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huhu posted:In an attempt to support my local brick and mortar store, I went there to buy some filters. I asked for a circular polarizer and he came back with one priced at $180. I said "I was hoping to spend about $100 on one." and he says he can go try and see if he can sell it to me for $100. How much are they marking all that poo poo up!? I left without purchasing anything and am just going to buy it all online. Wow, really? My local places tend to be really close to what I can get online. So much so that the only times I don't purchase from them is when they're just straight up out of stock on something and it might be a bit before they get it in. Or else it's a modifier that doesn't have the name Wescott or Profoto on it.
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Jun 15, 2019 23:59
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So I've got a really strange question that I'd like to ask here. Since a lot of you are doing some really cool work that I really like I figured this would be a place to ask. Especially more so since as near as I can tell no one else in here works in the same space we do so I'd really like that outside perspective. This at first might seem a bit meandering but it will eventually make sense. I work with a team of people where we do cosplay photography but since we also do completely original concepts as well I really lump it all together under 'fine art portraiture'. We're very much about doing on location and studio work. We love location scouting, finding props and background elements for our sets, etc. When we look at similar work in the US and Canada (for instance if you were to look through the #cosplayphotography hashtag on Instagram) it all tends to be convention shots. Hardly do we ever see a photo that wasn't painfully obvious that it was at a convention. But when we find photos that were done outside of north America they're damned near all location/studio work. And what we run into tends to be loving AMAZING. Like their photos make us go "Whoa" and inspire us. Really well executed stuff. The amusing bit is that we've noticed this tends to come from places like Germany, Romania, Russia, Japan, and Singapore. We see the locations they shoot at and we're all "Dammit we wish we had a place like that to shoot at around here!" Within the US it just all looks to be con pic, con pic, con pic. On top of that we've seen some pretty iffy if not downright bad editing at times with regards to what's found in the US scenes. Other members of the team (who are NOT photographers or photo editors) have posted examples they've ran into in our team chat and they've been able to pull apart what's wrong with them. Now we do talk a lot about how we're shooting, lighting, and editing things so that probably helps some. For THEM to be able to point out bits... I mean that should say a lot right there. And don't get us started on the application of CG here. Are we perfect in what we do? Oh, gently caress no! We'll be the first to say that. We freely share what we did right and what we did wrong for all of our work since we want people to learn from what we went through. If anyone is interested in what we talk about let me know and I'll link our site. What we don't have a lot of info around and can't understand is that why does this all seem to be so pervasive in the US? We figure part of it is due to people trying to get social media 'pop' which we get. But for everything to be so heavily skewed in that direction it just makes us go "Wait... why? We can do this so why can't you?" Part of the reason I ask about this is because we're looking at offering photography services soon. We already have a list of reasons why people should work with us like we're not pressed for time, we're not fighting for location, we have people that know what it's like in front and behind the camera, most of the team is female so we're a safe space (especially since there are a lot of creepers in this scene), and all that. But I'm trying to figure out what's that bit of 'extra' that would get people to hire us. We could easily show people a comparison of our work versus hashtags though I don't think that will be enough. So what could we say so people will easily understand?
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Jul 4, 2019 05:59
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Helen Highwater posted:It sounds like location is your USP honestly. If most cosplayers in the US are getting their photos at cons against concrete walls, or in the carpark of the centre, or surrounded by sweaty nerds under bad light, then having a cool place that's a better stage for the costume should be the most visible difference. Much more so than technical stuff like lighting and PP, and certainly more than intangibles like a lower chance of random sexual assault. Yeah, I figure coming up with and delivering a product that could in no way be done at a convention will be the main driving force. But since we're going to command a higher rate than con shooters (here in the central Texas area $50 for 45 minutes is pretty common) I was wanting to cover points to convince them it's worth the money. The fun part has been trying to figure out how to price things since I haven't been able to find someone who does the same thing. So currently I'm using the lower end of the fine art portrait market around here as a baseline and will see where that goes, which is around $300.
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Jul 4, 2019 21:20
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A photography related question that doesn't really fit any of the other threads: did anyone else's engagement on Instagram take a steep dive lately? Before I was getting a 30% or better ratio of engagement to followers but recently it just tanked. I haven't changed anything regarding tag use or being active before I post (liking/genuine commenting on other pics). Now admittedly I'm bad about using Stories since really I'd rather share something meaningful rather than say photos of my cats or something. Though I was that way before I noticed the drop. So at best I have to wonder if there was an algorithm change but I didn't know if anyone else saw the same thing?
