Your Own Photography

Eomer_sl said:

Not much story. I went heli skiing over the holidays, had my bud snap a picture while it was taking off with another group. The two of us always wear our Oilers jerseys when we go mechanized skiing, I'm not really sure why. I had actually forgotten mine, but my bud had a spare!

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That's pretty fucking cool.

Raptor Free Flight show at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum...

Love that last shot. What kind of gear/lens are you using?

Couple shots i took yesterday on Miami beach.

Subotai_sl said:

Raptor Free Flight show at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum...

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Awesome. Wow.

undecided about this one, throwing it on here before i toss it up on social media

Been kind of quiet since i'm living in a frozen hellscape at the moment I was going through some old photos I took and came across one that I liked of an Eaglet and a matured Bald Eagle behind it to the left of their nest:

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self

Nice self portrait! I need to do more like that.


A couple from the Tucson Botanical Garden. Humid as shit in the Orchid room, but could see the blue and yellow Poison Dart frogs loose:

Fantastic photos guys. I have a bit of a dilemma going on though.

I've always had an interest in photography but wasn't anything serious. I was given a Nikon D50 at the beginning off last year by my friend with some extra lens that he hadn't been using much. I had been learning off this camera for the past year and was given plenty of tips by my photographer friend on basic photography. I gotten to love shooting and aim to do it as much as I can as free time allows but here is the crux:

The D50 seems to be slowly dying on me (not surprising since its quite an old model) giving me error msgs saying I have no memory card when I do. Quite annoying sometimes when I try to shoot and then the error pops up causing me to lose my composition. It only happens occasionally but often enough recently for me to think about replacing it.

So I am ready to get serious and invest in a quality DSLR and lens but the so called mirrorless '3rd generation cameras' are causing me to hesitate. It seems that there is a strong market trend towards mirrorless cameras like the Sony A7 and the Olympus OM-D E-M1 both offering fantastic performance, at nearly half the weight of a DSLR and being much more compact.

Whilst these camera are still very good, I am sure that even more improvements and refinements will be made down the road as companies really start to throw more R&D into mirrorless technology.

As photographers know, once you select and commit to a brand (I like Nikon since I learnt on the D50) and start investing in lens then it gets difficult to back out of when you start buying more lens for it. I am not at that stage yet so I have a decision to make with me being a aspiring amateur.

1) Say 'fuck it', ignore the trend and commit to a reliable DSLR Nikon body and lens
2) Start committing to mirrorless now (don't know which brand yet :/ )
3) Carry on practising on the D50 even with the really annoying problems and see how the market is going further down the line.

Thoughts?

How exactly do you decide to frame a shot? Framing is probably the one aspect of photography that I need to work on the most.

Some really great pictures in this thread.

Morbeas_sl said:

How exactly do you decide to frame a shot? Framing is probably the one aspect of photography that I need to work on the most.

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I think you answered that yourself. You need to work on it. Shoot a lot.
There are some advices/rules, like the golden ratio, headroom, or the rule of thirds, (Drek's last pic is a good exemple of this one), but there are so many exceptions, just see them as guidelines, and keep in mind that nothing is set in stone.
I'd rather say shoot a lot, then sort your pics to keep about 10% of them, and while doing that, try to figure out while you prefer those 10% to the others.

woot!_sl said:

I think you answered that yourself. You need to work on it. Shoot a lot.
There are some advices/rules, like the golden ratio, headroom, or the rule of thirds, (Drek's last pic is a good exemple of this one), but there are so many exceptions,just see them as guidelines, and keep in mind that nothing is set in stone.
I'd rather sayshoot a lot, then sort your pics to keep about 10% of them, and while doing that, try to figure out while you prefer those 10% to the others.

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I couldn't agree more.

woot!_sl said:

I think you answered that yourself. You need to work on it. Shoot a lot.
There are some advices/rules, like the golden ratio, headroom, or the rule of thirds, (Drek's last pic is a good exemple of this one), but there are so many exceptions, just see them as guidelines, and keep in mind that nothing is set in stone.
I'd rather say shoot a lot, then sort your pics to keep about 10% of them, and while doing that, try to figure out while you prefer those 10% to the others.

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Exactly! I shoot a ton of photos, but only keep a small fraction of them.

Today at the Phoenix Zoo....