The *new* Perpetual Photo Accessory thread

richleader said:

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Does anyone have any recs for my first heavy-duty tripod? AKA something you're not terrified to leave unattended without sandbags (on my ifootage tc5, I sometimes use an 8lb hand weight, set it on the ground, and then bungee it to the hook on the bottom of the center column*)? Something that's compatible with cheaper dolly systems, too? I know the prices put the travel ones to shame so it's a long term goal and I'm just trying to calibrate how many pennies I'll have to save.

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I bought an aluminium Manfrotto 190 as a student 20 years ago and still use it at work for stills.

Think it's probably too light for what you're asking but the 055 or 290 may be good/heavy enough? They also do a Trinaut? with more triangulation.

Could be a good second hand buy? The pro product photographers we use at work tend to bring a heavy Manfrotto rather than some pricey Gitzo thing.

Manfrotto then also sell a hammock thing you can add more weight to as needed.

I don't really know what's heavy enough, only that I want the option of solid wheels/brakes and that while stuff that looks like this costs


$1000-2000, there's chinese knockoffs for under $200 so who knows (considering how fast the knockoffs for travel tripods leveled up)?

Ah OK. I misunderstood that.

A bit of searching on eBay UK suggests you can get something like a Manfrotto 504 for about £500 if you want a beefy tripod and video head. Are you worried about rigidity/shake, wind or security?

I've never had huge issues with wind/stability on a smaller tripod, but with a heavy camera it'd be tricky to pan on a video head without it feeling a little light.

Also a big fan of secondhand - particularly now that mirrorless is the new hotness and I can afford fancier Nikon F-mount lenses.

I'd like something that's both stable and physically intimidating (short of wrapping it in barbed wire) to leave out in a somewhat crowded space without keeping a hand on it at all times. I'd also like it to have wheels that glide fairly well since I'm well past the age of learning how to one-wheel on one of those boards. For some reason, all the travel tripods have leg angles that are "too narrow," "too wide," and "are you kidding" wide. So the "too narrow" setting is the only feasible one unless you're out on a barren moor or something. I'd like something that's wider and more stable without going into the ludicrous settings that travel ones have now. So a tripod that's comfortable with the fact that it takes up space, on purpose.


I have a prograde reader but no prograde cards. This might make me more likely to get a prograde card in the future but eh.

I go for travel tripods, folded to 15 inches or less.

So I eventually splurged for the Gitzo.

If you’re shooting indoors mostly or going out where you will have car, you can get the giant ones and maybe even have sand bags.

But if you’re shooting on long urban walks or hikes, size and weight become much more limited.

Yeah so the quest for travel tripods goes as such. The Gitzo with head costs $650. It has been the gold standard and continues to be that. However being that you don't want to buy it at that price you end up for the cheaper travel tripods and end up spending more then the Gitzo over time. That said i went the non-gitzo route and spent more money over time and now i have multiple tripods. And keeping up with Non-Aluminum travel and light. I've stuck with what Benro offers and under the table offers. Certain models you can only find on Ebay because they're overseas but they're better to what they currently offer and worse then what they used to offer.

For a small travel one. I prefer the Transversal leg style. And giving up height. The least amount of sections possible. Once you get to stupidly small sections you're like you never use them unless one section of the ground is slightly off balance.

As far as Prograde is concerned. 99.99% of that crap is all BS and marketing. I'm sure it is possible for you to remap the firmware 2-3 years from heavy use to use the lesser used sections first. But if you amortize it correctly if you're using it that much you should be able to just afford a new card before the degradation gets that bad. And the compatibility problem is for them to save money when they screw up the standard. If you remember Lexar has a firmware problem with some of their SD cards ages ago. Well Prograde is partially made up of those same engineers that were part of Lexar.

View: https://youtu.be/feKHGOBcWFk?t=788


"My tripod got shot three times during a gang war..."

I can't really swing most of the gear he's talking up but that's fine, I'm ok with babying my budget stuff a bit more for now.

@richleader aren't those big tripods generally somewhat modular? As in you could buy the legs to use with your existing head, then a head, then the wheels? That way you could ship-of-theseus a budget rig into something fancier over time.

Video tripods with levelling bowls like in that video are always more money than simpler photo tripods.

