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Drunk Badger posted:I'm about to get my first personal camera, and after checking out various brands I've settled on the Cannon T3i. Another recommendation from that thread was to also pick up a [url=]50mm f/1.8[/url] lens. I'm still not fully understanding what the differences between that and the 18-55mm IS II lens that comes with the camera, other than the stock lens is able to zoom. Can someone explain the basic situations where I'd want to use one lens over the other? You would want to use the 50mm ƒ/1.8 over the 18-55mm when:
You would want to use the 18-55mm when you would rather have greater flexibility in focal lengths. To further understand the differences between the lenses you should go find yourself a tutorial on the basics of exposure (ISO, shutter speed, and aperture). Someone already linked one. fwiw, I think 35mm is a more useful focal length than 50mm on a crop sensor camera like the T3i. 50mm is a bit cramped, especially indoors. Try setting your zoom to 35mm and 50mm to get an idea of which one you might like.
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May 10, 2013 16:22
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You might have not been using optimal settings. If you post the settings for those shots (aperture, shutter speed, and ISO) or post the photos somewhere that doesn't resize them and strip their exif (flickr, 500px) perhaps we could help you optimize for a better shot next time. However, expecting great quality at 100% on a 16 MP point and shoot camera is laughably ridiculous. If I were you I'd accept the camera's limitations, dial the resolution down to like 6-8 MP, and enjoy.
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May 13, 2013 18:15
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Yeah your setting suggest that the camera picked fine settings for you. ISO 100 is probably the lowest ISO setting your camera has and will give you the best image quality. At 1/320 and 1/200 camera shake should not have been an issue. Your lens looks a little soft towards the corners. This is pretty par for the course on a point and shoot. To give you some perspective, even thousand dollar zoom lenses on cameras with sensors twice as big as your P&S's couldn't pump out 16 MP images that aren't a bit fuzzy at 100% crop.
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May 13, 2013 20:21
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Suicide Watch posted:Going to Europe. I'm prepared to pick up a D7000 or X100 and I currently have a D50 with 30mm f/1.4 and 50mm f/1.8 and a 17-50 f/2.8 on the way. If I go with the X100, will I be redundant? Obviously the D7000 will replace the D50. I shoot with the D50 + 30mm 90% of the time now and have been considering downsizing for a while now. You're talking about two really different options. If you've been thinking about downsizing from a D50, which is about as small as a DSLR gets, you probably don't want to move up to a D7k. The D7k is a fantastic camera but it's not small or discreet. Also, lugging a D7k, a D50, and lenses around for days at a time is going to murder your neck/back/shoulders. Considering that you've been thinking about downsizing I think you should get the X100 (or the S), have ups reroute the 17-50 back to wherever it came from, and maybe pick up an ultrawide or a cheap tele for your D50 so that you can get coverage somewhere you don't already have it.
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May 14, 2013 02:13
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Fake Ken Rockwell posted:Oh, have I been forgetting to remind you how you can support my growing family? That's old ken Rockwell tricks. Ken is on some next level poo poo now. He's got his sites set on all that high end headphone referral money. I hate the idea of renting photoshop. I was thinking about buying a copy then not upgrading for a few years but now I will definitely not. I am a hobbyist.
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May 16, 2013 05:37
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INTJ Mastermind posted:What's wrong with buying the current-gen hotness and keeping that for 10 years? You just miss out on a few new tools. My timeline for buying photoshop was more eventually than soon. I probably won't buy the current gen and stick it out. I don't like the idea of renting for a month or getting hooked on introductory pricing. Once you get hooked on intro pricing all your photos are in ps format and they have you. Lightroom works the same way -- free beta to get all your files into the format then once the beta expires you have to buy. It's lock-in/ransomware. As for renting for a month, I can't say for sure what it will be like with adobe but my experience trying to cancel and restart services like that has been that it's a total hassle. Typically when you try to cancel a service customer service reps make you jump through hoops and keep you on the phone for an extended amount of time to make it as excruciating as possible to do something like buy for just a month.
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May 16, 2013 13:07
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8th-samurai posted:Uh that's not how file formats work. I guess if you save everything as PSD, then sure but TIFF and JPEG can be opened by literally anything. Show us on the doll where the bad computer program touched you. I meant psd. I'd like to be able to go back and re-edit my old stuff starting from where I left off. I don't want to pay a subscription for that. At least I have Lightroom. I really wish another company would successfully compete with adobe.
