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I was thinking... maybe we should have a thumbs flickr group or something? I'm kind of reluctant posting photos in this thread because I mainly post on facebook and then linking that here, I'm not sure how long the facebook image URLs last... I should use Flickr more as it seems better than facebook for presenting a larger set of images, has tags and stuff.

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Joined the group! I'll probably start using Flickr in a bigger way in 2017, once I've figured out how to do it best (haven't really used it much aside from having a quick way to upload and share my pics with someone specific). Not always happy with the way photo sharing works on Facebook, although it's nice to see the likes roll in when a picture turns out popular. :)

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Yeah I need to figure out my Yahoo account password, I created my account using the gmail connector they had and then they took that away so it was just a string of random characters for a while hah.

 

Chicago Skyline - 01/01/16

 

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I also had problems with the weird Yahoo/Google hybrid sign-in retraction thing. Anyway, I joined and posted a picture. It's nice to use a venue built for photo sharing, with high resolution images and a pretty good zoom tool and EXIF info and so on. 

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Photographers, lend me your ears and ideas. I have realized a new way to play at work, but I need your help to know how to do so. I can totally supply some weird-ass lenses for messing with light and creating natural distortion, probably for free I bet?

I make lenses for a living, and I have like a whole shitload of scrap to play with. I'm talking single vision lenses of all magnification (and whatever the inverse of that is) and cylindrical (this is the 'twist' of the light if that makes sense) powers, and bifocal, trifocal, the odd and elusive quadrifocal and circular-progressive, pure progressive (no line bifocals) of all types and magnifications, and I can manufacture custom real weird stuff like biconcave lenses at a 2 base curve and other oddities.

These I can do in both plastic (better clarity) and poly (like some weird color aberrations a computer will notice but not most normal eyes because brains are weird) and also apply some anti-reflective stuff to bounce non-direct light (snow photography?) and some photochromic stuff that slowly darkens in UV light (timelapse?). Additionally, I can make lenses up to a 10 prism, which I don't think translates well to non-optical measurements but is pretty intense.

I can also tint any of this a wide range of shades, darknesses and colors, and I can create gradients between either 2 or 3 colors, or between one and clear. I can do some really nuts stuff with tints, I used to play at work by creating new sunglass tint combinations.

I can make lenses both by themselves, raw, or I can also manufacture them custom to fit at least some basic camera filter mounts, the smaller ones, less than 80mm. I know that you can hold weird lenses between light sources and the camera lens, but I don't actually know how photography works at all. Give me some good ideas, and if there's something your heart desires, hit me up and we'll talk. I can get a whole lot of stuff done in this realm, and I really want to mess around with this stuff more.


Also, I can do some really weird stuff not on purpose. A lens that comes through bearing surface marks will randomly bounce light bi-directionally across a spirograph pattern of grooves and is really, really hard to look through for seeing but could be fun for photography. A plus prescription run on the wrong tools will create a magnifying glass that has blurred spots that merge smoothly into magnified, I can really do basically anything that involves transparent surfaces.

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That sounds great! I'm neither imaginative nor advance enough of a photographer to have specific suggestions, but that sounds like it'd be tremendous to experiment with. I'd probably focus on the deliberate distortion side of things. Maybe something that causes severe colour separation? Or non-uniform distortion? I don't know. I'd love to see some results, though! 

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That sounds really interesting neorev, what kind of physical format are we looking at?

 

I know there are filter holders like this that many people use that hold square filters over the lens, I use one for a set of cheap ND filters

 

 

 

profh.jpg

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@neonrev Also, a neat idea if people are interested but having a hard time suggesting things because of the technical gap, would be that you could send out flawed/discarded lenses and let people play with them to see what happens?

 

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I've added some photos to the idle thumbs group in flickr. Join us!

 

I also have a topic to discuss, if anyone has any opinions. So by now I'm doing photography as a hobby pretty seriously, although lately there have been some weeks where I don't take that many photos - especially after I got my first drone, I carry my normal camera less and take less photos with it. Anyway, I feel like I've made pretty good progress in photography as I only really started in the summer of 2016 (having done some shooting on film as a teen). Now I'm wondering whether I've outgrown some groups I started with, or if I should stick with them...

 

There is this Estonian "Hobbyist photographers" Facebook group which has over 7000 members and where you are allowed to post one photo per day. Usually it gets about 20-30 photos per day I would say, and maybe a couple of them are good. There was a week when each day my photo got around 100 likes - 6 days in a row I think, and I felt pretty proud of that. I would like to experiment some more with finding what kind of photos of mine would be more popular, although I'm not all about chasing popularity and also post what I like but not many others do.

