TAKE THE SHOT!! - The Photography Thread

[Fixer808]

I'm not sure we have one of these, I went back a few pages... Anyway, tech-talk, shop-talk, methods and techniques.
What platform do you shoot on?
SLR? DSLR? Mini DSLR? Polaroid?
Etc, and feel free to show any shots you're proud of!

[Fixer808]

Oh, and my Nikon has been sitting outside on a chair pointing straight up with the shutter open for about 25min now (55mm). About to go see if the results are any good!

EDIT: Looks cool! I'll post it when I have the proper cables tomorrow!

EDIT EDIT:

[Beef of the Sea]

I blew the dust off my D90 after ignoring it for close to 6 months now, after not feeling the urge to even look at it.
Mostly just garbage from my trip to the states in August, but there were a few nice photos in Utah and Arizona:





I feel like it's time I get motivated again, I've got a macro lens that I've never used and know next to nothing about decent post-processing.
I'm really excited about getting back into it again and learning new things.

[Pillfred]

Looking for good resources and such for a newbie. I have doe experience and friends that i can call on but i figure any help can't hurt. I see this thread is dog shit old so feel free to ignore.

[halloween]

Oh man, I'm getting a new camera soon and I'm looking forward to taking photos again. After college (majored in photo- arts photo) I kind of had a "falling out" with photography, because I was using film but I'm getting damn tired of working in the darkroom. I might go back to film again but only after I get a scanner and a printer!! Until then, digital it is. I'm getting my hand back in the other arts, drawing and painting and even some short film ideas, so I'm feeling a draw back to photography.

[Camille]

I had a DSLR, a Nikon D3100. It was an entry level machine, and while I liked it, I found it too cumbersome, and security gave me a hard time at gigs saying I needed a press pass to use it. I recently bought a Canon G16 high end compact. I have owned G series cameras before and enjoyed using them. With the G16 I have all the manual controls available on an SLR but in a compact body, and...I can get it into gigs with no problems.

Anyway, I took a walk today and fired off a few shots and this is my favourite. It was shot in monochrome mode and is straight from the camera with no photo editing of any nature...

[halloween]

Here's a shot with my new camera of the fancy ass scotch tasting my friend put together a couple weeks ago.

[Leviathant]

If you're using Yahoo! Weather in Philadelphia, depending on the weather, you might get one of my photos as a background.

Here's a couple of nuclear jet engines in a parking lot in Iowa.


(I'm on Flickr, so too should you be)

[Camille]

^ Love the lightning shots on your Flickr, and the two urban decay type photos following them.

[Substance242]

As a child (80s) I was allowed to use something called "Ljubitel 2", see:
http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Lubitel_2
You had to put the film inside in dark room by remembering where to push etc, actually nice experience. :-) I am not sure if color films even existed (edit: FOR THIS camera, of course later used mostly Kodaks all the time, ISO 100 or 200).

Years passed by, I had just some extremely cheap "point and stick", and somewhere around 1995 I bought my first camera - SLR Canon, just simple one, with kit lens, but all was OK, I do not shoot much, maybe two films in a year is enough. :-)

Then digitals started to appear, but they sucked big time or were far beyond what I could afford, so nothing for me. Until... Fujifilm S6500fd arrived (I think it was S6000fd in USA) - excellent camera, even now, my family still uses it.

And finally, some 3 or 4 years ago, I decided DSLRs are good enough and carefully chose Sony A580, perfect chip, stabilization, features, tilting display, and bonus - I could not possibly go to Canon or Nikon, because everyone else had them. :-) Pentax was also an option. (There was also a gift, small Olympus XZ-1, which is also still very good, no need to buy new cameras all the time, the advances are negligible till some major discovery appears.)

With (D)SLR, there comes a new hobby - hours spent reading about lens and other things. :-) Nowadays I have almost all the time on my Sony just small 35mm (50mm equivalent) 1,4 lens, fixed lens should be always better than zoom, as for picture quality, and I like them, 50mm is a "standard" for our eye.

It is also helps very much to learn something, in my case the best books are by Roman Pihan, if you can read czech. :-)

I like to shoot nature mostly, it does not move much so there is no panic about that. ;-) I would never take my camera to a concert, I want to enjoy it and make the people with phones just go home and wake up... another topic.

But I still do not know much about photography and so, I do not want to spend too much time with that... though when I release some photos, they have to be in some human numbers (not "here is unfiltered unprocessed 5000 photos from the party, enjoy, pigs!"), carefully tagged including GPS... many hours. :-) I use Zoner Photo Studio, I always liked it and it has everything you could need, or more precisely, I could need. I do not use RAW... yes I know I know, but that is more time spent and my JPEGs look good enough for me, because I have good lens and camera. :-p (e.g. shooting JPG I can use HDR mode which is sometimes handy - it takes three images and makes HDR for me so no clipping or lost shadows)

Sony DSLR A580 is discontinued long time ago, and I think it was maybe the last Sony DSLR? Sony is not afraid to try new things, so they have that translucent mirrors now or whatever... and I really really wanted optical viewfinder.

An example, proof that I know nothing: https://goo.gl/1k2z2u. Sorry if that was too long. :-)

Edit: I should add - my father was developing film and even color (!) photos here at home, all that chemicals and red green blue lights... you got to have a hobby in that era. :-) So that must have been some influence for me. And I still like to think before taking picture, making crops later is kinda cheap for me.

Edit 2: Recently I had to stop using Picasa web albums. It automatically "enhanced" uploaded photos (hey, if I wanted oversaturated shit, I would do that myself), and I would also like to slowly phase out of using anything Google related, and Picasa future is big unknown too. (You can turn this off only if you have Google+ account and I will never have, or using years old Picasa software but I will never install Google sw on my system...) So Zonerama it is for me now (yes it is related to Zoner Photo Studio:-).

PS: Do not forget to use flash in front of windows, especially in dark rooms! :-) Automatic all the way.

Last edit I promise: Battery life. Going to the 4 day trip linked above, I knew I do not have to take charger with be, one less thing to worry about. And do not forget to buy polarization filter, or Sky/UV at least. And bigger lens does not mean better pictures.

[Camille]

This is my newly opened Flickr account, all photos taken with a Canon G16 - https://www.flickr.com/photos/137634454@N08/