SDN Photo-a-Day (Rules updates - read the OP)

[The Grim Squeaker]

Don't let Death's gear obsession get to you. Lens quality is hardly relevant at this point.

Who said I'd want something in the same focal range? A reasonably priced wide-angle lens is what I really want. I can get a sharper lens later.

Good luck with that, wide angles on a crop body... Yeah, good luck finding a cheap answer to that.. (I couldn't apart from a 10-22, and that's too much to justify).

It all comes down to personal preference, and you should take the time to discover yours before you are bitten by the upgrade bug.

That's definitely true. For example, I should probably find a bag before I worry about a new lens.

Ouch. Did you get a strap with your camera at least?

Anyway, a "basic" prime lens is uber cheap (around a hundred bucks for a Canon 50mm "Plastic fantastic"), offers image quality superior to all but the most stupidly expensive zooms, and it's extremely light, perfect for practicing with available light and wide apertures as well as spectacular colours and IQ.

It's excellent as a second lens if you ask me. I've thought about it. And I'd hardly call a hundred dollars cheap when I just spent all my money on a camera.

True, cameras force a sense of perspective in terms of "damn that's Expensive" (it certainly leaves computer rig building in the dust), but still, the 50mm "Plastic fantastic" is damn cheap for what you get.

It'll take more than a year if you ask me, he should keep the kit lens and then later on get a 50mm prime if he feels like it. (or 35mm)

Who are you calling a he?

Sorry Mrs Hellsing

[Bounty]

I took my camera to the fair. Only got to take a few photos, but they came out nice.

The funny part was the photo club moving through with $$$$ gear all trying to get a perfect shot, then looking at me weird when I started snapping one-handed while balancing three bags.





The ferris wheel went really, really, really fast too:



All of these were taken without flash, full-manual. I tried saving a few in both RAW and JPEG myself and I *think* - though this may just be an impression - that the severely underexposed ones came out more salvageable in RAW. Then again, my memory card went from holding 250 shots at max quality to just 60, which is a steep price to pay.

[Simplicius]

Doin' this in three parts.

That second picture is fantastic - close, well composed, great DOF and colours. (Prime lens?)

Don't crit the machine - crit the photographer.

Also, substantiate your opinions. "It's well-composed" is meaningless if you can't put your finger on how.

True that, but good zoom upgrades are expensive, and a prime is a very specific tool, for general everyday use Zooms aer just superior unless you know exactly what you want to do (available light shooting for example, people shots in parties, etc'). It'll take more than a year if you ask me, he should keep the kit lens and then later on get a 50mm prime if he feels like it. (or 35mm)

Oh lol. "Primes are specific tools." Yeah, it's sooooooo hard for me to use my primes when I'm out walking around, because everything I want to take a picture of is either right in fucking front of me, or really fucking far away...oh, wait...55 mm + 135 mm = no problem. And oh man, that f/1.8 is suuuuuuch a pain when I'm not in low light, except...oh my god...the lens stops down. Huh. Well, whaddaya know?

[Simplicius]

Okay, second part:

That's definitely true. For example, I should probably find a bag before I worry about a new lens.

Since camera bags can be a bit steep as well (the cheap ones cost about as much as a photo artbook), take the time to find one that you can grow into, and most importantly will be comfortable for the longest stretch you can foresee carrying it. I grabbed a bag in a hurry because of need. Not only did I find it a few weeks later 25 percent cheaper, it has turned out to be a mediocre fit in terms of gear accommodation and comfort on long walks, which I take often.

Domke has padded inserts, if you've got a bag you could convert. They might be cheaper than most camera bags by at least a little.

I've thought about it. And I'd hardly call a hundred dollars cheap when I just spent all my money on a camera.

I don't know about the specific costs, but you'd get the most versatility in the fewest purchases with a wide-medium long zoom (17-55 or so) plus a medium long-long zoom (55-200 or whatever). Keep an eye out for lenses that will serve you well for a long time and potentially over several body upgrades, and try to avoid redundancy.

[Simplicius]

Finally, un-derailing thread and atoning for not posting any photos in a while, even though I have a huge backlog to choose from.



A 'study' (Trans.: 'pretentious bullshit'? Maybe. -Ed.) of part of a deteriorating barn.



An interesting historical tidbit. This is the memorial for the Spanish-American War located in Bangor; decorating the memorial is the ornamental scrollwork from the bow of USS Maine.



