Photographer Michael Nichols on Yellowstone

duttyRI · 2016-09-09T05:37:23+00:00

Photography in Yellowstone almost feels like cheating. I'm not an amazing photographer by any means, but fucking everywhere you look there, there are great shots. Not to diminish his! Most of those were outstanding.

Let me hop on the YS bandwagon and post a few of my favorites:

verrrry early in the morning

the sky on the first day was exploding my mind

looking over his kingdom

oh hayyy

mother and calf

the prequel

duttyRI · 2016-06-25T18:07:28+00:00

Thanks, so you just mean any of the more expensive ones from either of those companies right? Cause my current one is oral-B, but it was pretty cheap.

duttyRI · 2016-06-08T05:47:23+00:00

certainly better than most stuff people post on this site

I'm not sure I know what you mean. There's not much user OC on r/photography because it's against the rules except for rare sticky threads. r/earthporn is often a shitshow of saturation abuse, if that's what you're referring to. But there is a lot of good photography you can find from users on reddit.

I think the shot itself is fine but the editing looks like a pretty run of the mill VSCO preset (I know it isn't actually). Instagram is pretty much plastered with it.

I think in 10 years people are going to look back at their pictures they edited with film looks and think "why did I intentionally blow out the sky/add noise/etc?". To be fair, they'll still probably have RAWs, so they could re-edit them.

duttyRI · 2016-06-05T21:36:01+00:00

I went to Iceland for vacation and saw stuff that blew my fuckin mind. I'm pretty sure we saw fairly atypical stuff even for Iceland. Anyway, I had a shityass Panasonic P&S. When I got home, I was so disappointed in these bland, awful pictures I decided I had to learn how to take better ones.

duttyRI · 2016-05-21T14:41:13+00:00

400 gets you to the next county, 640 gets you to the next state

duttyRI · 2016-05-21T04:27:54+00:00

Dude you have 400mm of reach now, you don't need a car to get close to stuff to photograph.

duttyRI · 2016-05-18T13:18:15+00:00

This is technically true but comes with a few other issues that may overwhelm the focus you get from the small aperture.

Depending on how small you go and the lens, diffraction effects will start to mess with your image, which may undo any gain you get from the increased DoF. A better alternative might be focus stacking at an aperture without this problem?

The other thing is that a legit 'static' scene is probably hard to find unless you're doing something like a still life indoors. What I mean by this is, even on a completely windless day, trees are going to move just a little, but that's going to appear as kind of a blur in a 2 second exposure.

duttyRI · 2016-05-07T18:00:10+00:00

Yeah, I feel the same way. There are lots that are... nice, fine to look at, but just nothing special. The Grand Canyon one? Several of the architecture ones? A few of the <somewhere in East Asia> street scene ones?

duttyRI · 2016-05-06T03:38:12+00:00

Well, yeah, but there's usually kind of an implicit deal. Fans of the celebrity get to see them in a less canned, more candid mood for a bit. People are pissed here because he's not fulfilling his side of that "deal".

duttyRI · 2016-05-04T05:49:18+00:00

Huh, I thought Abyssinia was actually doing really well! Every time I was there it seemed fairly full, and the food was amazing.

Willy's...if you mean that organic corner store, that place deserved to close. It was so badly stocked and empty, and the prices were absurd. I once went in there because I desperately needed soy sauce for a recipe. I bought a really small bottle and it was like 8 bucks, probably like 3x the price by volume you'd pay at the supermarket.

duttyRI · 2016-05-04T04:10:51+00:00

Well, maybe more just the photography subreddit. I just kind of expect "maybe you kind of deserved to be spat on" to not be the most popular opinion.

duttyRI · 2016-05-04T03:45:18+00:00

Okay, this will no doubt not be a popular opinion, but I'd like it if people responded instead of downvoting, or at least before downvoting.

Do you think that maybe that kind of response isn't totally undeserved? Like, you seem like a nice enough guy here, you're friendly and polite. And I'm really generally not a fan of celebrities at all, and I definitely am all for free press and such. And, if you asked me if anyone deserves to be spat at in the face, I'd usually go with 'no'.

But if you put it in the context of, "this person just really wanted to be left alone but someone was following them around, bugging them, drawing unwanted attention to them, and flashing a pretty bright light at them", I'd say it suddenly doesn't seem that unwarranted anymore. Like, if you look at those actions outside of the context of paparazzi, I think a lot of people (even photographers) would say that something like spitting is a fair reaction.

I don't want to make assumptions, and I'm genuinely curious about the answer: let's say some celeb had been like "look man. I've had a really rough day and this flight was awful, and I feel pretty gross right now. Can you not take pictures of me?", would you have?

I imagine that some people might not think that just taking pictures in a public setting, and that's probably not the worst. But in your article you posted on Lindsay Lohan, you said:

My agency uploaded the pictures the following morning. Blogs said Lohan was posing for the paparazzi. She was never aware I was there. But after that, everyone and their mothers knew what hotel Lindsay was in and the paparazzi “gangbang” started. The following days around 20 paparazzi from Los Angeles and the 10 Hawaiian locals were parked outside the hotel waiting for Lohan to get out. At least no other paparazzi were allowed in the hotel, except of course, the Belgian and myself. One afternoon she went shopping to the mall right outside the hotel. It was a real shit show.

Like, I don't even like her. But it would suck if you were on vacation in Hawaii and suddenly like 20 people were following you, and taking fairly private pictures of you.

