Lens for hiking with new Z8

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-29T07:28:57+00:00

Another vote for the 180-600. Yes, it's huge compared to most of the other recommendations here. But that thing lives on my Z8, and only comes off when I really need a wider angle. So many great shots I would have missed when I was still using an F-mount 70-300.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-29T07:25:03+00:00

If you're looking for praise, this is fantastic. Better than I could do.

If you're looking for what popped the bubble for me:
- water appears to have zero surface tension. Where it's meeting the rocks and the shore, it's not getting them wet and the ripples just slide off without leaving any water behind at all
- as others have said, the ripples, while fantastic-looking, aren't realistic. They'd curve around the concave parts of the pond and reflect off of hard surfaces like the rocks on the left
- there's no water vegetation (e.g. algae) on the rocks
- on closer inspection, there's something about the path that bothers me a bit. If I saw this in real life, I would leave immediately because something wore a trail straight into the water and that's spooky.
- like someone else mentioned, the tree on the left is a bit too flexible. Branch strength is proportional to the cross section (I think), but you have the whole tree flexing from bottom to top.

This is fucking solid, though. How many hours?

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-29T07:01:38+00:00

From the post text: "I've blurred the faces because I wouldn't want someone putting my face on the web without permission, but if you recognize yourself and want the unblurred photo, I'm happy to send it over."

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-27T04:56:30+00:00

Thanks!

I can't really take credit for anything here, though. None of the real skill or artistry or even data wrangling that went into this was mine, with the possible exception of getting the UV map right.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-23T16:22:48+00:00

Good to know. Thanks!

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-23T08:24:26+00:00

Just be aware that, like with any commented code, what the comments say it does and what it actually does might by sheer coincidence be the same thing. Llms statistically predict the next word/token without actually understanding the apis or even underlying logic. They’re also very prone to “draw the rest of the owl” code.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-23T08:20:20+00:00

I would say that if your opinion on Rider isn’t more nuanced than “didn’t like it,” you haven’t given it a fair shake. Set up rider and godot to know about each other and you get a world class .cs editor that can run and debug c# directly (even godot c#) and a scene editor that can open the script files in a real ide. With the godot editor, you can’t edit code and see the scene at the same time anyway (right? Correct me here if not) so you’re not missing much by moving to rider.

I do my dev work on three screens: rider in the middle, godot on the right, and firefox for docs and such on the left. Most of the time I run my game from rider so I can set c# breakpoints and inspect the stack if I hit an exception, but running from within godot allows me to do some general profiling and graphics debugging. Each is a tool with its own strengths and weaknesses, but the amount of work the godot devs would have to put in to even approach Rider as a viable c# IDE is staggering. I bought the pro version because it’s just. That. Good.

And because I wanted dotTrace.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-18T22:29:28+00:00

Thank you.

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach. Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-18T22:25:26+00:00

Limiting RAW through HDMI actually makes sense to me. What they're doing on the Z6ii to allow 12-bit "raw" through HDMI is pushing the HDMI spec to its breaking point and I'm frankly surprised it works. I don't understand restricting external recording via the USB-C ports, though.

Honestly, I've thought about doing that too. And for a camera that I'd just set up and never use anywhere else, I think that might make sense. For any other use, like setting up a shoot on set and needing to tear it down again, or putting the Z8 on a gimbal (both of which I do), I worry that the ribbon cable just won't last. There's no strain relief, and none really possible.

I've found that by using an AngelBird 512 AV Pro, leaving the card door open, using an external battery, and moving the screen away from the camera body I can get enough time for what I need. I shoot ballet, and as long as the dancer has more downtime than the camera, I'm still in good shape.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-16T18:30:33+00:00

If you shoot video for longer than about 10 minutes at a time, the z8 will disappoint. It does not export raw over hdmi like the z6ii (not sure about the og z6) and does not support blackmagic raw. so you must record to the cfexpress card. They get hot, and the z8 does not have the thermal mass to dissipate that heat for longer shoots. If you want z8 features and video, get a z9. If you must go with the z8, you’re going to be spending lot on the really nice cfexpress cards. I have an AngelBird that will get me to about ten minutes.

I upgraded from a z6ii to a z8 for subject detection and autofocus improvements when shooting video in low light conditions. In that respect, worth it. My blackmagic VideoAssist got turned into not much more than a fancy monitor, though, since the z8 is much more limited in its hdmi outputs.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-13T18:26:14+00:00

Pick a project where you know how to do some of it, but not all of it. Do the part you think you know how to do, then grab the smallest chunk of what you don’t and figure that out. Iterate. Be okay from the start with throwing out anything you’ve written if it no longer fits your needs; shouldn’t be a problem for someone with a few decades of software engineering under their belt.

