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I have to admit that I'm a sucker for what I get out of DxO for very little effort. I used my friend's computer with DxO 9 and the smart lighting and lens distortion/softness correction kinda blew me away - but is that only because I'm a rube who doesn't know you can do this stuff other ways?
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Jan 16, 2015 22:35
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IceLicker posted:So here's an interesting dilemma. I have a few nice canon L lenses that I own but photography for me is just a hobby that I do in my spare time, I don't charge people. A friend of mine, who is really more of a person that I work with, is a little more serious and actually charges people to do photo shoots and editing and that sort of thing. Well, he's a big fan of my 70-200 f/4 L and I've been letting him borrow it to try it out and mess around but now he's asking to borrow it more and more and I'm pretty sure he's getting paid on some of these shoots to use my borrowed lens yet I'm not seeing a dime for any of this. Where should I draw the line and start asking for a rental fee or some sort of compensation? I don't know if this will really continue but I'm caught between letting a friend borrow and lens and being a free rental house. Switch to Nikon, sell your L lenses to your cheap buddy.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:04
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VelociBacon posted:Switch to Nikon, sell your L lenses to your cheap buddy. And then switch back in 2020 when Canon pulls their head out of their rear end and starts improving their cameras again. That's gonna happen, right? 
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Jan 16, 2015 23:23
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Radbot posted:If you had only LR5 and $200 to buy another piece of software to help improve your images, what would it be? DxO? Nik? Old copy of Photoshop? VSCO presets because I'm a lazy son of a gun. Although if you can get an .edu copy, Photoshop CS isn't a bad choice either. Personally I would suggest watching a bunch of tutorials on processing (something I need to do more of); there are plenty on YouTube, not sure of a Lynda.com is worth it or not, although my community college enrolment (of one measly English class) entitled me to access.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:39
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xzzy posted:That's gonna happen, right?
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Jan 17, 2015 02:35
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So is VSCO film pack really worth over a 100 bucks a pop? Some of their black and white simulations seem pretty cool as starting points, and not having to export your photos as tiff files just to process them is a nice bonus. They seem to calibrate their presets different camera models, which is nice. On the other hand these are just presets, so it just uses the lightroom as its processing engine, so I could see a lot of things such as grain not being that amazing. And bulk of the offering that comes with the film pack seems to be aimed at people who don't know or are unwilling to use lightroom, like their toolbox and brush sets that they tout as a feature. If they had a trial version it would be easy to figure out if its anything I could use but as of right now I am not willing to gamble so much money on an unknown. Seems like a bunch of people here dig it though. Opinions?
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Jan 17, 2015 04:29
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You're better off learning how to manipulate curves in Lightroom because none of the presets are especially difficult to emulate on your own.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:34
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Depends on how much processing you usually do I guess? I mean theoretically yeah it's all just stuff you could do your own, but one click vs. 20 over the course of my photography career or whenever it stops being supported is worth the money for me even if it's just as a starting point. But if you prefer "the SOOC look" or whatever then maybe you should reconsider. I will say though that I personally don't like their BW presets much but I also don't really have experience with what those films are supposed to look like.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:36
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Yeah but you can make your own preset and then apply it willy nilly instead of spending $100.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:39
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I like a few of the VSCO presets for their coloring and tone curves, but I cannot stand the grain. I finally ended up just using Notepad++ to find and replace every instance of the line "GrainAmount = ***," where *** was anywhere from 0 to 100 (the regular expression I used was just "GrainAmount = \d+") and replaced it with "GrainAmount = 0,". Problem solved. No more loving grain.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:56
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dakana posted:I like a few of the VSCO presets for their coloring and tone curves, but I cannot stand the grain. I finally ended up just using Notepad++ to find and replace every instance of the line "GrainAmount = ***," where *** was anywhere from 0 to 100 (the regular expression I used was just "GrainAmount = \d+") and replaced it with "GrainAmount = 0,". Problem solved. No more loving grain.
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Jan 17, 2015 09:12
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I like VSCO's Portra presets for the times when Fuji's aren't cutting it but they are in no way worth $100.