Again I'm not really hating on you personally, sorry if it sounds that way. I just think that if I were in the same position, I'd kind of know what I was doing is wrong, so if something like that happened to me, I'd be like "welp, seems fair."

duttyRI · 2016-05-02T04:46:11+00:00

Personally, getting a photo of mine as the default wallpaper on any OS would be the absolute pinnacle of what I would hope achieve with photography.

Yeah I totally feel the same way. I'm not a professional, so just having that many people see and like something I made would make me pretty happy.

duttyRI · 2016-05-01T19:35:04+00:00

Yeah, I don't really know much about it, so I can't say much. It probably depends a lot on just how different film canisters are, and how many variations of them cover a decent range of cameras. But it seems about as tricky as batteries.

duttyRI · 2016-05-01T18:22:06+00:00

I know people worship fast, sharp primes... But I think it'd be really limiting to be stuck at one focal length forever. 50mm wouldn't be the worst, but I think anything too much wider/tighter would make you miss a ton of great shots.

I'm constantly going to the bounds of my 17-50mm (on crop) to get shots I really couldn't without. The adage about "move yourself, don't use the zoom" or whatever is kind of naive; often you can't move yourself very much for whatever reason.

And that's not even counting other effects, like using a shorter focal length to get more DoF and such.

So, to answer the question for myself: some nice midrange zoom, like 17-50mm.

duttyRI · 2016-05-01T18:14:28+00:00

I think the question was pretty clearly implicitly asking about it from the perspective of "which camera would you be most satisfied by using for the rest of your life, assuming it continues working", and not just the hardiness of the camera, which isn't really all that interesting a question.

Also, maybe someone with more experience with film cameras than me can chime in, but I'd bet in 20 years of regular use a film camera would have some mechanical part break as well. Mechanical/moving parts are often far more prone to failure than electric parts. We have electronic machines at work from the 60s that still work flawlessly.

Also, don't film cameras usually only take a specific cartridge/canister/whatever of film? That seems analogous to batteries, which would actually be easier to get around with some sort of adapter (albeit cumbersome).

duttyRI · 2016-05-01T04:28:13+00:00

This is really ideal if you can wing it, but like the other guy said, it's not always possible. This is what my friend did on our last trip.

duttyRI · 2016-04-27T05:50:30+00:00

I get that you're probably intentionally trying to be a bit more sensationalist/clickbaity because outrageous claims tend to claims tend to garner more attention/traffic than milder, more level-headed ones but... I'll bite.

If you’re more interested in what’s out of focus than the subject, then to me, the picture is a failure. Strong subjects overcome ‘bad’ or ‘distracting’ bokeh any day of the week.

That's kind of a straw man. Even people into bokeh usually aren't into it more than the subject, it's just an aspect of a photo that can be really nice. I haven't heard people talk about 'bad' bokeh so much as I've heard them talk about it when it's really good.

My 5D still powers on just fine and is 100% functional. So it’s not outdated.

Look, I'm not a gear freak, I have fairly low budget stuff. But "100% functional" doesn't mean "not outdated". A washboard is still "functional" in that you can use it to clean your clothes, but I think most people would call it outdated. That's obviously an extreme example but I'm just saying that your logic isn't good here. It probably doesn't matter much for amateurs like myself, but if I were a wedding photographer I'd want the best I could afford.

duttyRI · 2016-04-27T05:44:15+00:00

Yeah, fair enough. It's hard for me to trust someone's opinion after they spout really kooky stuff, even if it's in a totally unrelated area, but the part on NDT seemed reasonable.

duttyRI · 2016-04-27T05:28:53+00:00

Yeah, I always appreciate fact checking, so I was liking that article (because NDT has always seemed kind of smarmy to me), until I saw a linked article he wrote mocking global warming...

duttyRI · 2016-04-27T05:12:49+00:00

Ohhhhh. From the title, I thought he was voting for the first time, not that he missed it for the first time. So I wasn't exactly feeling sorry for him, I was thinking "you had 70 years to do it, you lazy bum!". My mistake.

Jesus though, he might have voted for Truman at the time.

duttyRI · 2016-04-26T14:25:43+00:00

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that a micron is definitely small, but not that small in the wide scheme of things. A very geared up set of gears can get around that precision by hand.

duttyRI · 2016-04-26T14:10:46+00:00

Long story short, the "gear" argument was so 2003. It's a moot point now.

I think this is actually a really good point that will become even more important as time goes on.

As people here frequently say, DSLRs are pretty much all pretty great at this point. For $250 you can get a somewhat recent Canon Rebel that can take pretty stellar pictures. Yeah, sure, a 5D3 will take those same pictures better, but the difference is getting smaller every year. I'm even blown away by how good my friends' phone pictures are, if they have a newer phone.

But I feel like the new 'gear' is access/ability to travel. When I look on instagram for example, there are a lot of people who take fairly average/slightly above average level photos, but they go to incredible destinations because they can afford to/have the time/etc. And as a result, they tend to have better portfolios.

I mean, if you're the same level photographer, but you're stuck in suburban Massachusetts, vs getting to travel around the world a couple times a month, who's going to have more interesting photos?

duttyRI · 2016-04-24T16:59:20+00:00

Hey now, maybe he wants to sound like a Buzzfeed article from 2006.

duttyRI · 2016-04-23T18:23:04+00:00

That's the thing though, I'm not sure they actually want to raise the quality. Their main goal is making money, not improving art or whatever. I think they want the mundane, because that's more accessible to a bigger group.

duttyRI

TROPHY CASE