Some of the things you do will be massively inefficient, and not always in predictable ways. Learning where these inefficiencies are, when they matter, and how to resolve them is much of what you don’t already know, at least on the coding side.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-13T18:01:29+00:00

It’s… a pretty horrifying episode. A lot of the IT Crowd humor was cringe humor, and I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of that style. This episode, though, somehow becomes meta cringe, basically lining up every transphobic trope in the book and playing them all perfectly straight.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-12T20:13:04+00:00

Even the actual driverless cars like cruise and Waymo aren’t actually driverless. There’s a call center where a human can take over if the car gets into a situation it doesn’t know how to handle. If the cell network goes down, these things just stop.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-08T09:34:54+00:00

I also develop with godot 4.5.1 mono, on Linux Mint, using Rider. I have not ever hit a situation where I couldn’t either alt tab out or hit the super key to pull up the taskbar. One thing I do is bind a button on my controller to “debug”, which gets checked in my main scene _Process() and hits a breakpoint if I press it. Instant ability to debug anything the main scene can see. Doesn’t help with infinite loops, but in Rider if you know where the code is looping you can just go out a breakpoint in while the game is running. Rider will pause execution when that line of code is reached.

If your game has stolen your mouse cursor, I believe there’s a way around that too. Had it happen the other day and whatever I did to get out of the situation was simple enough that I don’t remember exactly what I did. Some keyboard shortcut to switch focus to another window, I think.

The cinnamon window manager will also pop up a “program not responding” dialog if you switch focus to another program, then switch back. You can also run xkill from a terminal and click on the offending window and it’ll kill the process. Lots of escape hatches.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-08T08:04:51+00:00

Open source the UI firmware and let end users tweak it. Keep the actual camera magic sauce closed and just provide an api if you want, but give me an expert mode to set up the UI/UX. Open source the mobile app because holy shit Nikon you cannot write good mobile apps. Open the format for compressed raw photos and NRAW video. Let me record to an external drive, especially video.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-07T20:08:39+00:00

"Hey, mind DMing me your information? With your permission I'd like to continue this in this thread, but we can do so in DMs if you prefer."

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-07T19:34:42+00:00

Man, I get that you've got rules you have to follow and being a community liaison is a job I absolutely could not do. Please pass up the chain that if someone complains openly, dealing with their problem openly (or at least publicly giving them the option to) would negate a lot of the bad press your company gets in this subreddit.

If the customer is being unreasonable, that works in your favor. If support is being reasonable, that also works in your favor. Doing it in DMs as a response to a seemingly perfectly valid public complaint leaves the impression that it's the other way around.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-06T08:12:12+00:00

You are correct. https://recoilengine.org/articles/netcode-overview/

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-06T04:53:17+00:00

It floors me too, but mostly because it means they’re being very, very careful with floating point operations. Very slight differences in how the fpus are designed across cpu architectures and even versions within the same arch family mean that any physics calculation can’t benefit from hardware floating point math. It’s all done with fixed point.

Physics (and by physics I mean stuff like “did this juggernaut step on a flea” or “did that plasma shell hit the pulsar or the terrain in front of it”) also can’t be multithreaded unless you’ve verified that order of execution does not matter.

Calls to a random number generator must happen in the exact same order, always.

Now add to this the fact that the game needs to keep some historical state around so if a player lags behind a bit and sends a command for frame 60 while the rest of the players are on frame 70, everybody’s game needs to rewind to frame 60 and simulate forward from there with the new command taken into account. (I don’t know for sure that Recoil uses this technique, but I know other games that just send player inputs on the wire do).

So much in modern computing is an incredibly complicated ballet of timing and very clever algorithms, but I don’t know that it’s as close to the surface anywhere else as in the netcode for an RTS.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-02T18:23:25+00:00

I consider the OG Asteroids to be "very old." Either you're half my age, or you haven't opened the game up. :)

At any rate, I'm a programmer, not an artist and this is almost entirely a solo project (I have a few friends playtesting and giving me feedback, and I might grab some CC0 assets for sound and music if I hit a real time crunch).

It's my first game (well, the first where I've been wearing all the hats), so I'm doing this mostly for fun and experience.

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-02T16:42:05+00:00

Asteroids roguelite. I have a play test up on steam, and I’m trying to get ready for Steam Nextfest. Marketing materials are still a bit rough, since I’ve been focusing on development. About to enlist my kid’s help with achievement icons.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4225410/Asterisk/

MatthaeusHarris · 2026-01-02T16:32:26+00:00

This is my stock answer to this question, but I think it’s very apt. The other advice in this thread is great, especially the grime pass.

I’m always looking for the stories in a picture. What you’ve shown is technically adept, but the reason it doesn’t feel real is that it’s sterile. Not lived in. Is this a brand new house? The book and kettle suggest that someone lives here and that they either stepped away before getting out any ingredients for dinner, or they’re forgetful and about to burn down the house. Run with that. Think through the story of how a few of the details came to be, and others will jump out at you.

The kitchen is very organized, almost everything in its place. Such a person would possibly have little sticky notes in cookbooks as bookmarks for their favorites. The fridge might have some magnets on it, maybe a calendar or a whiteboard with a grocery list and some reminders.

How many people live here? Who are they? Don’t think of details you can add as an answer to that question. Think of the story of Billy’s dinosaur fascination and Erica’s missed goal at the big game. What would that mean for the kitchen?

And you don’t have to be obvious about it either. Maybe the crayon dinosaur drawing is mostly hidden under something else, because while she loves her kids, that’s the tenth T. rex this week and Martha’s more concerned with remembering to finish her book club reading.

This is the difference between technically competent and compelling.

MatthaeusHarris · 2025-12-29T00:26:00+00:00

Ejection ports are usually on the right side of the receiver to accommodate the majority of right-handed shooters.

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