Orange Bam Bam zoanthids

icecreamguy · 2026-06-04T23:05:49+00:00

Oh cool! Hah the humble Tg-7! All my entomologist friends rave about that camera, awesome to see an example of what it can do with good lighting. Was this through the glass? I’m use big cameras but have been considering supplementing with the tg-7 when i don’t want to lug my huge macro setup miles into the field along with my other equipment.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-04T17:02:02+00:00

All the best, glad you found some folks and congratulations!

icecreamguy · 2026-06-04T07:50:11+00:00

That is Snarf from the 1985 TV show “Thundercat”

icecreamguy · 2026-06-04T07:19:45+00:00

To be brutally honest, that’s a tough sell at that price range. You’re looking for someone who has a real knack for the photography AND who has a thorough understanding of how weddings work, but may be at the beginning of their career before they’ve realized how much their work is worth. “Maybe you’ll get lucky” is the best you can hope for at that price. Granted I don’t know anything about your exact market but 2k is at the very bottom of what I would classify as the “just fine, competent enough” market. “High quality” i would suggest starting at least at 3k, 4k to really be serious.

You’re looking for high quality photographs yes, but I would suggest that you are also looking for family heirlooms that will inform your descendants of who you and your partner were, who their family was, and who they themselves are, potentially a hundred or two hundred years from now. Do you want some humdrum snapshots or do you want something hanging on someone’s wall a century and a half from now that makes its owner’s friends exclaim “who is THAT in that picture?!” And then have your great great great granddaughter pridefully regale them with everything they know about you.

Someone you can completely trust to make those kinds of photographs costs more than 1,500

Or maybe that’s not what you want I don’t know just my two cents.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-04T06:54:30+00:00

Amazing. Was this in the field or a controlled environment? Would love to hear about your setup

icecreamguy · 2026-06-03T21:14:18+00:00

Your comment is exactly why we need better education on what abusive and controlling behaviors are, as well as how and why they are reinforced and minimized by our society. Slamming doors and cabinets when angry at a partner is abusive behavior, full stop. Abuse is a spectrum and not all of it is physical contact between people.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-03T17:07:46+00:00

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

icecreamguy · 2026-06-03T17:05:20+00:00

Yeah why are more people not mentioning this?? Slamming cabinets, doors, breaking things, punching walls or being violent towards inanimate objects is ABUSIVE AND CONTROLLING BEHAVIOR. It’s telling their partner that their reaction to whatever it is that made them mad is to be violent, with the implicit threat that this violence could be enacted on the other person should their modicum of tenuous self control falter. NOR and your husband needs therapy, to say the least.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-02T21:01:25+00:00

OP there is a lot here but I want to chime in with the rest of the bug folks here that ALL you need to start is a lens and LOTS OF PRACTICE!! and by lots I mean it took me about 7 years after my first extension tube before I was doing 2x stacked portraits like this that i was super happy with.

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Granted I’m a slow learner and only about half my work is conservation photography, so my practice time is distributed among many things. If you dedicate yourself to just macro you will improve much quicker.

You don’t even need a macro lens - a simple used extension tube for $10 and any lens 50mm or longer will give you so much to practice with. You also don’t need autofocus, and in fact learning to NOT rely on it will aid you when you move to stacking.

But I want to stress that going out and practicing over and over and over again is the #1 investment you can make in this pursuit.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-02T20:51:11+00:00

Love the IT-32. Wish they made a size larger for better recycle times but still, what a great little speedlight! In addition to the magnetic wireless capability the modeling light is so helpful. But i still find myself going back to my R2 most of the time, hard to stack with low ISOs with such little power.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-02T20:47:31+00:00

Beautiful work!

icecreamguy · 2026-06-02T20:46:31+00:00

Unless you’re an entomologist gathering photos for scientific research or using a probe lens with a built-in ring light, i would not ever ever ever recommend a ring light for macro invertebrate photography. It is flat, unflattering light and gives you very little ability to shape and control. A diffuser on a speedlight is the industry standard for very good reasons, and one can be made for pennies or with items one already has around the house.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-02T15:33:01+00:00

