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At the time, vastly improved dynamic range. Today I'm p sure I wouldn't bother.
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Aug 23, 2017 12:43
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Mostly build quality, weather-sealing, all of which you could get on a higher-end crop body anyway. Better ISO performance too but it's not a noticeable deal nowadays.
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Aug 23, 2017 13:46
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The only real IQ related reason to go FF for landscapes is wider angles. Unless your current camera is more than about 10 years old, there shouldn't be a marked difference in image quality under most conditions. Sure a modern FF will have better dynamic range and better lowlight performance but, if you stick your camera on a tripod and either bracket shots or take longer exposures, then you can avoid that problem, a $150 tripod is a better upgrade than a $3000 camera for that particular task. Even with an older camera, you are going to need exceptional glass to outresolve the sensor. Landscape photography is pretty low-impact on body performance, its all about the glass and the post.
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Aug 23, 2017 15:41
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These reasons are why when people love to jump to recommending FF glass to people with crop body sensors annoys the crap out of me. 'Get something that'll still work when/if you go FF!' sounds good, but then you probably get a ton of people thinking they need to go FF because the lenses they have purchased aren't so ideal for their camera.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:56
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EL BROMANCE posted:These reasons are why when people love to jump to recommending FF glass to people with crop body sensors annoys the crap out of me. 'Get something that'll still work when/if you go FF!' sounds good, but then you probably get a ton of people thinking they need to go FF because the lenses they have purchased aren't so ideal for their camera. I'll admit I don't enjoy feeling like I CAN'T go FF because most of my lenses are for crop bodies. At the same time, I realize that if I had the cash for a FF body I'd also have cash for some new lenses, so it all evens out.
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Aug 25, 2017 15:17
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Ha, yeah. It also helps when buying lenses to do whatever you can to reduce your loss on resale. The only lens I ever bought new was my Sigma 18-35 because I saved something like $250 by utilizing 2 sets of Black Friday sales. I could probably sell it for the price I paid. If I 'future proofed' I'd probably be bugged enough losing the wide angle on each lens, which would've also cost more money, that I'd probably end up going FF because it felt right. That's a lot of money to dump into a hobby.
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Aug 25, 2017 16:45
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EL BROMANCE posted:Ha, yeah. It also helps when buying lenses to do whatever you can to reduce your loss on resale. The only lens I ever bought new was my Sigma 18-35 because I saved something like $250 by utilizing 2 sets of Black Friday sales. I could probably sell it for the price I paid. The new D850 looks super nice but there is no way I could justify buying it or FF lenses for the amateur shots I have. And yet... I want it.
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Aug 25, 2017 16:51
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If it lives up to the specs, it'll be incredible. It's a good thing there's nothing in this world that could convince me that a $3,000 body is a good thing for me to purchase, but I can't wait to see how others get on with it.
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Aug 25, 2017 17:25
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Zero One posted:The new D850 looks super nice but there is no way I could justify buying it or FF lenses for the amateur shots I have. Same, I need to be rich so I can get the D850 because holy
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Aug 25, 2017 17:35
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Zero One posted:The new D850 looks super nice but there is no way I could justify buying it or FF lenses for the amateur shots I have. God yes. They won me on the film scanner gadget, I've been living with 16MP scans, imagine that almost 50MP scans... I'd buy it for that alone if I had the money.
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Aug 28, 2017 18:09
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Does the film scanner have it's own light source? It doesn't look like it from the pictures. How do you get even, neutral illumination with it?
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Sep 2, 2017 17:00
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Actually, after looking at it it could probably be used on any camera with a macro lens.
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Sep 2, 2017 17:04
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succ posted:I'm curious as to what are some goons reasons for making the jump to full frame? I enjoy shooting landscape and notice limitations of using a low-end DSLR with cheaper glass. Would I be a good case for upgrading to a full frame? Upgrade path: skill > glass > 4x5. Why haven't you looked at better glass. Your babbyfirstcam might be missing pro options but it can still make wonderful photos with good glass.