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Jul 15, 2019 04:12
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elgarbo posted:Nope, but it's worth noting that the more followers you get, the lower your engagement rate will be (according to the algorithm.) You picked up some extra followers lately? No, I haven't. At first I thought it might be content related since our most recent sets were a goth swimsuit set and a Sanrio PJ set one of our team members wanted to do. But the way we did and presented things was still pretty 'on-brand' for us. Plus we've done stuff like that before and it went over well. So that's why I'm so confused.
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Jul 15, 2019 18:45
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InternetJunky posted:My Instagram engagement has dropped off a cliff -- which is not to say it was amazing before, but I could expect 100-200 likes and a few comments per image, now I get less than 50 and if I'm lucky 1 new follower for each photo I post. In comparison my facebook response rate is rising and I'm getting 50-100 new followers per day. So after doing some research it may not just be us: https://medium.com/@cspenn/instagram-brand-engagement-the-latest-statistics-3a269e9a1c75
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Jul 17, 2019 20:59
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Also: I posted a poll to my IG story... everyone that voted said "Yes" they had seen an engagement drop. Ooooohhhhhh gently caress these garbage rear end platforms. 
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Jul 17, 2019 21:45
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Well I certainly had an interesting weekend. I put on my first photography demonstrations. At an anime convention. They went over pretty well even with the small audience sizes we had. One thing I think that really helped was that not only did we pull audience members to be in front of the camera but also to help put the shots together. Getting people involved in various aspects with what we were doing I think helped a lot. If anyone is curious about the story behind this and the shots we got I wrote about it here: https://www.makethemawesome.com/home/2019/7/22/a-first-time-for-everything-putting-on-photography-demos One thing I was really curious about : have any goons in here put on demos/workshops or at least thought about it? I've never seen that sort of thing talked about here so I had no idea if anyone had any experience along those lines. If you have I'd really like to hear about it. Getting some outside perspectives might help give me things to think about in the future.
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Jul 23, 2019 06:17
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Helen Highwater posted:I did a science of photography workshop for a local photo group. Talking about circles of confusion, Bayer filters and what raw files really are. Wow, that's a pretty heavy level of technical discussion. Really curious on how you organized it and tried to make it understandable by everyone. elgarbo posted:In September I'll have the joy of talking about and sharing my work with a bunch of Year 10 Private School photography students. One hour to talk poo poo about my own photos and getting paid a sweet $300 to do it. What a dream. That's pretty cool. I've kinda wondered how we might be able to get involved with schools (well, those that have photography classes anyway). We're actually going to be guesting at a pop culture event at a public library that marks the end of their Summer Teen educational program. I'm thinking about talking to the coordinator to see if there's things we can also do during the summer. For instance one of the demos we did at the anime convention was one on light painting and portrait photography. Everyone had a lot of fun with that one and I think something like that might go over well especially with a younger crowd.
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Jul 25, 2019 07:51
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I contacted a local small sized anime event to see about possibly having a vendor table to sell prints and whatnot... and they asked me to be the official cosplay photographer for it since their go to couldn't make it. Exploring all possible avenues to get your name out there seems to be working for us. I must admit I laughed my rear end off when I saw that email come through.
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Sep 2, 2019 07:12
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bobmarleysghost posted:Don't forget to get paid for it. We do get a vendor booth out of it, so that's something. I'm really looking at it more as a networking opportunity. To provide some clarification on what I'll be doing: I'll set up a shooting area to take photos. Now most of the time what I've seen from people who do this at cons is that they'll just set up a white backdrop, one or two lights, and call it a day. Since this won't be as high volume compared to what I see at most weekend cons that does give me more creative leeway. The thought is that I'll set up a gray background so it opens up opportunities for creative lighting, use of gels, etc. That way if an idea comes about we can take a moment to explore it. Plus I'll be shooting tethered with a decent sized monitor so everyone can see what's going on in real time (that went over REALLY well for some demos I did a couple of months back). If people really like what they see even before any editing I can be all like "So you see what we can do within a few minutes... now imagine what could be done with a full session." Even if it may not convert into session purchases I figure having con/event material that doesn't look like it was shot as such may play into our favor when it comes to getting panels/demos/guest spots elsewhere. And at a minimum it will make a Saturday evening a lot more interesting. 
