Photos of things

[Luftmensch]

  On 1/18/2013 at 8:49 PM, brkl said:

To be fair, it's not like we just gut it out. You need a big infrastructure to deal with snow (tires with studs, tons of people operating vehicles with snowplows to keep the roads clear etc.). You need to have all that stuff prepared and it probably wouldn't make much sense in Britain.

I have been baffled how, here where I live in the south, we have an obscene amount of infrastructure for dealing with snowstorms relative to how much snow we get. In a typical year we get up to 4" of snowfall (a couple light dustings and sometimes a full inch or two stick once or twice), and the most I can ever remember falling was three or four inches at once. Despite that, our city somehow manages to pull out snow plows, maintenance vehicles with snow tires, and sometimes even salt the roads.

Not sure how they reckon it's worth the money, but looking at a map of house values, mine and the surrounding ZIP codes have an average home value between $290k and $508k, so that might explain how they can pay for it.

[osmosisch]

@Rodi: Jep

[miffy495]

  On 1/18/2013 at 9:10 AM, Mington said:

<del>Snow day</del> VIDEO GAME DAY \o/

Man, seriously? Calgary got that much in like the first hour of a full day of snow last week and the difference was that my drive to school took 25 minutes instead of 20. And for whatever reason, we never plow our damn roads. Nut up, England.

[brkl]

  On 1/19/2013 at 1:21 AM, miffy495 said:

And for whatever reason, we never plow our damn roads.

What the what? How's your traffic fatalities?

[miffy495]

Fatalities? Low. Highway fuckups and horrible delays? High. We plow some things some times, but the street outside my house (which intersects a MAJOR route through the city) is never plowed. Now and then I'll see a sander truck go by, but it's infrequent. We also have godawful public transit that is some of the most expensive in Canada. This is a city that takes great pride in massive eyesore trucks, and penalizes those who don't drive them by way of infrastructure.

[Nachimir]

Gritting roads is pretty much all that happens to deal with it in the UK, because we only get about one week of snow a year, if that. I live in a very hilly neighbourhood, and most of the roads turn to black ice halfway through a snow week. I see a lot of fools in cars and vans slowly sliding back down the hills after trying to get up them.

[osmosisch]

It's so awesome to have good ice again for once. To the village skating rink we go!

[Thrik]

Few more from over Christmas. Was my first opportunity to try and get to grips with my new cam, could have done better (had some retarded shooting options set) but that's part of the fun I guess!

[Thrik]

I suppose I'd better join in with the posting snow photos too.

[brkl]

[syntheticgerbil]

  On 1/19/2013 at 10:47 PM, Thrik said:

So hungry.

[James]

  On 1/18/2013 at 9:36 AM, James said:

Potentially getting stuck at work day!

It's unlikely, though. It only started snowing an hour or so ago, and not heavily

It eventually snowed some more on Friday. People at work got worried about trains being cancelled or something (which didn't actually happen), so we finished early and I spent the rest of the day taking rubbish photos. Here are a few of them:

EDIT: Warmed up the gull

[Thrik]

The last photo is great, James — good separation of the bird and the background. Seems a bit over-blue, though!

[James]

I know, that's just how the JPEG version came out of the camera (it was later in the day and the light was going). I'll fiddle around with the RAW this evening - I did some of that over the weekend, but the was getting very late).

Oh, and thanks, I appreciate the compliment.

EDIT: OK, I've increased the temperature a whole bunch. It took me quite a few tries — I kept thinking I'd got it spot on, only to realize through comparison that I was still pretty blue. Now, of course, I'm concerned that I might have taken it a bit too far.

[Nachimir]

Yes, pretty nice. I think a crop like this would serve it well:

Not that every photo should follow the rule of thirds, but it's a generally reliable way to compose stuff.

--

I once took this, at the ATP where Portishead re-formed:

It made me stop doing photography, because I was holding the camera at arms length above my head in a crowd, gawping at the tiny fold out screen and shooting a lot of photos until I got a good one; and this one was better than most of the things I've ever taken. I looked at it, felt very much like giving up, and haven't done much photography in the past five years. Recently though, I borrowed a DSLR and a prime lens and got to use it for a month or two, which did a few things:

1. I understood just how much faster a lens is at f1.8, and how much more powerful and flexible a good lens is in terms of focus and versatility.

2. I always used to tell myself "A poor workman blames his tools", but seeing the difference between the camera I've been using for quite a long time, and a DSLR with a nice prime lens on it, I've reconsidered. Beyond a certain point, kit makes a massive difference.