Could you bike-lock the tripod to a railing or a bleacher while you're away? First thought was to suggest one of those giant corkscrews for tents or dogs, but that won't be appreciated in sports venues.

Or just tape it up Barbie Pink?

aren't those big tripods generally somewhat modular? As in you could buy the legs to use with your existing head, then a head, then the wheels? That way you could ship-of-theseus a budget rig into something fancier over time.

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Yeah, that's the general idea. I already have a $$$ video head and my travel tripod even has a bowl -- it's a fine combo, although it feels silly buying carbon fiber stuff when you attach a metal fluid head to it. (I've told the story here at least twice about how my monopod fell over once and the head smashed a hole in the surface of a parking lot.) My current setup is mostly fine but I'll want to be able to do multi-camera interviews in the future and while my current camera is fine and I'm not about to downgrade it to b-cam and buy another, looking at what's out there for a second tripod is something I can do now. It's not urgent but there's times that I've wanted something more sturdy.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xygsWqgvEZ0


[channel of my favorite color teacher]

Lots of people theorycrafted (based on solid intuition) in the dozens of "expert" articles about the "Long Night" in Game of Thrones being too dark on the TVs of "normies," people who probably have theirs hanging on a wall at a 65 degree angle to their seating positions. Looking at how these things sit on the vector scope is more interesting, to me, at this stage of my learning.

Even the haunted house stuff I do tends to keep the highlights at about 95% of max and while I keep things dark, it's mostly to eliminate noise.

Most of my work is for teens and their parents and is most often seen on cell phones. My phone is ancient (iphone 8+) and I keep it at about 30% brightness for battery reasons and because I use my phone like an ancient person... I do wish I knew what was the average brightness level that people tend to use. Not that you should eliminate standards based on that but just so I could have some idea of how other people are seeing things.

In fact, I tend to drop an eq on everything for sound to dumb everything down to cell phone output. That reads badly, like the CD Loudness Wars or whatever that diminished dynamic range on cds, but it's also kind of necessary: I'll be ready to post something using my phone (social media gives you better quality and more reliability like that) and in the preview I'll catch an f-word that snuck in the background somewhere or a cough or something unpleasant. I'll then check out the same section on my computer and my LSR308s accentuate everything BUT the stuff that I just heard. There was basically no way for me to catch it in production. Whereas the phone basically amplifies anything that sounds like human speech at all costs whether due to the software or just the way the speakers are designed or both.

* About once a month I wonder if I should buy a Sennheiser MKH 416 microphone. On the one hand, I don't think I'm at that level yet (and it would require me to be using my Zoom F3 all the time since I don't have XLR on my camera) and its an unsexy purchase, but maybe the fact that I'm asking myself that often means I'm at that level...

* I talked myself out of getting the Sony 16-35 F4 PZ but I recently saw a quasi-deal via some auction site on the Tamron 20-40 F2.8. Deal was too wonky for me to jump on but if the Sony 24-50 F2.8 had been a 20-40 instead, I'd have been all over it.

I don't really need 16mm in my work but 20-40mm is 40-60mm in crop mode which gives me a huge range (20-60) for video from vista shots to talking heads while still being wide enough for photography to still constitute "wide" vs. 24mm. The Tamron is probably fine for my use but Sony's 24-50 is so excellent optically (close to GM) and gives all those other first party perks like better stabilization and more FPS, that I wish they put out a lens in that space rather than something for people who can't afford a "real" 24-70 (or just claim that they need something lite because they're "streeeeeet" photographers).

16-25 F2.8 can replace two prime lenses for photographers on a budget -- or work for someone who vlogs, but if you film other people, 16-35mm is really necessary (given the 50mm crop mode) and there isn't an affordable F2.8 anywhere for that. But maybe $2300 isn't unreasonable for a lens that could be a do-everything lens for video (if you're comfortable taking advantage of crop mode -- which typically costs you less light than you'd imagine).

