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Photography Equipment & Software Thread

rundll

By rundll,
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Rev

Rev

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Why do you want to take a panorama of 500 shots? Apart from the fact that there now exists a machine which you can buy to do it for you. What's the use in an 8 gigapixel image beyond being a neat and pointless tech demo to look at for a couple of minutes? It's just something to throw money at, it doesn't say or do anything or mean anything to anybody.

Every week you're buying a new toy but all we ever see are uninspired shots of buildings and the like. You even admitted this in this very thread when I asked you about it! Why not put the toys down for a bit. Creativity comes from limitations.

FYI, you're being weird. Buying a machine like that is no different to buying a set of £6 creative filters to put on a 50mm 1.8. It allows you to do something you can't do without it - just because you're not interested in the results doesn't mean no-one is, the fact he's been on Wired (and commended by UAE royalty, or whatever) is fairly good proof of that. And "uninspired shots of buildings" is a preposterous thing to say (you must hate this one then). The fact Canon make lenses that are essentially created for photographing buildings shows that they're as much, if not more of, a challenge. I mean, how much do you think about stuff like:

400px-Bashford_views_-_perspective_control.jpg

When you're snapping away on the street?

And creative photographs doesn't come from limitations. That's bollocks.

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NecroMorrius

NecroMorrius

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I was using Gerald's words from ages ago in this very thread when I said that, sorry for any confusion. I know how TSE lenses work thanks, but I've never considered one because I'm not a chartered surveyor. I certainly haven't considered buying four of them as someone people have.

And creativity does come from limitations, constraints, limits, whatever you want to call it. It's a bit like necessity being the mother of invention :sherlock:

And yeah I do hate that one :lol: at least in a way. I have an irrational dislike for religious stuff, all of my shots of the vatican and surrounding area are drab and shit and try to use juxtapositions to take the piss out of it. That one in particular though was just uploaded because a friend wanted to sketch it, I don't like it at all. (Hence not adding it to any groups, embedding it anywhere or giving it any tags etc)

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Rev

Rev

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And creativity does come from limitations, constraints, limits, whatever you want to call it. It's a bit like necessity being the mother of invention :sherlock:

Disagree, emphatically. The most creative photography goes from David LaChapelle spending a fortune to photograph the most glamourous people on the planet with essentially no limitations beyond the most inherent in photography, through to the World Press Photos honouring Michael Wolf who did nothing more than point a camera at his monitor. I can't see where either of those have had limitations being the defining factor of the creativity involved in their work.

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NecroMorrius

NecroMorrius

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Well, 'extremely expensive celebrity portraiture' is a pretty narrow hallway, right? It's the same reasons our photo competitions have themes, and other photo competitions are more stringent with limiting methods. It's not just so the entries can be compared, it's to get the entrants thinking about something they might not normally think about. Focusing on something more specific and challenging them to defy convention within a proposed theme.

To flip it back to gear somewhat, haven't you noticed how you learn a lot more about a single lens when you don't take any other lenses with you? If you take two you might learn a bit about each one, if you restrict yourself to just one you'll learn ten times more because you're challenging yourself and exploring the very limits of what your equipment is capable of, or more accurately how to get around them and get more out of your lens.

Or how about music? I play the drums. I used to have a massive drum kit, it was my pride and joy. But I never truly learnt what it means to be a musician (well, drummer, lulz) until I stripped it right back to the very basics and rebuilt my foundational skills, by forcing myself to use the smallest kit possible. It was a revelation, needed at a time when I was well on the way to becoming like this fanny :D

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Rev

Rev

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I'm not sure how you can possibly say 'extremely expensive celebrity portraiture' is a narrow hallway. There is almost nothing in common between, say, Bailey and LaChapelle even though they're in an almost identical genre.

Just because a situation can force creativity doesn't mean such a situation is required to generate the creativity. That's obviously not the case.

EDIT: And I'm obviously not offended. I'm doing the same.

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NecroMorrius

NecroMorrius

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No, I didn't mean that. I meant that 'limiting' yourself to working within surreal celebrity portraiture, rather than say doing a bit of that and a bit of something else and a bit of something else again all at the same time, forces you to focus deeply and in detail on your one chosen theme for the project. It's as simple as limiting yourself to shooting one bed for a whole project, as I saw some bloke do recently. The trick is to think about how to use the space and what to fill it with, working within the limits of that bed and those tight confines, rather than shooting the same exact scene with lots of different cameras or lenses.

