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

[Count Nerfedalot]

At the risk of totally confusing the thread, but to save downloading bandwidth while making comparison easier, I edited the post above to add a third photo. Sorry for the confusion!

So, did I mention I figured out bracketing on that outing? Did I also admit to maybe drinking a little too much bourbon while posting the pics, and grabbed the wrong one???  No wonder the sky and rock were blown out! The kid really did do pretty good, although he didn't recognize the shot as his, thinking he had zoomed in more on the little water fall.

As for the big waterfall, I'm assuming an ND filter is a neutral just make things darker filter?  Yeah, I need one or a couple at different densities maybe. I had one with my film kit back when. For this shot it was quite heavily overcast (had just sprinkled even), I had the ISO at 100 and the aperture as small as I can get it, so I can get any longer exposures without one unless I go at night!    I'm still thinking about the cropping and composition on it. I agree with all the comments. I like the green, but the forest is too busy. I was trying to force a landscape pic (I get far more opportunity to view and enjoy wallpaper pics) out of a portrait subject.  I have one with lots of blue wildflowers on the left (and less leafage in general) I took with my old camera that worked much better, I'll have to try that again next spring. Or maybe set up further left and zoom in and aim more right so I have the water on left and the rock and greenery on the right all on a flat plane parallel to the camera. I think that might work nice.

I've finally (almost maybe?) figured out how to get the picture I was trying to get out of all the shots I took while fiddling with the same area the grandson took. This one is cropped from a vertical format.


The shady tree tunnel with sunlit bank of wildflowers behind was magical, I'm just not quite capturing it but this is close.  Does it need to be cropped even tighter? I hate to lose the wildflowers on the near sides, but may need to in order to eliminate more of the clutter around the top.

GIMP? I'm using Paint for cropping, is that gimp enough? LOL  I know, I know.  I have an old pre-ruined by Corel version of Paint Shop Pro on my desktop machine. I need to get the subscription to Photoshop. I think it includes Lightroom? I used to craft pictures from individual pixels many years ago but now I find I'd much rather be taking pictures (or gaming, or reading, or house cleaning) than doing image manipulation, even when I desperately need just a little manipulation to make an OK pic great!

[IainC]

GIMP is a hardcore, command line graphics program. It's free but hard to use unless you are very familiar with graphics editing in general. I have the Photoshop/Lightroom subscription and I would recommend it if you take at least a few photos eery month. It costs me ~12 Euro a month for Lightroom and Photoshop which I am quite happy with. I used to use Aperture but that was a Mac only product and is now discontinued. The Adobe CC subscription lets you have two devices logged in at once on the same credentials too.

Regarding the last picture you took,  I don't think you need to crop it tighter but I would dodge out the shadows on the water underneath the archway so that you get a line of light leading you into the photograph. Maybe also hit the flowers at the back with a little bit of vibrance too so that they stand out more.

[Merusk]

Photoshop/ Lightroom sub is $10 a month in the states and SOOOOOOO worth it. Lightroom alone is worth the $10 a month to me because of the tagging, collections and ability to drag & drop favorite exposure tricks onto multiple photos at once. Plus digital "no loss" duplication and editing of "negatives"

It's really just the Bee's Knees. I use it far, far more than Photoshop.

[Khaldun]

Yup. Lightroom is the necessary utility; PS is now the thing for folks doing lots of blending, exotic filters, etc.--it's not what most photographers really need.

[IainC]

Yup. Lightroom is the necessary utility; PS is now the thing for folks doing lots of blending, exotic filters, etc.--it's not what most photographers really need.

However, unless you have a separate plugin, HDR composites are still done in Photoshop rather than natively in Lightroom. Having said that, the flow is super easy, you can edit a picture in Photoshop that has been imported into Lightroom from a menu option in Lightroom, you don't need to export it from Lr and import it to Ps first.

[Merusk]

Yeah, several processes that you can start in LR are run through Photoshop. Batch resizing is as well if I remember. I haven't done it in a while.

The HDR and Panoramic workflow is nice in that you pick the 3-4 pics you want in LR, right click and say "merge to..." and Photoshop does the rest.  But since you get the program as a bundle it's all gravy.

[MisterNoisy]

Look!  Another bug!



Very cool little orb weaver outside my apartment.

[Mosesandstick]

Funky spider!