New Tamron 50-300mm F/4.5-6.3 Di III VC VXD​

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It's smaller than the Tamron 50-400 but it's in a weird spot where I'd probably rather have the 50-400 or Tamron's own 28-200 on my camera. But if you absolutely want 300 it's probably one of the smaller ways to get there?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlctrt-gxfY


$1350 seems like a good price. I don't really buy the "bag of primes" anymore: it seems like, in the real world, whenever F6 isn't good enough, you're probably going to want F1.2 if you can swing it. Every time I do an event with my F1.8s, I tend to wish I had better. F2-F4 all live in a very narrow zone to me and while faster is faster, if you want to reach for a prime, it's going to be one that blows away the other options. I do like that this lens is added to the new ecosystem of weirdness, like the Tamron 35-150. If I didn't own a normal zoom right now I'd probably buy this over the new Sigma 24-70 because the light is that important to me.

It does seem that this lens is probably sharper at F1.8 than ANY number of budget F1.8 primes that you can possibly buy though, including Sigma's in this range, so if you're not going F1.4 or better, I'd definitely take this over a pile of F1.8 28/35/50s from anyone. All the elite F1.4 primes are designed to be fairly sharp wide open but it seems like F1.8s are meant to be stopped down to something barely better than your zoom if you want them to be sharp.

I hate the part where Petapixel always says "autofocus is just as good as a G-Master!" when for what they do, a Samyang is thus just as good as a Sigma which means it's also as good as Sony and I'm sure we can all suspect that isn't true, especially when the Sony has 2-4x as many motors. A 70-200 F2.8 is what bad sports shooters use for EVERYTHING but if you want to stand out from them, you're going to want more nimble and exotic tools. Polin did say he liked it more than the new Sigma 24-70 for autofocus speed (which he felt really paled before the GM equivalent):


View: https://youtu.be/4XSJU9hG8v0?t=190


Polin actually mentions "is the aperture ring really good for video shooters?!"

I did actually use aperture control mid shot last week: when panning from a stage where I was using F4 to the audience, which didn't have the spotlight on them, I rolled my front dial as I turned to get to F1.8. Results were mostly good enough. If I had aperture on my lens, I'd have had to massively reposition my hands to even get to it as I wasn't prepared in that moment -- so it's a skill you have to learn with that equipment and unless you were using a top handle, it might be less disruptive to your shot to just use the dial like a pleb.

I still think these rings are mostly a waste of materials.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXUi5-mKsoE


Found this really interesting (and the channel in general because it's way out of my wheelhouse). I've assumed for a long time that product shots were mostly 3d renders for some reason, only because that's one of the things I learned how to do well enough when I was into that stuff in the 90s.

richleader said:

Polin actually mentions "is the aperture ring really good for video shooters?!"

I did actually use aperture control mid shot last week: when panning from a stage where I was using F4 to the audience, which didn't have the spotlight on them, I rolled my front dial as I turned to get to F1.8. Results were mostly good enough. If I had aperture on my lens, I'd have had to massively reposition my hands to even get to it as I wasn't prepared in that moment -- so it's a skill you have to learn with that equipment and unless you were using a top handle, it might be less disruptive to your shot to just use the dial like a pleb.

I still think these rings are mostly a waste of materials.

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I HATE aperture rings. Especially ones that can't be locked. Inevitably I end up hitting it by accident and suddenly I'm at F22 and takes me a second to realize it. If I can lock them into A then it's not so bad, but I really would rather they not be there at all.

Kind of a random question, but what's with all the "FROM JAPAN" descriptions on lenses for sale on eBay these days? Is there some mystical property of a used lens that people are trying to advertise here? Is it a red flag that indicates that it's a seller to be wary of?

A lot of companies have moved production out of their old factories in Japan and some people think those lenses are better(worth mmore) than the ones from Vietnam or China?

Baenwort said:

A lot of companies have moved production out of their old factories in Japan and some people think those lenses are better(worth mmore) than the ones from Vietnam or China?

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I see it on a lot of much older gear. Like this 1st-gen 400mm DO IS. Maybe it's just me, but adding that to virtually every listing makes me question it more than if it was left off.

I'd be more impressed with 32 bit audio recording if it didn't require an entire XLR box. Using your hotshoe typically precludes using handles/rigs/etc. and if you need a separate system, I might as well use my Zoom gear that's probably superior. If you could just pop in any old mic to the jack and have 32 bit, it'd be a different story.

