I swear, I'm totally not procrastinating, but I just had a mental whoa dude moment when I applied something my dad told me about how to unscrew stuck things. Don't you love it when a filter gets stuck to a lens, or to a step-up ring or when step-up rings get stuck to each other? Well, a little while back I realized that one of the vintage lenses I inherited from my mom (a gorgeous 135mm f2.5) had a light blue filter stuck to its front. The thing wouldn't budge. To make matters worse:
(Here illustrated with one of my polarizing filters after the fact)
Turns out there's a simple, low-cost mechanical solution for that problem! It requires nothing but a piece of string and a pen. Wind the string tightly around the bit that's stuck, tie the loose ends around the pen, keep winding until the string is really tight. Then use the pen as a handle for the bit you couldn't unscrew, and voila!
Sad postscript to this story: the reason that red part rotated was that the front half of the lens was coming loose :-/ Put it back together for now, but now I'm worried...
I'm excited to get this, I basically got tired of my Nikon DSLR (from 2006) and taking it places because of size, and stopped using it much a while ago
And still take lots of photos with my phone and miss using a real camera, so I wanted something I could at least put in a jacket pocket or carry around easily
Fiddling around with it in the store I liked it a lot (sadly they ran out of stock earlier that day, hopefully I can get one before I go to Norway)
Still need to sell my DSLR lenses but I'll get around to it eventually
I haven't posted here in YEARS. Glad to see the thread is still going strong though! I'm still taking marginally decent landscape photos with marginally decent cameras (and phones).
Yay! Good to see you back @Gafoto. Great group of shots, looks like you're still getting to travel a lot? That second one is gawjus, that from somewhere in Utah?
Apparently Tulsa, Oklahoma is a great place to see Art Deco... they even have a museum for it (which I didn't get to go to). I'm going to be dumping quite a bit from Tulsa though, so bear with me.
@rothgarr None of these were bracketed no. Just single exposure with some lightroom/photoshop love, which I didn't need to do much of on any outdoors shots. There was no lack of great light the entire trip to Oklahoma and back.
Hey yall, I'm a long time lurker here but finally have something to share. I've been a 35mm guy since high school, so I have 20 years shooting that way, but recently decided to get with the times and bought myself a Fuji X-A3. I'm really only concerned with taking pictures of my kids and my nieces and nephews, because everybody takes a zillion pictures of their kids with their phones and to me they all look like garbage. So I stepped in.
Digital photography, and especially digital photo editing are brand new to me, so I'm struggling. But I do like being able to take 10,000 photos in a weekend and then sorting it out later. Really opened my eyes. I'm going to link my website, but also put up a few examples of shots I like.
If anybody has:
- any advice on what I'm trying to do
- advice or recommendations on editing software
- resources for learning how to do this better
- critique of my photos
I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance, this thread is awesome. I'm always amazed at the talent in this community.
Hey yall, I'm a long time lurker here but finally have something to share. I've been a 35mm guy since high school, so I have 20 years shooting that way, but recently decided to get with the times and bought myself a Fuji X-A3. I'm really only concerned with taking pictures of my kids and my nieces and nephews, because everybody takes a zillion pictures of their kids with their phones and to me they all look like garbage. So I stepped in.
Digital photography, and especially digital photo editing are brand new to me, so I'm struggling. But I do like being able to take 10,000 photos in a weekend and then sorting it out later. Really opened my eyes. I'm going to link my website, but also put up a few examples of shots I like.
If anybody has:
- any advice on what I'm trying to do
- advice or recommendations on editing software
- resources for learning how to do this better
- critique of my photos
I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance, this thread is awesome. I'm always amazed at the talent in this community.
Hey @Bubs, those look very cute :-) I think your biggest potential area of improvement would be composition - the framing and staging of your subjects.
The first photo is the best in this regard, I think: it's got a nice balance between subject and background. Though I would have tried to get the same shot further from the left, angled more to the right, so that you capture more of the open floor in the background. Right now those lines lead nowhere/out of the frame, which confuses the eye or at least adds no value.
The rest of the shots I think are either cropped too closely, or not close enough. The "rule of threes" is a bit of a cliché, but it's a great rule to stick to while you find your feet with composition.
