The Official Head-Case Photography Thread.

*Knuckledragger* · May 9

In the summer of 2007 I hiked up Mount Sugarloaf in Sunderland. I went up there many times in the '00s, both with and without a camera. The view from it is spectacular and really shows off a pastoral and idyllic perspective of the Happy Valley. The weather was fantastic and there were some hot ail balloons floating around merrily. Unfortunately for me, on this date I took the always terrible Canon 75-300mm lens and I did NOT know what I was doing. The photos came out terribly. I sat on them for nearly 18 years until last month when I sat down and processed them with some modern apps. I had to make deft use of Luminar 4, Topaz Sharpen AI and Photoshop to extract remotely decent results. The sharpening was key, and a faustian bargain. The 75-300mm is never sharp. I wasn't smart enough to up my 30D's ISO to improve shutter speed so a bunch of the shots have lens motion blur. The 30D isn't the most sharp thing to begin with in the best of circumstances. Too much AI sharpening makes for weird and very obvious artifacts. There is no perfect solution. With all of this said, the end results here aren't half bad. I rate this set a solid "Crank up that ISO you dumbass" out of 10.

I did take a few shots with the 17-85mm, which is is a Leica rangefinder lens in comparison to the 75-300mm.

*Knuckledragger* · May 22

I've been engaging in a bit of a photographic revisionist history/redemption arc. 2006 was a crazy year. I was working 3+ nights a week doing lights in nightclub (in addition to everything I did all day), and doing other sporadic events as well. It was mostly fun and I made enough money for it to be worthwhile. I cannot imagine doing it now. This was a time period right before LED luminaries became mainstream and most club lights were halogen or arc bulb based. This meant normal people could not operate or maintain them, so there was a niche I was able to carve out for a one man lighting business. All of that would change by the end of the decade.

During this time period, I took a ton of photos. Many of them are really awful. To the point, the edits I posted were terrible. I operated under the misguided notion that cropping a tiny section out of a 5MP original (taken with a mid 00s point & shoot sensor) was a good idea. Also many of the photos were of the partygoers and in my opinion even the originals for most of those shots are just bad. In 2007, partially inspired by some scene drama, I privated ~1500 photos on Flickr and got on with my day. There's still a couple people from the mid 00s who have a grudge against me because of shots I took during that time. (There's a long story here about a garage house DJ I knew who had a very attractive and insanely jealous girlfriend. I had a photo of him ogling a go-go dancer, she saw it and got mad at him. He of course blamed me for his dysfunctional relationship.)

Oh wait, I still have the relevant photos:

...but I digress. 2006 was also a significant year because it was when I bought my first DSLR (EOS 30D that I made heavy use of for entirely too long.) I bought the 30D because my PowerShot S60 died ...twice. Canon were real shitters about fixing it. I have been going through photos I took in the first half of '06, all taken with the S60. The process is slow and laborious, but it's therapeutic for me (and lord knows we all need some therapy these days.) I have been working from the original images (fortunately, I am a compulsive archivist and data hoarder), doing minimal edits and the then replacing them on Flickr. This is a process that no one besides myself will ever appreciate. Lucky for me I'm an only child and my primary audience. As I mentioned above, many of the shots are not salvageable. Using the built in flash on a ca. 2004 point & shoot while the club is full of fog is a benighted idea in the best of circumstances. I took a LOT of photos during this time period and it may well be years before I've finished this task. The following is a small sample:

Spinning fire, Jan 2006. 0.4" handheld. I had no idea what I was doing. Re-cropped square but otherwise unedited.

Same party as above. My friend Ed, who is a video artist and electronic musician. He has a tendency to hold still for long periods of time. 1.6 second exposure, with the camera sitting on ...some object (I no longer remember what.) I've got a long story about Ed I might tell some day. Re-cropped square, no other edits.

A slow night at a Sunday event I worked in an expensive but ultimately shitty bar. 4 second exposure with the camera sitting on case. Cropped 2-3, but otherwise unedited.