300 FPS in 1080 sounds pretty solid but no one really talks about how much effort is put into the codec there (Sony, for instance, cheaps out on how much data can be packed into their high speed modes and yet they'll let you waste as much data as possible when recording at 24FPS even though it's not something a sane person would ever use). Similarly, I'd probably rather have a full frame body and lenses to gather light rather than trying to overcompensate by recording in prorez all the time.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqn9Alkj5bU


C400: 3 base ISOs. That's a lot more numbers to remember: if you're someone who doesn't film in clog exclusively, you'll have to remember 6 or even 9 different numbers and unlike in a lot of dual iso cameras, they're not all multiples of each other (eg. on my camera it's 800/3200 for SLOG vs. 500/2000 for SCinetone so you can just remember x4 as a multiplier). The penalties for screwing this up aren't high these days though and you'll get the hang of it eventually.

Not exactly a slow motion beast: 2K will go up to 180fps.

ND filters cause less color shift and IR pollution than Sony, despite being a bit more clunky.

Good price as a FX6 killer but it's a 4 year old target.

Has anyone used presets, either sold or “free” ones?

I have my own presets but I still spend a lot of time in PP.

Wondering if there are presets which you just apply to hundreds or thousands of images and then mostly keyword and favorite the images, not have to touch any sliders or brushes.

I've never used any of the new adaptive ones that use advanced features like subject selection and a whole slew of commands. I can see how they might be really useful.

I'm biased against anyone selling "lut" presets and all the photographers who tend to use them: it's like, ok, all your wedding images and senior photos are brown, brown, and more brown and yet your highlights are cyan, which can't be on purpose, "how can you not see how crap these are as a 'pro?'"

OTOH, when I'm dealing with massive amounts of images, I'll often create a photoshop action where I'll run everything through Luminar AI (the old version before NEO) with a preset called "Focus" at about 40% strength that makes eyes pop a bit more, brightens faces, and does some slight sharpening. And then the action will engage Topaz Denoise and then fade the result to 70% to keep grain natural looking (it's like having the same shot with an extra stop of light and works better than just setting Topaz to be less aggressive, imho), along with a few color balance toggles that I can engage or disengage as needed, before doing a Save-As. The action as a whole takes about 30-40 seconds per image (for my 33mp camera) which can add up though.

But my process is probably similar to a fancy preset only it didn't cost me any additional subscription fees (old luminar is ownable, I paid like $20, and Topaz is still much faster than Adobe denoising, afaik) and having that software is useful in other ways to me.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b6_BY3oin0



View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_GItubht-I


Since I watch a lot of camera stuff, even though I'm not a canon owner, I've been flooded with "reviews" of this thing. They all feel weird since the consensus is "this is great for video work if only because so many plebs are stuck on the EF gear" paired with "but I'm a pro so I own the RF 28-70 F2 which never leaves my camera anyway so I won't be buying this but I need the youtube clicks so here's a video."

Man, I thought Sony reviews were pointless. But at least we're not celebrating "hybrid lenses" as an innovation still...

But, once again, video means you need an aperture ring...

"Oddly, this option is only available in video capture mode; when taking photos, aperture can only be controlled from the camera." (petapixel)

If your only choice is between a reasonably priced "ancient" prime (RF STM) and an overpriced elite version (the older STM needs to be at F4 to match it in sharpness), any sane person would probably save their pennies for that 28-70 F2 like the pros.

This is why I think F1.2 is the future of regular primes (not counting 16mm or 135, etc.) considering how much advancement zooms have had: you really want something different if you're going to change lenses, especially if your zoom starts at F1.8 or F2 -- and even the Tamron 35-150 stays closer to F2 than 2.8 for a decent chunk of its range. Viltrox is going to have a lot of sales if their full frame F1.2 prime lineup is better than Sirui's APSC line, which has had a spotty reception with their autofocus.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjFdFRdHtuQ


So much fun. Honestly, I'd just be happy with about 300 fps provided I could get sound to record at the same time and it wasn't a S&Q mode treatment.

People often say "you can't use sound you record that way, anyway, so what's it matter?!"

And that's true if you're a noob who tries actually slowing the sound down and using pitch correction. That's absurd even at 50% slow motion (60fps on a 30fps timeline), let alone 25% (120 on 30) or 10%. But if you just cut up your sound track to feature key sounds, it's not hard to place them at the correct moment.

