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hey folks, long time amateur photog checking in delighted that this chill thread exists, and I got all caught up and you all are running at my speed, and so here's a picture i took the other day of a crew just *partying down* this is an unknown-age-but-old pentax-M 50mm f4 macro lens and a first-gen K-3. i've only ever done photography to show neat things to friends, but i've liked following the yosposters and participating in threads a bit so here's where i will act like i'm a real person and share something i like doing  i see looking through the thread that the slr/mirrorless folks have very different processing styles than i do, and i dig everything i see. i also saw some terms flow around that are corners of raw processing that i've never dug around in before, so i'm looking forward to getting in and trying to fix my red hibiscus shots from the last couple weeks, as they've been incredibly disappointing at home like they always are.
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Aug 22, 2022 04:04
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since i'm rebuilding interest in photography, i've been arguing back and forth with myself about spending money on the hobby and while there are a couple of things i'd like to be able to accomplish that gear would do, realistically speaking, i need to just use the stuff i've got and enjoy the taking of pictures, rather than trying to solve problems that don't exist outside my own head. the only exception to that is, since i've been on pentax since my first slr, i still really want an FA 31mm limited, and but i agree with the thought of 'my skill ceiling does not exceed my gear' - it's more about targeting a specific artistic expression that could be available to me. Beeftweeter posted:heres a monday pic i guess i see your little friend there! that's one of the things i love about getting up close to flowers... finding all the little stuff going on on and around them. NoneMoreNegative posted:A Facebook 'Memory' from six years back to the last live show I ever covered, so it's been that long since I picked my camera bag up i should hope my disasters turn out as aesthetically nice as this
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Aug 22, 2022 16:45
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chiming in on the 'i like this' train
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Aug 22, 2022 21:07
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in the op, echi asked for bokeh my old k20d + smc-P FA 43mm f1.9 limited it's yalls fault now i guess, I am kind of randomly going back, selecting a lens, and reprocessing a little. this one just got brighter, and I like it a lot more than the last way I had it. (i appreciates you)
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Aug 23, 2022 04:35
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i just opened a smugmug account for non-thread purposes and they seem to give direct links for inline embeds, but it appears they don't strip exif/iptc either, so that's an extra step in lightroom. not that someone couldn't figure out the one thing in iptc on my images...Bloody posted:a white-crowned sparrow who was very curious in what i was doing: i love white crowns, they're fun little puffballs in the winter. HAIL eSATA-n posted:i demand satisfaction i was supposed to have gone 'home' to oregon this summer and didn't get the chance. my spruce lust hath been quenched. (i don't know what the makeup of trees is like that far north. i imagine my real favorites, doug firs, are in the mix bigtime, too.) nurrwick fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Aug 24, 2022 |
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Aug 24, 2022 19:56
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someone decided there should be some doug firs on campus, and i found out 21 years after i moved away from where they come from. unfortunately, it looks like the ipone se 2.0 did not agree that this picture was as pretty as i remembered it being, but whatever, these are my favorite seed cone by far. HAIL eSATA-n posted:evergreens are the best. pretty all year and drop fun crunchy cones possible point of disagreement: sycamores are real pretty with leaves, with the big green bits contrasting with the mottled to smooth bright trunks. i might make a case for birches, too. but i do agree that conifers are better.
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Aug 24, 2022 21:07
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i've been VERY slowly chipping away at the pictures i took last weekend because i've been also trying to actually remember to practice bass and there's only so much room in my day for artistic expression i guess  but i did just pack my bag for tomorrow with my camera and 14, 21, 43, and 77 lenses and a 25mm extension tube. i'm thinking about getting a third flash, too, for getting back around to painting with light. three off-camera flashes for wireless control with my k-3's built-in flash would give me a lot of options... and it would also serve to give me wireless control when-ifn i get a k-1, which don't have the built-in flash. i kinda miss playing with flashes... but ever since it cost me half a replacement value to get one fixed after it fell out of my backpack, i've been a little shy of taking them out. at least the current af540fgz ii is weather sealed, and if i found a used af360fgz ii for decent money, it would have that advantage too, plus not be a different brightness, requiring me to rethink how i point poo poo at other poo poo. i had a minute earlier where i thought about ordering an af200fg, which don't have the zoom and lack the tilt function, because i have the off-camera cable and shoe adapters, and that would be a way more portable option for putting light on macro shots than this other bullshit. someday i'll try to post a picture of what it takes to make coolass pictures like my monotropes.  k20d + da 16-45 + at least one AF360FGZ flash
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Aug 26, 2022 03:11
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also, i made inapproprate indoor nighttime use of my 300mm and futzed with an iphone workflow using an sd card adapter and my jpeg card:  meowsers
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Aug 26, 2022 04:00
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i found another crew partying down, this time on some allium also, there were blackberry lily seed pods to abuse maximum aperture on  since my 43mm lens is the star of this post, one of the things I've always enjoyed doing with it is taking a landscape picture wide open with some object of interest as the focal point. here, it was the sphere off in the distance (more easily evident in the linked size).  you end up getting a pretty dreamy effect out of it, though i am not super happy with how this specific frame turned out. i think it's a combination of the kinda boring scenery being a bad choice for this effect, the weird-to-me time of day, and the sun's position really taxing the 1997-era coatings. someday though i'll take my film camera out with this lens and really roll around in that f1.9, and that'll be what convinces me to save up for full-frame.