Today I took my new 10-20mm f3.5 wide angle lens out for a spin on my way home. Seems like it's a great focal range for architecture shots! (Portraits, not so much... )
Here are my two favorites of the test shots, click for higher res:
@Kashaar I LOVE the color tones in those two photos. How much work do you have to put into them afterwards color-wise?
I'm not crazy about the perspective in the second one. The church and surrounding homes look like they are leaning back. Probably the angle you are photographing the subject whereas the first picture is straight on. I'm personally a fan of isometric style which I fix in post when I shoot my aerial pictures but I realize this doesn't always work depending on the angle of the original photo.
@Kashaar I LOVE the color tones in those two photos. How much work do you have to put into them afterwards color-wise?
I'm not crazy about the perspective in the second one. The church and surrounding homes look like they are leaning back. Probably the angle you are photographing the subject whereas the first picture is straight on. I'm personally a fan of isometric style which I fix in post when I shoot my aerial pictures but I realize this doesn't always work depending on the angle of the original photo.
Thanks! Not a lot of work went into them at all. Here's my usual process:
I do almost all of my postprocessing in Lightroom. I've got an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport color chart that I use to create calibration profiles, sometimes for a specific shot when accuracy is necessary (such as for HDRi panoramas), other times I just reuse old color profiles that were created in similar lighting conditions.
Then I tweak the usual white balance, exposure, contrast and dynamic range settings (the Shadows, Highlights, Whites, Blacks sliders) to get a good overall balance.
Add in a little bit of Clarity and Vibrance, and that's basically it.
Most of it comes from using proper color calibration though!
Edit: I should also add that I've used a hardware color calibration tool (Spyder 3 Pro, though there are better, newer models) to calibrate my screens. Gotta get that color accuracy!
Click & drag to look around. If any of y'all are doing any 3D work and might find it useful for lighting an asset or something, you can grab high-res HDRi versions and JPGs of it for free/pwyw here: https://gumroad.com/l/WienhausenAbbeyGarden
Hey yall, I'm a long time lurker here but finally have something to share. I've been a 35mm guy since high school, so I have 20 years shooting that way, but recently decided to get with the times and bought myself a Fuji X-A3. I'm really only concerned with taking pictures of my kids and my nieces and nephews, because everybody takes a zillion pictures of their kids with their phones and to me they all look like garbage. So I stepped in.
Digital photography, and especially digital photo editing are brand new to me, so I'm struggling. But I do like being able to take 10,000 photos in a weekend and then sorting it out later. Really opened my eyes. I'm going to link my website, but also put up a few examples of shots I like.
If anybody has:
- any advice on what I'm trying to do
- advice or recommendations on editing software
- resources for learning how to do this better
- critique of my photos
I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance, this thread is awesome. I'm always amazed at the talent in this community.
Hey @Bubs, those look very cute :-) I think your biggest potential area of improvement would be composition - the framing and staging of your subjects.
The first photo is the best in this regard, I think: it's got a nice balance between subject and background. Though I would have tried to get the same shot further from the left, angled more to the right, so that you capture more of the open floor in the background. Right now those lines lead nowhere/out of the frame, which confuses the eye or at least adds no value.
The rest of the shots I think are either cropped too closely, or not close enough. The "rule of threes" is a bit of a cliché, but it's a great rule to stick to while you find your feet with composition.
@Kashaar That absolutely helps, thank you. I think I've fallen into a bad habit of "I'll just fix it in post" which was never really available to me on 35mm.
My wife echoed what you said about cropping too close. "These are great honey, but you can't tell where these kids are." I think those were her words.
Thanks for reminding me of the basics, I can see now that I'm a bit trigger happy with my fancy new camera. I'll get back out there and post when I've got something I'm happy with.
So I've been watching a bajillion tutorials and whatnot on YouTube (my favorites so far are Tony & Chelsea Northrup, Peter McKinnon, and PHLEARN). Haven't taken many photos, but have been learning my 70D. I'm not a big fan of my kit lens (18-55mm, 3.5-5.6), plan on picking up a 50mm 1.8 when I get paid on Friday. A friend of mine wants some new headshots and I want the practice, so I'm also going to pick up a couple of Yongnuo speedlites. For fun, I built a lightbox and took a couple of pics of some toys:
Bought a pair of IKEA work lamps, two large pieces of foam board, and a black piece of poster "board" paper. Cut the two boards into two pieces each, then cut square windows into two of the boards. Taped those to a third piece in a way that allows them to collapse into a flat package. Taped a piece of tissue paper over each window to diffuse the lights. Here are a couple results:
I'm wondering how the 50mm lens will work in this situation vs. the kit lens? Apparently the "nifty fifty" has a huge depth of field, so that should help keep everything in focus. I could just do focus stacking in Photoshop, but I don't have a way to keep my camera locked down in place yet (I still need a tripod, and I'm thinking of snagging a gorillapod).
