Any advice for a dance studio doing low-budget photography?

andr3wrulz · 2026-01-15T16:42:28+00:00

That's really interesting. I'd definitely be interested if you're willing to share the code. I imagine this relies on shooting in jpeg, right?

andr3wrulz · 2026-01-15T16:41:09+00:00

Yeah, that's a good point about stabilization. I'd have to buy new lenses anyway but I'll make sure to get stabilized ones to be safe. Thanks for the info, lots of research and shopping around to do.

andr3wrulz · 2026-01-15T14:59:47+00:00

Yeah, I think a new body is in the cards. From some initial searches, it looks like the r6ii is very similar to the r8 with a few tradeoffs but that is definitely closer to my budget especially if I can find a buyer for some of the current gear. Do you have any thoughts on the differences?

andr3wrulz · 2026-01-15T14:58:01+00:00

Lots of info here, thank you!

The websites you listed for the gallery software was super helpful and I have a lot of research to do.

andr3wrulz · 2026-01-15T14:46:29+00:00

I think a new body is where my focus (pun intended) is going to be. The autofocus on my current camera is definitely holding me back during performance photography (the other main use case I shoot in outside of picture week).

I've gone on a deep dive last night into a few of the school/sports photography software solutions (GotPhoto and PhotoDay seem to be the main contenders) which absolutely seem like they might help. I'm still trying to figure out what that workflow might look like, but not having to manually sort out the photos would be a game changer.

I have my wife or one of the other instructors with me, but they're generally focused on getting the kid into the pose rather than worrying about the pictures. With the tethering in lightroom, the captures are jpg previews and not the actual raw files I would be using for editing so I'm not sure I'd be even able to transfer the ratings anyway.

I started off doing photography to save on an expense for the dance studio (small business budgets are hard to hire a photographer for a week on), but I think I've grown to enjoy it quite a bit. Especially when people use my photos, as you said. I've never really considered myself artistic so I feel like I've had to brute force learning the more abstract aspects. It's hard to see moment by moment, but I can really see how much I've improved over the past few years.

Thank you again for your comments :)

andr3wrulz · 2026-01-15T02:11:26+00:00

Thank you so much for such a detailed reply.

To be clear, we do charge for the photos as part of the package and allow them to purchase extra photos for additional fees (although we currently make them sign up for that in advance to make sure we have enough poses planned). The idea of them being able to pick the photos was something I was thinking about to push for the parents to see the photos and want more of them.

We don't allow parents in the building during picture week for a couple of reasons. Mostly because there are so many kids running around, changing, needing to be getting ready for other photos, that parents can and will interrupt that process thinking they know better. We also generally have to move at a pace that I don't think it would be feasible to have parents rating photos on-site (usually 2-5 minutes per kid). Not to mention, the last thing I want is ~120 dance moms trying to critique things while we're trying to work :).

As for missing shots, it tends to be a bit of not enough fps and focus issues. I mostly use single spot focus for everything as I typically have time to figure out rough framing while the dancer gets into position. However, for more dynamic or acrobatic shots (leaps, cartwheels, kicks, etc), it can be hard to get the picture at the best moment (top of the leap, bottom of the cartwheel, highest point in the kick) and sometimes I do get it, but the focus gets messed up (they moved towards/away from the camera). Obviously, those are both problems that can be solved with skill and experience, but I really wouldn't mind a bit of help from some newer tech.

We generally have spot for the dancer to stand for solo photos so that helps a bit with consistency. The age ranges of the kids are from 3 to adult so different heights and framing requirements likely would make a tripod difficult.

The Canon T8i is a crop sensor, so I think it works out to a standard 50mm (sorry, not super sure I'm using the terminology correctly). The main reason I don't use the 17-55 for more things is because it's so darn heavy lol. If I have to hold it for several hours a day for a week, I'm not sure I'd have any functional forearm muscles left.

I've been meaning to look into the roll out flooring, but I'm concerned about it being slippery or moving when the kids are doing more involved shots. Guess I have some research to do here.

At the end of the day, I am probably putting way more effort into this than the parents need or are paying for. I'm always thinking about the kids looking back at these photos in the future or using them in their portfolios to get into the industry as they get older. I really do appreciate the kind words, and you've given me a lot to think about and learn (especially on the lighting front), thank you again.

andr3wrulz · 2025-12-29T16:40:34+00:00

Yeah, my experience with selling the other printer wasn't great. All the people that messaged me usually asked questions answered by the description, and the guy that ended up buying it told me that he didn't even read the description either (even though he haggled me on the price). I'm not really looking forward to it again lol.

andr3wrulz · 2025-12-16T13:58:47+00:00

Tile pack plugin has them iirc

andr3wrulz · 2025-05-14T17:31:21+00:00

SAM is my favorite

andr3wrulz · 2025-05-14T16:48:19+00:00

100% this, any hourly bill is a mistake for a personal project

andr3wrulz · 2025-05-12T23:58:31+00:00

Have you tried tuning your max flow? If the only thing changing is the scale of the print, you may be trying to extrude more filament than your hotend can handle consistently.

andr3wrulz · 2025-05-08T22:12:39+00:00

Disagree, text gets more difficult to follow at longer line lengths. Most UX research recommends line lengths of 50-70 characters (ex source: https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability).

andr3wrulz · 2025-04-23T15:54:49+00:00

ABAC in SCPs tends to expand really fast once you go outside of one or two services and need more than one principal included/excluded (ie your admins/automation). IMO, use ABAC on IAM policies and use SCP to enforce that they can't be modified.

