Warning: This blog may contain verbose ramblings intermingled with corgi pictures. I try to make my walls of text as compelling as possible, but if you have a short attention span (no judgement), this blog may not be for you.
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I was taking out the trash and suddenly the three kiddo foxes emerged and were playing in the yard. They were much more aggressive with their wrestling matches when their parents weren't supervising. One did a total Mortal Kombat finishing move and their sibling was motionless for over a minute. I started to worry until they popped up and resumed a high speed chase.
Latch key fox kids, what are you gonna do?
I was very far away, but they spotted me and got spooked.
But I learned 2 new things.
First, I know where their den is located.
All three of them just disappeared into that wooded area.
Second... they bark!
It's not like a dog, though. It's a very short, high-pitched bark.
If you can imagine what it would sound like if a cat barked, that is the noise they make.
I've pointed one of my security cameras at the opening to their den. So I should get an alert when they appear.
I haven't figured out how to get better pictures yet. I sold my telephoto lens to pay for one of my mom's medical bills.
I'm wondering if they will feel less spooked if I stay on my deck.
Even if I don't get better photos, they are fun to just watch from the window. I've been having such a miserable time recovering. Every day is just boring and long and lonely. This little fox family brought me some much needed joy.
They really do act like a human family.
The mom stays very far back near the entrance of the den. She is very still and just seems to be observing from afar. Like a human mom sitting on a bench at the playground.
The dad is following the kids around, almost instigating their pounces and wrestling.
Two of the kids wrestled and chased as their main activity. But the third kid is an explorer. Very curious. That's the one I got the close up of.
He likes to sneak through the fence and under the deck. I'm guessing he wanted some alone time.
Anyway, I will keep y'all updated on the Fox News.
So a few days ago I noticed a fox friend running through my yard. I was able to snap this photo.
I called him Milo.
I thought he was a lone wolf who chose my neighborhood as his domain.
But Milo is not alone.
Milo is a papa.
He and his lady fox have three little foxes!
I went from never having seen a fox to FIVE foxes playing in my backyard.
The three kiddos were wrestling. Their opening move is to do this cat-like superjump and then dive bomb into their sibling. Then they roll around. And then a high speed chase ensues.
One of the little foxes came near the house and I got a few closer photos.
I love the little black socks.
I'm going to need to figure out a lot more fox names.
It's not the golden ratio if you have to crop the composition to make it fit.
Rule of thirds and the golden ratio are compositional training wheels that are barely ever used in professional work. If a shot happens to line up that way, it is usually a coincidence. Sometimes, if I am improvising a composition, I may use the rule of thirds grid as a starting point. Or if I don't have time to think deeply about my composition, I may use it as a safety net.
Things that are often considered when designing a shot... background, midground, foreground. Symmetry or asymmetry. Primary and secondary subjects. Visual weight and balance. Visual anchors. Subject separation via depth of field, background/foreground exposure ratio, contrast, or color palette. And most importantly... storytelling.
Let's think through the composition of this shot.
I prefer to think back to front. What do I want the viewer to see?
Background is the sky.
Midground is the town.
Foreground is Michael B Jordan.
They chose a symmetrical composition. Symmetry is a powerful and dramatic visual anchor. If you would rather the viewer chew on the environment and absorb the entire frame, you may frame the subject off-center.
The primary subject is his face and the secondary subject is the gun. You can tell this because the gun is out of focus. They want you to visually anchor your attention to his expression. The angle of the gun even has a leading line that goes straight to his eyes.
Subject separation is mostly done with an exposure ratio. He is dark against a bright white sky. There is some background blur as well.
The camera is slightly below his eyeline so it is looking up at him. This gives him a sense of power and control. He is dangerous and imposing. They are using a strong central framing with a low perspective as storytelling tools.
At no point did the director or DP say, "Let's make sure his eyeball lines up with a golden spiral."
A lot of people confuse framing with composition. But if you design the composition well, the framing is almost an afterthought.
If you can't actually discern film from digital with confidence, I think your opinion loses all credibility.
That's like pouring Costco boxed wine into a fancy bottle with a prestigious label and expecting it to taste better.