I'm probably going to rent the 70-200mm 2.8 L in August and again in September when I go on a couple of weekend "vacations." We just had our daughter's two-year photos taken and the photographer was using it. I was miiiiildly jealous! Then she told me she rented it, and she's planning to buy her own eventually. That thing is not cheap!
Anyways, I'm having a blast learning about lighting and lenses and whatnot. I just need to find opportunities to do more of it.
Apparently the "nifty fifty" has a huge depth of field, so that should help keep everything in focus.
I'm not sure where you heard this, or maybe something got lost in transmission -- to create huge DoF, you just need to shoot at a smaller aperture, and I imagine every lens you could possibly buy will allow shooting at f/8 or f/16. It's when shooting with a thin DoF that you need to pay attention to lens specs, since you'll want something with a wide aperture (at least 1.8) and that's where things start getting expensive.
Of course, the 50/1.8 will probably perform better than your kit lens regardless, and might well be particularly sharper at smaller apertures. But purely in terms of keeping everything in focus, the 50/1.8 won't offer any gains over your kit lens at 55/5.6.
There's also the issue of how close you are to your subject; depth-of-field increases with distance to the subject, so shooting anything that close will result in small DoF even at the smallest of apertures. There's a depth-of-field calculator here which you might find useful; eyeballing the distance from camera to subject at ~8", and shooting a 50mm lens, you'd need to step all the way down to f/64 to get more than an inch in focus. From a foot away, you could open up to f/22 for the same DoF. And so on.
Apparently the "nifty fifty" has a huge depth of field, so that should help keep everything in focus.
I'm not sure where you heard this, or maybe something got lost in transmission -- to create huge DoF, you just need to shoot at a smaller aperture, and I imagine every lens you could possibly buy will allow shooting at f/8 or f/16. It's when shooting with a thin DoF that you need to pay attention to lens specs, since you'll want something with a wide aperture (at least 1.8) and that's where things start getting expensive.
Of course, the 50/1.8 will probably perform better than your kit lens regardless, and might well be particularly sharper at smaller apertures. But purely in terms of keeping everything in focus, the 50/1.8 won't offer any gains over your kit lens at 55/5.6.
There's also the issue of how close you are to your subject; depth-of-field increases with distance to the subject, so shooting anything that close will result in small DoF even at the smallest of apertures. There's a depth-of-field calculator here which you might find useful; eyeballing the distance from camera to subject at ~8", and shooting a 50mm lens, you'd need to step all the way down to f/64 to get more than an inch in focus. From a foot away, you could open up to f/22 for the same DoF. And so on.
Aye, it took me a while to puzzle out all the relationships between the different specs of lenses after getting into this whole thing, so pardon me if you already know this - figured it might be worth repeating anyway though
- Prime lenses (fixed focal length, i.e. 50mm instead of 35-55mm) are pretty much always sharper than zooms.
- ISO and Shutter speed are always controlled by your camera, but aperture is dependent on the lens. The trio of them determines your exposure.
- Shutter speed is (obviously) the duration of sensor's exposure, meaning longer shutter speeds let in more light, but also naturally make things blurry if your subject moves.
- ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor. Higher ISO means brighter images, usually however at the cost of more noise. Generally I try to keep my ISO below 800, which for my camera gives some noise but without being too bad. YMMV significantly depending on what camera you use.
- Aperture is where things get interesting. This is how wide the aperture blades in the lens are opened - wide (=low number) means more light, narrow (=high number) means less light.
- At the same time, wide aperture means narrow focus/much blur, narrow aperture means wide focus/little blur.
- So wide apertures (lower f number) are great for shallow depth of field, i.e. only a thin area in focus, which looks most awesome on portraits and macro shots. Wider aperture also means more light gets through the lens, which means you can use a faster shutter time to get the same exposure at the same ISO. That's why wide aperture lenses are often called "fast" lenses too!