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Aug 27, 2022 04:24
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this has excellent mood Beeftweeter posted:pretty nice! i wonder if that giant orb off in the distance might make an interesting subject? not a whole lot else going on this weekend, so    
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Aug 27, 2022 22:43
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i've always said that photography is an artistic pursuit that doesn't necessarily always create art. there are photographs that are very cold, clinical, documentary things, like when i took pictures of gigantic av drawings with my slr because i knew my phone wasn't going to cut it and they were too big for the copier. those photos are not art. but because of my experience with the artistic medium and all the time and effort i had put into the hobby as an artistic pursuit, i had the tools and skill to do the thing and have it be good. it'd be like if a hobbyist painter needed to make a sign for a yard sale and didn't put any embellishments on it or something. not quite a perfect analogy but whatever. i'd have to imagine that there are other places where you can draw lines like that, but it's so subjective and so up for interpretation, that it's probably not really worth trying to blanket categorize. plus, PokeJoe posted:post a photo and ill tell you if its art or not Beeftweeter posted:nggghf. orb: i like this orb. the art department here has one of the early sculpture classes that goes through a unit each term where the class seems to be told "glue some trash together" and i laugh at it a lot, but i think the reason i laugh at it is because they really don't have the fundamentals in place by that point in the term to make that trash look like something that isn't glued-together trash. i don't know what mrs beeftweeter's orbjet d'art looks like as a physical 3d object (i am sure it is wonderful!), but i do know that the photo of it is a delight, and it's making me wonder if maybe it would be a fun exercise for the art students to have to make a 3d sculpture and then take pictures of it. we don't do photography AT ALL here at this university anymore, not educationally, so i doubt that would be high on anyone's list nurrwick fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Sep 1, 2022 15:41
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i have a tektronix 317 oscilloscope and its manual, and the manual has fold out pages for the schematics of all the different circuits in the box. i think that is absolutely beautiful and that it's an absolute accomplishment of labor and effort and i hope that whatever engineer drew them out was very proud of their work personally, i would not normally call those pages art, but drat if sitting here thinking about the schematics doesn't link me to some of the same feelings i get looking at things i *would* call art. i find myself thinking that human creation is worthy of consideration and appreciation independent of what label it gets. humanity is complicated. here's a jpeg  i made this by abusing wide angle and close focus. 14mm, wide open f2.8.
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Sep 1, 2022 20:36
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i really like the texture on these flowers, and the color turned out really complementary to it Beeftweeter posted:f art i really like this too, it reminds me of a frame from many years ago that i took of a fire alarm fixture. i should see if i can find it. meanwhile, since the thread said the word stacking, i wanted to try it and went back to the oooorrb (partly because i wanted to get a sense for exposure with a polarizer and ND filters to help keep glass wide open) to get a stack of thin dof frames  i didn’t feel like i needed to augment the colors too much, partly because i went late and there was only so much i could do to keep the afternoon sun vibe
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Sep 10, 2022 05:38
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echinopsis posted:
i like these, good work! i've found myself cropping to 1:1 sometimes as a challenge to take an otherwise uninteresting frame and to force myself to think about it in an unusual way. as an example,  i was walking around a pollinator garden with my 77mm wide open trying to paint with bokeh and wasn't paying especially close attention to viewfinder composition. i don't know that this is a great photo, but whatever garbage not-defocused-enough flower stalks were off to the sides originally, i'm happier with it as a square than as a 3:2. personally, i almost never post to instagram 1:1 because that's not how I see the world in camera. i also guess i should really start pulling back from there anyway since they bury photo posts now.