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Sep 7, 2019 01:42
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:Con photographers use blank backdrops so they can drop the cosplay in front of prerendered backgrounds, usually. Well that's the thing... there's some around here that don't do that. But then again they are brought in to run booths at cons and tend to be high volume. So it's really almost like school/yearbook pictures in a way. Though I've noticed they never bother to change their lighting setups in any way even including the power. Some of my friends have had pictures taken by these groups and the lights tended to be so bright that anything white would wash into the background.
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Sep 8, 2019 02:54
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ReverendHammer posted:I contacted a local small sized anime event to see about possibly having a vendor table to sell prints and whatnot... and they asked me to be the official cosplay photographer for it since their go to couldn't make it. Exploring all possible avenues to get your name out there seems to be working for us. So this event was this past Saturday. While there's some stuff I could have planned better for (like not assuming that my gray muslin would not have a ton of wrinkles even though I steamed and thought I had folded it well enough the day before and decided not to bring my steamer along with me)... I feel like we achieved what we set out to do? When people saw the kinds of images that were coming up on the tethering system they quickly understood how we worked and got excited about it. Also explaining the whys behind something we wanted to do without being overly technical helped as well. But I think we did show that a cosplay photo booth doesn't have to be a white background with even lighting. https://www.makethemawesome.com/home/2019/10/21/a-first-time-for-everything-running-a-cosplay-photo-booth
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Oct 22, 2019 03:21
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DJExile posted:These are good! and yeah I think the wrinkly muslin and uneven lighting helped. There's a certain personality to it Thanks. It was funny that you mention the muslin because when I was going through them it made me start to wonder about backgrounds with texture to them in some way. Sometimes a flat smooth surface is what you need. But there was something about getting a tiny bit of depth out of the background that added something. Just need to figure out how to do it without being really distracting.
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Oct 23, 2019 00:20
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:I know a few photographers who will use a flash or strobe with some kind of focusing glass with a gobo holder in it to project texture onto a smooth background. Strobogobo has a ready made version for like a hundred bucks but I'm sure there's a DIY guide or ten online. Yeah, that's stuff I definitely want to explore. I've seen people do neat things with glass blocks and textured plexi as well.
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Oct 23, 2019 02:42
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I was wondering if people here wouldn't mind helping out with something. My cosplay/cosplay photography team is currently running a research project to try to gain an understanding of what people think is a "good cosplay photo". There's been things we've noticed with photos that have been shared by cosplayers and cosplay photographers that brought up a number of questions for us. But realistically we can't use other people's photos to try to answer those. Thankfully we have another way to get somewhere with this. We want you to critique our work. We've set up a survey where you'll be presented with twelve photos. At a minimum you'll be asked to rate each photo on a scale of one to five. But there are also optional questions about what you did and did not like about a pic. We also ask what we should start/stop/continue with our art. We've specifically created this survey to be as simple or as complex as you'd like. We also have a question that asks people if they currently practice any sort of art or not. And here's the big thing: we're going to share our findings. As far as we know no one in our space has done anything like this and we really want to see what can be determined with this project. And we think what will come out of this will be very interesting for a lot of people. One bit I do want to stress: we're not going to automatically collect emails and put you on a mailing list or something. We hate that as much as you do. There is an option to enter in an email address but only if 1) you want to be directly notified when we release the results, and 2) if you leave really interesting feedback and we can pick your brain about it. It's the only way your email address will be used. We crafted this survey to capture info from a wide array of creative people as we thought getting those distinct perspectives was important. And this is the only photography centric group I'm going to post this link to. Mostly because I do like the work people here post and a lot of you have shown you know what the hell you're talking about. https://www.makethemawesome.com/photosurvey
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Nov 2, 2019 22:13
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ExecuDork posted:Today is Review Other People's Stuff Day for me, so this is good. Overall, I like the pictures and what you're doing. And I really like the basic idea of trying to figure out what and why people like or dislike cosplay images. Thanks. We know we're certainly not perfect in what we do. But through observing others and what they share (and the reactions they get) we had a bunch of questions come to mind. This whole idea might not be able to answer them all but better for someone take a stab and asking those questions to start a conversation. Much better than people not talking about it and not growing because of it.