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May 16, 2013 14:19
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casa de mi padre posted:Who edits their old work? Move on and make better stuff. I recently got an old photo printed to put up on my wall. Once I saw it printed I realized that I had underexposed it. Fortunately, I was able to pop back into Lightroom and clean it up starting from where I'd left off. I didn't need the old processing settings -- I could have taken the RAWs and reprocessed it. But being able to know exactly how I'd had things set up in the past and tweak from there made me more confident that I would like the new adjustments. Plus, I didn't have to redo little retouches like cloning out some small ghosting caused by the filter I had on the lens. Maybe I'm just getting old and people don't care about owning (i.e. having a perpetual license for) their software anymore.
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May 16, 2013 15:54
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I've had strange spikes in views on my flickr photos before too. The last time it happened they all came from some site that seemed to index flickr photos to make them available in some photos widget used by various websites. Does anyone have any pointers on what to do with timelapse photos? I was taking some pictures of clouds rolling around a mountain in the Shenandoah Valley. I set the camera to take a shot once every 15 seconds and took a few shots before realizing that I had no clue what to do with them in post. Could I have shot a little faster then stitched them together into a 30 fps video or something?
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May 19, 2013 23:52
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Fake Ken Rockwell posted:you guys ought to GIS your photo when you smell something fishy. Now that you mention it, it would be cool to have a browser plugin that added a "GIS this image" button to flickr.
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May 20, 2013 00:09
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ExecuDork posted:I've been messing around with timelapses, there's a thread for it here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3185188 Thank you, I didn't know lightroom could make a movie. I made a lovely timelapse with windows movie maker (it was awful) but I'll have to try it out in lightroom.
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May 21, 2013 17:55
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You don't look up the measurements you calibrate it yourself. http://www.johnhpanos.com/epcalib.htm I use the empty ball point pen on a table method.
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May 25, 2013 05:24
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The basic nodal ninja kit is $220 shipped. You'll probably want the extension rails too. I thought about the panosaurus, but then I got a tax refund. I'm not sure what the ezleveler nonemorenegative mentioned does but I can confirm that leveling can be harder than you might think, even on a stable surface (I.e. the street instead of a bunch of rocks).
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May 26, 2013 00:03
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unprofessional posted:An acquaintance of mine takes waterlily photos with very dark backgrounds, but there's a language barrier there, so it's hard to get a good answer when I asked her how she does it. The challenge is that waterlilies open up in the sun and close before the sun sets, so it's hard to get anything but direct sunlight on them, making for harsh light. The whole thing just looks really underexposed to me. If you want light that isn't so harsh take a shade with you and hold it over the flower when you shoot.
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May 26, 2013 18:37
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Subyng posted:I want to take a picture of a person using a slow shutter speed for the background, slow enough that motion blur from the person is almost guaranteed (say, over one second). Is there a way I can somehow eliminate the movement of the subject while still using a slow shutter speed? I've thought (and tried) using strobes, having the person quickly run into the frame before firing the strobe on them, but the problem is that the area behind the person still gets "filled in" by the ambient light. I can't think of a way to get this to work physically. Do any of you have any ideas? The effect I'm thinking of in my head is to use a slow shutter speed to have lots of motion blur in the background while having a still subject in the foreground. Attempting to freeze a person in a long exposure using a flash will not work well inside a single exposure. If the area where the person ends up being is exposed as well or nearly as well as the flashed subject is, you will get the effect of a double exposure where the person and background overlap. The only way you'll get a clean exposure of the subject using this technique is if the area where the person will be is dark/unexposed before the flash. Perhaps you can approximate the effect you're after by shooting a long exposure that intentionally underexposes the background by a stop or two then exposing your subject with a strobe strength that overexposes them by a stop or two. 3-4 stops of difference between the subject and background should be enough that the background is not noticeably visible through the subject. When working with flash it is important to remember that only two of the factors of exposure, ISO and aperture, actually affect flash exposure. So set your flash power and subject distance to expose for ƒ/16 ISO 200, use a long shutter and underexpose, then see what you get.