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Sep 14, 2022 15:55
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it's some combination of having worked on film and having the advantage of the absolutely massive and bright pentax mx viewfinder to work in and then moving to digital in the 6.1 megapixel era, but i actively avoided making ANY crops to images for years. i didn't have the resolution or glass to support it at the very beginning of digital for me, and even with the k20's 14mp sensor, i still felt like cropping was just showing me the limitations of the sensor more than allowing me to correct for framing mistakes (or allowing me to make intentional choices about alternative framing). it wasn't until like six months ago, about seven years into my k-3, that i realized 1) i kinda don't care, it turns out, and 2) the glass and resolution both support what i do well enough to let me throw away framing information. i still find myself holding the shift key when running the crop rectangle because i like 3:2 as a starting place, but it doesn't have to be all of the original frame for me anymore. i'm also beginning to poke at in-camera jpeg stuff and wondering if there aren't situations where that would be Decidedly Good Enough. i wish the k-3 had more jpeg presets and it were easier to switch between them, but i don't know. it feels wrong, or like cheating, or something. but as i have started to actually want to understand the tool i've been using, its hard to resist the urge to let myself run a little more free with it. i do wish pentax's camera presets were in lightroom and didn't require me to learn their software to get at. maybe i'll buy the one package of them someone has tried to duplicate into existence.
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Sep 14, 2022 16:40
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Beeftweeter posted:for the q system pentax lets you export to DNG, which is obviously very well supported by adobe. it embeds color profiles and lens distortion info (plus stuff like stuck pixels etc.), so the sensor really punches above its weight there i think (12 MP, but 1/1.7") because brainworms, but: it sounds like you shoot with a q and enjoy it. is it a recommendable system, with the understanding there will never be new lenses for it, and that it's got a few inherent limitations because of the sensor size? i have been disappointed with the output of the iphone 13's cameras and that's a big part of the reason i've moved back into the slr world, but there are a whole bunch of ~10 year old cameras that people really seem to enjoy as tools that filled the gap back then when all phone cameras were trash. the big-sensor qs are there, the mx-1 is there, even old ricoh GR models, but i don't know that i'd actually ever leave the house with intent to shoot in the kinds of environments where something like this would shine. i think i internalized a LOT of bullshit about what cameras and imaging are for just by latent exposure to the discussions on places like dpreview way back when, and i'm only just now starting to get to the point where i never should have read anyone else's opinions about the technical points of any given piece of gear. like... i get it, the movie mode on my k-3 sucks and if that had at all been important to me, it would have been helpful to read other people's thoughts. but these are the same people who these days proudly declare the pentax FA limited lenses to be relics of their time and no good because of purple fringing, and that's no-questions-asked about what you intend to do with them. at least i never bought into ken rockwell's brand of bullshit. "bad: made in korea" is a thing he wrote and posted in his review of the irix 150mm macro in 2019 (and it's still there), and he thinks foreground blur is a 100% forbidden technique.
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Sep 14, 2022 18:22
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my iphone frustration comes from... i don't even know how to describe how this is disappointing to me. i've watched it happen to images after i open them, where apple's imaging algorithms finally finish a picture i took and all of the sudden a bird that should look like this crop from a video frame: turns into a picture that overall looks like this:  with the bird being interpreted to look like this absolute mess:  all of those should be clickable for more "detail" but i've been really disappointed overall in the cameras module on the iphone 13 pro max and the way apple's software insists on 'improving' the captures. idk maybe there's a way to defeat this in the stock camera app... but i've tried a couple of third party apps and they just are not fun to use and like... i guess i could write an automator or whatever script to open a different camera app but i'd rather just use a camera camera at this point, since it's clear to me there will never be an acceptable-to-me camera in a phone ever again, rip lumia 1020. e: all that's to say: this is why I find alternative hardware from a decade ago fascinating. echi, very nice snow mesa.