- Pretty much all lenses can be stepped down, i.e. have their aperture reduced, for a wider depth of field = wider area in focus. So whether you have a 50mm f1.4 or a 50mm f2.8, if you shoot both of them at f8 they'll give pretty similar results. (Some specialty lenses have a fixed aperture, such as a crappy 500mm mirror lens I bought on ebay. That one is locked at f8, and pretty crappy.)
- A little digression: The aperture number btw is calculated by dividing focal length (i.e. 50mm) by the radius of the aperture. Meaning a 50mm f2 lens has a 25mm wide aperture. This is why if you look at lenses like 500mm telephotos, the faster ones get MUCH bigger than the ones with a less wide max aperture. I mean just look at this thing here - it's a 200-500mm f2.8. To get to f2.8 at 500mm, the aperture needs to be 178.5mm wide! This one for comparison is a 150-600mm f5-6.3, meaning with f6.3 at 600mm it only needs to be 95mm wide, a little more than half that. That means all other lens elements can be smaller too! Seems a lot easier to carry, dunnit.
Uh yeah, that's all I got before I lost my train of thought. My 50mm f1.8 is one of my favorite lenses - it's going to be a great upgrade to your standard kit lens! I find primes a lot more fun to shoot with too - you have to think more about where you position yourself in relation to your subject, since you can't just compensate via zoom.
Re: the 50mm's DOF, I was reading reviews and someone mentioned how wide the DOF was on it. Talked about getting crazy detail from far away and up close, and I guess I just projected what I wanted to hear. Oh well, I'm still going to get the 50mm 1.8 because at $110, that's an easy justified purchase. The sharpness alone will be welcome. I'm sure getting a tripod to make the camera absolutely still will help as well with the kit lens, but I do want a "better" lens.
Re: the 50mm's DOF, I was reading reviews and someone mentioned how wide the DOF was on it. Talked about getting crazy detail from far away and up close, and I guess I just projected what I wanted to hear. Oh well, I'm still going to get the 50mm 1.8 because at $110, that's an easy justified purchase. The sharpness alone will be welcome. I'm sure getting a tripod to make the camera absolutely still will help as well with the kit lens, but I do want a "better" lens.
Careful though, it's a trap! Some nights I go on ebay, trolling for lenses... and I never return with my wallet in the same state as it was when I left.
This weekend I was in NYC, and after thinking about @Kashaar 's tips, I tried to be a little more selective with my shots. The result was quite a few pictures I was happy with, but I'd still love to know what anybody else thinks. Here we go:
This was my attempt at using the frame to show more about my subject than I could have if I'd zoomed in on her. This was Washington Sq. Park's playground.
Same deal here, the actual playground was really cool looking and I didn't want that to get lost in the shuffle.
This is me playing around with focus while still trying to keep my two subjects front and center.
I don't really have a lot to say here other than this was an adorable opportunity, so I had to take it.
Many people hate "back of the head" shots, but short of climbing into the bear pen (we were at Central Park Zoo) this was the only way I could really show what the scene was all about.
This weekend I was in NYC, and after thinking about @Kashaar 's tips, I tried to be a little more selective with my shots. The result was quite a few pictures I was happy with, but I'd still love to know what anybody else thinks.
I think one issue is that, except in the last one, there's too many people in the photo. A long while ago I remember reading some sort of photo tip that was, basically, "what's not in the photo is as important as what is" -- your first one, for instance, is a nice shot of the girl, but the boy in the background is right next to her and looking at the camera more, so he's what I wind up paying attention to. The second one, there's three children that might be the target;
Getting photos of kids in an active place without other people in the background is tough, but that's why I take lots of photos and trim out the ones that are duds. Here's some examples of this sort of thing -- some of them are definitely 'back of the head', but that's because the kids tend to keep moving and so I wind up taking photos as they wander off, or pause for a moment:
(ugh, now I can't un-see the camera strap dangling in at top right)
this one there's people in the background, but they're looking away so your eye isn't drawn to them, and they're not overlapping the main subject; you can still tell where he is, but the subject is more obvious:
Same thing here -- there's stuff in the background, but the only bits of people are far off / on the side, so the location is obvious as well as who the subject is.