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Jan 17, 2015 10:46
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Everyone I know that buys VSCO tends to split the cost between 4-5 people. Around 20 or so dollars seems fair for the sets but hey, they're selling at the current price so I doubt they feel the need to change. The pricing on actions is kind of insane in general. It's kind of hilarious when googling tutorials and stuff at the sudden shift in monetisation. There's some great tutorials from ages ago on deviant art and such about how to use curves and such to tone images. Now people realise that you can box them up and sell for 20+ bux with some whimsical names. I have a friend who essentially lives off selling photoshop action sets. VSCO is kind of annoying as it is a very defined aesthetic and it's very oversaturated if you're a photographer and look at a lot of other photographers online but if you're dealing with clients and people who aren't exposed to VSCO as much it can be a pretty handy tool.
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Jan 17, 2015 13:25
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Paragon8 posted:Everyone I know that buys VSCO tends to split the cost between 4-5 people. Around 20 or so dollars seems fair for the sets but hey, they're selling at the current price so I doubt they feel the need to change. Straight VSCO is annoying because it's good but it's not perfect. If you have a ton of experience scanning and color correcting a specific stock it's fairly easy to pick up on the tiny missing bits. I'm also not a fan of the way it compresses up my shadows, I always end up dragging the left part of the histo out a little when I use a Portra preset.
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Jan 18, 2015 05:50
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8th-snype posted:Straight VSCO is annoying because it's good but it's not perfect. If you have a ton of experience scanning and color correcting a specific stock it's fairly easy to pick up on the tiny missing bits. I'm also not a fan of the way it compresses up my shadows, I always end up dragging the left part of the histo out a little when I use a Portra preset. I think a lot of the appeal with VSCO isn't necessarily that it's straight up film emulation but rather it's adding an aesthetic to an image which a lot of people resonate with in the digital age especially if they've never shot film before. Digital can be so neutral that it's boring so I think there's a lot of demand for something to add to it.
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Jan 18, 2015 14:57
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But then everything gets boring because it starts to look similar. You'd figure that anyone that earns any kind of money with photography can set aside some time here and there to start developing their own styles and presets.
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Jan 18, 2015 15:26
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Combat Pretzel posted:But then everything gets boring because it starts to look similar. You'd figure that anyone that earns any kind of money with photography can set aside some time here and there to start developing their own styles and presets. When money starts getting involved you end up doing what you've done to get to that position. Clients are booking you to get more of the same not investing in your developmental future. It's very easy to coast when your career gets to that point. I've had numerous conversations where I've suggested to photographers about trying XYZ new thing but they're just not interested in changing that winning formula for themselves which ends up limiting their future viability. I absolutely agree with you though. Photographers should be developing their own style constantly because literally nobody else will tell them to.
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Jan 19, 2015 13:12
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Since that's something that needs to be developed and tested first, you could stuff it into the portfolio while keeping the winning formula for actual paid content, until people start asking for the new stuff. I guess in the end it doesn't matter. It just irks me that there's plenty of pro-photographers (where pro merely hints at earning money with it) around where I live that think they're the bomb, when often VSCO makes half of the image (kind of compensating bad composition or focus, because "it's like ~*~*ANALOG*~*~").
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Jan 19, 2015 15:21
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Paragon8 posted:When money starts getting involved you end up doing what you've done to get to that position. Clients are booking you to get more of the same not investing in your developmental future. It's very easy to coast when your career gets to that point. I've had numerous conversations where I've suggested to photographers about trying XYZ new thing but they're just not interested in changing that winning formula for themselves which ends up limiting their future viability. There was this dude that posted in a Facebook group about how he was getting out of the wedding business because the times are changing and he's not making a profit and brides keep wanting more for less and his expenses are too high. Then I look at his photos and his poo poo is terrible and it's like no wonder you aren't making much
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Jan 19, 2015 16:11
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dakana posted:There was this dude that posted in a Facebook group about how he was getting out of the wedding business because the times are changing and he's not making a profit and brides keep wanting more for less and his expenses are too high. The cost of equipment used to be the barrier to entry; even if you were lovely you could make a decent living by virtue of being the only game in town. Now with the digital age, equipment is so cheap that the barrier to being a professional is talent (and probably marketing). The market flooded with cheap, lovely facebook mom-tographers for a while, but I think there's now a resurgence in demand for quality photographers. I assist for an architecture photographer, and it's basically like watching a dinosaur die. His workflow moves at a glacial pace, he resists every suggestion I've made to improve it, and even though he's very good he's losing jobs to younger guys who can do the same job in a third of the time. Like he drags (has me drag) 2-4 75 lb bags of gear to every job regardless, just in case he needs the one thing he's used twice in a decade. He won't even let me reorganize the bags to make more sense by putting the most-used stuff in one bag, he prefers to have everything spread across 3. Or he'd prefer to pay a retoucher to remove light cords rather than make the switch to battery powered strobes.