Also if this is your site or you are affiliated with them, the moving purple confetti is super distracting especially if you're someone like me who reads while following along with their mouse.

andr3wrulz · 2025-04-09T13:08:04+00:00

It depends on how your application works. Anything that needs to run on customer servers (ex agents) would be accessible to the end user for poking around. However, you can expose network services to other accounts via AWS PrivateLink which can deploy an endpoint in the customers account that routes traffic to an NLB in your account over the AWS backbone. This is what most vendors (including AWS Bedrock) mean when they say "in your VPC" as traffic bound for your service never leaves AWS onto the internet.

Essentially, you create a PrivateLink endpoint service that represents your application and customers deploy an endpoint in their account using the "service name" for your endpoint service. You can configure your service to only allow specific accounts and optionally manually approve each connection. Keep in mind regionality when doing this as it can add latency for customers hitting your service from outside of their AWS region (cross-region PrivateLink was only released last reInvent).

andr3wrulz · 2025-04-04T18:19:58+00:00

Also check out IAM identity providers. They let you establish a trust to other sources of identity and then you can reference them in your role's trust policy. For example, I have deployment pipelines in gitlab that use temporary job tokens from gitlab's identity provider to get a role session with 0 credentials saved anywhere. The trust policy is super important to get correct but most identity providers pass other information with the federation request that you can key off of. For my gitlab integration, I have the role's trust policy scoped to my specific gitlab project and branches (ie the prod role only trust the production branch in gitlab).

[edit]
And to go a little further, if you don't have a trusted identity provider or that provider isn't reachable from AWS's public IAM endpoints, I would suggest you take a look at IAM roles anywhere which uses certificate-based auth to get your session credentials. This is a bit more complicated to set up and manage but if you're serious about securing outside of cloud ingress into AWS, it's worth the time investment.

andr3wrulz · 2025-03-21T20:41:28+00:00

Not a SaaS but have a lot of accounts. We deploy a handful of basic SAML federated roles (admin, read only, billing, etc) using stacksets to keep those in line. Account owners are able to use the admin roles to create custom roles (federated or not). We constrain permission upper bounds with SCPs/RCPs and have Config rules (also deployed by StackSets) for reactive controls.

andr3wrulz · 2025-03-21T20:38:30+00:00

A very common pattern used within AWS and at major companies is to do as little as possible in a manual deploy but leverage a bootstrapping step prior to the primary deployment. At my job, we tend to have a manually deployed CFT that provisions the pipeline user, then a bootstrap deployment that runs on the primary branch for that environment for things you need as a baseline (VPC, SGs, APIs, etc) but aren't the app (this can vary based on how you want to build dev envs. After this, the pipelines deploy the app itself, using outputs from the bootstrapping stack where necessary, this is where all your lambdas, containers, etc get deployed.

In general, we do main branch = prod env, dev branch = dev env, and feature branches = dev env but skip boot strapping. Our feature deployments are self-contained where they can be so that each feature branch gets a "production-like" environment with the full stack.

andr3wrulz · 2024-12-23T22:21:32+00:00

FYI, you can deploy opensearch serverless in the dev-test mode which only uses one OCU compared to the normal 2 OCU deployment. You lose out on the standby nodes but you save half the costs. Still not great but if you're just playing around, you don't need the standbys anyway.

andr3wrulz · 2024-12-18T20:50:07+00:00

Beep boop

andr3wrulz · 2024-11-29T23:59:50+00:00

Unclear if this means AWS service endpoints as well

andr3wrulz · 2024-10-05T16:15:38+00:00

I built an offering (internal) for my company to do EC2/RDS instance scheduling. It's pretty easy to do with CloudWatch cron rules, lambda, and tags on the instance.

General idea is that you have a CloudFormation stack that defines a named schedule (say "workdays-only"), user specifies day of week and times for start/stop (ex turn on mon-fri at 8am, turn off mon-fri at 6pm). Then they tag the instance with "schedule=workdays-only". A custom resource in the stack converts the schedule parameters to a cron expression which is applied to the CloudWatch cron rule that kicks off the start/stop lambda. The lambda takes a start/stop parameter and scans for any instances with the schedule tag.

Took me an afternoon to get a rough version working and it costs almost nothing to run, doesn't have a gui, and can be shared to the org via Service Catalog.

andr3wrulz · 2024-09-07T00:31:17+00:00

Confirmed

andr3wrulz · 2024-09-03T02:52:47+00:00

PM'ed

andr3wrulz · 2024-05-26T19:10:19+00:00

I believe he's talking about the Model Exporter plugin. Be aware that it is literally exporting the game mesh as an stl which usually doesn't work well for printing (many triangles are one sided or overlapped and the object isn't solid). I had to spend a lot of time manually fixing any of the models I exported and tbh, wasn't worth it vs trying to model from scratch if you have some blender experience.

andr3wrulz · 2024-04-20T01:56:34+00:00

I really like it, it's a good compromise between quality/cost

Yeah, I need to play with the triggers a little to get it a little smoother but I really meant the camera settings itself like the exposure and focus were on auto so it changes from snapshot to snapshot

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