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GAF Photography Q3 - 2013

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Dreaver

Member
Got back this weekend from holiday. Took about 1600 photos in RAW. I haven't really looked into them yet, except for one: I took this photo in Munich and I LOVE the lightening in this photo (nothing faked, all natural).
LPkgLYj.jpg
 

noolli

Neo Member
Welcome aboard! great light in this first shot :)

Thank you, I cheated a bit with the light in the first one. This is the original capture. I was playing with the settings, trying to get more detail out of the clouds as they seemed underexposed. The result was that the clouds then looked as they do in the final photo so I then adjusted the rest of the shot to look like it had been taken at dusk.
 
Got myself a new toy to finally venture into the world of medium format


Lucky, currently hunting for one myself (Also love your windmill photo), where did you take those landscape shots, makes me think of Scotland. Really dig your second shoot guess, digging the comparison of the architecture. Darkness the first shot is really stunning, surreal feel to it. Too much stuff to comment on! Anyways here's more phone shots.

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Dreaver

Member
So this holiday I shot everything .RAW, and holy shit it makes such a huge difference, even for "bad" pictures.. I'm so glad I did, the processing part sucks though (1600+ photos). Here are a few I shot in Berlin which I liked (click for bigger size):

edit: god damn imgur compression :'(
 

Damaged

Member
Lucky, currently hunting for one myself (Also love your windmill photo), where did you take those landscape shots, makes me think of Scotland.

Thanks, you can get them at a pretty decent price on ebay now. Really surprised me. The landscape shots are in North Wales, grew up around there and it can be stunning.
 

Flo_Evans

Member
MAN I need to travel some more. Damn kids! Really jealous of all these amazing places, thanks for sharing guys!

Got a new macro extension tube and took this amazing pic of a.... quarter.

 
I took my EOS 50D out on a hike this past weekend...

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And the art museum a couple of weeks ago...
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Not up to par with some of the work here, but we were all beginners at one point!
 

Magni

Member
Some great pics in here, way too many to quote! Here are some from earlier this month, my first month in Chile! The first two are from Valparaíso where I'm currently studying, and the rest from the Atacama desert where I traveled two weeks ago.

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cKzqegi.jpg


Taken with a K-r and either a Sigma 10-20 F4-5.6, Sigma 17-70 F2.8-4, or Pentax 55-300 F4-5.8.
 

Fëanor

Member
Guys, I want to try and do some simple time lapse videos. I have access to a Nikon D7100 so I want to know how to go about creating a time lapse! Suggestions?
 

aidan

Hugo Award Winning Author and Editor
That first shot, aidan. Love.

Haven't seen you in a while!

Thanks, dude.

Though I follow along with these Photography threads as much as I always have, I haven't been very prolific in my own photography over the past year or so. There's a lot of reasons for it, but I've been finding my groove again after doing a bit of travelling and having a lot of fun shooting a wedding.

I really love this community and it's nice to see I've been missed by someone. :)
 

RJT

Member
Went on a boat ride in Algarve, this cave had amazing lighting. I hope the photos do it some justice:

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Hyoushi

Member
Took a test pic with the gf's SLT-a77. Damn this camera has a lot of chromatic aberration, a lot more than my RX100. I guess there is some refraction going on in that translucent mirror

a77test.png
 
we climbed Mount Fuji over night to watch the sunrise:

[ur=http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnrabbit/9651243456/][im]http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2887/9651243456_b0e3e015a3_z.jpg[/img][/url]
[im]http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7394/9651243406_7e99822e82_c.jpg[/img]
[im]http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5470/9648009075_94cd877eb7_c.jpg[/img]
[im]http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7324/9648011385_4ea52e6228_c.jpg[/img]

Absolutely beautiful.


Untitled by OscarSeymourEsq, on Flickr

St. Leonard's beach, Hastings.


This looks like a monkey riding on top of a bird.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
I've always liked taking photos on mouth breathing canon powershots, so I've decided to step it up to a DSLR. I got a Nikon D3200, and to be honest the kit lens isn't that impressive. It seems to do such a poor job at low light and just bad performance in general. Is this expected with the kit lens, or am I just so inexperienced I'm making a decent lens perform like a point/shoot camera?

I ordered a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens which I think will help with low light and for casual shooting.

Any recommendations for a landscape, long focus lens?

Also, how do you all view your photos on PC? Windows photo viewer is chugging on 21 MB NEF files when it shouldn't. I have a 4.6 GHz i7 3770K and an SSD. Seems to be a software problem.
 

Ptaaty

Member
I've always liked taking photos on mouth breathing canon powershots, so I've decided to step it up to a DSLR. I got a Nikon D3200, and to be honest the kit lens isn't that impressive. It seems to do such a poor job at low light and just bad performance in general. Is this expected with the kit lens, or am I just so inexperienced I'm making a decent lens perform like a point/shoot camera?

I ordered a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens which I think will help with low light and for casual shooting.

Any recommendations for a landscape, long focus lens?

Also, how do you all view your photos on PC? Windows photo viewer is chugging on 21 MB NEF files when it shouldn't. I have a 4.6 GHz i7 3770K and an SSD. Seems to be a software problem.

Kit lens is pretty marginal. You will notice a jump in actual and perceived sharpness / resolution with the lens you ordered. Also Lightroom. NEF comes out completely unprocessed...none of the added vibrance, sharpness, contrast, etc that all cameras process on board for jpeg. In fact, if you are looking directly at NEF in windows photo viewer....no bigger upgrade can be made than investing in processing software (Lightroom!!)