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Sep 14, 2022 19:40
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Beeftweeter posted:oh, i forgot to mention that MFT raws are basically like i described DNGs from the q system earlier: they automatically populate the camera's built in color profiles, embed lens info with distortion characteristics, etc. along with an asston of other metadata. it's just not wrapped in some adobe trash. this is true for panasonic or olympus, it doesn't matter - part of the spec i use the native pentax raw format, pef. i should try futzing around with dng, i suppose... maybe the dng format out of it would save color profile. lens information does get embedded and is readable in lightroom, though i don't know if it is using the camera's corrections or applying its own. i assume the latter. clearly i'm not *unhappy* with what i can do with the native format or anything, i'm just very lazy and like the idea of having between 6 and 12 quick-click color profiles to ooh and ahh at before i go back to natural and do whatever i was going to do anyway. ughghhh artistic expression is hard work as penance for lovely whining in the last post and this wall of text, here's a picture i took a very long time ago of some cubes in a brutalist atrium 
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Sep 14, 2022 19:51
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beeftweeter, that background is buck wild. i love it. pokejoe, i love your crowfriend, it's doing a great job... bringing you stuff? video nasty, your standing duck is wonderful echi, keep playin with filters. nobody does that poo poo anymore, but i still laugh and clap my hands when cinematographers use split diopters in frame. i went out after work today as it's gotten cool, and i had set out with the hope of getting some macro-scale photography done, as i used to love it and have a hankering to do more. i took my 100/2.8 macro and a flash and cable with me so I could attempt to add some light one-handed while i monopod-stabilized the camera. all that was fine, though the wind tried its best to ruin the experience and reminded me i should take two flashes and also not go when it's windy. honestly the picture i just like the most out of today's stash, though, is the one i got of really strikingly-lit fern buds.  i did get to spend some time pointed at this common green darner. this is the best full-body framing i got; either the wind or my poor bracing practice got the rest of the shots, but this one is mostly acceptable  once i got the flash out, it was a bit easier to trap focus  i think keeping a diffuser on the flash will help smooth out the lighting on the up close things where the extra light is necessary. it's possible i could relax it a bit in post, too. i don't know. i had issues with series of frames coming in dark, which may be because i haven't tried using my flashes or their eneloops in a while, but i see it as now i have reason to go back out and try again!
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Sep 24, 2022 03:55
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HAIL eSATA-n posted:
Corla Plankun posted:god drat this is one of the best landscape shots i've ever seen like… god drat, though Video Nasty posted:Great shot! I got a bug party on some milkweed thistle the other day. hell yeah milkweed party 
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Sep 28, 2022 03:43
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Achmed Jones posted:m happy to be pointed at beginner resources (because searching mostly just turns up lovely seo spam). if i may be so bold as to suggest... just take pictures. take a lot of pictures. set the camera to jpeg mode, maybe even pick one of the jpeg processing modes that canon probably includes on the camera, and take pictures of everything you think looks interesting. maybe eventually start thinking about what YOU like and don't like about the work you've done. maybe look at other people's pictures and compare on the basis of something like overall bright/dark look, or framing of the subject, or how the subject interacts with the world around it, and then try to take pictures in a way that works on you understanding the relationship between your point of view and the jpegs you want to produce. don't spend a lot of time looking at the image on the camera... check it and move on. stay in the moment. etc etc. eventually you should develop a style that reflects your own interests, and then you can start chasing glass that does the specific things you are interested in. you hope that eventually you settle on one area or another, instead of being an idiot like me that wants both ultrawide and telephoto/macro. personally: i learned not by reading or studying, but just by blowing through my whole student job paycheck on film and processing. there's probably a happy medium, but i loved almost every second of that journey. i imagine i would probably have killed the shutter mechanism in my first dslr if digital had been ready four years earlier than it was. that said, i'm sure the other folks have thoughts on actual resources, but i want to encourage you to  but instead :justshutter: rather than worrying about taking bad pictures or whatever. i have a book called Mastering Your Digital SLR by Chris Weston that does a pretty good job explaining the actual mechanics of the poo poo if you want to read more about how the camera actually makes its decisions and why certain things happen (iirc purple fringing, aliasing, etc) that i think i would recommend if you want to get at paperbacks.also, of course: share dog
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Oct 13, 2022 00:02
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Beeftweeter posted:imo since everyone has different tastes and priorities it's pretty difficult to give catch-all advice, so basically yeah honestly the coolest thing about the idea of being a beginner in this, the future, is that you don't have to pay $12-15 to find out two days later that you screwed up half a roll of film, got ten technically fine shots, and got two you actually liked. that and it's SO incredibly easy to find other people's work and think about how it tickles your fancy, especially once you have an idea how shutter speed, aperture, and sensitivity work together to determine how photons turn into images. now that you don't have to worry about killing a whole roll of iso 100 film before you go inside again, and now that you don't have to worry about the color balance and latitude of any specific film, it's so much easier to experiment and compare results. i definitely understand why people who started with digital photography now find themselves drawn to the look and feel of film and film cameras, respectively, but honestly? if you like takin pictures and you like what your gear does, gently caress it and i do especially get the idea of 'gently caress postprocessing' - the only reason i think i still spend any significant time doing it is because i'm used to it. i have shot two weddings and honestly, after the first one, the full two and a half days of processing across the ~300 worthwhile pre-show, portraiture, ceremony, and party shots was enough to convince me i never wanted to do that kind of work professionally. do NOT think you are required to live in lightroom for a couple hours after every day shooting. for me, it's easily the least fun part of my day, except for the part where i get to spend time looking at the cool poo poo i got to see earlier. that part's pretty cool. i also still take enough bad pictures that i get absolutely delighted by finding the diamonds in the rough. oh that reminds me, definitely don't ever let anyone tell you that you should get to a point where all the pictures you take should be masterpieces. no faster way to lead to disappointment.