For example, I did photos at a pickleball tournament (my town has been playing it since the 1980s so we liked it before it was cool adjacent) over the weekend with my 50-400mm. I wanted to record video for the championship so I switched to 120FPS and shot at about F8 and 1/500 at ISO 100-200.

50mm was still tight so there was a lot of waggling back and forth (although it was nice being able to push to 400mm for closeups during serves). For editing, I pushed into a 4:5 ratio from 16:9 which meant I could combat the waggle some by keyframing the view to follow the ball a bit better than I did in real time, making it a bit smoother and less jarring to watch since the view travelled considerably less distance for each volley.

But once you select a section that you want to slow down, you basically just cut out that duration of audio, slice it up into x-number of pieces where you see spikes in volume on the timeline (racket on ball strikes), and then adjust them to line up with the visuals. So long as you put a soundtrack in, it'll cover up the fact that there's not wind/crowd noise in the gaps, which a bit of EQ will soften anyway.

So getting audio at the same time as slow-mo footage is often super useful since there are often key sounds that don't actually need to be slowed down so long as you drop them in the right place, from basketballs hitting the floor or the rim or the sound of a match striking before the flame goes up, etc., and while you can grab stuff like that from sound effect libraries, it's really often better to just get it naturally in case you don't bother with slow-mo in your shot: about 90% of that pickleball match I just let play out in real time, anyway, since no one wants THAT much slow-mo (Galadriel on her freaking horse...).

richleader said:

This is why I think F1.2 is the future of regular primes (not counting 16mm or 135, etc.) considering how much advancement zooms have had

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How many people want or need F1.2? Even 1.4 on FF seems like a ridiculously narrow dof. Obviously someone wants that, but I'm very rarely among those people. I guess for dark events like concerts or dances without flash, where the alternative is the shot being too dark altogether?

How many people want or need F1.2? Even 1.4 on FF seems like a ridiculously narrow dof.

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F2.8 is usually perfect for concerts, imho, since you're often looking up at the stage from an extreme angle if you have access to row zero, plus, you usually have spotlights to help out.

But that's the point I was making: F2.8 zooms (and now F2 and F1.8 zooms) and modern ISOs are so very good that if you're going to bother with a prime, it had better be able to do something completely alien or supernatural in nature. (Just like a camera needs to be a serious step up to bother with it over a cell phone.) It doesn't mean you ALWAYS have to shoot F1.2 but it needs to have the option, imho, if you're going to purchase it to begin with.

There are still people who preach in the "emotional purity" of primes (especially for "learners") or are anti-size people who must have the smallest gear at all times, but for most people, the time of primes seems to be over.

The Sigma 28-45 F1.8 has gotten a lot of hate from photographers ("I guess it's a reasonably sharp 35mm that gives you some wiggle room for framing") but they don't get it, imho: no matter what, you're always zooming with your feet with that lens, the zoom isn't about zoom but about giving you 28mm for places and 45mm for faces. It's the two different compression effects for one lens and its a lesson you learn as soon as you start with video. And I do think that being forced to do that at least some times helps with your photography (it's helped with my narrative/storytelling for stills immensely).

I guess for dark events like concerts or dances without flash, where the alternative is the shot being too dark altogether?

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Yeah, all the anti-noise software out there is REALLY good at taking the noise out of bokeh balls in bird photography (where you've obliterated the background) but it can often look actively bad, worse than raw noise, in "maybe you shouldn't have taken that shot at the party, at all" situations.

Non studio flash photography isn't really hot anymore, outside of people who sometimes try to recreate crappy American Apparel ads for Instagram occasionally. The times when you have the perfect room to bounce over your right shoulder into a nearby corner on a white wall are... lacking. Plus, if you're shooting video as well, you really can't have a bracket to rotate your flash since you often don't have access to your hotshoe with a full rig (OTOH, with modern resolutions, vertical crops from horizontal shots are often fine. Yet for that same reason you can often be further away from the subject and crop in, which gives you a more respectable depth of field even wide open.)

