The Official Head-Case Photography Thread.

[blessingx]

Kinda interesting to compare size of the full frame Sony RX1R III f/2 and the $200 cheaper medium format Fuji GFX100 RF f/4.

[n_maher]

Work has been continuing to use photos that I’ve been shooting for publicity and Congressional communication so I decided that rather than keep shooting with my personal camera that it was high time to request a replacement.  They asked what I wanted so I spec’d the following:

1. Body - Sony A7R5 - I’ve gotten used to the Sony ecosystem through my A7IV and figured what the heck, might as well have all the megapixels.  I don’t need 120FPS so the A9 series was not compelling and while it would have been fun to shoot with an A1II budget was somewhat of a consideration.

2. Lenses - I’ll continue to shoot my A7IV with it’s 24-240mm so figured I should cover an expanded range with this rig and be able to shoot high(er) quality.  So a 24-70mm F2.8 GMII and a 100-4000mm F4.5/5.6 coupled with a 2x teleconverter round out the bag.  

I’ve got the whole shebang with me on vacation to get used to the platform and find its limits (me) but sheesh, 60MP is a lot to work with.  Initial impression is that it’s all very similar to the A7 but doesn’t shoot low light as well.  That won’t be much of a concern at work and if/when night time becomes the right time I’ll switch back to my A7 for those situations.  The 100-400 has as lot of pull and with the 2x, it’s pretty absurd. 

That was lightly touched in LR and just a quick handheld at sunset.  I’ll have to contribute more to the HC coffers if I start pushing up 40MB drink photos.  And 12,800 starts to get a bit noisy so I’ve reduced the max ISO to 3200 for now to see what I can still grab.

And [EDIT] seems like the forum software intelligently down-sampled that image to a more manageable 5MB.

 

It is wild what you can do for fun crops with this much real estate.

[blessingx]

Congrats and nice shots! Curious how the low light noise would compare if you shot the A7R5 in 26MP or 15 modes (or even downsampled the 60MP to 24)? 

Edited July 21 by blessingx

[blessingx]

Iiu Susiraja’s Self-Portraits Are More Than a Dare 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/iiu-susirajas-self-portraits-are-more-than-a-dare

https://web.archive.org/web/20250721014944/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/iiu-susirajas-self-portraits-are-more-than-a-dare?mbid=social_bluesky 

 

[n_maher]

12 hours ago, blessingx said:

Congrats and nice shots! Curious how the low light noise would compare if you shot the A7R5 in 26MP or 15 modes (or even downsampled the 60MP to 24)? 

I’ll have to tinker a bit more and see.  For now I’m just shooting native to see what comes straight out of the camera.  I’d love to have enough time to tinker with raw files but reality is that I don’t, so I try not to kid myself into taking them and then having to deal with the massive file bloat.  

Honestly, if they’d followed through with the A7IV this year like originally planned that probably would have been the camera of choice.  The A7IV has been game-changing for me.  It’s got all the resolution that I need, exceptional low-light capabilities, and was not hard to adapt to coming from Nikon.  This stuff is still mind-numbingly expensive but life has moved on to the point where it was not an impossible reach to pick one up. 

[Knuckledragger]

I used to have a friend from .ca who lived outside of the Toronto area.  His parents owned a BMW dealership, so I called him "The Torontonian Trustafarian."  TT for short.  He endured a good decade of "TT" jokes.  If we were still friends, he'd be extra annoyed with me today as all three TTArtisan lenses I bought during prime day arrived.  I made it a point to use all three.  I favored the 75mm F/1.5 the most, to the surprise of no one.  The 100mm F/2.8 Bubble Bokeh is odd and I need to use it more.  The 11mm F/2.8 Fisheye is neat, but I have no idea what I'm doing with a fisheye lens.

75mm, wide open.  This wood pile is my new favorite subject.

 

100mm wide open, I think.  The aperture ring is in an odd spot on all of the TTArtisan lenses and was not used to adjusting them.

 

My neighbors across the street are and old Vineyard family.  Mr. Norton died earlier this year at 93.  His family do a top not keeping up the farm.  They replaced half a dozen rails in their fence (which are expensive AF.)  I think I mentioned I have no blinkered idea what I'm doing with a fisheye.

