Reply With QuoteI feel pretty much every single one of your “points” has already been discussed enough . Enjoy yourself , happy photographing.Originally Posted by Tooks
...... indeed :)
I feel pretty much every single one of your “points” has already been discussed enough . Enjoy yourself , happy photographing.
indeed you have very little to add
Fortunately, photography for me these days is firmly in the ‘for my own enjoyment’ category, so no worries there.
Good enjoy being your own singular audience.
My advice would be to write a business plan before buying any fancy camera gear.
Starting up a new business is a challenge and a written plan before starting will greatly increase the chances of success.
Patronising to the end.
Yes I thought you had an alterior motive rather than just offering solid advice . What an argumentative timewasting sad little specimen you are .
What is the matter with you? What ulterior motive are you imagining here?
I’ve been very careful not to personally attack you, but respectfully I think you’re out of order here.
I took up photography a few years ago and i made it fully aware to the chap who was teaching me that my camera was a bridge and i expected to have its limitations. I did this after learning a little beforehand and realising what id actually bought. The guy in question was rather impressed with the quality of the pics my camera took however when compared to his over slightly further distances it was clear to see why mine wasn't as good. Without doubt i can take better pictures using manual settings than i could by selecting auto and pointing. The basics were important and whilst not 100% necessary it helped me to take better shots and in general to understand what the camera was actually trying to achieve or what you were trying to make it do. I agree with you 100%
Saved to use on various car threads lol
cant add much to it , the new digital cameras do everything for me.
i'd stay out of the barbecue thread if i were you as well - theres an influx of untrained chefs in there cooking decent food which may start you off again.
“Patronising” is your idea of not personally attacking someone ? How very convenient . Away and bother someone else .
I think everybody is in agreement that whatever camera you’re using, understanding the basics of photography (literal translation being ‘drawing with light’) should help you achieve better results, but it’s still a creative art that can’t necessarily be taught, just the tool you’re using.
I raised camera phones not to say ‘they’ll be good enough’, but because any portrait photography business at the level being discussed will be competing with them. It’s very difficult to compete with free.
Your bridge camera will likely be digitally cropping at the longer end of the zoom field of view, a dedicated supertelephoto lens that optically gets you there should always capture more detail. At some point equipment can become a limitation, even if the user isn’t, there’s a reason that a lot of wildlife photographers use 600mm f/4 primes, but you can of course take great pictures with anything, as the countryfile calendar each year attests.
Photography is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, we shouldn’t try to pigeon hole them is my view, nothing more.
Last edited by Tooks; 1st January 2024 at 19:46.
Thank you . I think the thread has unfortunately been infiltrated with timewasting troublemakers with very little actual experience or desire to explore actual photography .
Nothing you’ve said is remotely useful for someone starting out in photography . I would suggest you find your own oeuvre of unpigeon holed incompetent photography . This discussion with you is about as redundant as an experienced artist trying to argue with a neophyte that a sharp pencil works better than a blunt one or indeed that a camera works better if you take off the lens cap .
Go away old chap, I was talking to FFF.
I doubt your food is any better than your photography and “decent” isn’t quite what I look for in life for either food or photography . You fill your boots at iceland and with whatever passes for photography for you .
Its a forum and FFF was responding to me not you . I’ll comment on whatever I want old chap.
How many people have you trained in photography oh great creative freedom fighter ?
What’s a stop in photography parlance ? Why is it relevent , what creates a stop
, how do you control stops and approximately how many stops does a real world nominally exposed image contain . Where is your “ white point “ relative to stops ?
What’s a dmin , what is reciprocity failure and why does it matter?
What’s the difference between depth of field and depth of focus and describe what impact each has on the image and how other camera controls also impact on each parameter.
Explain how field of view impacts the image relative to focal length and distance to subject .
I await your responses within 10 minutes oh mr great creative photography champion
And likewise, I’m free to comment on a public forum as well. Seriously, are you ok?
I can see you’ve checked out my profile, now please just move on and ignore me if that helps, I think that would be for the best.
Yep and nothing in your profile or previous posts leads me to believe you have any interest or knowledge in photography and are just a complete timewaster generally ,
So your lack of meaningful response to my basic questions on photography is hardly surprising .
Jog on and waste someone else’s time why don’t you
Charmed.
I rest my case .
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread you’ve contributed to which hasn’t derailed into a narcissistic car crash.
You sure?
Someone who lies about the little things will lie about the big things too.
Absolutely
Do you have anything worthwhile to add to the subject of this thread or are you just holding a grudge because I exposed you as a troublesome overopinionated nut in an earlier thread ?
You are arguing with the mirror again
Keep it up with your usual hectoring personally directed irrelevant comments until you are bored but don’t make any meaningful contribution to the subject of the thread. Sad .