This time I just waited until there wasn't anyone else in the same area:
here, the focus is off, but this is an example of where I took probably 100 shots of kids as they spun on the roundabout, and selected the one or two where the timing came out right:
also, selective depth of field can help to bring the subject out even when there's distracting stuff in the background:
Splash parks / playgrounds are fun -- it can be difficult to get the whole thing in shot without also getting bits of photo you don't want, so I tend to zoom in and wait until the kids are somewhere distinctive:
I'll admit shooting at New York parks was an overwhelming experience; trying to isolate my kids is one thing but you also don't want to come off like you're standing around in a park taking pictures of random children. You can get punched for that
Appreciate you taking a look and all the pointers, it's effectively impossible for me to be objective about pictures of my own kids sometimes. And I tend to forget that just because I know who the subjects are doesn't mean everybody else will, so good catch on that.
Your 3rd, 4th, and 5th from the bottom in particular are incredible, reminds me a lot of a friend who does this professionally. I'll see if she'll let me post some of her work.
I'll admit shooting at New York parks was an overwhelming experience; trying to isolate my kids is one thing but you also don't want to come off like you're standing around in a park taking pictures of random children.
Yeah, I think a lot of that's in how you do it -- I'm always there with my kids in the first place, and if I stop to take photos then it's because I'm not hanging out with them. But I agree, it's a situation where it makes sense to be careful to not give the wrong impression.
Your 3rd, 4th, and 5th from the bottom in particular are incredible, reminds me a lot of a friend who does this professionally. I'll see if she'll let me post some of her work.
thanks! Shallow depth of field helps a lot in the right situation. (Also taking bursts of photos and picking the one which was in focus -- I'm occasionally tempted to switch systems to one of the great big bodies and lenses that sports photographers use for this sort of situation, but size and weight still win out for me)
Just for fun, here some shots I've taken with my iPhone 7. I should have gotten the Plus, but didn't realize the camera was that much better. These were tweaked in Snapseed (my daughter is my #1 subject, so I have like a 100:1 ratio to choose from daughter vs. "other" lol).
Speaking of smartphones, smartphone photography has come a long way. I took all these seven years ago on an iPhone 4 when the wife and I went to Mohonk Mountain. At the time I thought they were pretty good. (I wish I hadn't added all the dumb borders):
Spent a few hours yesterday lounging in a nearby park. Both taken from the same angle, but at different times and with different lenses:
(20mm - f3.5, ISO 800, 1/4000s)
(70mm HDR - middle exposure at f4, ISO 100, 1/50s)
The second one was a handheld bracketed shot combined into HDR. I've been testing out the limits of the in-body image stabilization and the steadiness of my hands lately. Still need practice with the latter, but folks... IBIS is pretty sick.
Interesting... I feel like it might be one of those things that makes sense only sometimes. I don't think I would want it when doing landscape (especially because I have to manually bracket if I want to exposure blend), but it could make sense for wildlife, or events I think.
[Edit] Also, does anyone use back button focus? I tried it for a bit, and kept forgetting to re-focus.
So, I need some gear advice. I'm looking to get into photography, and have been looking at a couple of option to buy into. I'm really interested in the Fuji X-T20, but at the moment it's not really available with the better 18-55mm kit lens. I've bandied about the idea of just buying body only and grabbing the F2 35mm that gets a lot of good reviews, but this is a tad more expensive.
So, that's the one I really want, but I wonder if it's the smart move since it will be my first foray into ILCs? I could go instead for an older/cheaper Fuji model (X-T1/10 or X-E2S), but I'm tempted by the idea of a camera to really grow into.
Also, and I am aware of the sensor difference, but I have also looked at the Olympus OMD E-10 Mark II but am worried about the build quality and the image quality. Anyone have experience with that particular camera, or Micro 4/3s in general?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm looking to go mirrorless because I am currently traveling a lot with work, and it would be easier to take with me.
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Sad postscript to this story: the reason that red part rotated was that the front half of the lens was coming loose :-/ Put it back together for now, but now I'm worried...