Starfighters on the ramp, Andrews AFB. Still haven't made it this far in my re-scanning and re-post-processing, no no new version.

[DaveJB]

Some more samples from the batch I did with the 50mm 1.2, this time from the National Railway Museum.

[Bounty]

part of a deteriorating barn

If you don't mind me asking, what attracted your attention here? I can see the concept, I'm just not immediately seeing what I think you're trying to show here. And it's a shame because you can do a lot with ruins.

Train museum

The second shots of the dials is really nice. I know this sounds like the critique a six-year-old would give but it's all I really can come up with



The convenient thing about fairgrounds is that there's usually some light you can mooch off for shots

And my first tasteful nude:



Wonderful model to work with, by the way. He (she?) even sat still while I got my camera.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Doin' this in three parts.

That second picture is fantastic - close, well composed, great DOF and colours. (Prime lens?)

Don't crit the machine - crit the photographer.

Also, substantiate your opinions. "It's well-composed" is meaningless if you can't put your finger on how.

Tight shape, follows the rule of thirds, no extraneous elements (cat, couch, good streaming lines). Good DOF keeping the cat in focus. (The colours were great, like what I usually only see on my Sigma prime from inside buildings with the crappy light usually present).

True that, but good zoom upgrades are expensive, and a prime is a very specific tool, for general everyday use Zooms aer just superior unless you know exactly what you want to do (available light shooting for example, people shots in parties, etc'). It'll take more than a year if you ask me, he should keep the kit lens and then later on get a 50mm prime if he feels like it. (or 35mm)

Oh lol. "Primes are specific tools." Yeah, it's sooooooo hard for me to use my primes when I'm out walking around, because everything I want to take a picture of is either right in fucking front of me, or really fucking far away...oh, wait...55 mm + 135 mm = no problem. And oh man, that f/1.8 is suuuuuuch a pain when I'm not in low light, except...oh my god...the lens stops down. Huh. Well, whaddaya know?

When did I say anything about not stopping down? I never use my prime wide open, I need some DOF . (and there are the optical benefits of stepping down a little bit).

[The Grim Squeaker]

Starting off with areturn to uploading: 3 Wall photos of graffitti from Reykjaavic, the capital of Iceland.
It was painted next to a freehouse, a community building full of free stuff for the needy. The city was covered with great graffiti, quite impressive .

Bike on a cafe wall: I just had to take a picture of this, rain or no rain. (And it was raining, quite a lot).
IMG_0012


IMG_0023

IMG_0021

[Simplicius]

If you don't mind me asking, what attracted your attention here?

What appealed to me was the texture and straight-line patterns of the weathered wood offset by the smooth, rounded metal of the vent fan. I didn't want to be late for work, though, and there were ticks congregating around my feet, so I made the shot quickly and got the hell out of Dodge.

I've done a lot of straight nature-themed shots in the past couple of weeks as I've gone out and about.



Orange jewelweed.



Fir stand.



Long grass, Sears Island.

[Simplicius]

Better, Death. Now I'll beg to differ.

Tight shape, follows the rule of thirds

Following the rule of thirds isn't meritorious in and of itself. It's one guideline for composition, and it isn't always the right choice.

In this case, the 2/3 placement of the cat's head is a bad one. You don't even see the cat's face until your eyes are almost out of the frame, and you follow the cat's gaze...right out of the frame. This photo does all it can to help you not to look at it.

no extraneous elements (cat, couch, good streaming lines).

The camera angle and the resulting placement of objects in the frame is actually really poor. Half of the frame is completely wasted on out-of-focus cat and out-of-focus background. I mean really wasted, as in "There is nothing here that contributes to the photo in any way."

In a way, the red arm of the desk chair is an extraneous element because of how it screws up the rest of the picture.

Good DOF keeping the cat in focus.

I'll forget for a moment that half of the cat isn't in focus at all. DoF use for pet pictures should be similar to DoF use in portraits, because pet pictures are portraits. This means a narrow DoF to throw whatever is unwanted out of focus. Here, the focal length is too short, the subject too close to the unimportant parts of the photo, and the aperture too narrow for the DoF to work effectively. Too much junk is included by being in reasonable focus.

(The colours were great, like what I usually only see on my Sigma prime from inside buildings with the crappy light usually present).

That's a gear crit again, and an erroneous one at that - the colors as presented are really ordinary.