Still waiting for you to google the answers to these basic photography questions . Not even capable of that are you? Empty loud mouth
I had to have one done recently for my new website. The guy was a pro and it showed. The result was far better than anything an amateur could do with a phone in my opinion.
You can see the photo here:
www.alexpriorauthor.com
It actually makes me look quite “interesting”! 😁😁
So clever my foot fell off.
It is quite a striking image, and to be honest not at all like I’d imagined you look! Even more handsome though, obvs! 浪
Out of interest, did you have a choice of pictures/styles, or did you agree to go down that road during the shoot, or was it to your brief?
You got a sponsorship deal with Ralph Lauren?
Someone who lies about the little things will lie about the big things too.
We just kicked around a few words like “thoughtful”, “intense but not scary!”, “enigmatic”, “creative” etc.
And then he said, “Yep, I’ve got it”, and started rigging lights and diffusers etc.
I wanted to keep the glasses on, as I wear them all the time, so he played around with the lighting some more to eliminate reflections.
I have quite unusually bright green eyes (so I’ve been told) and although we decided to go with black and white he wanted to bring that out.
The session lasted about an hour and a half - most of which was spent on endlessly adjusting the lighting a fraction at a time.
So clever my foot fell off.
Sadly no. I do like their stuff though.
I’d like to say my modeling days are long in the past, but that would be a lie. I’ve never been asked to model anything! 😁
So clever my foot fell off.
Well, it was obviously money well spent, I purchased your book about 2 mins after seeing it! :-D
I’m about half way through, I’ll leave a Kindle review! ;-)
Top man!
Hugely appreciated.
👍👍
So clever my foot fell off.
Your comments come across as those of an 'old school' film photographer – which is fine for film photography – but we live in a digital photography age where optimal digital exposure can be, and often is, very different to that of film.
Optimal digital exposure should ideally be assessed via the live view histogram to ensure that highlights are not clipped. And there is a digital technique to optimally adjust the histogram – thus ensuring that as much highlight detail as possible is recorded.
Using an exposure meter will not necessarily optimise a digital exposure. The histogram should be the exposure guide for digital imaging – not the exposure meter.
Professional digital photographers should be aware of how to read a digital camera image's histogram - it's a prerequisite of/to, successful digital imaging.
Last edited by sundial; 2nd January 2024 at 00:21.
"Well they would say that ... wouldn't they!"
And as the paying customer that's what ultimately matters, perfect for what it was commissioned for, a touch dark and cliched for my taste though.
[QUOTE=pugster;6329434]i dont need to know that to put my camera into macro, sport , nighttime or any other mode.
.... knowing shutter speed, aperture etc isnt going to make you take a good picture.
........ taking digital pictures these days is more like saying you own a private chef , he does the work for you.[/QUOTE
Can we see some of your photographs please?
Ah, shame. I was going to offer to send you the poster version for your wall.
😁
So clever my foot fell off.
You’ve obviously have never used a digital camera in your life otherwise you woukd onow its exactky the sane principles as a film camera except we no longer need to change the film stock to vary the exposure index (iso) . The histogram is barely used.
And the exposure meter on a digital camera is still based around exposure for mid gray . 50% in digital , 18% in log film exposure densities .
So excuse me if I say you are talking rubbish
Ah yes because all your many author headshots are far superior in comparison I take it ?
You are excused. I have attended digital exposure courses based on Thomas and John Knoll's teachings.
Furthermore, there is no need to rely on a digital camera's exposure meter to optimise the histogram.
Your dogmatic comments earn you no respect.
"Well they would say that ... wouldn't they!"
Oh and of course I assume your opinion is based on your monitor and graphics card having been meaningfully calibrate to display sRGB material correctly at keast in terms of black level white level , gamma and colour temperature i. order for you to reliable form that erstwhile opinion .
Pray tell enlighten us , oh great learned one , where is your mystical white point ? What stop does it live at ? How many stops can your camera capture . what’s your headroom in stops or digital values as you prefer , how about in linear scene referred thats relevent to raw . Give me it in nirmalused log values if you want.
What will a histogram tell you and what are you going to do about it ?
Love to gear this . This guy is calling me dogmatic and talking about “histograms” in the same breath , how about oeaking and fakse colour ? How about doobg it blind ignoring the canera and using a light meter .
Explain to me the differences between digital and film cameras . I’ll love that considering I worked for eastman kodaks digital film department for 10years .
Congratulations!!!
"Well they would say that ... wouldn't they!"
It's time to go to bed, Peckinpah.
Alright you spineless loudmouth . Here I’ll educate you .
A noninally exposed scene in hatiral light with gray in the middle and deep blacks down past reciprocity failure and highlights beyond peak white tgatvreach the bleaching point of the himab eye us about 9 stops of dynamic range .