Lightroom 6 does HDR now. I can think of very few reasons why you'd need Photoshop nowadays. I'd also think hard about buying it standalone instead of paying for the subscription.

And a couple photos of Glasgow I took during the referendum.


2014-09 Glasgow 005 by Aled Moses, on Flickr


2014-09 Glasgow 008 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

[Merusk]

Funky spider!

Lightroom 6 does HDR now. I can think of very few reasons why you'd need Photoshop nowadays. I'd also think hard about buying it standalone instead of paying for the subscription.

Nice snaps!

I didn't know that about LR6, I don't do HDR and just opened it to check workflow here. Last I used it it was generating through Photoshop. Nifty.

Is the standalone still a $75 upgrade? If so then, yeah, you're saving money by purchasing, especially if you don't use Photoshop.

[Lantyssa]

Jeweled spiders are my absolute favorite.  They come in beautifully spotted whites, reds, and yellows, too.

[Sky]

I still suck with my camera, but I thought this was pretty cool. All the good eclipse shots needed too slow a shutter speed, boo. Great color but no detail. So just some decent supermoon shots.

[apocrypha]

Nice! I was going to ask if anyone got any blood moon pics.

[Samwise]

This is the best one I managed.

[Merusk]

Clouds here kept me from seeing the blood moon. The eclipse lead up was bright enough to show through but that was it after the last quarter disappeared.  Thanks for sharing with those of us in cloudy zones.

[Khaldun]

Too cloudy here.

[Sky]

Probably the best I can do out of my eclipse shots:



edit: since there's fuzzy detail, here's a less-cropped version:

[Count Nerfedalot]

thanks for mooning us!     we were completely overcast the whole evening until about an hour after it was over, when it completely cleared up. 

[MisterNoisy]

Love the lunar eclipse pics.  Sadly, it was overcast here.  :(

More bug pics from work:

Leaf-Footed bug:


What I think is a Wolf Spider (though it was kinda small) that had no issues with my phone being right up in its face:

[Khaldun]

Very nice. The leaf-footed bug is very interesting looking.

[climbjtree]

I am working on getting a picture of the Orion Cloud Complex as a whole, and the parts of it individually. I'm having a bit of trouble with noise and bringing out color though. Anyone with any astrophotography experience? I'd be really happy if I could bring out M42, and next in line is Bernard's Loop and the Flame Nebula.

I stacked 6 light frames and 6 dark frames at 100mm, f/5.6, ISO 1600, with 6 bias frames at 100mm f/5.6. Light frames and dark frames are 5 second exposures, bias frames are 1/8000. I'm thinking I could bump down around 70mm, keeping the other settings the same and I might have more luck. The hardware side isn't too much of an issue for me, but the post processing. Here's my result:



Full size: http://i.imgur.com/1fGGHM7.jpg

I did the stacking with Deep Sky Stacker, some minor edits in LightZone and final stuff in GIMP. I feel like a peasant when I watch video tutorials of Lightroom and Photoshop and then try and mimic it in the open source (read: free) apps.

Here's the result of 18 stacked frames. 2 seconds, 300mm, f/5.6, ISO 1600. The lower exposure time is because I'm trying to minimize star trails, since I'm on a fixed tripod:



Thanks in advance for any help.

[Merusk]

 If you really want photoshop and Lightroom, the subscription to Adobes photographer edition is only $10 a month. You don't get access to the full Creative Cloud suite but those are the only two programs you really care about anyway.

 http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

[climbjtree]

That's awesome! I didn't know about it, thanks man!

[Merusk]

Yep!

Check out the apps, too. Photoshop Fix is pretty cool for messing with your phone photos and spot--correcting/ color editing a few things quickly.  Adobe's really focusing on mobile workflows since all the creative types want to work off insanely lightweight devices in the moment.

[IainC]

Yep!

Check out the apps, too. Photoshop Fix is pretty cool for messing with your phone photos and spot--correcting/ color editing a few things quickly.  Adobe's really focusing on mobile workflows since all the creative types want to work off insanely lightweight devices in the moment.

Yeah, the new hotness for photo processing in the field has moved on from a MacBook Air to a Microsoft Surface. It's basically a standalone Cintiq. I still use my MBA for editing, it runs LR and Ps just fine and I keep my libraries on a Thunderbolt drive that's fast enough - even as an external device - for lag-free processing.