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Jun 12, 2013 19:41
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ZippySLC posted:How does one get better at photography? I alternate between thinking my photos are good and that they're poo poo, and all the while nobody seems to comment either way when I post pics on facebook, where i basically look for adulation. #1 Take a lot of photos. If you want honest critique you'll have to seek it out. Post in PAD, try joining a local photography club where you could meet people who'd be interested in sharing critiques, or take a local photo class. I don't know about your Facebook but on mine I wouldn't get critique I'd get likes from people who know I like to take pictures if I got anything at all. I only Facebook stuff that I feel like is a good picture I want to share with people.
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Jul 4, 2013 03:59
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I always thought it was take lots of photos, hate them, focus on taking photos you don't hate and as a result take a lot less photos. Eventually you get to make a few photos you don't hate as long as you don't get discouraged and quit.
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Jul 4, 2013 04:34
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VelociBacon posted:My longest lens is a Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6 kit lens (VR1). I would like to try some birding, would buying a $100 2x teleconverter essentially give me a 110-400mm? How disabling is using a teleconverter to the end image? I don't mind manual focusing, but will the use of a teleconverter on an already average lens make it crappy to such an extent that the whole enterprise isn't worth it? I don't really want to spend money on a nice long lens yet. Thanks in advance. The 55-200 VR1 is a piece of poo poo. Sell it if you can and if you can't maybe just smash it to pieces and throw it in the garbage. The AF is painfully slow, the IQ is poor at 200mm, and the effect of VR1 is barely noticeable. Take the money you get from selling the lens and the $100 you were thinking about dropping on a teleconverter and put it towards buying yourself something better like the 70-300 or a decent sigma with some reach. rio posted:Get a Nikon J1 or some other silly crop body and get an adapter to mount your lens. The J1 with the FT-1 mount has pretty bad autofocus. With a telephoto attached it hunts a lot even under bright, sunny, high contrast conditions. You could bird with it but realize going in that you'll probably have to manual override the focus sometimes to help it out and that it'll probably be impossible to get shots of birds in flight without a lot of luck. One thing the J1 has going for it with regard to birding is it's 60 fps continuous shooting mode which could give you some cool shots of birds taking off.
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Jul 5, 2013 17:11
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Reichstag posted:Those are some really bad photos, and some really bad web design. The whole site seems an homage to krock. From the awful in your face font to the shameless marketeering "HOME OF THE AWARD WINNING FREE HDR TUTORIAL" right down to the review style that favors repetitive, aggressive remarks about subjective qualities over organized, factual review content.
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Jul 5, 2013 19:01
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Ahhhhhh bad photos of his children! edit: removed Look at that vignette! He's out krocking krock! Dren fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 19:29
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I've used google+ to share with family. I collected all the photos while still at the event, uploaded them to the album, then emailed a private link to all my family members. They all seemed to get it.
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Jul 6, 2013 17:28
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I use Lightroom for that stuff. That's pretty much exactly what lightroom is for. You could probably use picasa, the I'm feeling lucky button is quick and does a pretty satisfactory job of processing images. First things first though, go through the pictures and select only ones that are good. If you still have too many go through the ones you selected and be more selective. Pay attention to what you like about your pictures as you do this and next time try to only take keepers so you'll have less work to do in post.
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Jul 7, 2013 17:15
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mclifford82 posted:As an aside, does anyone here find the digital level on cameras like the 5D3 / 6D useful? I find it jittery as hell, at least when trying to get something level handheld. On a tripod it's pretty awesome. Sounds like it's your hands that are jittery. But I agree about only using that feature on a tripod. If I want something perfectly level I'll usually already be using a tripod anyway.
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Jul 8, 2013 13:46
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XTimmy posted:Any recommendations on the articles about art fundamentals? I feel my grasp of light and tone is at a good level, but I fall apart when it comes to composition. The Photographer's Eye is a good book that focuses on composition rather than basic technique.
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Jul 8, 2013 14:49
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I think there's a way to get some or all of the metadata entered in LR to show up in the exif. Not sure if keywords will show up. Why do you want the keywords in the images themselves?
