my night shots didn't turn out very well. I just don't understand how you can go 'beyond' infinity. It's a concept that my brain struggles with, though I'm sure once I hear the right combination of words to explain it, it'll finally click and I'll feel like a total moron for taking so long to figure it out.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:11
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Do some reading on basic optical physics. Lenses aren't magic.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:18
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dukeku posted:Do some reading on basic optical physics. Lenses aren't magic. What do you read? I've hunted around and there's not a lot out there that talk about the physics of lens that use language a layman can understand. It's all bits and pieces that you have to build up over time as you dig around with google. The only great resource I've ever found was the lensrental blog, which has a handful of posts on the history of lens design. Pretty much everything else out there is forum posts and formulas.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:29
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xzzy posted:What do you read? I've hunted around and there's not a lot out there that talk about the physics of lens that use language a layman can understand. It's all bits and pieces that you have to build up over time as you dig around with google. Nikon's "1001 Nights" series of articles is really good, written from the point of view of lens designers trying to solve problems. GobiasIndustries posted:This absolutely makes sense and explains why a few of my night shots didn't turn out very well. I just don't understand how you can go 'beyond' infinity. It's a concept that my brain struggles with, though I'm sure once I hear the right combination of words to explain it, it'll finally click and I'll feel like a total moron for taking so long to figure it out. "Infinity" isn't a magical concept in this case, it's just "anything further than this will be in focus". If you focus past infinity, you're just going past that mark and making it out of focus in the other direction, much like focusing at any other distance then turning the ring some more.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:42
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SMDH if you haven't read through Hecht.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:59
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xzzy posted:What do you read? I've hunted around and there's not a lot out there that talk about the physics of lens that use language a layman can understand. It's all bits and pieces that you have to build up over time as you dig around with google. I read my physics course's textbook.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:04
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dukeku posted:I read my physics course's textbook. Yeah, a lot of this stuff is either poorly explained in "layman terms" or doesn't work at all. With poo poo like optics there's not much middle ground between "because reasons" and actually reading up on the physics.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:08
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Actually the wikipedia article on lenses seems pretty solid and well laid out, with lots of example pictures.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:21
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Mr. Despair posted:Actually the wikipedia article on lenses seems pretty solid and well laid out, with lots of example pictures. Yeah just don't trust their article on optical aberrations because some dickhead keeps vandalizing it. Also it sucks. EDIT: Really, you don't HAVE to dive too deep into optical theory to take pictures obviously, but you'll probably have a much easier understanding of things once you know WHY your lens is doing whatever the hell it's doing, and what you might be able to do to solve it.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:29
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SoundMonkey posted:Yeah just don't trust their article on optical aberrations because some dickhead keeps vandalizing it. It really sucks, it looks like some student went and cut/paste their answer to a physics assignment.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:33
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Spedman posted:It really sucks, it looks like some student went and cut/paste their answer to a physics assignment. Yeah it really really sucks and is barely even coherent.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:50
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dukeku posted:Do some reading on basic optical physics. Lenses aren't magic. Thanks, good thing I never tried to get my wand out and tap my camera to focus properly. A read through of your your responses in this thread have all been equally helpful, so I'll go ahead and ignore you from now on  SoundMonkey posted:Nikon's "1001 Nights" series of articles is really good, written from the point of view of lens designers trying to solve problems. That article compilation is really interesting, I've tossed it on my reading list. It'll be good for me to understand the POV behind lens designs. So if I'm understanding your infinity explanation right, does this mean every lens will have a different (slightly, possibly) 'infinity' point? SoundMonkey posted:EDIT: Really, you don't HAVE to dive too deep into optical theory to take pictures obviously, but you'll probably have a much easier understanding of things once you know WHY your lens is doing whatever the hell it's doing, and what you might be able to do to solve it. Agreeing with this. I've (somehow) made prints that people have purchased already, but knowing WHY I was able to create what I did is only going to help me, and the concept of how focusing works is still something I need to nail down.
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Jan 14, 2014 00:08
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GobiasIndustries posted:Thanks, good thing I never tried to get my wand out and tap my camera to focus properly. A read through of your your responses in this thread have all been equally helpful, so I'll go ahead and ignore you from now on The manner in which advice is given doesn't make it any less good advice  GobiasIndustries posted:So if I'm understanding your infinity explanation right, does this mean every lens will have a different (slightly, possibly) 'infinity' point? Each lens is designed with an infinity focus point (usually dependant on focal length, infinity focus on ultrawides is like four feet sometimes), and usually the 'infinity stop' (assuming the lens isn't focus-by-wire) is actually slightly past infinity focus, for the reasons mentioned earlier. Each lens is also designed for a specific flange-back distance, so if you try to adapt it to a mount that has a longer flange-back distance than the lens was designed for, it can't get infinity focus because the back of the lens would actually have to poke into the mirror chamber. It doesn't take much either, 1 or 2mm difference in flange back distance, and suddenly "infinity" is "three inches away".
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Jan 14, 2014 00:19
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Where can I buy a focus wand?
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Jan 14, 2014 18:40
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Musket posted:Where can I buy a focus wand? Hitachi make one.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:41
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GobiasIndustries posted:Thanks, good thing I never tried to get my wand out and tap my camera to focus properly. A read through of your your responses in this thread have all been equally helpful, so I'll go ahead and ignore you from now on  And I don't wanna talk to a scientist Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
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Jan 14, 2014 18:44
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Move a lens forward from its registry distance while locked at infinity focus, and watch everything go blurry. Science.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:45
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dukeku posted:
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Jan 14, 2014 18:48
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Musket posted:Move a lens forward from its registry distance while locked at infinity focus, and watch everything go blurry. Science. 
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Jan 14, 2014 18:55
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Mr. Despair posted:SMDH if you haven't read through Hecht. You think you're joking, but... 
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Jan 14, 2014 19:13
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single-mode fiber posted:You think you're joking, but... Express deliveries are known to occasionally work.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:27
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single-mode fiber posted:You think you're joking, but... You havent even opened that book, have you?
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Jan 14, 2014 19:54
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 17:33 |
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Basic Photographic Materials and Processes would be better for getting to know the science of photography. Less depth but broader in coverage.
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Jan 14, 2014 20:06
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