The *new* Perpetual Photography Thread

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TheGnome

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  • #5,761
    Nice texture in that bark Richleader.

    I'm starting to think about getting my wife a new tripod & head. She's got a fairly nice Manfrotto tripod with a ball-head, and she's happy with it so I'm in no hurry to replace it. But her camera system (medium format Fujifilm GFX50R plus lens, which can be well over 1kg) is pretty chonky for that head. And she does primarily landscape work, so she needs to carry it.

    Her current Manfrotto is aluminum, and the leaver/catches for the legs are pretty stiff, so it's a heavy beast to lug about and setting it up/tacking it down (in the rain, or snow, or whatever) is a bit of a chore.

    My primary role in our photography collaboration is gear-nerd; so it's my job to figure out what tools are the best for her, and I'm thinking a nice carbon fibre tripod with a beefier head would be a nice addition to her arsenal. So now I need to start doing some research (again, there's no hurry on this, so I can take my time and get to know the pros and cons of the various options). So I thought I'd ask the Hive Mind about tripods and heads; what technologies should I consider, any brands to avoid/look for; what are the trade offs, etc?

    Edit: I forgot there was a gear thread; thanks.
     
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    richleader

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  • #5,762
    This is probably more appropriate for the other thread that's focused on gear...

    Unless the head is actually failing to support the weight (which is mostly a problem in vertical positions, imho), it's probably the right head. Whether going to a bigger ball makes things easier from a dexterity standpoint isn't something you can tell unless you have practice with it. I wouldn't worry about upgrading unless you wanted something that added value besides just size (for example, I went with the relatively bargain-bin Ulanzi Claw ballhead because the plate for it works with their backpack strap mount). Maybe a panorama head is something you guys could investigate using?

    Almost all of the slim tripods out there now are clones of each other (solved problem) and it's just down to whether or not you like screw or clamp legs and what's on sale on a particular week, imho. Some people like flippy center columns for low shooting and other people think that omitting them altogether ensures you make better decisions and get a more stable shot. (I currently own the iFootage TC5 just as a point of reference)

    photo tax:

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    richleader

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  • #5,764
    I honestly think that A93 (and the next generation in general) is gonna take all the fun out of it. Two years from now everyone will see a "well timed" shot and not think "nintendo reflexes" but "wow, that loser probably shot a full terabyte at a freaking softball game and spent their entire weekend combing through 50K photos. Get a frickin' life." I might actually like it that my A74 realistically caps out at 5FPS with advanced focus features on which means that I'm just as likely, if not more, to get the shot I want by trying for it than going for a burst.
     
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    Neill78

    Neill78

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  • #5,765
    richleader said:
    I honestly think that A93 (and the next generation in general) is gonna take all the fun out of it. Two years from now everyone will see a "well timed" shot and not think "nintendo reflexes" but "wow, that loser probably shot a full terabyte at a freaking softball game and spent their entire weekend combing through 50K photos. Get a frickin' life." I might actually like it that my A74 realistically caps out at 5FPS with advanced focus features on which means that I'm just as likely, if not more, to get the shot I want by trying for it than going for a burst.
    Click to expand...
    I signed my son up for some photography classes, and realized they are teaching this generation to basically keep the camera in burst mode all the time. My son has a heavy shutter finger plus the tendency to tense up his whole body before hitting the release, so he introduces a lot of motion blur. But when we got home he had to sort through hundreds of shots just to find one to keep. After that day he finally listened to me griping about how holding the camera properly, controlling his body and breathing, and taking time to set up the shot is better technique and, in the end, less time-consuming than just spraying and praying. Since then he is enjoying taking pictures more too, as technique gets him more mentally into the artistic side of it. He spends more time setting up unique shots, and while he might use burst mode still, he is coming home with far fewer pictures, but a higher variety of compositions, making it much faster to choose his best shots.

    My own camera's burst mode is fixed at either 25fps or 50fps, depending on shooting mode, both of which are way too fast for what I need. I wish I could take it down to 5~10fps!
     
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    Demandred

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  • #5,767
    Spring wildflower bloom in the desert is amazing. I caught it in Palm Springs once, a few years ago.

    Was just in Paris for a few weeks. Shot four rolls of Ilford HP5+. Nikon F4, pretty much all 50mm f/1.4. A few with a 24mm f/2.8 though.