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Sep 3, 2017 08:37
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This is a great thread, everyone. Just finished reading from page one, and a lot of the advice has seemed really solid. It’s also really cool how welcoming everyone seems to be towards noobs such as myself. I just bought a t6i, pretty much the first “real” camera I’ve ever owned, and have been snapping away mostly with the 18-55 kit lens. A friend of mine, who helped pique my interest in photography in the first place, lent me his 75-300 to try out for a few days. I ended up wanting a longer zoom for myself, but after reading consistently bad reviews about the 75-300, including from posters here, I opted for an EX+ 55-250 IS from KEH.com for around $80. The only issue (that I can see) is that it’s not the STM version. Will I regret this? I really don’t plan on shooting much, if any, video, for what it’s worth.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:49
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I very much doubt you'll regret that lens. If you do, you're only out $80 which is practically zero in photography money. Go play with it as soon as it arrives, and worry less.
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Oct 16, 2017 02:35
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Thanks for the assurance. Once I lay hands on that lens, and eventually a nifty fifty, I think I’ll consider myself all set for a while. I figure having those three lenses (including the kit 18-55) will offer a good selection for a beginner such as myself.
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Oct 16, 2017 03:23
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President Beep posted:Thanks for the assurance. Once I lay hands on that lens, and eventually a nifty fifty, I think I’ll consider myself all set for a while. I figure having those three lenses (including the kit 18-55) will offer a good selection for a beginner such as myself. Those three lenses (on a T3i) held me through my first four years of messing around, making mistakes, and learning. You'll probably be fine.
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Oct 16, 2017 03:54
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Nifty 50 is great for portraits but on a crop like t6i the 24mm is a way more flexible walking around lens. Also is tiny and super easy to carry. Both are ~$100. I got a yongnuo 50mm for $50 first and a canon 24mm later and use the 24 way more often. And for occasional portraits the yongnuo is perfectly fine.
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Oct 16, 2017 06:19
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Yeah, generally speaking the 24 is going to get a lot more use. There’s a reason that many people don’t ever take a 35mm equivalent off of their camera. That said, the two lenses I use the most on my x-t2 are the 24 1.4 and 56 1.2 so I probably use them both equally. When I was starting to get into digital photography I just had a kit lens and a 50mm that I adapted and I did like it because it taught me about learning how far to stand from my subject since you usually had to move back a bit to get what you want and since I was taking a lot of pictures of my then new kid I appreciated the bokeh and fairly useful focal length for portraits.
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Oct 16, 2017 06:32
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So I've spent the past year not using the camera I bought because my life teetered on the edge of falling apart, I moved, and changed jobs, but things are better now and I'd like to try to start taking cool pictures. I bought a copy of Understanding Exposure; is there a tutorial on getting started with Lightroom? Like, super basic. I know nothing about what makes a good photo, or things like light level or color balance or composition. Til now I've basically only snapped photos with my phone. Oh, and my camera is a Pentax K-50 that came with two lenses, a "DA L 18-55mm WR f3.5-5.6mm" and "50-200mm WR" so hopefully it's good.
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Oct 16, 2017 06:43
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my turn in the barrel posted:Nifty 50 is great for portraits but on a crop like t6i the 24mm is a way more flexible walking around lens. Also is tiny and super easy to carry. Both are ~$100. Good point about the crop factor. I would like to get some “walking around” utility out of a short prime, but I’ve also been having a lot of fun messing around with bokeh. How’s the DOF on the 24? On a side note, my wife had an old Focal MC 135mm f2.8 kicking around (hooray for the ol’ K-Mart blue light special!). For shits and giggles I bought a cheapy MD to EF mount adaptor from Amazon. I remember the lens being reasonable to mess around with in close-ish outdoor settings on her old Vivitar V50, but it acts pretty long on my crop sensor—really goes to show what that 1.6 factor does to a given shot’s framing...
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Oct 16, 2017 11:21
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Annath posted:is there a tutorial on getting started with Lightroom? Like, super basic. I don’t know what the desktop version of Lightroom is like yet, but I’ve had some fun playing around with the free app on my ipad. I assume it’s gimped in some way, but it’s a snap to use—everything’s done with sliders—and you can always revert your changes if you mess up (as I constantly do). The pic below is an example of one of my first forays into shooting with a long-ish zoom (borrowed 75-300 canon), with the Lightroom-corrected version following:   Far from brilliant, but you can see how much monkeying you can do with light levels, colors, etc. even with the freebie version.