Use of color, which is a useful thing to critique, is really bad in this photo. The colors are purely haphazard and don't fit with any kind of compositional scheme at all. Most of the colors are dull ones - browns and blacks - including those of the subject, so the subject merges with a lot of the background. The red arm of the desk chair really fucks with the picture, because red is a strong attention-grabbing color. It's also the most colorful object in the whole picture, and it's right next to the cat's face. That means that when you first look at the photo you see a red bit of desk chair. When you eventually look at the cat's face, your eyes are drawn to...a red bit of desk chair.

I like cats and all, but these are both really mundane photos. I bet that's why Instant Sunrise asked us to avoid pet photos back in the first post - to make a good photo of an animal, you have to be a skilled portraitist. I would say more skilled than usual, since people are much more obviously expressive than animals are, so it's much easier to show the personality of a person than of Fido or Fluffy. Without that expression, there's nothing in the picture besides "Hey, look at the kitty."

[The Grim Squeaker]

Three more photos of Reykjaavic (Capital of Iceland).


F Reykjaavic-1

F Reykjaavic-2

F Reykjaavic

[The Grim Squeaker]

London Zoo. I have more photos from there than all of Iceland, due to the lack of rain and abundance of electricity .

Tyger, Tyger


"A pretty Butterfly" (Rorsrach voice)


Monkey pick nose

[The Grim Squeaker]

I've done a lot of straight nature-themed shots in the past couple of weeks as I've gone out and about.
"snip"
Orange jewelweed.

Sorry, but a very bad shot, i'm surprised you didn't delete it. Crapped out technically, the ISO was too high as a base, shutter speed too low (it's very blurry), and you blew the exposure up far too much.

Fir stand.

Excellent. The composition isn't that good due to the small tree leading the eye out of the frame on the right side though, I'd have gotten in closer with a wider angle to keep the triangular composition of the \|/.

[Bounty]

Sorry, but a very bad shot, i'm surprised you didn't delete it. Crapped out technically, the ISO was too high as a base, shutter speed too low (it's very blurry), and you blew the exposure up far too much.

None of those necessarily make it a bad shot. What I'm seeing is a shot of a flower which manages to avoid being just another picture-card flower shot. It's nicely framed too - I'm not sure it was intentional, but the leaves sort of make it look like the top flower is giving a very passionate and very boring speech with the bottom one sighing. There's something interesting going on, and that's not easy to do when you shoot a static object.

If you approach the photo from a purely technical standpoint of course it could have been better. But that takes nothing away from it being a photo that is interesting - put this is a sequence of stock, imagination-less flower shots (you know the type - perfect colours, perfect focus, same old close-up of a flower head) and it will immediately stand out. That's what makes it a keeper, and that's something you won't improve upon with technical trickery.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Sorry, but a very bad shot, i'm surprised you didn't delete it. Crapped out technically, the ISO was too high as a base, shutter speed too low (it's very blurry), and you blew the exposure up far too much.

None of those necessarily make it a bad shot. What I'm seeing is a shot of a flower which manages to avoid being just another picture-card flower shot. It's nicely framed too - I'm not sure it was intentional, but the leaves sort of make it look like the top flower is giving a very passionate and very boring speech with the bottom one sighing. There's something interesting going on, and that's not easy to do when you shoot a static object.

If you approach the photo from a purely technical standpoint of course it could have been better. But that takes nothing away from it being a photo that is interesting - put this is a sequence of stock, imagination-less flower shots (you know the type - perfect colours, perfect focus, same old close-up of a flower head) and it will immediately stand out. That's what makes it a keeper, and that's something you won't improve upon with technical trickery.

So a blurred shot that was underexposed and had the exposure yanked up blatantly on the PC is good due to... Looking different?
That's fallacious logic and you know it. What's next, a -6EV shot of a white horse?

[Bounty]

The only time - the *only* time - when the technical quality of an image is a deciding factor in the quality of an image as a whole is in 1:1 documentary photography, such as product photographs or archival images. If the goal isn't to provide a 1:1 objective representation of reality but to create a photograph, technical merit matters only insofar as the image conveys what the photographer wanted to convey. Everything else is irrelevant.

Simplicius made a good photograph. You are of course free to disagree, but to base that only on technical trivia means you don't understand why he takes pictures.

(By the way, not all of us use DSLR's. Simplicius often shoots film and he's been scanning his back catalog like a madman. Think before you accuse him of badly touching up a digital image in post)

[The Grim Squeaker]

(By the way, not all of us use DSLR's. Simplicius often shoots film and he's been scanning his back catalog like a madman. Think before you accuse him of badly touching up a digital image in post)

Accusing? . Are you off your rocker?