While fIlm can have inherent qualities that create a pleasing aesthetic, when you give all the credit to a piece of plastic, you are being reductive to the actual human beings creating the art.
My phone is in bad shape. The back fell off and I keep it together with a case. And the lenses are unprotected and hard to clean. So all of my photos look a bit hazy now. Plus it is an older phone and the camera system isn't the best. I can't justify replacing it at the moment since it does everything important I need it to do.
Which is why my photo restoration skills are like a superpower.
Scrolling the timeline on Mother's Day can be hard for me so last year I decided to turn my grief into something positive.
This year, I decided to make it a tradition.
I noticed people were posting a lot of old, degraded photos of their parents. So I try to pick a few good candidates to restore.
I spent a couple of years learning how to do this. I am very good at it. And I really enjoy it. But I learned it isn't very lucrative and most people are fine with what AI can do now.
It makes me a bit sad, but I actually think restoring people's precious memories is not the worst use of AI. Plus, I use several AI tools in my workflow. When there is extensive damage, generative fill is a lifesaver. The remove tool makes quick work of stubborn accumulated dust. And AI upscaling makes the photos printable, often at many times their original size.
My restorations are still much better than the free AI ones. I edit them with a precision and fidelity that can hold up to 400% magnification. I take special care to preserve likenesses and often work with reference photos to make sure people's loved ones still look like who they are after upscaling. I also do colorizing by hand (though I will sometimes make initial color maps with AI). I color grade using film stock color references so the photos still look like film, and I add texture and grain selectively to keep people from looking like smooth rubber.
But that kind of quality takes so much time. One photo is probably several hundred dollars of labor. And no one is willing to pay that so I have to charge below minimum wage.
I will probably just do pro bono restorations from here on out. Focus on fixing photos that AI isn't very good at restoring. Plus I have a ton of family photos that I want to restore for my niece. At some point, years from now, she'll be old enough to talk to me without my brother's permission. And she'll probably want to know who her grandparents were. I hope to be ready with photos and stories by that time.
In any case, it felt nice to do this on a hard day. And it helped clarify to myself how I should use this skill I've developed going forward.
What would a good starter camera be? My BF wants to get into photography but I don鈥檛 really know where he/we would start
It's hard to give you a good custom answer without knowing your budget restraints and what aspects of photography you are interested in exploring. Depending on what you want to shoot I may have different advice.
If you like landscapes, you might need a wider lens, if you like portraits you might need a cheap prime lens, and if you like small birds you might need to sell an organ or two.
The main tool you need is an interchangeable lens camera or "ILC." People used to just say DSLRs, but once they started yanking out the mirrors from cameras, that catchall term didn't make sense anymore.
You just want a camera that allows you to change out lenses. Whether you get a DSLR or mirrorless, depends mostly on your budget.
The cheapest way to get into photography is to buy used gear. Photography equipment is wonderfully robust. You can get a used camera from 10 years ago with 100K shutter actuations and it will probably still run another decade without much issue. Camera gear is also cool in that it retains resale value. So if you get a basic system to start, you can sell it and upgrade without taking a huge hit on depreciation.
The big decision in the current market is going to be whether you get the cheapest system possible or save up for something mirrorless and modern.
There is a huge issue with people starting photography, getting frustrated with the learning curve, and then their camera permanently sits on a shelf collecting dust.
The same thing happens with guitars. Parents buy the cheapest acoustic in the store. It is poorly built, very hard to play, and doesn't sound very good. If they had bought the cheapest "good" guitar and not the cheapest cheap guitar, their kid may have had a chance at falling in love with the instrument.
It sucks that the beginner friendly cameras with the shallowest learning curve are more expensive. Though mirrorless cameras are starting to become reasonable on the used market.
Mirrorless cameras have two big features which make the beginner experience much less frustrating. IBIS and eye-detect autofocus.
IBIS stands for in-body image stabilization. This allows you to take pictures in more challenging situations without a tripod. It saves you from getting blurry shots because you messed up the settings. And if you have shaky hands, it can adapt to that movement.