Same club a month later. Around that time Technics tried to compete with Pioneer in the CDJ market and made a really weird and poorly received product. They made for an interesting light source however. 4 second exposure again with the camera resting on an equipment case. Re-cropped 4:5 (my favorite aspect ratio) but otherwise unedited.

Longtime reggae DJ. He's got a huge local following. I never saw eye to eye with him on a great many things (I could write a fucking book on that subject, but I won't.) 1/4 second handheld. I could hold the camera pretty steady for such a long focal length. The joys of a 5.8mm focal length...

Part of the live kit belonging to Ed, the bald fella from a few shots above. Not a good photo at all, but the synth gear is too cool not to include. Sadly, in early 2012 Ed passed out drunk with a lit cigarette and burned his studio down. That was a very bad day. Alcoholism is the worst.

Same show, available light. 1/6th, handheld. Re-cropped 4:5, but otherwise unedited. That blue LED Doepfer Schaltwerk was the stuff of legend.

Same gig. Ed lit up by my 20mW 532nm green 3 mirror lissajous laser. 1 second exposure. No idea what I used as a tripod.

Ricardo, the guy who helped me finish my Saturnine mix in 2009. Seen here in April of '06, using my CDJ and mixer combination. I could NOT find that flight case when I moved. That's somewhat concerning as it's kind of huge. Half a second handheld, cropped 4:5.

All of this is the tip of the iceberg. I've probably re-edited ~100 photos at this point. More later.

*blessingx* · May 22

^ Keep posting!

The most hated camera of 2025 will be released tomorrow. Sounds kinda fun. Too bad about the $150 Orange Tax.

*dsavitsk* · May 22

.

Edited May 22 by dsavitsk

*dsavitsk* · May 22

3 hours ago, Knuckledragger said:

+1

*blessingx* · May 22

Maybe I was a little cynical on the initial X half reception.

https://www.techradar.com/cameras/compact-cameras/fujifilms-x-half-is-a-tiny-retro-compact-thats-big-on-wacky-film-photography-features-and-i-love-it

Edited May 22 by blessingx

*Grahame* · May 22

"Fujifilm’s X Half camera is so dedicated to the analog vibes, it can’t shoot RAW"

https://www.theverge.com/news/672268/fujifilm-x-half-digital-compact-camera-fixed-lens-analog-price-specs

*jpelg* · May 22

"...you can add a (randomly-assigned) light-leak..." 🤣

*blessingx* · May 22

47 minutes ago, jpelg said:

"...you can add a (randomly-assigned) light-leak..." 🤣

For jealous users of other systems you have options https://www.polarpro.com/products/lightleak-lens/

*blessingx* · May 22

Mr. Polaroid (full doc)

*Grahame* · May 23

"Fujifilm's new camera is silly and fun, but is it just a joke?'

https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilm-x-half-retro-compact-camera

*Knuckledragger* · May 25

Where was I?

A different crop of this photo was the background for the website for my lighting company in the 00s. I turned off auto-renewal for that domain last week. Soon it will redirect a gambling site, I'm sure. 1 second with the camera placed on the sound booth.

A breakbeat DJ and tattoo artist I knew in the 00s. I put a 300W moonflower light with a yellow gel behind him.

A actual turntablist and not merely a DJ. Same 300W moonflower.

Hannah under the lights. 1/30th, F/2.8, ISO400. I should add at this juncture that I cleaned up most of these shots with Topaz Denoise AI, which is a very 2020s anti-noise app. 00s noise reduction apps and plugins left a lot to be desired.

I don't know who this long haired woman was, but she was quite photogenic. In this second shot, I originally cropped out everything and it looked terrible. Almost 20 years later, the rest of the frame serves as negative space.

A very slow Sunday evening. Originally I cropped out everything except for the lissajous pattern. Now the photo is an available light study. As I mentioned previously, 2006 was an insane year. There are quite a few photo sets I haven't even looked at yet.