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Oct 13, 2022 00:45
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echinopsis posted:aperture priority would allow the camera to make fail judgements about shutter speed, and that’s unacceptable. manual with auto iso is the superior choice my camera won't even let me do auto ISO in manual, because how would it, how is that manual actually you have highlighted kind of an interesting thing... i only own one mirrorless ilc, and it's the pentax k-01 from 2012, so: does anyone that makes a mirrorless ilc have a custom setting or whatever that lets you drop the camera into a mode that literally is not allowed to overexpose? would be kind of an interesting 'working professional' feature, though i don't think i personally would want to ever use it. i shoot too many way-dynamic scenes, and i hate shadow amplification noise.
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Oct 13, 2022 00:50
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i actually started using auto iso this month. pentax has long had this TAv mode on their dslrs (and previously on film cameras the 'green' program shift nonsense i never looked into because i don't use the program modes, just Av) and so they've gotten to be pretty good at riding the absolute minimum sensitivity necessary for the aperture value and focal length/shake tradeoff for any given scene. i use it because i kinda got tired of thinking about it and wanted to let the tool think for me a bit. that said, i used manual iso selection SO MUCH that it's part of the reason i moved off consumer bodies into 'professional'... using buttons to menu to a different sensitivity took me far enough out of the shooting moment that i'd get pissed off at having to do it. hold ISO + twist dial was a workflow godsend, and in macrotimes, I still drop back into that frame of mind. auto's great for landscapes and quick telephoto of butterflies or whatever.
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Oct 13, 2022 01:11
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my experience has been that i can get multisegment errors of way more than one stop if the object in frame isn’t adequately large, which is fine as i also don’t need to get it right on the first shot - a swamp darner isn’t gonna get bored. but if the camera is metering off the sensor’s live image instead, i would think it could get much finer grain information than off the prism’s ~86k pixel metering sensor (using my k-3 mk1 as an example - i’m sure there are cameras with more density, and I know older and cheaper rigs have the old zone-based metering). it should then be able to completely avoid any highlight or shadow saturation, if you wanted to do that for whatever reason. it would be pretty neat if that could eventually lead to a world where you had imaging sensors that could dynamically change sensitivity of groups of, or even individual, pixels, which would be buck wild. i would assume doing that kind of magic would significantly increase the shutter lag of a camera that had it, but it’s fun to dream [edit: changed 300k pixels to 86k pixels in the metering module. literally nobody would have cared and the point is unchanged, but i was wrong about something] nurrwick fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Oct 13, 2022 |
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Oct 13, 2022 15:43
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yesssss dog post achieved!
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Oct 14, 2022 03:27
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i wanted to get good pictures of an american coot that just keeps coming back to the lake near where i work, but it was nowhere to be found. so i had hauled my 300mm lens around with me for almost no reason, until the last quarter of the loop around the lake  i find myself a LITTLE disappointed at the noise performance for the ruby-crowned kinglet, but i also have never gotten anywhere near that good a look at one, and i am at least pleased with the detail in the shot. i've been stuck in 'trying to get my place of employment to process the financial documents necessary to buy macsbooks for people that don't need them' hell at work for the last week along with trying to get a couple of av installations going, so, to be totally honest, just going outside was really nice and who cares about the camera's noise floor.
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Oct 25, 2022 03:17
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that is a great picture, there is no taking away from that. you did great work, in camera and in processing! i feel the same way about my 77 i think as you do your 135... if i don't let it down, it takes the pictures i tend to see in my mind. someday, i look forward to seeing its work on 36x24. also, i'm glad you had a good time with Av mode! i'm sure the rest of us will be, too.