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
I've already decided I want a Fuji X100F
But I can't decide if black or silver
I know it is basically personal preference but ack I dunno
Black more subtle
Silver is pretty but kinda flashy
They had some in stock this morning but were sold out this afternoon
Pretty tho, the floor model was
I'm excited to get this, I basically got tired of my Nikon DSLR (from 2006) and taking it places because of size, and stopped using it much a while ago
And still take lots of photos with my phone and miss using a real camera, so I wanted something I could at least put in a jacket pocket or carry around easily
Fiddling around with it in the store I liked it a lot (sadly they ran out of stock earlier that day, hopefully I can get one before I go to Norway)
Still need to sell my DSLR lenses but I'll get around to it eventually
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Apparently Tulsa, Oklahoma is a great place to see Art Deco... they even have a museum for it (which I didn't get to go to). I'm going to be dumping quite a bit from Tulsa though, so bear with me.
Exterior of the Philtower building
interior lobby
A lot of the interior details of these buildings reminded me of something out of Bladerunner.
This church was absolutely wild.
Very odd to see what looks like religious figures alongside founding fathers.
Some details, loved the lettering.
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Watch my music videos
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
@rothgarr None of these were bracketed no. Just single exposure with some lightroom/photoshop love, which I didn't need to do much of on any outdoors shots. There was no lack of great light the entire trip to Oklahoma and back.
Those last two are great captures @MichaelLC
This one is gorgeous, the man on the left gives the photo an immense sense of scale with that concrete looming above.
A couple with some more color.
I know they say all the animals at this zoo are rescues... but man zoos are sad. I would imagine they have to clip the flamingos' wings
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The color & light were great that day. And so was the wind! Thought some of those vets were going to be blown right over.
Digital photography, and especially digital photo editing are brand new to me, so I'm struggling. But I do like being able to take 10,000 photos in a weekend and then sorting it out later. Really opened my eyes. I'm going to link my website, but also put up a few examples of shots I like.
If anybody has:
- any advice on what I'm trying to do
- advice or recommendations on editing software
- resources for learning how to do this better
- critique of my photos
I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance, this thread is awesome. I'm always amazed at the talent in this community.
Hey @Bubs, those look very cute :-) I think your biggest potential area of improvement would be composition - the framing and staging of your subjects.
The first photo is the best in this regard, I think: it's got a nice balance between subject and background. Though I would have tried to get the same shot further from the left, angled more to the right, so that you capture more of the open floor in the background. Right now those lines lead nowhere/out of the frame, which confuses the eye or at least adds no value.
The rest of the shots I think are either cropped too closely, or not close enough. The "rule of threes" is a bit of a cliché, but it's a great rule to stick to while you find your feet with composition.
Here's a good primer on some useful composition techniques: https://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/14-composition-techniques-that-will-instantly-improve-your-photos--photo-7978
Hope that helps!
---
Today I took my new 10-20mm f3.5 wide angle lens out for a spin on my way home. Seems like it's a great focal range for architecture shots! (Portraits, not so much...
Here are my two favorites of the test shots, click for higher res:
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
I'm not crazy about the perspective in the second one. The church and surrounding homes look like they are leaning back. Probably the angle you are photographing the subject whereas the first picture is straight on. I'm personally a fan of isometric style which I fix in post when I shoot my aerial pictures but I realize this doesn't always work depending on the angle of the original photo.
Watch my music videos
Thanks! Not a lot of work went into them at all. Here's my usual process:
I do almost all of my postprocessing in Lightroom. I've got an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport color chart that I use to create calibration profiles, sometimes for a specific shot when accuracy is necessary (such as for HDRi panoramas), other times I just reuse old color profiles that were created in similar lighting conditions.
Then I tweak the usual white balance, exposure, contrast and dynamic range settings (the Shadows, Highlights, Whites, Blacks sliders) to get a good overall balance.
Add in a little bit of Clarity and Vibrance, and that's basically it.
Most of it comes from using proper color calibration though!
Edit: I should also add that I've used a hardware color calibration tool (Spyder 3 Pro, though there are better, newer models) to calibrate my screens. Gotta get that color accuracy!
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
https://broad-strokes.com/media/panos/WienhausenKlosterPark.html
Click & drag to look around. If any of y'all are doing any 3D work and might find it useful for lighting an asset or something, you can grab high-res HDRi versions and JPGs of it for free/pwyw here: https://gumroad.com/l/WienhausenAbbeyGarden
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Shot with an 8mm fisheye. I kinda love how it turned out!
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
@Kashaar That absolutely helps, thank you. I think I've fallen into a bad habit of "I'll just fix it in post" which was never really available to me on 35mm.
My wife echoed what you said about cropping too close. "These are great honey, but you can't tell where these kids are." I think those were her words.