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Jan 19, 2015 17:07
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Combat Pretzel posted:Since that's something that needs to be developed and tested first, you could stuff it into the portfolio while keeping the winning formula for actual paid content, until people start asking for the new stuff. That's what people do. That's why it's so interesting I find to look at photographers when they're putting together shoots for themselves rather than a client and why it's worrying when you see photographers that don't do that. Honestly when you get into it there's so many people doing such annoying bullshit you can't really look over your shoulder at them or you'd get driven insane. dakana posted:There was this dude that posted in a Facebook group about how he was getting out of the wedding business because the times are changing and he's not making a profit and brides keep wanting more for less and his expenses are too high. I think photographers tend to get a bit hung up on being delicate artists. For as common as those memes about photographers deserving to be paid just like plumbers or tradesmen are nobody realises that photographers have to work like plumbers and tradesmen in hustling down clients and working for it and adapting to a changing marketplace.
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Jan 19, 2015 19:07
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Any way to find out if a Polaroid One-Step fires without spending $25 at Urban Outfitters?
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Jan 20, 2015 03:51
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Liam Emsa posted:Any way to find out if a Polaroid One-Step fires without spending $25 at Urban Outfitters? If you have an old film cart you can build a battery but its a pain in the rear end.
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Jan 21, 2015 17:08
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Hey everybody... Was looking to print some 13x19's, and want to purchase a printer. Does anybody have any recommendations?
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Jan 22, 2015 04:20
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I'm doing a 365 photo challenge for myself and I've realized as part of the project, I'd like to focus on various aspects of photography and learn more about them. Some of the things on my list include Sunny 16 rule, square format, zone system, post production, focus stacking, HDR, rule of threes(not thirds)/triangles. I'm wondering if there are other things big/small worth checking out that you guys suggest.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:31
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huhu posted:I'm doing a 365 photo challenge for myself and I've realized as part of the project, I'd like to focus on various aspects of photography and learn more about them. Some of the things on my list include Sunny 16 rule, square format, zone system, post production, focus stacking, HDR, rule of threes(not thirds)/triangles. I'm wondering if there are other things big/small worth checking out that you guys suggest. i don't see photography of nachos in a toilet on that list
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Jan 23, 2015 22:44
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naked babies accidentally making GBS threads on their parents seems to be big these days
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Jan 23, 2015 22:48
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huhu posted:I'm doing a 365 photo challenge for myself and I've realized as part of the project, I'd like to focus on various aspects of photography and learn more about them. Some of the things on my list include Sunny 16 rule, square format, zone system, post production, focus stacking, HDR, rule of threes(not thirds)/triangles. I'm wondering if there are other things big/small worth checking out that you guys suggest. You forgot dick pix.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:54
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huhu posted:I'm wondering if there are other things big/small worth checking out that you guys suggest. What kinds of photography do you think of as your rut / comfort zone? Figure out a genre of photography you rarely or never do, and do a bunch of that. Have you ever paid a model for a shoot? Have you ever done a commissioned shoot, either for money or just at the request of somebody you respect and want to impress? When you run out of ideas (I'll be generous and give you until mid-June), buy something new and exciting, spend a lot of money (by your own personal standards).