Eye autofocus is kind of like an aimbot in a video game. The camera's focus system can see a person, a dog, a bird, a lion, a tiger, a bear and just stick the autofocus on the nearest eye.
When you are first starting photography, there are a lot of variables you have to consider when taking a photograph. And having two of the more technical and less artistic tasks completely taken off your plate allows beginners to concentrate more on composition and artistic thinking without worrying about blurry, out-of-focus results.
That said, if you are willing to learn and put in the effort, you can buy any ILC and get amazing results. You will need education and practice, no matter what. And if you are determined to learn this craft, it won't matter if you have the modern features.
I have written a few posts which you may find helpful.
This is a general buying guide.
馃挰 1聽聽馃攣 55聽聽鉂わ笍 147聽路聽Frogman's Camera Buying Guide聽路聽A few weeks ago someone asked if I could recommend an interchangeable lens camera (ILC)
This is a buying guide geared more toward landscape shooting.
馃挰 5聽聽馃攣 15聽聽鉂わ笍 50聽路聽Landscape Buying Guide聽路聽Recently I took a panorama of the Pittsburgh skyline at night that got a positive response. That
And this post tells you everything you need to know about lenses and also has some advice on what to buy.
馃挰 1聽聽馃攣 21聽聽鉂わ笍 67聽路聽Note from Future Froggie...聽路聽Hi Froggy,
I hope you've been well! I wanted to reach out and first say that you inspired
Remember when I give buying advice, I am giving representative examples. I am not telling you exactly what to buy, but rather how to figure out what to buy. The examples in these posts are 2 years old, so you may be able to find newer gear that you can still afford.
If you want to tell me about what you two hope to photograph and a budget range, I can give you more custom advice.
When I started my weight loss plan 2 months ago, I set an initial goal to lose 20 pounds as a sign that what I was doing was working and sustainable. The other day I stepped on the scale and hit 19.9 pounds lost. And my OCD was unable to round up. I had not reached my goal and it was driving me nuts.
Today I stepped on the scale again and I was still 2/10ths of a pound away from 20.
Another film bro with moody teal and orange lighting is here to tell you why movies are ugly.
For weeks I have been paying more attention to the aesthetics in the shows and movies I have been watching.
And I have come to the preliminary conclusion...
Most of them looked pretty good. A few looked fantastic. None of them looked so bad that it ruined the watching experience. And I could not identify a culprit of egregious "Netflix lighting."
I have identified short, individual scenes in every single thing I've watched that have had boring lighting. Even in the fantastic looking movies. But no movie has had bad lighting on a consistent basis.
The only movie in recent memory that I actively disliked the visuals of was Tron: Ares. But it had good lighting. The colors were saturated. The CG was well done. But the visual style was boring and uninspired. I don't know how else to describe it other than "corporate." It felt like a soulless money grab in which no one was heavily invested in creating a creative, stylized look as they did in the first two films.
The worst looking movie I saw did not look bad because of color grading, depth of field, lighting, or visual effects. Shooting on film would not have made a difference. It looked bad because it lacked any inspiration or artistic enthusiasm.
Make of that what you will.
I am going to keep this experiment going to see if I can find actually objectionable aesthetics, but that has been my experience so far.
This discourse is so fucking broken.
If you were to go by the examples above, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a colorless, sterile movie with Netflix lighting.
And that might be true if the entire movie took place in that goddamn elevator.
But more trailers have come out and I have discovered, this movie has all kinds of interesting lighting environments and a mixture of cool colors and warm, saturated colors.
It's almost as if they didn't think creating magical lighting in an elevator was an aesthetic priority.
And now that shot of her brushing her teeth is going around as an example. Which I can't find in any of the released material.
These are not images from the movies.
These are.
The skin tones in the new movie look similar but her actual bathroom has less warm colors. But it certainly isn't the stark difference from the comparisons going around.
And again, the movie doesn't take place entirely in a fucking bathroom.
People are taking single frames from movies, sometimes very edited ones, and telling you everything is ugly.
I'm asking people to watch entire movies and make up their own minds. Do not let these clickbait opinions infect your ability to judge things for yourself.
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