I'm far from a flash expert but I recently had a step and repeat where I had a flash setup on a c-stand with a modifier and when there were a lot of people I still had them casting shadows on each other and I just got a better image dropping to F1.8 and 1/60 and hoping for the best with the flash turned off. But the extra stop of light that F1.2 would have given me could have given me a much cleaner image. And of course there's no flash for video (hence me salivating a bit about what the Sigma 28-45 could do for my 120FPS basketball footage where I could cut my ISO by 1/3rd or by half in a lot of gyms!)

Most of the time, these days though, I'll just bring a pair of 24" tube lights and some Amazon Basics style stands to events and set up an informal step and repeat, if there isn't an official one, because they help out not just me but everyone trying to take pictures with their phones as well. People get a lot of pleasure out of taking and posting their own stuff, not waiting around for the official pro shot, anyway, so it's best to help out as many people as possible since I have the gear and it's so easy to pack and set up.

richleader said:

There are still people who preach in the "emotional purity" of primes (especially for "learners") or are anti-size people who must have the smallest gear at all times, but for most people, the time of primes seems to be over.

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I have no idea what emotional purity might mean in the context of lenses, but I do get amateurs like myself wanting cheaper lenses. Physically smaller, lighter lenses when traveling are also useful.

I've seen a lot of amateur and semi-amateur photos in which the focal plane is fucked up from being too narrow, and I've been guilty of the same, for example in the photo at the bottom of this essay. Those photos are meant to be illustrative for rapid scrollers on social media, though.

This is funny.

Errm, hi, I am swiftdraw and am new here. I generally have no idea what I am doing.

I got talked into buying a Sony A7 IV (I originally was going for a Canon EOS R6 mkii), which might have been a mistake given I am mostly am interested in photographing flying things. But it’s the camera I have now so, eh, I will make do. However, in my two days fiddling with the camera I am finding the 10FPS to be a tad unforgiving when it comes to smaller birds in flight or jets doing high speed passes. Is there anywhere that shows techniques, namely panning, that I can tighten down to get better framing and shots?

I'll be your A74 buddy... yeah, it's not exactly a fast camera and already feels fairly obsolete from that standpoint. You're really lucky to get 5FPS with advanced focus features turned on (and turning them off to get that 10fps isn't typically useful) and I really don't think there's an advantage to the High+ mode over High in practice and you sacrifice your viewfinder for it since it'll black out.

The one option that I wish I learned sooner was using the option on the very bottom of the focus choices: "Tracking: Expand Spot" where a half-shutter press will begin tracking whatever is under your crosshair. But that's only half of it: use the joystick to move the crosshair to the upper 2/3rds line intersections on your grid (depending upon whether or not you're shooting vert/horizontal), wherever you'd want the eye to be in a perfectly composed shot. That way you can shoot as normal but after your first shot the focus will be sticky from then on since it'll track whatever you first grabbed.

I find this setup to be super useful for when you're too far away to reliably get eye tracking to engage (for me, it's birds with my 400mm or football/lacrosse where faces are obscured). You might have luck with planes as well though.

I went searching for the perfect panning (low shutter speed panning) tutorial video a while back and I'm afraid it doesn't exist; it's probably something that really does require actual experience and trial and error with your own equipment. And even the best results aren't really spectacular when you pixel peep so you'll always be more impressed with other people's work, fwiw.

swiftdraw said:

given I am mostly am interested in photographing flying things.

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Birds are tough. They are small (relatively speaking), move fast, change direction often, and are always moving if in-flight so getting a good shot with everything lined up as you want is really hard.


Has a ton of how-to guides. I would look at a few and honestly pick a few areas to practice on/pay attention to, and if after a few attempts it doesn't seem like you're improving as much as you want, try a different area to practice on/pay attention to. Plenty of other sites with advice too, see what resonates with you?

swiftdraw said:

anywhere that shows techniques, namely panning, that I can tighten down to get better framing and shots?

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So panning is just straight up practice, but a good thing about panning is that you can practice on anything that moves, it doesn't have to be birds. Cars, people, animals, trains, etc. IIRC someone here used to photograph a lot of bicycle races, which is a bit tougher because cyclists can move pretty fast, but that might be good to try at some point too as practice.


Some tips about actually panning near the end there.

swiftdraw said:

am finding the 10FPS to be a tad unforgiving when it comes to smaller birds in flight or jets doing high speed passes.