You took me the wrong way there, I was saying that working within narrow confines allows you to go deeper and challenges you to make the most of your chosen situation, not that everyone in the same genre produces similar work. Creativity allows you to avoid doing the same thing as everyone else :)

Back to gear - Canon 50mm 1.8 is £78 delivered at kikatek at the moment. Prime lenses are a great way to 'limit' yourself and learn a bit of manual zooming technique, i.e. walk forwards a bit etc.

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iwan_canobi

iwan_canobi

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Isn't this Geralds career though? I was under the impression he was doing this as a profession and had a niche in the market over in Dubai, therefore I can completely understand buying a tool like that.

Narrow confines forces you to try other things, but also limits you to a certain type of shot, so its a double edged sword. I struggled using only a 50mm prime as I prefer doing landscape stuff, it forced me to re-think shots but more often than not I was frustrated because I couldn't achieve what I wanted with the 'limitation' of that lens for that type of picture.

But maybe I'm just not good enough to rise above that limitation, Nicky was always a good example of showing that you could do landscapes with a 50mm.

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Nicky

Nicky

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But maybe I'm just not good enough to rise above that limitation, Nicky was always a good example of showing that you could do landscapes with a 50mm.

:wub:

since getting a 14-24 i've gotten far too lazy though, I need to put it away and get out the 50 again.

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rundll

rundll

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Has anyone ever printed a one-off book using Lightroom?

Just starting to look into it and wondering if the print module can output a PDF or something I can mail out.

Is Photobox the best one to go with?

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gerald.d

gerald.d

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Isn't this Geralds career though?

Nope. Purely for fun.

On very rare occasions someone may see something and consider it to have commercial value and offer me some money, but out of 10+ million views of outputs from my hobby, I can assure you it's very much the exception.

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Nicky

Nicky

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another thing i'd love to see Gerald do, is more varied locations, I know oyu live and work in Dubai, and you obviosuly love it, but It'd be great to see other cities and rural / historical areas and historical landmarks with your mental architectural and panoramic equipment.

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PopeSmokesDope

PopeSmokesDope

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Has anyone ever printed a one-off book using Lightroom?

Just starting to look into it and wondering if the print module can output a PDF or something I can mail out.

Is Photobox the best one to go with?

Install cutepdf and instead of printing to paper you can print to a PDF file

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rundll

rundll

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Install cutepdf and instead of printing to paper you can print to a PDF file

That a windows thing? You can print to PDF from any dialog in OSX, that might work in Lightroom.

Photobox do plenty of books. But they are limited to 26 pages by default, and extra pages are £2 each. Can't *see* anyway of making a book other than using their online flash tool.

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gerald.d

gerald.d

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Gerald, with that kit could you do shit like track the moon across the sky to make a silly high quality animation? I assume it'd be a prick to determine paths?

Nope. You need one of these to do that.

Dead simple to track the sky with those things - they can track in solar, sidereal, and lunar time. I was thinking of getting one to do a dawn-dusk timelapse with the sun stationary in the frame of an 8mm fisheye for the full day so that you'd get the Earth landscape rotating around the sun, and a night-time one do do the Milky Way. No point doing the Moon - it's so much brighter than anything else in the night sky that if you exposed it properly, nothing else would show up.

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Nicky

Nicky

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well, there's ways to present criticism though, A) respectfully, and B)when it's asked for.

It's something we should all remember, especially when it's something we love.

this is probably my most womanly post on rllmuk.

massive tits in my face! or something

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Alexlotl

Alexlotl

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Long winded semi-defence of Foveon sensors.

Those who were interested in this might want to take a look at this review at Luminous Landscape. Looks like the SD1 is indeed equivalent to a 24Mp FF Bayer (and possibly slightly better) at rendering detail. But the colours are still unreliable (if beautiful), the software's still shit, and the camera costs too much. So pretty much what I expected.

In other news, the new Olympus m43 stuff sounds fucking ace, and I may have to pick up the upcoming VF3 EVF for my XZ-1.

Let's keep the criticism constructive, folks.

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