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Jan 23, 2015 22:57
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ExecuDork posted:Something about bokeh? Focal length and apparent perspective. The exposure triangle (ISO / aperture / shutter speed). B&W vs. Colour (vs. selective colour - you're already talking about HDR, why not another photo cliche?). Filters - polarizing, neutral density, graduated ND, and the various cheap-fun filters like star effects or multipliers; filters designed for film and predating the digital post-processing era, like those "balanced" for tungsten or fluorescent lights. Macro and extreme macro (you're already doing focus stacking). Astrophotography and other really long exposures. Any kind of exotic lighting situation (a dozen flashes of different power; interiors lit by 3 or more qualitatively different light sources; bright light source in-frame). 8th-snype posted:You forgot dick pix. huhu fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 23:26
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huhu posted:I'm doing a 365 photo challenge for myself and I've realized as part of the project, I'd like to focus on various aspects of photography and learn more about them. Some of the things on my list include Sunny 16 rule, square format, zone system, post production, focus stacking, HDR, rule of threes(not thirds)/triangles. I'm wondering if there are other things big/small worth checking out that you guys suggest. I suggest not doing a 365. If you really want to do a year-long thing make it a 52 at most.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:10
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RangerScum posted:I suggest not doing a 365. If you really want to do a year-long thing make it a 52 at most.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:36
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huhu posted:Any reasoning? I'm guessing you're coming from the angle of quantity vs quality? I checked Lightroom and last year I took pictures roughly 200/365 days. I've got a job (Peace Corps) where I've got crazy amounts of free time to achieve this project versus people who have to work a 9-5 and deal with all the before/after work crap. I feel like a 52 week challenge would be a bit underwhelming for the amount of free time that I have. For people that are actually able to stick to a 365, 99% of their photos are total garbage and they don't really show any growth in that period because it becomes a thing of obligation. Like don't get me wrong, I loving love taking photos, but there's no way I could take a photo every day and not have to just fudge it a lot of the time because of time constraints, lack of ideas, stuff like that. Why bother? I think setting aside one day a week actually gives you time to look up locations, think about what you want to shoot, and actually put in effort. I'm also going to go ahead and say there is no way I could pull off a "52 project" without also fudging a lot of shots... but everybody is different. I mean, you do you. Just my $.02.
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Jan 24, 2015 04:15
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RangerScum is spot on. How about just carrying a camera with you all the time and taking photos when you see them? Some days you are just not feeling it and forcing yourself to take photos anyway will just result in garbage. Sometimes I'll take 15-20 shots in one day and have 3-4 keepers, sometimes I'll take 3 photos all week and have them all be crap. This is MF film so I am more selective anyway but you get the idea.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:19
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RangerScum posted:For people that are actually able to stick to a 365, 99% of their photos are total garbage and they don't really show any growth in that period because it becomes a thing of obligation. Like don't get me wrong, I loving love taking photos, but there's no way I could take a photo every day and not have to just fudge it a lot of the time because of time constraints, lack of ideas, stuff like that. Why bother? I think setting aside one day a week actually gives you time to look up locations, think about what you want to shoot, and actually put in effort. I'm also going to go ahead and say there is no way I could pull off a "52 project" without also fudging a lot of shots... but everybody is different. I mean, you do you. Just my $.02. Good god, this. I'm coming up on my one year anniversary of event photography.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:54
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If he's got as much free time as he says why discourage him from a 365? I think RangerScum and deaders are spot on in pointing out the troubles that can come up but if it's what he wants to do then he should go for it. If he ends up halfway through, phoning it in 4 days a week and unsatisfied with his results the other 3 then hopefully he'll realize there's no shame in not sticking to a silly schedule and work out how often he'd really like to shoot. I don't want to do a 365 myself, it would drive me crazy, but maybe it'll work out for him.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:55
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Dude, you're just saying he should find his limits. I don't think anyone would argue against that. I think we are all just showing him what our and by extension, the average photographers limits are?
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Jan 24, 2015 05:56
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I know a guy who has done a 365 for 9 years straight. :|
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Jan 24, 2015 05:58
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The argument against the 365 so far is that he might end up producing a bunch of garbage because the schedule is unreasonable so he shouldn't even bother. Well poo poo, what if he likes it despite the schedule or he ends up not producing garbage? We don't know. If he wants to do it he should give it a shot and if it's not working for him he can ease up on the schedule or quit altogether.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:09
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BANME.sh posted:I know a guy who has done a 365 for 9 years straight. :| the last irl person I knew who did a 365 made horrid photos and I hid them from my fb feed
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Jan 24, 2015 06:12
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