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FWIW, I find jets a lot easier than birds, because while flaps, slats, spoilers, and rudders do move, they're a lot smaller of an impact on composition/appearance than the wings of a bird and said wing movement. However if you're talking about close-in shots, the rate of change is a lot faster, and honestly that just comes with practice.

I don't spend a lot of time photographing birds, but I do spend a fair amount more time photographing air shows, and I can honestly say for both that in a given shoot, I can spend hours and thousands of photos to keep less than a hundred, and even of those hundred, sometimes zero will be "good", so don't beat yourself up too much.

Puffins in the Faroe Islands, I realized why so many photos are of them standing-- in flight is orders of magnitude harder, and the angle of the sun means some good spots for photography actually are terrible because the face of the puffins ends up in the shade.

Air shows... also keep in mind there's just some days/times the weather doesn't cooperate.

Well, the nice thing about aircraft photography for me is I work at an airfield and have access to the old control tower from the 1950’s. So I can at least get some practice on aircraft there. The has been a H-34 buzzing around I want to get a picture of in particular, though I have been battling limited lens selection. My Tamron 70-300mm F/4.5-6.3 is my best lens for it, but it still struggles past a certain distance.

The Viltrox 16mm F1.8 is on sale most places for $467. I'm really tempted.

If you're on APSC, the 27 and 75mm F1.2s are also on sale.

Sony is planning to update the FZ100 battery to an improved capacity but still the same size and compatibility. It’ll still be called NPFZ but the 100 number will change.

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Not sure how much extra room is in there: I mean, evidently the Smallrig battery performs within 5% of it and has room for a USBC port so there might be some extra space to work with but I figure if there were that much to work with (or that materials are that much better than when FZ100s were first introduced, which they definitely are), Smallrig might have offered a 1.5x or even 2x claim on their own battery and charged more, rather than trying to undercut Sony by mirroring their performance for less money.

At any rate, I think it's absolutely MAGIC how long you can shoot 4K 60 on a modern battery. OTOH, it's crazy how much than that just browsing the menus of my freaking camera is at draining the battery...

richleader said:

Not sure how much extra room is in there: I mean, evidently the Smallrig battery performs within 5% of it and has room for a USBC port so there might be some extra space to work with but I figure if there were that much to work with (or that materials are that much better than when FZ100s were first introduced, which they definitely are), Smallrig might have offered a 1.5x or even 2x claim on their own battery and charged more, rather than trying to undercut Sony by mirroring their performance for less money.

At any rate, I think it's absolutely MAGIC how long you can shoot 4K 60 on a modern battery. OTOH, it's crazy how much than that just browsing the menus of my freaking camera is at draining the battery...

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So Smallrig knows better then to claim more peformance because they know they can't. But Sony probably has enough safety space built in already. Their cell physical dimensions probably didn't change. They might of gotten a better formula. Smallrig's battery provider so far produced stable batteries. Maybe they exceed performance in the short term but long term longevity can only be known with real world hours and years.

Smallrig without the USB Port does undercut sony. https://www.smallrig.com/smallrig-np-fz100-camera-battery-and-charger-kit-3824.html The charger is actually kind of nice. It does attempt to pulse charge the battery and has a handy Voltage read out so you it can give you a real indication of 80% 90% 100% by the voltage the battery is at.

Anyone have a quick opinion on Wescott vs Flashpoint/Godox for some strobes and a wireless trigger? I'm looking to get a 2-light battery setup. I'm not looking for anything crazy and I'm not shooting Vogue magazine covers so perfect color accuracy isn't an ultimate goal, but overall usability and light mod compatibility are.

At this point i'd probably say go for Godox. They've been around for a decade at least and at least have some quality standards. As far as modifiers. Most of them all even Westcott who used to have their own mount just fell to the Bowens mount and copied it as the patent probably ran out. Like Arca-Swiss tripod plates.

Wescott is way more expensive obviously. But their product line has to be innovative and last until everyone else copies the same concept for cheaper. Like the Westcott Icelight was probably the best at it's introduction but at $450 piece for an LED light stick. But all the controls and superior quality can't save you from people selling similar for %50-%70 the price.

