Take a picture once a day, whether you need to or not

[Paelos]

I want you to eat that and then start an hour by hour update thread on what happens.

[calapine]

I want you to eat that and then start an hour by hour update thread on what happens.

Friends are coming tommorrow and I am going to 'cook' it. I say 'cook' because it's supposed to be eatable already and only needs to be warmed a bit.

But yes, there will be blood pictures.

[Paelos]

I think at this point, we should consider you and your friends lucky if it doesn't give you SARS.

I'm officially intrigued.

[RhyssaFireheart]

looks like a dead hapster lying on it's back....

Whew.  Glad I wasn't the only one that saw that.

Did someone send that to you through the mail or did they bring it over?  I'd be a bit creeped out if the head was still attached like it is in that pic (which I can totally see the duck now as well... duck... hamster... duck... hamster... duck... goose!)

[calapine]

Did someone send that to you through the mail or did they bring it over?  I'd be a bit creeped out if the head was still attached like it is in that pic (which I can totally see the duck now as well... duck... hamster... duck... hamster... duck... goose!)

A friend of the friend who gave it to me works in China. He bought and brought it here with the flight home, she gifted it to me. The bag is see-through on the backside but all it shows is something chicken-shaped wrapped in aluminium foil.

The only thing understandable on it is  '18.8.2012'. My friend assured me that's the production date.

I am starting to think opening this package will either be the most interesting or disappointing day of the month year.

[Cadaverine]

Oh, I don't know about that.  I'm thinking that the 24 hours after you eat it will be more interesting than the opening of the package.  I mean, how often do you get to eat something that causes psychotropic color shifts, and isn't illegal?

[Paelos]

It's possibly an expired chinese shelf-ready packaged duck.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG! 

[ghost]

looks like a dead hapster lying on it's back....

I thought the same fucking thing.  

It's possibly an expired chinese shelf-ready packaged duck.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG! 

Mercury and Lead content may be the least of the worries.   

[Sky]

[RhyssaFireheart]

Cube flower is all dressed up and ready for Hallowe'en.


I think I'm going to decorate for the other holidays as well, just because it'll be amusing.

[Signe]

With tissue?  It actually looks really good.   

[apocrypha]

Focusing at f1.4 is difficult! I got about 1 in 10 close enough to use.

[Nebu]

That is a great picture.  Well done.

[Khaldun]

Working on fall pics over the last week. 


past peak 1 by swarthmoreburke, on Flickr

[JWIV]

Finally starting the process of cleaning up and reviewing photo pictures.  Pretty happy with a few shots I got out of the butterfly house we went into.



Also ran into a spot with about 20 of these guys crawling all over the place -

[cmlancas]

15 minutes could...   

I love the contour of the second picture.  It's odd that I looked at it at rest and thought about its speed.

Well done.

[Signe]

You guys take great pics.  And none of them have my thumb, my foot or half of my sister's ass in them!

[JWIV]

15 minutes could...   

I love the contour of the second picture.  It's odd that I looked at it at rest and thought about its speed.

Well done.

Thanks!  It's my first time playing around with Lightroom and I regret not getting it earlier.  Simply a thousand times better than anything else I've ever used.  My only regret with the lizard is I didn't think to swap to a different sharper lens until way too late.  

[apocrypha]

So we finally moved house, after 5 months of stress with purchasers, solicitors and estate agents. The house we've moved into is a 1905 detached house, on a hill, overlooking a church. Needs a lot of work (builders have just started, chaos reigns) but it's about as close to the gorgeous gothic mansion as I think we'll ever get.

Sorry for the terrible quality of most of these, they're nearly all mobile phone snaps:

[Lantyssa]

It's lovely.

[Paelos]

I like it. I immediately saw the pictures of the background and said to myself, "That's certainly not the US." Hard to find that vista anywhere here.

[apocrypha]

Indeed :)  It's north of Manchester, England. And it's fucking cold with the heating off for 48 hours while a new boiler & radiators are being fitted! I am typing with a wooly hat, 2 jumpers and gloves on!

[kaid]

Couple pictures of my friends Ninja cat that I thought turned out pretty well for my cheapy lil camera.


Ninja cat zipping over fences



Looking a bit displeased at me pointing cameras at her

[apocrypha]

That is a beautiful cat.

[Signe]

It really is so pretty.  I wish I knew it's name. 

And congrats on the new house, apocrypha.  Good luck!

[Samwise]

This seems like a good thread in which to bitch about the use of the fake depth-of-field filter that people use on Instagram to make it look like they used a camera with a wide aperture.

Every now and then, they get it just right and it's a convincing fake and it looks okay.  But when you have a precisely circular section of the photo in focus (that does not correspond to a circular object) and everything else is uniformly blurred, it looks like ass.

It does make me appreciate the genuinely nice shots y'all post here all the more, though.

[cmlancas]

I read a really interesting FB post from a young lady I work who is a photographer by trade and teaches it at university where she argued crappy filters and applications such as Lightroom are destroying the business of photography.  Many startup photographers aren't carefully considering things like proper staging and lighting, instead opting to take 500 pictures and spending a lot of time in post-work. 

