Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Photography for geeks

lcamtuf.coredump.cx

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 150 posts

Re: Photography for geeks

#141

Post by antihero »

post_break wrote: post #120
antihero wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would recommend the X-Tx range over the X-Ex range, as they have an ISO dial on the top at the cost of being slightly bigger and heavier. I have an X-T2 and it's great, but obviously the X-T4 etc will have more features. One BIG caveat with Fuji though is that the X range use an APS-C sensor instead of full frame, so if you get into vintage lenses (really good fun) your effective focal length is times by 1.5. Your ni…

If your camera supports it you can shoot RAW + jpeg and get best of both worlds.

I’ve done this and found it fairly annoying to manage, and of limited value because if you’re editing a shoot you will want to have some visual consistency which means if most are RAW that you have given a style to in your edits, the same settings will look totally whack on any JPEGs anyway.

For one offs? Maybe I guess.

Some people also swear by editing at the point of shoot (Ken Rockwell for instance, but his logic sounds absurd today) and thus use JPEG.

Re: Photography for geeks

#142

Post by post_break »

antihero wrote: post #141
post_break wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your camera supports it you can shoot RAW + jpeg and get best of both worlds.

I’ve done this and found it fairly annoying to manage, and of limited value because if you’re editing a shoot you will want to have some visual consistency which means if most are RAW that you have given a style to in your edits, the same settings will look totally whack on any JPEGs anyway. For one offs? Maybe I guess. Some people also swear by editing at the point of shoot (Ken Rockwell for instance, but his logic…

I just shoot jpeg + raw because my body has dual cards so I'll always have a backup in raw format, if the jpeg card fails. I've found that I'm editing raw so much less because I love the look I'm getting straight out of camera. I shoot a lot of instant film so shooting this way digitally works for my workflow, but I understand why it might be complicated if you like a jpeg but then need to modify a raw to conform to it.

Re: Photography for geeks

#143

Post by thih9 »

> Telephoto optics tend to produce shallow DOF; wide-angle lenses keep almost everything in focus most of the time.

Isn’t this incorrect?

I.e. the article itself states that telephoto is just a crop of the wide angle. And sure, the background gets “larger” and if that changes the composition, it might make it look less busy. But the DOF (blur factor) stays the same.

Re: Photography for geeks

#144

Post by tsqj »

bradknowles wrote: post #30
muglug wrote: post #24

The main thing about photography is your first 10,000 photos will likely be bad. Modern technology makes it possible to get through 10,000 snaps much faster and much cheaper than when using film. But taking those photos is not enough — it’s in the editing of those first 10,000 photos that you will find the hidden photographer in you. Photography is a lot like writing code: you can create something that does the job,…

I wouldn't say it's your first 10k photos. Because anyone can just hold down the button and take hundreds of photos. And those hundreds of photos don't really count as separate pictures in this regard. I would say that it's more like your first 10k different photographic compositions/subjects. From there, I agree that you really learn in the editing.

reminds me of that most quoted lines from Bruce Lee, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

same as what you are indicating here. Deliberate / mindful practice leads to significant improvement.

Re: Photography for geeks

#145

Post by tsqj »

mod50ack wrote: post #95

I've been taking pictures for a few years now. Not all of my photos are fit for Wikimedia Commons, but I've put a lot on [1], especially of baseball players and buildings (just what I happen to enjoy photographing). I began originally with point-and-shoots, which I borrowed from my parents and basically used as they're designed: pointing and shooting. The quality of those early photos is not always great. But with ti…

thanks for sharing! those are really valuable thoughts.

one of the top takeaways :

> The most important thing is to get a lot of practice taking pictures of the thing you like to photograph.

Re: Photography for geeks

#146

Post by autorun »

serko wrote: post #126

The author gave a nice general overview of the topic. But the thing is, none of these technical things are essential. Like a lot of people here (me included, but I am actively trying to get rid of it) the author has an engineering mindset, that was built (I am just guessing here) through years and years of engineering work. And it is really cool and may give an advantage in some professions (and sometimes in life ove…

I've been reading this forum since years, and generally its perception of photography is rather technical and very proud to achieve perfect photos with the right color balance and all that. Sure it's nice to know all those technical concepts, so you can be conscious when destroying them, and have fun.