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Jul 11, 2013 05:06
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Yeah in LR you could use the spray paint can in grid view to quickly mark your stuff with the BT and LT keywords (or actually use "bright" or "light levels" since it's not in the filenames so no need to conserve characters). It'd be a shitload faster than renaming things. I'm no pro but renaming my files like that would drive me insane. Do BT and LT actually measure something about what you did? Sounds like they measure the capabilities of your camera's meter.
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Jul 11, 2013 12:49
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Find some photos that are good golden spiral photos and crop them to square. Additionally, the photoshop crop tool overlays the golden spiral. You could screenshot that to easily draw the golden spiral on some pictures. Here's a recent forum post w/ a golden spiral shot. Someone put the overlay on it a few posts later. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3450024&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=75#post417263225
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Jul 14, 2013 18:58
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It sounds like you don't know about parallax errors. They're probably giving you problems. I suggest getting a nodal ninja tripod head to eliminate parallax errors and stitching in Hugin. Hugin can even process bracketed photos and output a high dynamic range tiff that you can open in lightroom 4+ and tone really nicely. It'll do a good job when you have shots with windows + house interior.
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Jul 23, 2013 18:05
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I think it's really challenging to have a good photo blog/podcast/whatever. I really like the lensrentals.com blog. Some pretty unique content. The guy who writes it only seems to write when he's got something to say, which is a nice change of pace from blogs that update on a schedule whether they've got anything decent to write about or not. strobist.com, about off camera flash and lighting, used to be better but it's still pretty decent.
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Jul 23, 2013 22:15
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Hugin generates control points for you automatically. At least, it does for me. I've had a couple of panos where it missed a picture or two out of like 40 and I had to go add a few control points to those photos.
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Jul 23, 2013 23:26
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Check out Ben Wyatt's stopmotion. I think it took him several days? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jqKiVHS6x4
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Jul 24, 2013 00:19
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If the balloon wasn't moving too much you could've exposure bracketed and combined the images in post w/ a mask over the people so that they weren't all aliased and crap.
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Jul 24, 2013 02:31
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Hell, I bet you can pull a ton out of the jpeg with ACR or lightroom. Probably not as much as you'd like but more than you'd think. Someone else give it a shot, I'm not at my pc.
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Jul 24, 2013 03:26
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If you go into develop, push the sliders for shadows and blacks (I assume this is LR5), push the clarity up a bunch, then crank the noise reduction it'll end up looking a little nicer. However, you can't bring the shadows up much more than what you did there without the shot getting consumed by noise. If you crank it way up you can see the horizon line and much more of the onlookers.
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Jul 24, 2013 04:38
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Paragon8 posted:The trouble is that there is really no real incentive for genuinely good photographer's to produce blogs unless they're courting the strobist/guy with camera type market. Zach Arias is probably the best of those, but he's sort of become lumped in with the strobists and mcnallys. Otherwise you run into a few blogs here and there that are great but only have a few posts because it's easy to wander off. I had a blog that I really enjoyed writing for but I'd only get 50 or so views and it didn't really seem worth the time investment. I like Zach Arias on occasion too. I even bought his one light dvd. You hit the nail on the head talking about how it can be hard to find people who post consistently and really seem to like sharing experiences. A blog requires constant updates to keep readers interested but experiences worth sharing don't adhere to a schedule. It seems like there's room for an aggregator like petapixel or popphoto that doesn't suck.
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Jul 24, 2013 15:47
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The first rule of the dorkroom is you don't talk about the dorkroom!
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Jul 24, 2013 17:21
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Is it getting your lens data and crop factor right?
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Jul 26, 2013 03:12
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Did you strip the exif on these? You should be able to hit load images, then align and get control points. You can change the method for control point generation to like point, barrel, view to get a better fit sometimes.
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Jul 26, 2013 13:21
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It seems like there is something in your exif from your camera's files that hugin doesn't like. http://queue.acm.org/blogposting.cfm?id=46057 Perhaps hugin isn't the program for you. I've gotten nice results with it but it is not without it's byzantine errors that sometimes must be overcome. crime fighting hog posted:Is reading Exif info something I should be doing? Because I've been doing it more and more on here, when I see something I like I want to know what settings it was on. Reading exif is a fine way to learn what settings something was on.
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Jul 26, 2013 15:28
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:41 |
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You can get canvas from canvasondemand.com
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Aug 1, 2013 15:11
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