She argued this is mostly because the untrained eye can't tell the difference when not presented with another nicely set-up shot with careful consideration of the aforementioned things, where a photographer takes three pictures executing his or her vision.

I find the same thing creeping into Picasa and Instagram too.  Adding one random filter to your crappy cell phone picture doesn't make it a quality shot.

[Samwise]

I find the same thing creeping into Picasa and Instagram too.  Adding one random filter to your crappy cell phone picture doesn't make it a quality shot.

To be fair, sometimes it does look really cool and enhances the effect that the photographer was going for, evoking nostalgia or drawing focus to a particular element or whatever.  But it generally gets way overused, and in most cases just degrades the quality of the photo rather than making it look more interesting.  I hope the novelty wears off within a few years.

[Merusk]

Lightroom can fix a lot, but you still require some consideration of things.  There's only so much that creative cropping can fix using Lightroom.  Trust me, I'm a culprit.

Photoshop is where most of the ire should really be directed, because there is SO MUCH that you can (and do) modify using it that you wonder why some people still call it a photograph and not "Digital Art."

I've seen a lot of the same bitching from pros in the Photography groups on LinkedIn and other discussion boards.  Same conversation over and over about how amateurs and readily available semi-pro cameras and digital shooting has ruined the profession.  

Seems more like a failure of explaining your skills and your professional expertise to your market to me. You can't just expect the arcane "trust me I'm a photographer" statement to cut it any more than "just trust me, I've got a degree." works for explaining why you should trust a professional over joe shmoe in anything these days.  The culture of questioning expertise reigns supreme, so marketing yourself and your services and explaining to the untrained exactly WHY they should trust you is a big part of everything these days.  

You're still not going to convince everyone, but you have to let people make mistakes and learn.   Hell, if they're happy with the product you can't really bitch at them any more than car aficionados can bitch at you for buying a Corolla.

[cmlancas]

I think you're right Merusk.  It might be a failure to market.

But, I'd say the analogy is closer to wanting a nice C-class and ending up with a Kia Forte touched up to look like a C-class.  After a day or two in the body shop.

That being said you're still right.  Who am I to say the person happy with the touched-up Forte isn't just as happy with the person with the C-class.

[kaid]

It really is so pretty.  I wish I knew it's name.  

And congrats on the new house, apocrypha.  Good luck!

The cats name is fuji the ninja cat. She is a ninja cat as shown in the fence what you dont see there is she was up and over that fence in about 2 seconds. I saw her wiggling her butt towards the fence and just pointed and shot where I hoped she would be when the picture would go off and I got insanely lucky and it did not even come out blurry. She spends most of the day going up and down fences/houses/trees. She is a friend of all dogs and goats and likes visiting all the lil animals my friends have. She is also a ninja for hunting skills my friends used to have tons of problems with mice and squirrels eating their plants now that fuji is in the house they have zero mice/squirrel problems.

[JWIV]

I find the same thing creeping into Picasa and Instagram too.  Adding one random filter to your crappy cell phone picture doesn't make it a quality shot.

To be fair, sometimes it does look really cool and enhances the effect that the photographer was going for, evoking nostalgia or drawing focus to a particular element or whatever.  But it generally gets way overused, and in most cases just degrades the quality of the photo rather than making it look more interesting.  I hope the novelty wears off within a few years.

It's honestly part of why I think I've got such a kneejerk reaction to 95% of the HDR pictures people post up on social media.  Most of the time, it's an average shot that's been punched up to look like someone shat a box of crayola over it and then becomes ART

[Khaldun]

Lightroom has made a difference to my shots but if anything it's made me understand even better the value of compositional choice and the need to get my concept for the shot right in the first place.

I had to really try to find a shot that made this early morning fog into an interesting composition, and then get the light right. Now once I did, Lightroom let me do a slightly unnatural tint that I really ended up loving. This could have been done through pre-digital printing but it would have taken a tremendous amount of skill and some special darkroom gear.


into the electric by swarthmoreburke, on Flickr

Same morning, slightly different place, completely different approach. But not random and not thoughtless.


deep in by swarthmoreburke, on Flickr

Same morning, a bit earlier, a shot that I deliberately looked to get more light on and to frame the autumn leaves behind the bare branch.


misty morning by swarthmoreburke, on Flickr

[JWIV]

All 3 are very nice shots and show that you spent some time and thought into them.

[Khaldun]

I mean, I get what people are saying about digital photography in general, but at least half the people bitching are just sorry their party got crashed, like everyone else who had privileged access to cultural production in the past. What we're finding all across our culture is basically:

a) There are way more people who can create good writing, film, photography, etc. given the equipment and the platform to publish than the editors, producers and other owners of media used to tell us in the past
b) There are way way way more people who couldn't tell a story, create an image or make a film if you gave them a billion dollars and the best support in the world.

Sturgeon's Law still holds, but what's changed is the artificial limits to how many people can participating in making culture. 1% of a billion is a lot more stuff (pictures, stories, etc.) than 1% of 100,000.