3. A really big one: I learned some technical stuff that photographers have always told me is not important, but it really improved my mental model of how photography works: The f-number is the ratio of the aperture to the focal length. So on a 50mm lens, at f1.8, the aperture is roughly 27.8mm wide. At f4, it's 12.5mm; at f16, just 3.1mm. Before, I only understood f-numbers as counter-intuitively corresponding to bigger and smaller apertures, and apart from that progression they seemed arbitrary. From understanding how those measurements are defined, optics/lenses went from partial mystery to something I could relate to the way a pinhole camera works, in that both are now parts of the same model in my head rather than things that work differently. A pinhole camera works because it has a tiny hole and big area to expose, so each part of the photographic paper in it is (mostly) only hit by light coming from a very small line of sight (Imagine lines of sight going from every point on the paper, through the pinhole and out into the world). In really naive terms, I now understand the optics in a lens as something that lets you use various sizes of big hole to expose a much smaller image coherently and consistently.

(Edited for clarity. Well, an attempt at clarity).

[James]

  On 1/21/2013 at 7:44 PM, Nachimir said:

I think a crop like this would serve it well

Yes, that does work rather well. Out of interest, is there something in particular that inspired that? Is it that there's too much empty space around the subject in the original, or perhaps that the patch of sky in the top-right is a bit distracting? I don't really know anything about composition (as is probably quite evident), so I imagine your version is probably more universally appealing (and I do like it myself – I'm not really sure which version I prefer), but I do have a bit of a fondness for big empty spaces around the subject for some reason.

[brkl]

I actually prefer the original. If you crop too close to the bird, it's just a bird. Nachimir's crop cuts away too much of the boats in the background for me: you lose context. I would dial in a stop or so of exposure.

[Nachimir]

  On 1/21/2013 at 9:05 PM, James said:

Yes, that does work rather well. Out of interest, is there something in particular that inspired that? Is it that there's too much empty space around the subject in the original, or perhaps that the patch of sky in the top-right is a bit distracting? I don't really know anything about composition (as is probably quite evident), so I imagine your version is probably more universally appealing (and I do like it myself – I'm not really sure which version I prefer), but I do have a bit of a fondness for big empty spaces around the subject for some reason.

For me, the photo is about the bird (of which everyone has heard), so by doing that crop I'm putting it on a point in the photo, according to the rule of thirds, that gives it more impact. If I thought the photo was about the boats, I'd crop it differently. Neither me nor brkl is necessarily right, there is no one true word (about the bird) and every time someone comes up with a rule, there will be exceptions. The rule of thirds I linked above is a good starting point when it comes to composition, and generally pretty reliable, but when used to it I think it might be an interesting exercise to go out and break it repeatedly.

(I only just noticed that colour has been changed in the one I cropped: that wasn't intentional).

[James]

  On 1/21/2013 at 10:40 PM, Nachimir said:

The rule of thirds I linked above is a good starting point when it comes to composition, and generally pretty reliable, but when used to it I think it might be an interesting exercise to go out and break it repeatedly.

Sorry, I completely missed your mention of the rule of thirds. Funnily enough, that's one of the very few composition guidelines of which I am aware, but in this instance I felt it would be better if the gull was looking over the width of the image, so I didn't want to much space behind it. I'm not sure how well that works, but I quite like the effect.

  On 1/21/2013 at 10:40 PM, Nachimir said:

(I only just noticed that colour has been changed in the one I cropped: that wasn't intentional).

No, that was the original colour, which I later corrected (see Thrik's comment and my response). You actually posted just as I was editing the original post, I think.

  On 1/21/2013 at 10:04 PM, brkl said:

I would dial in a stop or so of exposure.

I'm afraid I don't tend to spend much time fiddling with the settings when taking photos, in part because I worry the moment will pass, in part because I feel rather self-conscious doing so, and in part because I only have a very basic familiarity with them, but I know I really ought to be doing more of it, not least because I'll never learn how if I don't.

[brkl]

Just fiddle with the exposure of the RAW file. This will increase noise some, but that shouldn't be a problem. Depends on what you shoot with.

[brkl]

Mmmmm... Fisheye lenses.

[osmosisch]

Oh gosh, that's lovely.

[James]

That can't be a fish eye lens. There aren't any skaters.

(I agree with Osmosisch.)

[Luftmensch]

These photos of a fictional Zambian space program from the 60's are a thing of wonder (sorry they're not my photos)

[Thrik]

Just got back from a few days in London. Lightroom pretty much had a heart attack when I tried to import them all, but I've been quite brutal about cutting the number I actually share down to a minimum. Only got like a quarter of the way through so I'll probably post some more when I have more time for processing later in the week.