Show us your great photography thread!

[ClaudeJ1]

Here's one of Jeff Beck with Buddy Guy on Buddy's 80th Birthday, at Meadowbrook Amphitheater, July 30, 2016.  Buddy did his usual crowd walk with wireless transmitter, so he kept playing. I was in the last row an he literally stopped 6 feet away right behind my seat and looked right at me when I did this close up. Camera was a Sony A6000 with a 55-210 Kit lens. I also own a Sony Premium White 70-200 f/4 Pro Lens, but I'm always afraid they won't let me bring that since it looks "too professional. So I had the body and long, small, black kit lens in  a small bag (since it's a variable aperture zoom, it's got a small front element and it doesn't look Professional. Obviously I got away with it, but they tend to frown on big, white lenses and make you take them back to the car.

[parlophone1]

So, now you are Sony guy 😊

 

I was thinking to get me one of these smaller mirrorless  alphas, been thinking to buy the adapter for Nikkor lenses.

But then again, things in photo world are going fast and I am no professional. My old equipment satisfy my needs and unless something radically changes, I will not go for new.

[JohnJ]

Great Pic @ClaudeJ1  That is almost like getting introduced to a living legend. He noticed you!!

[ClaudeJ1]

8 hours ago, parlophone1 said:

So, now you are Sony guy 😊

 

I was thinking to get me one of these smaller mirrorless  alphas, been thinking to buy the adapter for Nikkor lenses.

But then again, things in photo world are going fast and I am no professional. My old equipment satisfy my needs and unless something radically changes, I will not go for new.

As the first Digital Photographer in Michigan (paid $11,000 for a Kodak 420 with no lens and terrible color and noise in 1995), I have owned over 100 digital cameras from several brands and helped to develop the Foveon X3 sensor. I have been doing digital output since 1986 in the field of Printed Circuit Board Design (4000 PPI Laser Digital Photo plotter on Kodalith film). I have also owned over 50 digital printers.........laser, dye sublimation, inkjet, etc.No reason to abandon mirror DSLR completely as they both have pluses and minuses.

 

ALL digital cameras have had plenty of image quality since the Fuji S2, Nikon D1X, and Canon 10D, and I have large prints to prove my point, but most people, including Pro Photographers would rather Pixel Peep in Photoshop to "prove me wrong" (because it's free and easy) rather than make Big, Expensive Epson Inkjet Prints to prove me right.  I have made some 3 1/2 x 5 FOOT prints from a 3 Megapixel Canon Point and Shoot Camera with Manual Settings, using Studio Flashes that looked terrific in Store Windows. Also, I have made lots of BILLBOARDS around Detroit for one of the Casinos (big budgets). I'm tired of the BS I hear about justifying 100 Megapixel, Medium Format cameras with "Billboards" when all you need is TWO MEGAPIXELS to do it (also for Blue Ray HDTV). All my Billboard images were printed with 2-3 Megapixel JPG or TIFF files!!

 

I also think Cell Phones should ONLY be using 2 Megapixels instead of 12 Megapixels, which is way overkill resolution and way too NOISY, but that is beyond the scope of this text.

 

[Marvel]

Claude... this was with a 5MP Canon Powershot, that I got in 2005. This is the original pic, in Nanchang, CN in 2007.

 

[Pinball_pw]

Wisconsin state capital using a high res medium format camera, but then downsized to a 2 megapixel image

[ClaudeJ1]

7 hours ago, Marvel said:

Claude... this was with a 5MP Canon Powershot, that I got in 2005. This is the original pic, in Nanchang, CN in 2007.

 

 

Even as Technical Editor of Rangefinder and Professional Photographer Magazines, I had a hard time convincing photographers that anything over 5 Megapixels was overkill. Then I met David Pogue, Tech. Editor of the New York Times, talking about the same thing in front of 1,000 Photographers at Photo Plus. He said he got about 78 Nasty Emails when he proved that on a 16x24" print (posting 3 of them on a window in NYC and asking people walking by if they could tell them apart........One was 16 Mpx resized DOWN to 8, then 5 (throwing away pixels), then interpolated back up. Not ONE person out of 50 could tell them apart. All printed by a Pro Lab, of course.

[ClaudeJ1]

26 minutes ago, Pinball_pw said:

Wisconsin state capital using a high res medium format camera, but then downsized to a 2 megapixel image

 

Nice shot.

[Pinball_pw]

Just for fun, here is the center, different image, not a crop of the first one. 

[Dave1290]

Is it time to stop carrying a Domke bag full of Nikkor glass and bodies when your right shoulder is 2" lower than your left shoulder?  Asking for a friend.  😂

[parlophone1]

Claude, what would you say are the most improvements comparing the first usable generations of digital cameras and today's cameras? Of course except the count of pixels.