A piece of film negative can capture about 10.5 stops
Rubbish dslr coukd manage about 8 stops up until about 10 years ago. They now routinely ckaim to capture about 14 stops but thats a test chart with no lens in the camera . Real world its more like 11-12 stops .
So film negative correctly exposed puts mid gray at about 3-4 stops , then 3stops up to “white reference” so about 6-7 stops displayed on your monitor is about as good as it gets if you want to preserve the stop relationship without crushing the lower intensities together . Your whites will either hard clip at 7 stops or soft clip giving you a nice smooth falloff into the whites.
As your scene only has about 9 stops of usable range to your eye if you expose the same scene with film that caltures 10stops and digital that captures 12 stops both will look perfectly fine ( I haven’t seen an real nominally exposed image with more than 9.5 stops of range in it in my entire career , film or digital).
So what does this mean for exposure?
Film suffers from reciprocity failure , film is powered by light , the more light hits it the more silver halide oxidises and provides seeds fir the dyepacks in the film emulsion crystalise around and to go opaque ( its negative for this reason) but the less light there is the less detail film records and human beings love velvety subtle range near black . We don’t care too much about highlight information as we generally can’t see much variation up there . So how to leverage film to record more variation towards black ?
Answer push up the exposure so the lower stops are recorded with more energy and expose more density variarion . So most people shooting film will overexpose by a stop and then print down to restore contrast on the print . That way you get subtle black tonal range that human eyeballs perceive as attractive and deep. But what happens to the whites when you over expose ?
Well film has a thing called dmax ( density maximum) which is the point where features start to become bright enough to desaturate and bleach out the human visual response . This is about 7 stops in nominally exposed images but thats going to be 8 stops if over exposed . So when its printed back down you still have 2 stops of headroom so your whites don’t gard clip but nicely fall off into imperceptability. And that is totally deliberate and designed over decades by Kodak who were very smart but basically figured it out by sticking a bunch of people in a room and averaging out their visual preferences to certain types of images to identify trends that they could target that would produce a positive response from viewers . ( this is where all image technical standard are developed from) .
Now digital comes along and the cameras initially are nowhere near as good as film and can only capture 8 stops as opposed to films 10 stops .
Stops are BIG , Stops are logarithmic in nature , stops are completely unatural and are created by changing the area of the hole in the film path . These days its usually done by the iris in the lens . Each stop on your lens is half the area of the one before it , so each stop up lets double the light into the camera as the i e before so if the first stop is 1 and you add another stop you double , the third stop is double that again , the 4th is double that againand so forth . So hy the time you are talking about a camera that shoots 8 stops vs 10stops those 2 stops difference are BIG in terms off dynamic range . Its a big deal and cameras that shoot 10stops are way better than cameras tgat shoot 8stops .
Remember a few points now ;
Most real world scenes in front of a camera need about 9 stops to adequately represent them . If you want to overexpose to mitigate agai at reciprocity failure then you need 10 stops … film negative is about 10.5 stops … see a connection … lets hear it for Kodak. This is also why film still looks great when digitally scanned and colour corrected ( printed) relative to todays digital cameras .
So digital caneras come along and don’t have the same stop capability as film .. 8 vs 10 remember .
10 looks good as most real world lit scenes only have 9stops of range so you have one stop to overexpose and improve the blacks.
8 stops looks clipped in the whites no matter what you do as the scene reference has more and just like film digital suffers from its own reciprocity failure in terms of increasing noise towards black ( less photons , sensor struggles to resolve detail , more noise .. your eyes donexactky the same thing by the way … its signal to noise ratio applied to photons) but if you push it up to a cleaner sensitivity range then you onmy have 7 stops of range to capture with and your whites looks really badly clipped.
So experts start telling people with digital cameras to expose to avoid clipping highlights instead of prioritising mid gray . So know digital i ages don’t have clipped highlights they just have flat crushed blacks instead . Most people are viewing them on video monitors that only show 5-6 stops cleanly so the crushed blacks don’t look so problematic comoared with clipped whites .
Go 10 years later and digital cameras start to hit 10 stops of range , Which makes them as good as film . So the claptrap talked about histograms and white clipping prioritising picked up by enthusistic amateurs who believe any self describing “expert” still gets trotted out by nitwits who don’t understand the fundamentals of photography , the dynamic range capabilities of their equipment or how images get displayed nicely to human eyeballs.
Remember stops are big . If you have a camera that shoots 10-12 stops and you can’t stop your whites clipping even if you are shooting from inside a cave to wards a bright sunlit sky you seriously need to brush up on your basic photography instead of blearing about Knoll , ( this also tells me you haven’t done any serious photography in at least 20 years by the way)
Seriously get back in your cave with your flimsy 20 year old prosumer seminars instead of lecturing those of us who do it for real.
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