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Oct 30, 2022 02:35
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PokeJoe posted:cool bird pics hell yeah peanut party the last frame is great, but i also really like the framing of everything in this shot, nice work 
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Nov 21, 2022 03:12
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 i ended up getting a copy of the 31mm, which was a pretty good way to offset how lovely it is to be in an office with no decoration starting last week. as i believe the chant goes, bo keh bo keh bo keh my lens is possibly a pos: i found haze in the rear element group somewhere on my 77. taking it apart for cleaning is a no go. i did an aperture degreasing on an old manual focus lens once and that went fine, but the screws are torqued far enough (or loctited) that trying to remove them even with the appropriate JIS driver makes me uncomfortable. what's weird is that there is a swirl mark in the haze, like an incomplete wipedown of condensate on a front element. it almost looks like the haze came down on poor factory polishing... which if that's the case, i bought the lens in 2007 and I guess it doesn't matter at all in practice as i've loved the output of it the whole time it's been in my bag. that means i should just leave it alone/ right?
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Dec 14, 2022 01:57
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yeah fair enough! im heading out to my dad's for the winter break next week and will take and use it, we'll see if i'm finding myself disappointed in any way. ive had it for just shy of 15 years and it's probably my most frequently used lens, so it'd be unsurprising if it got jacked up in that process. it definitely has a bunch of dust inside but that's been the case for a while. tax: here's a random shot from august with the lens. probably a bit unsaturated based on the butterfly weed colors, and i missed focus on the bee, but whatever. j u s t p o s t 
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Dec 14, 2022 23:56
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i don’t know why but these two really say something to me. i should probably talk to someone about that.
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Dec 15, 2022 03:06
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Casual Encountess posted:its mostly that ive been going to a bunch of drag shows and my iphone 13pro does Pretty Good in even the shittiest lighting and i'm jealous that my d40 just Does Not Work in dark indoor settings in the way I wanted it to. like i'm not trying to go full rear end club photographer but the places i will likely be shooting the most will be in poorly lit clubs or at night and my poor baby just does Not Like It. it's been reasonably well discussed, but i think you'll be amazed by how much better APS-C and full frame sensors are at "high" iso performance these days. 2006-era ISO 800 is easily equivalent to ISO 3200 performance on a 2015 era camera, and that's only if you actually care about the degree of detail loss caused by sensor noise. given my current fixation on macro poo poo, i find myself mildly irritated by 2015 sensor tech, but if I reflect on what the pictures i was taking with my (i shoot pentax) *ist DL versus what I get with my K-3, I stop whining and appreciate what I've got. honestly, any dslr or mirrorless camera from the last 5 years is going to be a massive in-place upgrade with your existing lenses. if you can also swing a lens that does the field of view you want at a faster aperture than you have, then making that a part of the upgrade will help. i did this backwards - the field of view i used the most was the mid-tele range, so i went with that upgrade before i moved through the body options. on reflection, the upgraded dynamic range and noise performance of the 2015-era K-3 helped more than the added light gathering and easier hand-holding of the 77 f1.8 lens. that said, the shots i got out of it were way better than what i was getting out of the kit zoom, and i probably would have jumped on the 21/2.4 as a step up from the 24/2.8 experience i had on film had *it* been available 10-15 years ago. for the electronics, though, if i went to the trouble of moving to last year's k-3 iii, i'd probably swear up and down i'd never need anything else to do really demanding work. if i were to travel back in time and try to point myself at the current imaging performance of an entry-level dslr to winter 2006-myself shooting on late 2005-era tech, I probably would have sworn up and down i'd never need to replace my lovely 50-200 kit-grade tele lens. i also would have been amazed at both how good and how lovely my iphone 13 pro max was. this hunk of poo poo can take amazing pictures i wouldn't have dreamt were possible even five years ago, and it also manages to disappoint me at very nearly every single moment i want it to do something specific. i think really this rambling poo poo boils down to: whatever modernization you put behind that 50/1.8 will be an unbelievable improvement relative to where you've been shooting for the low-light environments you're talking about. and with regard to that aspect, the newest you can buy, the better off you should be, check reviews of dynamic range and high iso performance for the camera you think you are interested in moving to, but know that anything released in the last five years will blow away your expectations based on 2005. as amazing as phones have become, proper camera image sensors have made as much progress. you might need to put a bit more after-shutter effort in in some cases, but the end result will 100% be worth compared to the iphone 13 it if you want it to be. echi: i'm gonna echo megabound's advice of 'try taking a good picture with a wide-angle real-camera lens.' yes, boring lovely 28-40mm equiv pictures are going to pretty much look the same between a random terrible cell phone shot and a random terrible 'real' camera shot, but either device can do better than the way you're talking about them. we all see way more snapshot photography by people who don't put the care and attention into the pursuit, and ... actually all of the suddent I'm filled with a disappointment that i think most people probably don't actually appreciate good photography for what it is. well, anyway, buy a 30-35mm equivalent lens and go take some interesting pictures with it and I think you'll be entertained. or don't, because of course if you want to tell the world what you see through a 135mm framing, who the gently caress are any of us to tell you you're wrong... all i can tell you is i find wide angle framing fun, and if i weren't away from my library, i'd post some of what i found to fit that bill this is all too much god drat writing for a camera thread so here's a shot i don't think i posted here that's in my goonshare album: 
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Dec 29, 2022 07:47
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Viginti Septem posted:From tonight somehow i missed the last two posts on the last page and holy moly I like these these are fascinating. i had some shots come out of a dslr corrupted like the cat one once and never did figure it out, nor did it ever happen again... kind of an interesting substitute for "old camera had weird film advance problems" or "sticking aperture exposure errors" or whatever else.