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Oct 16, 2017 11:36
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There are tons of getting started in Lightroom YouTube tutorials that will get you started with the understanding of which slider does what
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Oct 16, 2017 12:25
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One of the important things with Lightroom, isn't just the editing capabilities but the fact that it's a workflow and file organiser too. Start out with a good methodology in Lr even if you don't understand what all the sliders do, and you'll be set up for ever while you grow as a photographer. There are two important concepts with Lightroom's file handling - Catalogues and Collections. Catalogues are databases of your files and the edits you've made to them. Lightroom never changes your original files. If you import a photo, you can gently caress about with it as much as you like but if you go to where that photo is stored and open it in a different app, you'll see the original version, not the one with your edits. When you export a photo from Lightroom (either just saving it locally or publishing it to an online service), Lightroom applies all the edits you've made to that exported version. Catalogues also aren't the physical location of your files. You can have the catalogue on one drive and import all the photos in that catalogue to a completely different one. You can have multiple catalogues but switching catalogues requires restarting Lightroom. If you have the same photo in different catalogues, then those photos will not share edits. Collections are basically albums and are a way to thematically group pictures however you want - by subject, by date, by event, or whatever. A photo can belong to multiple collections at once but there's only one instance of the photo no matter how many collections it belongs to. If you edit a photo in one collection, those edits will appear on the same photo in all the collections. If you want to have different versions of the same photo, you need to create a virtual copy of the image and this creates a new version that can be edited separately. Photos do not need to be in a collection, but you'll find it easier to locate files and organise them if they are. So, to start with, you need to import your pictures to Lightroom. Here's what I do. My photos start out either on the SD card from my camera or in a Scans folder on an external hard drive for my film shots. I open the Import window and there are three main areas. A left explorer pane, a central file preview pane and a right settings pane. In the left pane, I navigate to where my original photos are - the SD card or the Scans folder. In the right hand pane starting at the top, I select a location to save the files to. This can be anywhere and it's not connected to where your catalogue happens to be. I generally organise my photos into folders by month or by event to make it easier to find originals. So I'll either create a new folder for the photos or navigate to an existing one here. Just below that is an option to make a second copy of them as a back up on a different drive. I make a folder on that drive with the same name as the folder where the originals are being imported to. Next I get the option to add them to a collection. You can create a new collection or add them to an existing one. Again, I have collections that have the same names as the folders where the originals and the backups are. If you want to add them to multiple collections, it's easy to do that either now or later on after you have imported them. There's a useful checkbox that ignores already imported files. If you have imported some of the files on your card already to the same catalogue, then this will remove the ones that it recognises from the preview pane. There are also options in the right pane to batch rename files as you import them, add tags, add various contrast curves etc. Select the photos that you want to import by checking their boxes in the preview pane and hit the Import button. Once you've imported them, you can see your recent imports as well as the collections in the left hand explorer bar of the Library Pane. By default, they'll be open as soon you've finished importing but it can be handy if you are importing several sets of photos at once to different places to know how to get back to a previous import. Switch to the Develop pane and this is where you can start working on the photos. Again, you can switch between different collections and previous imports in the left hand bar while all of your editing tools are in the right. A useful thing to do here is to use the filters to do a first pass on your pictures and cut out all the ones you aren't going to work on. Select the first image in the import, turn on caps lock and then you can apply a numerical rating from 1-5 to each picture just by pressing the appropriate number key. I rate all the pictures that are interesting and worth editing at 4, all the similar ones or boring ones at 3 and all the lovely ones that have technical problems at 2. Then I go to the filter dropdown right of centre at the bottom of the screen, choose 'Rated' from the dropdown, then click on the 4th star and suddenly I've cut out all of the photos that I don't care about. As far as the editing goes, there are a lot of options to you, I recommend just playing with them to see what happens. If you gently caress up, you can always hit the Revert button to undo all your changes and start again. There's also a poo poo-ton of useful tutorials and advice on the web, just type in 'How do I <thing> in Lightroom' and you should see all kinds of useful resources.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:05
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Thanks Helen for that little rundown, it's gonna be saved for when I have time to play with my copy of LR Question that's open for all: do you delete your "bad photos"? I always worry that I'll think a photo is crap and delete it, then later find out I could of made a small edit and turned it to gold.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:20