Is it dynamic range, focusing...or something else?

 

For example, in DSLRs I find very usable to be able to fine-adjust focus of a particular lens, which is a negative design issue with all SLR cameras and probably one of important reasons for designing mirrorless.

[ClaudeJ1]

10 hours ago, parlophone1 said:

Claude, what would you say are the most improvements comparing the first usable generations of digital cameras and today's cameras? Of course except the count of pixels.

Is it dynamic range, focusing...or something else?

 

For example, in DSLRs I find very usable to be able to fine-adjust focus of a particular lens, which is a negative design issue with all SLR cameras and probably one of important reasons for designing mirrorless.

NOT having a separate optical path for focusing, like all mirrored cameras results in inhferently more accurate focus (unless you use live focus, which has been available since the Canon 40d). Dynamically speaking, the most significant improvement I have seen (a compelling one) is the full time EYE FOCUS feature of the Sony A6400, which will compel me to upgrade soon (I sold my A6000 Kit). You will appreciate this if you become an f/1.4 -f/2 shooter!!

 

4K video is too much, IMHO, since regular HD is just fine for 99% of the video out there. Unless of course you want a 30 frame per second motor drive, whereby, you can pull out some 8.3 Megapixel stills out of it!! LOL.

 

But speaking strictly still photographs, most of the features on modern cameras of any kind are BS to old fashioned tripod users (I shot 4x5 and 8x10, and 20x24" bellows cameras too). I happen to like the FOCUS PEAKING of the Mirrorless cameras because you can adapt old manual focus lenses, which have their own unique appeal. The best inkjet printer can only give you, at best,  a 7 stop dynamic range with visual discernment of the tones. And all a camera does is record the light that results in those colors with reasonable sharpness. All a camera can do, manually or automatically, is determine REFLECTVE exposure values that are WRONG most of the time (I use the superior INCIDENT meters), and allow you to change focal lengths, shutter speed, and aperture, while firing on not firing a Xenon discharge from a capacitor, making the huge number on confusing features a FASTER way to arrive at those very basic values. Regardless of manual or automatic exposures, the in-camera JPG features are a real time save if you don't like to process out RAW files. Just remember that NO camera can fix bad lighting!!

[ClaudeJ1]

14 hours ago, Pinball_pw said:

Just for fun, here is the center, different image, not a crop of the first one. 

 

Rotated +45 degrees, that would make a very fine diamond angle, square framed wall print! It's hip to be square, but not necessarily Orthogonal!!

[JL Sargent]

1 hour ago, ClaudeJ1 said:

Just remember that NO camera can fix bad lighting!!

 

This is it really, isn't it. I've found if you start with awesome lighting, the rest of it just falls into place.

 

[dtel]

38 minutes ago, JL Sargent said:

 

This is it really, isn't it. I've found if you start with awesome lighting, the rest of it just falls into place.

 

AND good glass, it is more important than extreme amounts of megapixels.

 

Part of a phones problem, and probably the size of the sensor?

[ClaudeJ1]

1 hour ago, JL Sargent said:

 

This is it really, isn't it. I've found if you start with awesome lighting, the rest of it just falls into place.

 

Well as a "Lighting Guy" sponsored by Westcott and Paul C. Buff, I was opening speaker at WPPI in LasVegas, 2008, to 1,000 photographers in a huge room. I think THEY understood how photography IS all about lighting. The camera simply records what you LIGHT, and nothing more, which is why I avoid shooting anything anyone can do with an iPhone, which means off Camera Flash most of the time. Here's my cover shot for a book, for which, I was asked to contribute images and text. BTW, the "high key" cover was shot on an actual GRAY background!!

[ClaudeJ1]

1 hour ago, dtel said:

AND good glass, it is more important than extreme amounts of megapixels.

 

Part of a phones problem, and probably the size of the sensor?

I worked in the Engineering dept. at Ikelite (underwater photography company) when I lived in Indianapolis (Klipsch Country). We studied the TI or Sony sensors in those cameras. YOU nailed it. The "normal lens" is about 4.8 mm, which is like a 28 mm lens on a full frame 35mm. Which means the sensor is about 6 x 4.5 mm for a diagonal of about 7.5mm. So YES, that small of a "well site" in the sensor for a 12 Megapixel total is VERY noisy. If they kept the pixel count down with the same noise reduction techniques we would have much better QUALITY images from cell phones (if we could hold them still enough) since the noise would be many f/stops less at high ISO (they go up to 3200 ISO) and are TOTALLY dependent on light INTENSITY for their image quality.

 

[Pinball_pw]

Self portrait 

[dirtmudd]

Wow she's getting big !

[dirtmudd]

Gia just told me... Can you picture me with better hair..