 

However, I find that lately I get into a lot of pointless arguments there, sometimes with people who are even asking for feedback in their original post and then get combative when the feedback is not positive. Also sometimes they don't ask for it, but their photo is tilted 2 degrees - I just can't stand that - why do you post to a group with 7000 people if you can't be bothered to learn to use the simplest tools that help you better present your photos. Sometimes they've even used Photoshop on the photo, but it's still tilted. Sometimes they (or someone else pitching in) say that maybe it was meant to be tilted 2 degrees... umm... NOPE. Sometimes there is no subject on the photo or something else crucial is missing... One recent example was a totally black photo where you could barely see something resembling a face in the middle if your monitor was well-calibrated. I don't know, in some ways I understand that you find a group "hobbyist photographers" and you have a camera, and you've managed to take some shots... and you don't really know anything but you want to share and maybe even improve. Maybe I've grown to be too demanding and should just leave that group if these basic photos annoy me? Or maybe my feedback is actually useful to someone, but they don't say it in the comments, I don't know. I try to give CC but I might come off as arrogant or something, at least it gets to combative pretty quickly with some people. I mean, I kind of feel like I still get something out of it - I see one or two good photos a day, sometimes I learn about a new idea or technique, or a new place I could go to, but maybe the arguments are taking too much out of me. So should I

 

A) stay, keep giving feedback in hopes that it still helps someone and to improve my own ability to understand and critique photos

B) stay, stop giving feedback to avoid pointless arguments

C) leave, because my time might be better spent elsewhere

 

I also started doing the dogwood52 challenge, but that's very different with one photo per week on a known topic. I kind of like the group for being able to post a photo of my choice in any given day and see how people react to it (even if it's just the FB likes and nobody has anything else to say).

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Haha, I was looking back to find a photo I had posted here and found out that yep, those Facebook photo URLs aren't forever.

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You guys post such good photos, it's a bit intimidating hah.

 

I don't have my own camera right now, but I got to borrow a DSLR for a few minutes and I managed to take some lab pictures that I like.

 

6kUwPEo.jpg

 

N9ydEno.jpg

 

EdH2H6y.jpg

 

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So my sister volunteered me as a portrait photographer for my nieces bday party - does anyone use Yonguno flashes/wireless recievers? 

 

I currently have a YN560-II that I used with the RF603-II receievers shooting through an umbrella, but my umbrella broke so I bought myself a slightly nicer softbox. A little less versatile but the light seems a little bit nicer. The problem is the flash gets put in the softbox so I can't putz around with power settings 9manual flash only) so I bought myself a wireless receiever controller combo (YN560-TX) but did not realize I couldn't control the power/zoom using the RF603-II reciever so I had to purchase a YN560-IV that has a built in wireless trasmitter.

 

It's something I've been meaning to do for a bit, but just annoyed with a lack of documentation on Yonguno's side hah. On the plus side I'll have a main flash + a hairlight which will be handy. 

 

This is a recent shot using my last setup

 

c7QW200.png

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On 22/02/2017 at 2:05 PM, YoThatLimp said:

So my sister volunteered me as a portrait photographer for my nieces bday party - does anyone use Yonguno flashes/wireless recievers?

I have both, but I don't really know the right way to do flash photography, and I still find the controls on those things a bit confusing, so I kind of flail around until something works. The flashgun in particular has seemingly endless and pages and sub-levels of incomprehensible menus, as well as several only barely comprehensible modes. Sorry I can't be of more assistance. Your test shot looks great, anyway.

 

On 22/02/2017 at 2:11 PM, Cordeos said:

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Took a hike on Saturday, Got a nice photo of the Mississippi and city, as well as a tree that a beaver had been working on.

 

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Does anyone have much experience buying photography books (as in books/monographs by photographers, not books about the art of photography)?  I know basically nothing about photography, but in the past couple years I've started picking up books by photographers I like and I don't really know printing books really works.  The answer to this could very well just be "it depends", but basically what I'm trying to figure out is are most books of modern photographers only printed once?  A lot of the time I'll find a photographer I like and try and get something they've put out, but even if it was just a year or two prior they're almost always sold out (I'm assuming everything is done in fairly small quantities so that totally makes sense)  and in my brief experience it kind of seems like for the most part things don't get reprinted and that's sort of it so now if I want something that was in 2014 a 35 euro monograph my only option at this point is paying $250+ to get it used or hoping some of the same material will be reprinted in some sort of compilation (which is what I did with Todd Hido  because as much as I love his stuff I'm not trying to spend $300-600 on a 56 page monograph, used.)  Is this just the way the game is played?

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I volunteered recently at the Dundee Design Festival here in Scotland. They had filled this old warehouse building with different objects and demos of making processes, the windows were covered with these amazing coloured gel film that created beautiful squares of light on the floor.

 

westward.png

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