[Mosesandstick]

I do so many panos I can't imagine processing on anything other than me desktop!

Work sent me to Copenhagen, took a few photos in my spare time.


2015-11-08 Copenhagen 005 by Aled Moses, on Flickr


2015-11-08 Copenhagen 003 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

[Count Nerfedalot]

I haven't bothered to google it yet, but using all 16 of my Swedish words to try and translate the Danish sign I come up with "American artist, Finnish drunkenwhat??" 

nice pic of the statue by the way. is that HDR? the shadows seem .... odd.

[Mosesandstick]

Funnily enough for me it's not a HDR for once. I think it's a combination of the shadows, the rust on the statue and me using a circular polariser that gives it that "off" look.

Something more exciting, fireworks! I gave away my old tall, sturdy aluminium tripod because I figured my shorter travel carbon fibre one would good enough. Naturally the next time I need a tripod I start wishing I had a taller one. Immediately after taking these I had a hankering for getting a new £400 two metre tall tripod.


2015-11-07 Battersea Park Fireworks 006 by Aled Moses, on Flickr


2015-11-07 Battersea Park Fireworks 012 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

[Count Nerfedalot]

yeah, tripods. PITA to carry around. and mine has turned out to be a lot less stable that I remembered. and too short! and still bulky as heck.  I just can't swing $500 for a tripod though, anyone got any suggestions for something that is really truly stable and still portable and affordable?

[Merusk]

Depends what you mean by "truly stable" What are you putting on it?

The $30 tripod I bought at Target 5 years ago still works great *for me.*  I only have a Nikon 7100 and my heaviest lens is a 70-300mm that's not 3.2-f5.5f. Total weight is maybe 10# max.  My only complaint is it's not a ball joint at the camera connection so sometimes getting a level picture requires more fiddling with the legs.

However, I'd never think of using it with the $3,000 2.?f 300mm lens our Mac tech brought in to show off, or if I'd invested in one of the Pro-level cameras. $200 would be a 'cheap' tripod with that sort of investment.

[apocrypha]

really truly stable and still portable and affordable?

You can't have all three I'm afraid. Stability comes from weight. Aluminium/carbon fibre tripods are inherently more flexible than steel etc, but a lot lighter. Cheaper tripods are machined to lower tolerances and are thus more prone to movement at joints and heads. I've used 300kg fixed column support platforms for large format cameras in studios and even they can't eliminate 100% of vibration.

There's a few things you can do to improve stability with any tripod though. Make sure the legs are spread far enough. A larger tripod will give you a more stable base but if it's light and/or cheap then that can make things worse because of leg flex. Make sure you've always got the central column vertical if you're on a slope - use a spirit level if your tripod doesn't have one. And try hanging a weight from the central column (I use my camera bag) to give it a more stable centre of gravity. That only really works if it's not windy though.

Unfortunately, as with most things, choosing a tripod is really a game of compromises between those three factors: stability, weight and cost.

[climbjtree]

Beaver Moon over Kabul, Afghanistan.

Spoilered for huge:

[Mosesandstick]

Really nice detail. You might also have a dead pixel on your camera - bottom left of the moon.

[climbjtree]

Ah, good catch! Thankfully I don't own the camera 

[IainC]

On my way to take photos at the local nerdcon and spotted this guy lurking in the entranceway to the courtyard behind my apartment. Shortly after I snapped this photo, half a dozen or so other guys wearing body armour and carrying Kalashnikovs came barreling out past him at speed. No idea what it was about.


Militia on the street by Iain Compton, on Flickr

[IainC]

Some phone photography. All of my recent real camera work has been NSFW or otherwise not shareable.


metro texture #kievmetro #kiev #kyiv #ukraine #stationdecor #publictransport by Iain Compton, on Flickr


Bright kiosks #cityscapes #streetscene #kyiv #kiev #ukraine by Iain Compton, on Flickr


Old glass #nikon #cameragear #canon #lens #analoguephotography #noautofocus by Iain Compton, on Flickr


Lva Tolstoho #metro #kievmetro #publictransport #kiev #kyiv #ukraine #station by Iain Compton, on Flickr

One real camera shot from a dance event a few weeks ago.


IMG_1715.jpg by Iain Compton, on Flickr