That amount of type of noise is either/or from a digital camera that's ahd the exposure boosted, or a scanned image that's had it's exposure boosted on the pc. Same thing.

[Bounty]

Or it's from slight overexposure on high-ISO film. Or it's just an artifact from using an old lens. Or something else entirely - I've had images come back straight from the photographer that looked like that, and then it's *usually* a sign that the original film has been slightly pushed or pulled. Until Simplicius comes back you can't say for sure, and just assuming he 'shopped the hell out of it is pretty low.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Or it's from slight overexposure on high-ISO film. Or it's just an artifact from using an old lens. Or something else entirely - I've had images come back straight from the photographer that looked like that, and then it's *usually* a sign that the original film has been slightly pushed or pulled. Until Simplicius comes back you can't say for sure, and just assuming he 'shopped the hell out of it is pretty low.

How the fuck is it low?
Since when is photoshopping something an insult? What, Next you'll be campaigning for people who crop their photos to be banned from the photo contest?

[Bounty]

What are you on about? You said it looked like he made a bad shot and cranked it up on the PC, I say you don't know that's what happened. And now I'm all of a sudden against cropping!?

[The Grim Squeaker]

What are you on about? You said it looked like he made a bad shot and cranked it up on the PC

Yes, I did.

, I say you don't know that's what happened.

Doesn't matter. It doesn't look good, and that's that.

And now I'm all of a sudden against cropping!?

I was irritated by your acting as though my comment was some insult/blow against his artistic self .

Leave it to Simplicus maybe?

[Simplicius]

(By the way, not all of us use DSLR's. Simplicius often shoots film and he's been scanning his back catalog like a madman. Think before you accuse him of badly touching up a digital image in post)

Oh, I always touch up every image in post. This flap is kind of funny, though, since my 'darkroom' work has gone completely unnoticed up until now...just as it should.

Death is a little right, in that I am not completely satisfied with the final result. I feel that there's just a little too much empty frame, but the plants grew as they did and I had to make the most of it.

However, his technical analysis is comically wrong.

ISO was too high as a base

ISO 200. Not very high at all.

shutter speed too low (it's very blurry)

1/8 sec., which is low but not impossible with image stabilization. Shutter speed was not a problem; most of the image is just soft, but not blurred. The distinction is an important one.

There is a small amount of motion blur on the flowers, yes. However, slow shutter for low light + P&S on macro mode = inevitably visible motion. What was I supposed to do, stop the wind?

you blew the exposure up far too much

Ha ha ha...no.

exposure yanked up blatantly on the PC

I hate to state the blatantly obvious, but you are blatantly incorrect. I pulled the exposure down, then bumped midtone contrast, decreased brightness, and bumped overall contrast.

I don't know how on earth that looks like I pushed it. Maybe you should get your eyes checked.

noise

Original, 100 percent:



Edit, 100 percent:



oh god so noisy...It's not as if I was taking a photo in low light (EV 7, the same as streetlights at night) on a really tiny sensor or anything.

Of course, I know what you mean by noise: the sharpening artifacts. That kind of thing is hard to avoid with the image produced by a tiny sensor, and it will be especially pronounced in bokehlicious parts of a photo. But you know what? Looking at the full-size edit at 100 percent, the effect isn't much stronger than the grain of a fast film. So who cares?

Doesn't matter. It doesn't look good, and that's that.

I don't care that you don't like it; as I said, I'm not that happy with it myself. But there is a take-away lesson for you in all this: It's very easy to be a critic; all you need is an opinion. But if you aspire to rational critique you need not only to be able to justify your opinion, but to know what you're talking about as well.

[muse]

Fir stand.

Excellent. The composition isn't that good due to the small tree leading the eye out of the frame on the right side though, I'd have gotten in closer with a wider angle to keep the triangular composition of the \|/.

That wouldn't work. A wider angle lens will alter the perspective & size relationship between the V-shaped trees in the foreground and the vertical tree behind it. Specifically, it'll make the V trees a lot bigger and the tree behind it a lot smaller, the size relationship which is pretty good in this photo will get screwed all out of whack.

[Bounty]

Phone! Remember kids, bring a camera. I'll keep repeating it until I remember it.



This tree will be dead and on a dump truck by Monday.