Thanks for reminding me of the basics, I can see now that I'm a bit trigger happy with my fancy new camera. I'll get back out there and post when I've got something I'm happy with.
Much appreciated!
There is no such thing as posting too much to this thread.
Bought a pair of IKEA work lamps, two large pieces of foam board, and a black piece of poster "board" paper. Cut the two boards into two pieces each, then cut square windows into two of the boards. Taped those to a third piece in a way that allows them to collapse into a flat package. Taped a piece of tissue paper over each window to diffuse the lights. Here are a couple results:
I'm wondering how the 50mm lens will work in this situation vs. the kit lens? Apparently the "nifty fifty" has a huge depth of field, so that should help keep everything in focus. I could just do focus stacking in Photoshop, but I don't have a way to keep my camera locked down in place yet (I still need a tripod, and I'm thinking of snagging a gorillapod).
I'm probably going to rent the 70-200mm 2.8 L in August and again in September when I go on a couple of weekend "vacations." We just had our daughter's two-year photos taken and the photographer was using it. I was miiiiildly jealous! Then she told me she rented it, and she's planning to buy her own eventually. That thing is not cheap!
Anyways, I'm having a blast learning about lighting and lenses and whatnot. I just need to find opportunities to do more of it.
Of course, the 50/1.8 will probably perform better than your kit lens regardless, and might well be particularly sharper at smaller apertures. But purely in terms of keeping everything in focus, the 50/1.8 won't offer any gains over your kit lens at 55/5.6.
There's also the issue of how close you are to your subject; depth-of-field increases with distance to the subject, so shooting anything that close will result in small DoF even at the smallest of apertures. There's a depth-of-field calculator here which you might find useful; eyeballing the distance from camera to subject at ~8", and shooting a 50mm lens, you'd need to step all the way down to f/64 to get more than an inch in focus. From a foot away, you could open up to f/22 for the same DoF. And so on.
Aye, it took me a while to puzzle out all the relationships between the different specs of lenses after getting into this whole thing, so pardon me if you already know this - figured it might be worth repeating anyway though
- Prime lenses (fixed focal length, i.e. 50mm instead of 35-55mm) are pretty much always sharper than zooms.
- ISO and Shutter speed are always controlled by your camera, but aperture is dependent on the lens. The trio of them determines your exposure.
- Shutter speed is (obviously) the duration of sensor's exposure, meaning longer shutter speeds let in more light, but also naturally make things blurry if your subject moves.
- ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor. Higher ISO means brighter images, usually however at the cost of more noise. Generally I try to keep my ISO below 800, which for my camera gives some noise but without being too bad. YMMV significantly depending on what camera you use.
- Aperture is where things get interesting. This is how wide the aperture blades in the lens are opened - wide (=low number) means more light, narrow (=high number) means less light.
- At the same time, wide aperture means narrow focus/much blur, narrow aperture means wide focus/little blur.
- So wide apertures (lower f number) are great for shallow depth of field, i.e. only a thin area in focus, which looks most awesome on portraits and macro shots. Wider aperture also means more light gets through the lens, which means you can use a faster shutter time to get the same exposure at the same ISO. That's why wide aperture lenses are often called "fast" lenses too!
- Pretty much all lenses can be stepped down, i.e. have their aperture reduced, for a wider depth of field = wider area in focus. So whether you have a 50mm f1.4 or a 50mm f2.8, if you shoot both of them at f8 they'll give pretty similar results. (Some specialty lenses have a fixed aperture, such as a crappy 500mm mirror lens I bought on ebay. That one is locked at f8, and pretty crappy.)
- A little digression: The aperture number btw is calculated by dividing focal length (i.e. 50mm) by the radius of the aperture. Meaning a 50mm f2 lens has a 25mm wide aperture. This is why if you look at lenses like 500mm telephotos, the faster ones get MUCH bigger than the ones with a less wide max aperture. I mean just look at this thing here - it's a 200-500mm f2.8. To get to f2.8 at 500mm, the aperture needs to be 178.5mm wide! This one for comparison is a 150-600mm f5-6.3, meaning with f6.3 at 600mm it only needs to be 95mm wide, a little more than half that. That means all other lens elements can be smaller too! Seems a lot easier to carry, dunnit.