Concerning photography tech, it's great to talk about sensors, how mobile camera is being achieved nowadays, like explained in those Pixel blog posts, or even about analog photo development works.

Hey HN, enjoy bad photos, take pictures with the worst camera you can find. I've read in some comments here that you need to take at least 10k photos first until you get better, this is not a sport

Re: Photography for geeks

#147

Post by IIsi50MHz »

semireg wrote: post #118
kak9 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait what are the five bad things in baking bread?

Too much or too little energy when baking (burned or raw in the middle), too much or little water (hydration), too much or too little rise time (loaf density). Just off the top of my head.

Adding incompatible ingredients (like honey) that mess with the yeast culture or kill it. "Peeking" at you loaf during bake too often or for too long. If you use a home bread machine, layering the ingredients incorrectly so that different things start too soon.

An important exception to "Always PEEK before you POKE.", because peeking can change the value of what you eventually slice.

. o O ( Almost wrote ".slice". And I'm sure there's a tortured Heartbleed/Spectre/Meltdown analogy in this loaf somewhere… )

Re: Photography for geeks

#148

Post by lucb1e »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #121

I'd be curious to know if any beginning photographer could actually put those tips to good use. I find it odd they did not cover adjusting exposure with ISO, shutter, and aperture. Getting the right exposure, and not blindly accepting auto-exposure, is probably the most fundamental skill to develop, and is usually where most teaching starts. The example I use as to why auto-exposure is unreliable is that most manufac…

> not blindly accepting auto-exposure, is probably the most fundamental skill to develop

Bit late to the party (why is hn so ephemeral) but this made me realize that my Samsung phone camera has literally 1 option to adjust: exposure. Sure, zooming is also default-accessible but that's selecting what to capture than photo-technical adjustments of what you're capturing. Any other such slider, you have to go into pro mode. Never realized this was the most fundamental skill but why they picked this just clicked into place!

> if you take a picture of a white wall, the camera will expose it as 18% grey. If you take a picture of a black wall, the camera will expose it as 18% grey.

That sounds like the two pictures should look the same in the end, then. If the walls are perfectly black and white and nothing else is visible, of course, but even with imperfections it should still look similar and not necessarily recognisable as a white or a black surface. Am I understanding you right?

Re: Photography for geeks

#149

Post by lucb1e »

yetihehe wrote: post #133
bambax wrote: post #109

Re: focus. Most cameras focus on shutter button half-pressed. Learn to use this by focusing first (with a half-press), framing, and then taking the picture by finishing the press (not doing a complete press again as that would reset the focus point). Some cameras let you have a focus button different from the shutter button. This can be super useful and can become natural after a little while.

Or even use manual focus. Want to do "artistic" photos? Get lens with wide aperture (below f/2), it has very low depth of field, so you can focus on your subject and have blurred background. After using "normal" cameras all my life, I've recently (less than 3 weeks ago) bought cheapest mirrorless camera and bought f/1.2 lens (50mm without zoom, those are cheapest lens there are). First photos of my dog were so sweet…

I was going to ask the stupid question "why bother with special lenses to introduce unsharp parts if you can just destroy details in software still anyway" but I think I realized the answer, in case anyone else has that question also: introducing it later depends on knowing which parts were further away. Pictures (typically) don't have depth/distance information for each pixel.

Re: Photography for geeks

#150

Post by lucb1e »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #106

Great article. In case the author stops by: Why no mention of CRI? It's definitely a great geeky topic, and the article links out to professional lights with exceptionally high CRI.

For anyone else who's not a walking TLA dictionary:

> color rendering index (CRI). CRI is a quantitative measure of a light's ability to reproduce the colors of objects faithfully in comparison with an ideal or natural light source.

Post reply on HN