I'm on Godox. I wish I had skipped even having a speedlight and went straight to the full size strobe since I basically never want the thing on top of my camera anyway. A lot of the power on any of these things comes from the modifier since the new beveled "hyper" reflectors are so much better than the old dimpled ones; that means a light with a bigger/better bowens reflector can actually beat a light the next tier up in output if kitted out that way. If you want to move these things around the AD300 is apparently really easy to pack in multiples even though it means giving up some AD200 features/power.

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I didn't realize that Topaz Denoise was discontinued and isn't really for sale anymore. I knew updates were over since there hadn't been one for a year, but I also thought that was mostly because of diminishing returns on their models. At one point if you wanted Topaz Photo AI, they'd cut the price by 1/3rd for each product you had in the line (denoise/sharpen/gigapixel), giving it to you for free if you had all three. Denoise and Sharpen are all gone. So that deal is off the table and the best you can do is $20 off as a general coupon. I'm kinda surprised that Gigapixel has survived as a standalone product.

Topaz denoise might be worse than DxO and Adobe currently but if you're a high volume shooter it's still the fastest, afaik, which adds up across hundreds of images.

So I've mentioned a few times here that I bought the Ulanzi Claw Ball-Head in anticipation of getting their Peak Design clone that also uses it (but not their Falcam clone of the PD one). TLDR: when I finally needed to buy their Claw attachment, I found out that they don't sell a cheaper version without a second copy of the Claw-plate and that it was out of stock everywhere or overpriced so I wound up buying the Peak Design clip anyway. /doh

I've never been a backpack person. For short trips -- aka driving 1-block to 30 miles -- I like my camera put together (since I often have a full rig built out with monitor, microphone, etc.) and I have a cardboard box of the right size that's padded with towels and bubble wrap and I have two hard foam blocks that I stuff in on either side of the lens to keep it from shifting. For longer trips, I have a Vanguard bag, Pelican boxes, etc.

I normally don't have an issue setting my camera down on the ground, even in the wilds, as with a cage, six inch plate, and a side handle, it'll rest off the ground an inch or so and be completely stable. And I'm more mobile when I have a top handle to carry things (I've run 5:30 miles with my camera like that). Even when my camera is stripped down to just the body and my 50-400, the fact that it still has a cage on it combined with the weight makes it very uncomfortable to use even the fancy side-shoulder strap that I wasted $80 on when I first bought my camera.

But I finally had a trip where I'd need both hands free at all times (to push a wheel chair) so it was finally time to get a backpack. I didn't want to overspend since I had no idea what I'd like (since I hate backpacks) but the idea of a side port for grabbing the camera out quickly intrigued me so I went with this:


View: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09YRTTPBJ


Which was cheaper when I bought it because the price changes every day. The diagrams they provided for using inserts that don't really resemble the actually included inserts weren't helpful. At all. They had all sorts of T-shaped diagrams that might have worked without gravity and spherical cows but what seemed to suit me best was a complete mess and not at all suggested:



I ended up going with this: K&F seemed to believe that the side flap opens to the middle of your camera bag and not the bottom. I'm calling shenanigans on that claim. There's no way I could fit a freaking drone underneath a full frame camera (let alone one with a cage and several nato rails) and still have room to extract it through the side, it needs to be on the bottom, with just enough room for some bonus padding. I did my best to use inserts to support other inserts and work as fail-safes.

OTOH: It works. I was able to pull the camera out easily (even without flipping the lens hood on my 50-400) while on a bus to get shots of various things and then instantly put it away. There's not a whole lot of room to fiddle with but I have space for a VND (white plastic case) and a few other items between the two main compartments. Plus the top storage area above the picture that's accessed through the top of the bag. I keep my top handle in a side pouch for it but my side-handle (I have the smallrig one with a trigger that lets you rotate it) is too big so I usually have to find some other place that's slightly inconvenient for that (and airport security wants to know why you have a pistol grip).

On the other, other hand, I still hate backpacks and it really only serves as a vehicle to be able to use the Peak Design clip which I have to say is totally worth it (if not the PD version, the method in general terms). The method is the only remotely comfortable way that I've ever found to attach my camera to me and it's more comfortable for me than even the average user because I always have a top handle on, meaning that I can keep my hand on it at all times and lean the weight of the camera off of my body so it's like it's not even there, even if it has a big lens, shotgun mic + Zoom F3 + wireless system, etc.