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Dec 29, 2022 18:43
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i think i like the second one better; the first one feels off balance as shot, but a little closer, a little more toward the corner, and the corresponding extra bit of bokeh would more firmly lead the eye around the frame. the second one is pretty nice centered like that, to me anyway i took my film body and film-suitable fixed focal length kit out to finally finish a roll of film i loaded into it in 2017. i took a digital body with me, too… my k-01, the world’s dumbest mirrorless. i probably would have enjoyed doing that more if it hadn’t been set to jpeg for some reason. the jpegs out of this camera (or at least how they load in lightroom) are smeary like iphone heifs. i also was kind of shooting intentionally questionable frames, though, so eh.  i also had used a card in it i hadnt checked since 2018. those weren’t intentional crap photos, so they were just let down by being kinda crap jpegs  
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Feb 5, 2023 05:01
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hey thanks folks for the feedback, i'm glad you liked the shot i found disappointing. it's good to remember other people can see past your own internal limitations sometimes, especially during a rough week. re: tubechat - i have a couple of aftermarket kenko tube-related products (25mm extension and 1.4x teleconverter), and while they work fine, they don't feel as good - the mating surfaces and latching mechanisms seem to be rougher and give off a strange feel when in use. it also changes the balance of the camera in a strange way because they're so light. that has a benefit, at least, in that it's less weight in the bag! none of this is insurmountable or makes me not want to use the devices, but the plastic body and cheaper mounts are certainly there. someday i want to switch out for the first party teleconverter so it does the math on focal length and aperture for me, but i also don't want to replace working gear, and the cheaper tc works fine. all that to say: as long as it doesn't fall apart, yes absolutely it will do the job forever, and with extension tubes, there's not even any wondering if the optics are letting you down. re: modechat - I basically only ever shoot in Av with auto ISO right now. i do make extensive use of exposure compensation, as it works better for the way i learned how to think on cameras. as much as id like to say that i found the creative control made possible by changing the aperture to be more engaging than changing shutter speed or some learned thing i could say about my opinions now, instead i will blame lazy 22 year old me for learning on a compact film slr with no automation at all and getting into the bad habit of only thinking about changing the lens setting because the ergonomics stopped me from wanting to twist the shutter dial. i also... given the two factors outside my control for any given shot on a roll of film (ambient light and film speed, though i guess focal length+hand shake figured into that too), it was easier for me to visualize what the aperture was going to do in the range of shutter speeds that were available for a given shot. the only time i use manual shooting is if i am using old K and M lenses, or if I'm messing around with night sky/fireworks/light painting stuff. i do find that pentax does a pretty good job with determining exposure time and iso based on the lens's internal data, which i think comes down to the mtf curve and focal length. the only time i have to really make sure i have things more fixed down is if i'm shooting my 300mm; 1/400 isn't really good enough with 2015-era shake reduction for me, and that's where the camera is absolutely convinced it should keep the shutter speed. fortunately, i also already have to have a special user config setting for that lens because half the time, the body's af module just gives up confirming a lock even if the selected point is in focus. i have no idea if that's a body problem or a lens problem, but i know my af mirror was filthy and probably still needs cleaning. speaking of... does anyone have experience with cleaning services for dslrs? i've never had it done, and precision camera decided not to respond to my email so i guess they don't want to help.