Uh yeah, that's all I got before I lost my train of thought. My 50mm f1.8 is one of my favorite lenses - it's going to be a great upgrade to your standard kit lens! I find primes a lot more fun to shoot with too - you have to think more about where you position yourself in relation to your subject, since you can't just compensate via zoom.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Careful though, it's a trap! Some nights I go on ebay, trolling for lenses... and I never return with my wallet in the same state as it was when I left.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
This was my attempt at using the frame to show more about my subject than I could have if I'd zoomed in on her. This was Washington Sq. Park's playground.
Same deal here, the actual playground was really cool looking and I didn't want that to get lost in the shuffle.
This is me playing around with focus while still trying to keep my two subjects front and center.
I don't really have a lot to say here other than this was an adorable opportunity, so I had to take it.
Many people hate "back of the head" shots, but short of climbing into the bear pen (we were at Central Park Zoo) this was the only way I could really show what the scene was all about.
I think one issue is that, except in the last one, there's too many people in the photo. A long while ago I remember reading some sort of photo tip that was, basically, "what's not in the photo is as important as what is" -- your first one, for instance, is a nice shot of the girl, but the boy in the background is right next to her and looking at the camera more, so he's what I wind up paying attention to. The second one, there's three children that might be the target;
Getting photos of kids in an active place without other people in the background is tough, but that's why I take lots of photos and trim out the ones that are duds. Here's some examples of this sort of thing -- some of them are definitely 'back of the head', but that's because the kids tend to keep moving and so I wind up taking photos as they wander off, or pause for a moment:
(ugh, now I can't un-see the camera strap dangling in at top right)
this one there's people in the background, but they're looking away so your eye isn't drawn to them, and they're not overlapping the main subject; you can still tell where he is, but the subject is more obvious:
Same thing here -- there's stuff in the background, but the only bits of people are far off / on the side, so the location is obvious as well as who the subject is.
This time I just waited until there wasn't anyone else in the same area:
here, the focus is off, but this is an example of where I took probably 100 shots of kids as they spun on the roundabout, and selected the one or two where the timing came out right:
also, selective depth of field can help to bring the subject out even when there's distracting stuff in the background:
Splash parks / playgrounds are fun -- it can be difficult to get the whole thing in shot without also getting bits of photo you don't want, so I tend to zoom in and wait until the kids are somewhere distinctive:
Appreciate you taking a look and all the pointers, it's effectively impossible for me to be objective about pictures of my own kids sometimes. And I tend to forget that just because I know who the subjects are doesn't mean everybody else will, so good catch on that.
Your 3rd, 4th, and 5th from the bottom in particular are incredible, reminds me a lot of a friend who does this professionally. I'll see if she'll let me post some of her work.
Yeah, I think a lot of that's in how you do it -- I'm always there with my kids in the first place, and if I stop to take photos then it's because I'm not hanging out with them. But I agree, it's a situation where it makes sense to be careful to not give the wrong impression.
thanks! Shallow depth of field helps a lot in the right situation. (Also taking bursts of photos and picking the one which was in focus -- I'm occasionally tempted to switch systems to one of the great big bodies and lenses that sports photographers use for this sort of situation, but size and weight still win out for me)
Watch my music videos
(20mm - f3.5, ISO 800, 1/4000s)
(70mm HDR - middle exposure at f4, ISO 100, 1/50s)
The second one was a handheld bracketed shot combined into HDR. I've been testing out the limits of the in-body image stabilization and the steadiness of my hands lately. Still need practice with the latter, but folks... IBIS is pretty sick.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Making some books right now, and found this old thing. Nothing flashy but I just like particular shades of gray.
I guess I'll mess with it and see.
Yep, sometimes! If you limit the max ISO to something reasonably noise-free, it's pretty useful.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
[Edit] Also, does anyone use back button focus? I tried it for a bit, and kept forgetting to re-focus.
So, that's the one I really want, but I wonder if it's the smart move since it will be my first foray into ILCs? I could go instead for an older/cheaper Fuji model (X-T1/10 or X-E2S), but I'm tempted by the idea of a camera to really grow into.
Also, and I am aware of the sensor difference, but I have also looked at the Olympus OMD E-10 Mark II but am worried about the build quality and the image quality. Anyone have experience with that particular camera, or Micro 4/3s in general?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm looking to go mirrorless because I am currently traveling a lot with work, and it would be easier to take with me.