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    Few more here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/milliron/albums/72177720315772628/

    Long time since I posted in this thread!
     
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    Neill78

    Neill78

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  • #5,769
    Demandred said:
    Spring wildflower bloom in the desert is amazing. I caught it in Palm Springs once, a few years ago.

    Was just in Paris for a few weeks. Shot four rolls of Ilford HP5+. Nikon F4, pretty much all 50mm f/1.4. A few with a 24mm f/2.8 though.

    53618739655_1245ffe17d_c.jpg
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    OK I love this shot on so many levels because it captures everything I associate with the French:
    Cap, scruffy beard, scruffy layered sweaters (and hoodie!) all pulled together to achieve cooler-than-thou je ne sais quois bum chic, while simultaneously scolding/lecturing/praising: the bottle? the label? the wine? the estate? the customer? something!!

    I swear, as soon as food or drink appears, every French person I've ever met turns into this guy.

    Great capture!!
     
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    Paranoid Android

    Paranoid Android

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  • #5,770
    Those shots makes me so envious. The last time in was in Europe was for a college study abroad program a few years back, and Paris was obviously one of our first targets for weekend excursions. I was loaded to the gills with newly purchased Canon gear, with visions of taking exactly those kinds of photos (and impressing the girls as the arty camera guy, let's be real). And on the first weekend there...my 70D slipped out of my hand, hit the only rock on the entire hillside, and shattered into a million pieces. 🥴

    Que "Hide the pain Harold" meme template.
     
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    richleader

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  • #5,771
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    Eclipse was a bust for me (heavy cloud cover) but here's Toronto. I didn't bother to "clean up" the birds. I missed the one good shot I could have had on the day of some planes flying low but I had just taken off my 400mm to put on my 24-70 in anticipation of the darkness.

    Everyone thought the darkness would last longer than it did (despite having the numbers) so when the light came back... that's when the fireworks went off and no one could see them...
     
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    TheGnome

    TheGnome

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  • #5,773
    I tried with the full spectrum converted D7200 and the 18-300mm zoom, but that lens generates a lot of internal reflections, so I'm not happy with the images. My wife's GFX50 with a 250 mm f4 (~200 mm full-frame equivalent) did much better but I've had to crop in quite a bit, and I've put it in phone aspect ratio to make it my new phone wallpaper. I like the diamond ring effect.Eclipse_phone.JPEG.jpeg
     
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    wco81

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  • #5,774
    continuum said:
    Had a thin layer of high clouds so my plan to get detailed photos of the corona was impossible, but can't complain...


    Cloud filters
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    Wow, 700mm.

    I heard this one has bigger corona than some recent eclipses.

    I think it would have been interesting to have a wide shot, showing it against a landscape, maybe showing people looking up at the sun.

    But then the sun/eclipse would be tiny.

    So the only way to make it "dramatic" is to composite two different shots, like they do in the movies -- ET for example, with the humongous moon.
     
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    richleader

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  • #5,775
    I think it would have been interesting to have a wide shot, showing it against a landscape, maybe showing people looking up at the sun.

    But then the sun/eclipse would be tiny.
    Click to expand...

    I think that unless you were in Mexico, maybe, by the time the eclipse got to you, the sun was way up there. Way up there. Some of the best "place" photos had the head/torsos of statues in frame (in NY, you basically had to be standing under the Statue of Liberty!) but that's about as good as anyone could do with that.
     
    continuum

    continuum

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  • #5,776
    wco81 said:
    I heard this one has bigger corona than some recent eclipses.

    I think it would have been interesting to have a wide shot, showing it against a landscape, maybe showing people looking up at the sun.

    But then the sun/eclipse would be tiny.

    So the only way to make it "dramatic" is to composite two different shots, like they do in the movies -- ET for example, with the humongous moon.
    Click to expand...
    Yah... unfortunately thin layer of high clouds meant I could not get the detail I was hoping for. :(

    Friend with me did some wide angle shots, I'll see when he posts them.
     
    Carhole

    Carhole

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  • #5,778
    continuum said:
    Had a thin layer of high clouds so my plan to get detailed photos of the corona was impossible, but can't complain...