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Feb 8, 2023 01:58
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third party lenses are big partly because the same optical formula needs to work across whatever mounts they sell the lenses for, and that’s tied to registration distance and flange diameter… but i also understand that recent third party stuff and increasingly first party designs are beefing up because of contemporary use trends. i think someone in this thread said it as “we aren’t shooting tmax through spherical-ground lenses anymore.” it tracks that making good images on a high density digital sensor will require more glass, i guess also though, lens designers probably have been optimizing for the performance characteristics highlighted by test charts, for better or for worse, and working for mtf and corner aberrations are going to require a lot more glass in the barrel. HAIL eSATA-n posted:i've agreed to take pictures of a friend's wedding this is the way. i did two weddings for friends, might get talked into a third this year. i charged a fair rate so it wasn’t abusive toward either them or me, and i did it like i meant it. the work isn’t my favorite, but it is wild to see prints of my portraiture work in other people’s houses
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Feb 9, 2023 00:04
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agree strongly with "i wouldn't worry about it" i think you have it just right, use the 50 from further away than you'd think you need to given the shorter focal length. iirc, the perspective distortion issue is, for rectilinear lenses without any additional hardware weirdness in the lens, entirely dependent solely on subject distance, not on focal length, angle of view, aperture, or anything to do with sensor/film size. a subject viewed through a 50mm lens on aps-c is going to have the same basic appearance as that subject through a 75mm lens on 135 format when photographed from the same distance. the 50mm picture will have one stop's increase in depth of field at the same aperture setting, but chances are good that won't really matter as you won't be spending a whole lot of time worrying about the comparison if you don't have the equipment to make it. unless you talk to horrible camera nerds who will categorically tell you you're throwing away any extra speed you have by shooting "small" sensors. they are horrible do not talk to them. generally: use a lens that gives you the category of view you want on the camera you have. me personally: yes please to 14mm, 31mm, 77mm on aps-c. ~90 degrees diagonal for wide angle, ~45 degrees diagonal for normal, and ~20 degrees diagonal for telephoto are easy for me to work with for how i look at subjects. you may find you have specific view preferences and that's good! use what you like to tell the story you see in front of you. i went out to take shots today of apricot blossoms on campus and then headed over to the local gardens to get the (very) early spring flowers coming up 31mm  200mm macro  31mm  200mm macro  21mm  i don't know if that last one is anything. i thought the redwood or whatever frond stuck in the ivy was interesting, but i haven't done enough selective desaturation work to do a whole lot to make the orange pop. i know that stone fruit flowers are generally regarded as pretty cliche, but i thought the kind of otherworldly quality to the slightly screwed up plane of focus on the 200mm sample above was interesting. i included the 31mm shot because bokeh. i also was really happy with the subject isolation on the flamingo i got from it, though i think I do wish i had brought color film in my mx to try to get it at 43mm and wide open for that extra stop of isolation. oh well. still great to get outside in nice light in february without having my knuckles split open!
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Feb 12, 2023 05:17
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HAIL eSATA-n posted:
i like this a lot if they don't. something about the leading action of the rails and the mess of poo poo in the lower half with the bridge truss and tree. cmon. Beeftweeter posted:also, one thing i really like about most MFT lenses (unless they are fully manual), the lenses provide barrel distortion information to the body — it's automatically corrected, even using RAW. same deal with chromatic aberration was this a feature of the mft mount from the beginning? i always have found this kind of lens data fascinating. pentax DA - at least most of them, anyway - and D FA lenses are supposed to have optical distortion and aberration correction, but i think the only FA lenses that do are the now-reissued FA limiteds. FA lenses were what introduced the mtf curve for better program operation, but nobody had any reason to build distortion numbers into the data protocol because what was the camera gonna do in 1991, twist the film a little bit? the original F lenses only had aperture and focal distance transfer, presumably the latter just to help the camera do exposure compensation or something. or maybe it was tied to autofocus performance. i've not ever spent a lot of time thinking about F lenses, I got into the game way too late.
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Feb 12, 2023 05:28
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yeah the tiny flange distance and smaller sensor really free you up for a lot of wonderful pocket-saving stuff. i used to be the king poo poo of tiny cameras shooting with my *ist dl and 43mm pancake, then the mft things blew up and i have that 'aw man i want microcamera' feeling.
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Feb 12, 2023 05:37
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