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Nov 7, 2019 01:59
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OK, I have something that our team has tried to understand for months. And at this point we're stumped. When we see photos we do try to pull them apart to get an understanding of how an image came together. A good chunk of that has been around lighting as we want to learn new things but we also try to figure out post-processing technique. In both of those we try to consider what was their intent in those areas. But this... this is just something we cannot figure out. What's with this lower contrast/desaturation/"haze" style? Like we get where it could be applied and it would work. But in our space we're seeing it all over the place. The examples I have here are from three different photographers and we have seen it elsewhere. We have also noticed some black cosplayers complain about it because it does mess with their skin tone. I guess we're just trying to figure out why the gently caress is this a thing.   
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Dec 4, 2019 02:47
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elgarbo posted:It is a thing because people like poo poo photography. Uptime Sinclair posted:It reminds me of those photobooths that automatically filter and photoshop things into oblivion. By that i mean any subject comes out looking like an npc from the game oblivion xzzy posted:It's just a modern gimmick aesthetic and people always flock to and overuse anything that creates some separation from the previous generation. The bit I'm amused by is that crazy things like that really cranked up HDR/tone mapping fad from a few years ago or badly applied CG make sense to me to why people did them. But this one has eluded me for a while now. The funny thing is one of the photographers I used as an example here has used this style for YEARS. Since they're relatively local I'd love to ask them how they developed that style. And not to ask it in a 'this sucks' sort of way; it would be to get some insight into their creative philosophy. While I may not agree with the style maybe understanding what got them there will help me learn something.
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Dec 4, 2019 17:18
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xzzy posted:The owner of smugmug had always been extremely open, compared to other ceos at least. It's actually cool they sent that letter out. Yeah, I got that email last night. I knew about the Yahoo login removal (THANK GOD) but didn't know about the move to AWS or beefing up the support staff. Kinda wonder what the costs were on those last two. I did appreciate the candor though.
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Dec 20, 2019 22:17
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Remember how I asked people in here to give us some photo critique? We finally published our findings. I will warn you it's a long read. https://www.makethemawesome.com/home/2019/12/20/the-great-photo-critique-experiment If any of you decide to go look at the actual feedback data you might be amused by some of the commentary in there.
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Dec 21, 2019 00:23
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Awkward Davies posted:Some non-photo related critique: I found this hard to navigate because your section headings and your links are treated the same. I also found the fixed header to be pretty distracting while reading. Yeah, I do wish there was a better way to handle the page navigation/viewing for something like this. Like the template we use is fine for our shorter articles/photo sets. Just not here. Might have been a way to solve for that with some creative coding. But with how long this project has gone on (we started working on it back in early September) and we just now got it finished we wanted to get it out there. I can add something to the next page links at the bottom to hopefully make things a bit more obvious though.
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Dec 21, 2019 00:54
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So it turns out we will be doing our light painting demo at a local con this weekend. One that has a bigger attendance than the first time we did it. Plus we have our original suggested runtime (90 minutes). At least this way we can show off more ideas. Now to hope that people show up.
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Dec 25, 2019 05:40
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ReverendHammer posted:So it turns out we will be doing our light painting demo at a local con this weekend. One that has a bigger attendance than the first time we did it. Plus we have our original suggested runtime (90 minutes). At least this way we can show off more ideas. Forgot to report back on this one. We did have a much better turn out this time around. We ended up with a really rushed setup and some technical issues at the beginning. But having conversations with the audience while we were going through that helped smooth things over. And then once we go rolling people really got into it. Everyone had fun being a part of things... especially when we had a bunch of people throw glow sticks around. What got me were the questions people were asking. They understood the starting points we wanted to present and were already thinking things through on how to make them better. That REALLY surprised me. And it turns out we'll be presenting this demo and another one at a con next month. Really looking forward to seeing where these things get us.
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Jan 6, 2020 08:07
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I... er... what? https://twitter.com/BrianHolmPhoto/status/1215851176798965764
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Jan 11, 2020 07:39
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How did I know that Fuji would say something? https://twitter.com/FujifilmX_US/status/1217256224271618049
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Jan 15, 2020 02:30
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xzzy posted:lol at anyone paying attention to anything that comes from fstoppers, the site that managed to be an even shittier source of photography information than petapixel. Yeah... most of their stuff is poo poo. Though the video series they did about their time working at Ritz Camera was pretty amusing.
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Jan 15, 2020 03:14
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Makes me glad that all I got in my time was a wrestler's boot to the lens that killed the AF on a cheap Canon 18-55 EF: https://www.dallasnews.com/photos/2...o6TxLoOIvWcn6vc
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Jan 19, 2020 06:59
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