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If it's beyond saving, i.e. too blurry or incorrectly focused, I delete. No sense wasting 20MB on something that you won't be able to do anything with, especially when you start amassing hundreds of gigabytes of RAW files in your Lr catalogue(s). If it's a little more unclear as to whether or not the picture can be redeemed, like it's focused right but say your exposure is way off, you can determine within a few moments of quick and dirty adjustments as to whether or you'll be able to make it work without having a dreadfully noisy end result.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:34
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RedMagus posted:Question that's open for all: do you delete your "bad photos"? I always worry that I'll think a photo is crap and delete it, then later find out I could of made a small edit and turned it to gold. There are always several ways to do anything in Lr. I don't really use collections, but I use the star ratings, colours, and keywords. I go through a set of photos, typically all the shots I took one day. Anything obviously bad gets 1 star. Then I filter to show only 1-star photos and I delete that poo poo. Not "remove from catalogue", DELETE. There's no point in polishing a turd that's out of focus, motion-blurred, and miss-exposed. No "small edit" is going to save it. My off-site backup is 94% full, I have no room for that nonsense. I *should* use keywords more, but what I do is add them just before export after editing a bunch; it would be more useful to add keywords before or during editing. Colours help me track my own intentions. Once a photo has been edited, exported, and uploaded to my Flickr, it gets to be green. Red is for photos I really want to edit, either sooner or as a reminder to myself to put some additional effort into editing that one. Blue is for multi-photo effects, like panoramas or dyptichs I can do after exporting from Lr. The other colours get used when I'm narrowing down on one photo out of a few for things like submitting an entry into a photo contest.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:47
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Annath posted:I know nothing about what makes a good photo, or things like light level or color balance or composition. Til now I've basically only snapped photos with my phone.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:54
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Kenny Logins posted:This thread may be of some help to you. Bookmarkin' the poo poo out of this. Thanks for the link!
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Oct 16, 2017 14:00
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RedMagus posted:Thanks Helen for that little rundown, it's gonna be saved for when I have time to play with my copy of LR I delete the bad ones, the ones with obvious technical flaws that are never going to get published, there's no good reason to keep those at all. I save the ones that are technically ok but that don't make the cut for editing. Say I've shot a bunch of pictures that are very similar - like a burst or some different exposure settings of the same scene - I'll pick the one or two that I think are best and rate them at 4, then rate the rest at 3. While I'm editing, I'll get a better idea of which of the similar photos is the better one to use and rate the other down to 3 as well. Because of my filter, the one that's rated down will disappear from the editing pane, but it's still there in case I want to return to it later and use it for some reason, I just need to search amongst the 3-star photos in that collection to find it.
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Oct 16, 2017 14:14
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President Beep posted:Bookmarkin' the poo poo out of this. Thanks for the link!
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Oct 16, 2017 14:32
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While we're on the topic of workflow, I had an interesting conversation with a professional photographer at a music festival this summer. I was volunteering as a campground host so I had backstage (but not on-stage) access when I wasn't on duty. Friday night's finale was a mostly-South-American band that had brought along their own (Canadian) photographer on their North American tour; he was hanging out at a picnic table behind the stage on Saturday afternoon, editing his photos (many taken from on the stage - he had better access than me). I introduced myself and asked him to tell me about his work - most people are happy to talk about their jobs, especially if they like their job - because I could see he was using LightRoom on his laptop. His workflow is completely different from mine. "Brad" (not his real name) dumps the photos off his camera onto his computer, then imports them into Lr. I didn't see him do this so I don't know if he puts each import into a collection or tags them or what he does at import. Once the photos are in, he starts going through them, one at a time. Every photo gets edited - he barely uses the Library view, and stays in Develop. He works on each individual photo until he's happy with it, then moves to the next, always in Develop. At the end, he goes to Library and filters for photos that received no edits at all - and those are the ones he deletes. If it wasn't good enough for him to work on the first time he saw it, it's not good enough at all. This workflow combines both parts of my two-step sort-first, edit-later approach, and for somebody on a tight schedule - Brad's gotta get those photos up on the band's Facebook page (and other places) ASAP - it seems pretty efficient. Notably, he's much better at avoiding spray-and-pray shooting. In his hundreds of photos from the previous night, nearly every one was unique in composition and subject. He takes one Good Enough shot, then moves on. None of his photos that I saw were even a little bit bad, from a quick