A DJ I knew turned 30 in May of '06. He threw a party at the expensive yet shitty club where I worked sometimes. I couldn't use fog in there..

...because it set off the fire alarm. Pic from 2005 very related.

Early in the night. 0.4" with the camera placed on the bar. I elected not to use noise reduction on this one. I didn't like this shot in '06, but revisiting it, I cropped it square and now enjoy it's near abstraction.

Wise DJs bring at least one opening act. The birthday boy picked the fella above, which was a wise choice. 1/6 handheld, which was quite reasonable with a tiny focal length P&S.

As above with different lights on. I really liked this one in '06. I still do.

The party got kind of wild.

Birthday DJ reacting to a request to play ...not house music.

This was a meter malfunction. Notice my photo tag. This is an image I did not re-edit.

A case where motion blur actually improves the image. 1/15th handheld.

0.4" handheld. I have no idea. It looks neat.

1 second handheld. I braced my back against the wall of the club and held my breath.

The answer is still "no" even if you play with your hair.

Sneak peak for next time. This is a project that's going to take the last half of forever.

*dsavitsk* · May 25

9 minutes ago, Knuckledragger said:

I turned off auto-renewal for that domain last week. Soon it will redirect a gambling site, I'm sure.

Last year I sold a domain I had for 20 years or so. It quickly became into a crypto site, but has now turned into an AI site.

*Knuckledragger* · Sunday at 06:21 PM

In 1996, a then 19 year old woman founded "Haven" a goth night hosted at Club Metro in Northampton MA. I was there in the first year. I still have a flyer from a 1997 event ...somewhere. Club Metro became Diva's at some point, and was the biggest gay nightclub in the area. Space-wise it was the biggest nightclub period. In 2006, Haven celebrated their 10th anniversary and it was insane. I have alluded to the fact that I have taken a fair amount of shit for the nightclub photos I took in the mid 00s. This got stuck in my craw and I (as I am wont to due) overrated a bit. There's a lot to unpack here and most of it is, to be frank, fucking irrelevant. The bottom line is that a lot of freaky shit happened at goth night, I gleefully took photos of it and posted them online. I got rather puritanical reactions from a number of people in the local nightclub scene, earning me a reputation as some kind of leering pervert. In the fall of 2007, I made ~1500 photos private because I was tired of hearing about it. As I have said before my edits to many of the photos I took were crap, primarily because I thought it was a good idea to crop in super close, with zero regard to aspect ratio and framing. Bad editing definitely made the situation worse. Now with nearly two decades of reflection, I've concluded that yes many of the photos were without merit, the reaction against them was primarily from assholes, and I am remarkably bad at not taking things personally. With that said, here's Haven's 10th anniversary. There will be some titty. When I get to a later photo set from Haven, there will be a lot of titty. You have been warned.

Diva's had remarkably crap lighting. They had a bunch of flat mirror scanners set to "synchronized spaz" and two 1000W strobes that went off irregularly. The combination made for the worst imaginable source for available light photography. This shot is 1 second with the camera placed on a railing. I should add that all of these photos are ISO50, because at this point I didn't know how to adjust the ISO setting on my PowerShot(!)

See the woman in the far left? In '06 I cropped the image to just be here ...resulting in something that would barely be a thumbnail today. She's still the subject of the image, now she just has some context.

This is The Enigma. He's a heavily body modified performer. He's actually quite a showman. The goths ate up his schtick.

He hammered a nail up one of his nostrils.

He ran a drill up the other one.

He blasted himself in the face with an angle grinder.

He pumped a bottle of what he said was Windex up his nose.

People went back to dancing.

This guy is not the founder of Haven, but he was the main DJ for many years. He's like 6'5 and rail thin. I used to call him "The Alpha Goth." I know him a bit. He's dedicated to his craft, but we have some ...philosophical and creative differences.

The two main people behind Haven. They had a falling out as some point. This photo is absolutely terrible from a technical perspective, but documents the moment in time.