ICJ's photography thread

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

5E0A0009

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

5E0A1193 by bluejays2017, on Flickr

[AArdvark]

OOh! new desktop background!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Milker got into pinball.

SPMM_5E0A1189 by bluejays2017, on Flickr

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I had a James Bond car from the Spy Who Loved Me. It was the white Lotus something-or-other, the one that was also a submarine. Made by Corgi, it was super awesome with the fins that came out of the back and everything. I took that to school one day and it never came home, not with me anyway.

I feel there was a lot of theft from piece of shit kids when we grew up.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

My new camera is a Canon Mark IV. It has an HDR mode. Here is an attempt to use it:

[Tdarcos]

Did you read what Q—Bert said when he got hit on the head? Man, I don't think I have ever heard such purple epithets in my life.

[AArdvark]

Do you consider HDR a shortcut of sorts or is it using the available tech?

When I took photography in high school none of that stuff was available. We had to bring out the details using the burning in and dodging techniques. Having this stuff built in makes it easier to take NatGeo quality photos. I guess it's the composition aspect that's key.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Do you consider HDR a shortcut of sorts or is it using the available tech?

When I took photography in high school none of that stuff was available. We had to bring out the details using the burning in and dodging techniques. Having this stuff built in makes it easier to take NatGeo quality photos. I guess it's the composition aspect that's key.

Well, the HDR mode was something that I wouldn't have the patience for - take a few shots of the same thing at lower exposures, take the same thing at higher exposures and blend them. I am happy to let the camera do that. But for where I am in learning, the target has to be non-moving (I couldn't do it with a cat, for instance). So for static subjects where I have a tripod and wanted to try that HDR function out, sure. I'd never go through the process manually in Photoshop or Affinity Photo.

Burn and dodge is something I have coincidentally been trying lately. I feel like there is this huge industry to dodge corporate head shots so the lighting is "right." Even if I am carrying lights with me, getting a subject's face lit to where the rest of the body isn't more over exposed than I'd like isn't something I have been nailing on the fly. So I don't mind painting over that with the dodge tool. (The tutorials I have seen all say to use curves layers instead of the dodge tool, but none of them say why. They just spit and spittle and say don't use it. That's fine, but I need to find a tutorial to give a reason why before I abandon it.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I bought some gels in an attempt to try a shoot like this at some point in the future: https://fstoppers.com/studio/shooting-color-gels-2723

Also, I shot a three second video the other day. Here is my take on it:

1) I can't believe how shaky it was. If it's shaky like that for video, how much shake am I introducing in a photo?
2) 3 seconds was 37 megabytes.

[Tdarcos]

Do you consider HDR a shortcut of sorts or is it using the available tech?

When I took photography in high school none of that stuff was available. We had to bring out the details using the burning in and dodging techniques. Having this stuff built in makes it easier to take NatGeo quality photos. I guess it's the composition aspect that's key.

I suspect many of the tools we have to use with photography - and even videography - were available before, just either required extremely high-end (read "not just expensive, but super expensive") equipment, post-processing (like airbrushing, overexposure and underexposure, etc.), or both.

The drastic drop in the price of computers and the exponential increases in speed and capacity have given ordinary people access to features and functionality either unavailable before or only available to large businesses and the rich and super-rich. Not just this field but in many others. The availability of open-source and free for low-end use apps like Trimble Sketchup for CAD and 3D sculpting equivalents, and low-cost apps, have further enhanced these capacities.

let's not forget what's happened with photography. When was the last time you handled a negative or bought film? Absent emergency use like buying a disposable camera for use on vacation because yours was forgotten or is unavailable - and even that's highly unlikely since most phones have really good cameras in them - it's probably been more than a decade if at all. Combine essentially free digital photography and digital storage and it's created a devastating improvement in what's possible.

When was the last time you took one picture of anything? A typical 32gb memory card which costs about $9, holds thousands of pictures before needing unloading, taking (and keeping) extra pictures costs nothing, and there's plenty of room, meaning people take six, or ten, or twenty shots when on (expensive) film and processing before, they took maybe one or two. So we have the luxury of taking lots of extra shots to get just the right one or to get multiple angles. And you can take a memory card - or the camera with it, or a jump drive - to a drug store, insert the storage device into a kiosk, let it show you thumbnails of all the pictures, and you can pick the ones you want prints of, in seconds on photo stock, for about 17c each, probably less than it costs to print them at home. For bulk quantity - like for Christmas cards - you can order prints for about $9/100.

[Flack]

I hadn't considered that before.

[Jizaboz]

That’s cool.

[Flack]

I hadn't considered that before.

Surely you're being sarcastic, right? Everybody who has ever taken a digital picture has already thought of this.

[Tdarcos]

I hadn't considered that before.

Surely you're being sarcastic, right? Everybody who has ever taken a digital picture has already thought of this.

You just criticized your own comment! Now that's funny. I did that once when I misspelled The Dark Knight. Which in that cace wuz a sahd commentari on the lak of permision todo posst editing.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Enter GELS.

Clyde

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

More with gels.

Rorschach by bluejays2017, on Flickr

[Jizaboz]

Ha I thought that was a cosplayer model at first! Nice job

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

[Tdarcos]

Is the cat - which is hard to see - also named Zork II, just like the program you're running on the screen next to it?

By the way, what are 'gels'? Usually it means pens with thicker ink for easier writing since it flows better. But we're talking digital photography here.

Again, Jonsey, you do such amazingly beautiful photographs, you overly talented son-of-a-bitch.