technical point of view - always in focus, properly exposed, little or nothing to distract in the background (the extreme high contrast of stage lighting - well-lit performers with no-light backgrounds helps here), and solid compositions. Unlike mine, which are 1/3 delete immediately, 1/3 work-on-this-later (bursts and duplicates galore!), and 1/3 not-bad-enough-to-kill. He looks at each photo once, I see the shots I will eventually upload several times, usually separated by weeks or months, and I see a bunch of photos I will never upload multiple times each, too. He's prioritizing his own eyes-see-something-new time, which I think is a really interesting point of view. Dunno if I can do what he does, but it was a fun conversation. EDIT Annath posted:Oh, and my camera is a Pentax K-50 that came with two lenses, a "DA L 18-55mm WR f3.5-5.6mm" and "50-200mm WR" so hopefully it's good. Go out and shoot. Just shoot. Like, everything. See it, shoot it. Especially in lovely weather. Your camera and lenses are weather sealed (that's what the WR means in the names of those lenses; the body is weather sealed, too, they just don't put that in the name). The glass is NOT fragile. The metal, plastic, and other materials are TOUGH. You will NOT damage your camera. Get outside, shoot stuff. DO NOT put your camera into a case or a bag or the pocket of your jacket - keep it IN YOUR HAND and shoot shoot shoot. ExecuDork fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 15:36
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I try to do that, but can't do it and I chalk it up to being a horrible photographer. That is, everything I shoot is actually a piece of poo poo but I'm scrolling through the options trying to find the one that is the least bad piece of poo poo. I imagine when you're actually competent at using a camera it's easier to do a simple "first impression" filtering. So my compromise is that obvious technical errors get a reject flag and deleted on the first pass through, anything that doesn't immediately make me puke gets 2 stars and everything else gets 1 star. I'll hang on to the 1 star photos "just in case" until I finish editing the import and then purge them from disk before sending them to my long term backup.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:50
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So I went on a walk down to the river behind my house, Lightroom is currently importing all the photos haha. Question: Is there a way to move previously imported photos to a new location while not loving up the LR catalog or whatever? I have some pictures that I took last summer before I put the camera in the closet for a yeah, and they are on my 256GB SSD, but now I have a 7TB external that I'd prefer all the big files go on. For that matter, should I, or can I, move the LR catalog there too?
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Oct 16, 2017 20:46
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Just do all file management within Lightroom itself and you’ll be fine. Don’t be tempted to start moving folders around in Explorer/Finder.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:57
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Annath posted:So I went on a walk down to the river behind my house, Lightroom is currently importing all the photos haha. Import from their current directory on your SSD and delete when done!
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Oct 16, 2017 21:03
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Annath posted:So I went on a walk down to the river behind my house, Lightroom is currently importing all the photos haha.
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Oct 16, 2017 21:24
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So if I move them within LR, it will move them on the disk as well? I just want to make sure a bunch of huge RAW (or, well, DNG?) files arent going to eat up my SSD. Also, #BUGLIFE:  e: Have a river too: 
Annath fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 21:37
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It should move the original files but I don't remember if there's a dialog box that asks you what you want it to do or not because I know that there is some way to leave the originals in place.. just can't remember it off the top of my head. Worst case you can move the originals around in explorer if you really want to, Lightroom won't forget about the images and will have a little icon on the photo strip saying it can't find the originals. Click it and you can go through a process to update the original's location. One of the drop down menus has a "find all missing photos" option too. Last resort, you can select any images on your SSD and "export as catalog." This will bundle everything up into a brand new catalog, original images included. Then you can import that into whatever other catalog you have that is storing images not on your SSD. Basically Lightroom is a really good digital asset management product as well as a photo editor, so it's reasonably careful with your data, and generally has more than one way to get a task done.
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Oct 16, 2017 21:57
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Annath posted:So if I move them within LR, it will move them on the disk as well? I just want to make sure a bunch of huge RAW (or, well, DNG?) files arent going to eat up my SSD. Yes. Move them using the explorer strip on the left of the Library module. It will move the originals and update the location in the catalogue so that you won't get any orphaned images. If you move them in Windows, then Lightroom will tell you it can't find them and you'll have to relink the new location with the old photos. It's not hard to do but it can take a while and a lot of clicking if you have a lot of files in multiple folders. Moving them using the Lightroom interface is just as easy and avoids all those issues.
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Oct 16, 2017 23:23
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