Not sure what you mean by long focus lens. Wide angle or tele? The tele end I am really eyeing the Nikon 70-200mm F4 VR. A great resource is DXO mark, especially if you don't know how to properly read MTF charts. Its pretty amazing the differences between lenses. I tend to favor max aperture ("lens speed") and sharpness due to the excellent processing available. Lightroom can get rid of chromatic aberration, vignetting (within reason), and many forms of lens distortion, all with really no loss in quality when processing RAW (NEF for you). Processing can't bring back the original information from an unsharp lens though.

I view my photos and do almost all processing on Adobe Lightroom. Exceptional for both orgainization and for general processing (tones, curves, crop, etc). You will see a lot of recommendations. I have upwards of 28MB NEF from my D600. It takes a decent chuck of processing...it doesn't stay as the original file size for most programs. Each can take a few hundred megs in RAM during processing. Another reason I love LR is the thumbnail and indexing system.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
Kit lens is pretty marginal. You will notice a jump in actual and perceived sharpness / resolution with the lens you ordered. Also Lightroom. NEF comes out completely unprocessed...none of the added vibrance, sharpness, contrast, etc that all cameras process on board for jpeg. In fact, if you are looking directly at NEF in windows photo viewer....no bigger upgrade can be made than investing in processing software (Lightroom!!)

Not sure what you mean by long focus lens. Wide angle or tele? The tele end I am really eyeing the Nikon 70-200mm F4 VR. A great resource is DXO mark, especially if you don't know how to properly read MTF charts. Its pretty amazing the differences between lenses. I tend to favor max aperture ("lens speed") and sharpness due to the excellent processing available. Lightroom can get rid of chromatic aberration, vignetting (within reason), and many forms of lens distortion, all with really no loss in quality when processing RAW (NEF for you). Processing can't bring back the original information from an unsharp lens though.

By long focus I mean something that's better at landscapes. It seemed like large f stop and lens length in mm were for this.

That Nikon 70-200mm F4 VR is over a grand...not sure what hobby I just got into, lol.

Though I'm glad I'm not just imagining the stock lens performing like junk.

So going raw disables about bunch of auto enhancing? I was avoiding JPG because it's a relic compression file format with tons of artifacts...I'm guessing JPEG fine is not as bad?
 

RJT

Member
By long focus I mean something that's better at landscapes. It seemed like large f stop and lens length in mm were for this.

That Nikon 70-200mm F4 VR is over a grand...not sure what hobby I just got into, lol.

Though I'm glad I'm not just imagining the stock lens performing like junk.

So going raw disables about bunch of auto enhancing? I was avoiding JPG because it's a relic compression file format with tons of artifacts...I'm guessing JPEG fine is not as bad?

Just use a free RAW processor if you don't want to invest in Lightroom, better than straight JPEG. Try RawTherapee, it's open source.
 

noolli

Neo Member

Brighton Pier by matthewexford, on Flickr

I was helping my sister move away, somewhere near to where this shot was taken. The Pictures itself is probably nearly a year old, it was taken during the summer(British summer) during the most tropical it gets here. I really like this one as it pretty much sums up all my time of being in Brighton. The weather has never been good to me there but it is always a gay old time.
 

East Lake

Member
By long focus I mean something that's better at landscapes. It seemed like large f stop and lens length in mm were for this.

That Nikon 70-200mm F4 VR is over a grand...not sure what hobby I just got into, lol.

Though I'm glad I'm not just imagining the stock lens performing like junk.

So going raw disables about bunch of auto enhancing? I was avoiding JPG because it's a relic compression file format with tons of artifacts...I'm guessing JPEG fine is not as bad?
People generally use shorter length lenses for landscapes because it gives them a wider field of view. Like a 24mm lens for example. Not to say telephotos aren't good for landscapes but they're not what people typically think of as a "landscape lens."

Your d3200 also has an aps-c sensor which is smaller than full frame sensors. This will essentially will crop your image like this.

totGdsj.jpg


If you had your d3200 (aps-c) with a 24mm lens and a d600 (full frame) with a 24mm lens yours would look like the center and the d600 the full image. Since the field of view is different people with aps-c cameras multiply the focal length of there lens by a certain conversion factor to get the full frame equivalent. In your case since you bought the 50mm you multiply it by 1.5 to get the full frame equivalent. So your 50mm on your d3200 has the same field of view as a 75mm lens would on a d600.

Lightroom is a pretty good investment for photography if you plan on sticking with it. Great for file organization and most processing needs. RAW allows you to make more adjustments than jpeg would. Kinda short on time right now so I can't expand but you can read about it in a quick google search if you're interested.
 

Ptaaty

Member
By long focus I mean something that's better at landscapes. It seemed like large f stop and lens length in mm were for this.

That Nikon 70-200mm F4 VR is over a grand...not sure what hobby I just got into, lol.

Though I'm glad I'm not just imagining the stock lens performing like junk.

So going raw disables about bunch of auto enhancing? I was avoiding JPG because it's a relic compression file format with tons of artifacts...I'm guessing JPEG fine is not as bad?

For now just stick with the stock kit lens and stop it down. The lens I mentioned would be very sharp but is too telephoto for most landscape, especially on the APS-C sensor in your camera.

Your images are primarily underwhelming due to the fact that RAW is right off the sensor and have not even the basic, required processing. Unless you have decent processing, shooting RAW is hurting you, not helping you. A the very least, use the software that was packaged with the camera if you don't want to do lightroom. You can always do the 30 day free trial to see what the fuss is about.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
I got this lens. Massive improvement. But I see the cropping the poster 2 above mentioned. This will require a bit of footwork to use it, but I think I'll manage for a while. If this hobby becomes more intense I'll get another lens.
 

DagsJT

Member
I've started shooting in RAW but is there any kind of basic guide for minimal processing that the camera would do if I shot in JPEG? At the moment, I'm basically using CTRL+U and CTRL+Shift+U to change the colours a little to see how the photo changes.
 
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