[blessingx]

Character lens train. The LLL 50mm f/1.5 Z21 (Angenieux S21 recreation) arrived this afternoon. Only time for a few nearby shots (mostly at f/1.8) due to work, but might be fun. 

Edited July 24 by blessingx

[n_maher]

Still haven’t tinkered with downsampling or much else but nature is putting on a show this week.

[HiWire]

Too much money:
 

 

Edited Friday at 02:59 PM by HiWire

[Knuckledragger]

I'm voluntarily getting up at 8AM tomorrow (a Saturday) to take photos of Land Rovers. 

^ I wrote that last night and forgot to hit enter.  Also I think I managed like two hours of sleep last night.  With that said, I made it to the Vineyard Series LR meetup and took a ton of photos. 

Now replaced with a properly edited version.

More when I'm less tired.

Edited 14 hours ago by Knuckledragger

[n_maher]

@Knuckledragger - not kidding, I look forward to this post from you every year.  I'll likely never own an LR again due to price/performance/practicality reasons but a guy can dream, right?

[Voltron]

[blessingx]

The Quiet Melodrama of Todd Hido 

https://aperture.org/editorial/the-quiet-melodrama-of-todd-hidos-photographs/ 

 

[Voltron]

On 7/26/2025 at 11:37 AM, Knuckledragger said:

 

More when I'm less tired.

You must have been very, very tired...

[Knuckledragger]

In an earlier era, I was a regularl reader of The Online Photographer.  I haven't kept up with it in years, for a host of reasons ranging from lack of interest to not really gleaning much worthwhile info to entirely too many Amazon affiliate links.  One of the entries on TOP from 15+ years ago was "No one cares how hard you worked."  I took that one to heart.  I've spent ages editing a photo only to earn a collective shrug.  Conversely, I've had SOOC jpegs from years ago that get attention to this day.  With that in mind...

OnnnnOn two occasions recently I've had the hood on my 17-40mm misaligned and not realized it.  It's not super noticeable in the viewfinder and I don't chimp (stare at the LCD like a monkey) much.  The misaligned hood only shows up in super wide angle shots, say 17-20mm.  On Saturday, I had that problem for the entire shoot and didn't noticed until I was done.  I have had quite a job with the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush tools in Photoshop, painting out the upper left corner of dozens of photos.  When that doesn't work, I have to crop.  Sometimes, both are necessary.  Also, as was the case last year, the lighting conditions were harsh and difficult.  I'd already edited 30 or so photos in Photoshop before I decided I was unhappy with the results and ran them through Luminar 4.

Let's talk about Luminar for a moment.  I pirated it 5 or so years ago.  I liked it enough that I bought it.  It does a lot with pseudo HDR math, similarly to what smartphone cameras do.  The advantage Luminar offers is that it has sufficiently deep granularity in its controls that it's possible to reel in the more cartoonish aspects of HDR.  With careful tweaking, Luminar allows for improvement of the dynamic range of images without looking like Photomatix vomit ca. 2006 or Facebook family vacation photos.  L4 is no longer updated and in its final state is a quirky and buggy app.  I have to make a copy of every photo I feed it because if I use the original, L4 will delete it.  I learned this hard way and had to do serious work to replace all the originals Luminar deleted when I discovered this "feature."  The app dev Skylum is now pushing the successor, Luminar Neo.  They want it to be rentware like an Adobe product, but they don't have ADBE's clout.  There is a lifetime license.  I bought it on sale months ago for like $120.  I am ...underwhelmed.  Some of the UI is better than L4, but Neo is enough different that my workflow is much slower in it.  Also, said UI is basically a new coat of paint on the same old engine.  I find this displeasing.

So far I have edited 102 photos (ya rly) including in a number of cases several edits of the same image.  If you're really impatient, they're on my Flickr page.  It has been been uncharacteristically hot and humid here on the Vineyard, and I swear I can feel my brain swelling.  I went over my work earlier and found I had uploaded dupes of at least four different photos.  Then there's the issue of figuring out which photos to post here and arranging them.  It's exactly like a DJ set in that regard.  

Anyway, here's a nice bright rear end to tide y'all over while I finish editing

The truck.  I'm talking about the TRUCK.  Stop looking at me like that.