    Cloud filters
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    That’s still a rather dynamic corona. Nice capture. Did you try stacking a burst in post? You may be able to pull more detail of the flares. Gawd, look at the reach of the one at 18:30! Pretty neat stuff considering you’re staring at a freakin’ boiling star.
     
    continuum

    continuum

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  • #5,779
    Tried stacking in LR but not in DeepSkyStacker or anything-- was in a hurry to get these out. However there was a legit layer of high clouds so that was part of why I wasn't too stressed abou tit.

    I did do a bunch of images at various exposures so I might give it another crack later. Any advice on software? (I saw this guide using PS...)
    Carhole said:
    Gawd, look at the reach of the one at 18:30! Pretty neat stuff considering you’re staring at a freakin’ boiling star.
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    SRSLY. I saw some red stuff on the viewfinder and was like "is my sensor damaged??" then I pulled them off the camera an hour later and went holy crap!
     
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    TheGnome

    TheGnome

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  • #5,781
    TheGnome said:
    I tried with the full spectrum converted D7200 and the 18-300mm zoom, but that lens generates a lot of internal reflections, so I'm not happy with the images.
    Click to expand...
    I spent some more time going through the images from the full-spectrum camera, and there are a couple that are not a complete waste of pixels. The interesting thing about them is that the corona is so much larger than what the visible light camera caught; I was using the solar filter before totality, and then no filter during totality, so the full spectrum camera caught all the UV coming from the corona extending out more than a full solar diameter.

    Yesterday, I took a day off (the first since the eclipse), and went for a walk with my wife at Kingsbrae Garden in Saint Andrews NB. I went back to using the LP830 'deep infrared' filter because I'm enjoying the contrasty B&W images and surreal rendering of foliage. Here are a few shots.
     
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    Ananke

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  • #5,783
    I've spent many a day trying to shoot various birds in flight - usually gulls, because all you need is to go and stand around where children are feeding the ducks while wearing an anorak and pointing a long lens in their general direction.

    I've spent a few particularly frustrating days trying to shoot swallows in flight, and never got a single useful picture out of it - the little bastards are just too fast when close, and too small when not.

    I've never tried to capture swans in flight before. And, wow, it's so much easier with such big, slow, targets.

    IMG_5888_crop.jpg

    Unfortunately, they, uh, have an awkward habit of taking a long and, presumably, quite satisfying dump as they take off, and a surprising fraction of the photographs caught them, as it were, in motion.

    IMG_5870_crop.jpg

    Whooper swans at grandefjæra
     
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    phlaym

    phlaym

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  • #5,786
    richleader said:
    I'm a long way from being able to justify spending on macro stuff but what's the best you can do in terms of magnification without getting into focus stacking at all?
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    I'm not using a macro lens. This was a fairly ridiculous setup with two macro rings (10mm, 16mm), the adapter for my old C/Y lens to E-Mount, another three macro rings (13mm, 20mm, 27mm) I have for the old mount and finally an ancient 50mm manual lens. The lens itself does 1:4.5, but I have no idea what the final magnification is with all these rings and adapters in between.

    For shits and giggles I attached a 70-200mm zoom lens to the setup, mainly to make it look absolutely ridiculous. Didn’t get any good shots with it though

    IMG_1933.jpeg
     
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    richleader

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  • #5,796
    Power line kills me, but I can't bring myself to crop it and take any of the aurora out.
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    Modern tools make that a pretty easy fix (I think DxO has a feature that will remove crazy complex ones with one button?) and removing powerlines is fair game imo for anything other than competitions which are all bullshit anyway these days. (Even for ones that can prohibit staged scenes and AI, they still seem to be mostly about a combination of access + the Ivy League words you attach to an image and not the image itself.)

    I was so busy this week that I went to bed at 8pm and missed the whole thing, although it ended up being cloudy over land and you'd have to drive to the beach to see it anyway.
     
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    mlewis

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  • #5,798
    wco81 said:
    I mean you don't have to go far to the northern latitudes but it seems like the ones from Norway and Iceland are more visually striking, with the furled ribbons appearance.

    Maybe too much solar particles just filling up the sky so you get different colors.

    Can you see movement as is sometimes the case with the auroral borealis?
    Click to expand...
    The different colours are due to the gases (nitrogen & oxygen) being excited, the altitude where the solar emission interacts with the gases, and the energy of the solar emissions. The wiki page on aurora goes into detail on how the colours are generated.
     
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