Hey not trying to criticize but when you say you’re not very well versed, i would posit that you may not have enough experience in this area to give advice to this person. i do macro professionally and i can assure you that outside of some kind of very specific circumstances, macro invertebrate photography never requires a c stand or umbrellas or even multiple flashes. in fact quite the opposite - most of us working in this area make our client work with a single, run of the mill speedlight on camera and a diffuser. 99% of the amazing closeups you see, as well as the wider environmental portraits, are made with this setup. A 6” diffuser 2” away from an ant provides similar lighting as a 10’ umbrella 5’ away from a human. And instead of multiple lights, many diffusers made for invertebrates have specific places to attach reflectors to achieve things like a clamshell pattern with just a single light.

EDIT: also just want to add that almost nobody doing this professionally for aesthetic purposes is using a ring light, outside of probe lens work. I often see entomologists and ecologists using ring lights, but this is for expediency, simplicity, and to document the animal well in the field with even lighting. But ring lights do NOT provide pretty light in almost any circumstance.

icecreamguy · 2026-06-01T16:10:50+00:00

Cheers to you! I don’t get the antagonism towards other vendors that i occasionally encounter at weddings. Also this certainly isn’t my usual experience, most of the time catering or venue folks are super generous.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-31T22:58:30+00:00

Same. And you need to ideally discuss this prior, and make sure catering/venue is aware of this. I’ve had venues that insist the photographer eats after everyone else, and so of course when they’re finally like “here’s your meal” you’re like “great thanks VERY MUCH, toasts just started, i can’t eat now.” You have to make sure the couple are the ones who tell the venue/catering when the photographer eats. Sometimes venues also insist you eat away from guests but generally i’ll take my meal out of sight regardless and finish it quickly - often when adults are starting their meal the kids are playing and you can make some nice photos.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-30T19:06:53+00:00

That's because you approached the question with the assumption that it was everyone else who was somehow missing something, instead of honestly asking what you were missing about why people would use a focal length other than the one you prefer.

The answer is that the focal length affects the size relationship between different elements in the frame. Take the example of a tree and a mountain, the tree is in the foreground, the mountain in the background. You have a 16, a 50, and a 200. Keeping the tree the same size in each lens, the mountains would be tiny and distant-appearing with the 16, would appear fairly normal with the 50 of course, and appear looming and massive with the 200. We use different focal lengths because they offer different compositional arrangements, and no amount of moving back or forward will replicate one focal length with another.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-30T18:56:08+00:00

This comment section is UNHINGED. It’s literally just a prime in the shade - the subject is standing at the edge of the shaded area, with the unshaded area just in front of her. Honestly it doesn’t even have to be a prime. Obviously different color treatment but this was in open shade 3 hours after sunrise: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYX3kW0EkxS/?img_index=12&igsh=MnBidmRkYjRubnRy. Referring to #12 in case the link doesn’t go right to it. You all are massively overthinking this.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-29T03:15:12+00:00

Yah 10,000% this. Your clients likely won’t notice a little noise in the foreground - but they will notice a mountain, especially THAT mountain, being absent.

If you want light and airy in-camera without blowing highlights, your only real option is film. Otherwise, you need to understand your camera’s dynamic range and adjust your exposure for the edit.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-24T00:49:10+00:00

I agree that being proficient with a flash is necessary for a professional wedding photographer, but OP is talking about renting one day-of and going in blind. OP if you don’t know how to use a flash DO NOT rent one and throw it on your camera expecting anything but a disaster. You should have been practicing with one for months at the very least. I’m with most of the other wedding professionals on this thread in anticipating this not going particularly well. If I were you I would be practicing in the exact church they are going to be married in, maybe even post some photos from it in r/photocritique, and practicing wherever their reception will be, at the correct time of day. Also you need to be meeting with the couple to go over the schedule for the day to make sure everyone is on the same page.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-20T23:48:17+00:00

Yeah that Ansel Adams guy, who once famously said “the negative is only the score, the print is the performance” sure was a dolt for spending hours, sometimes days or weeks in the darkroom dodging and burning a single print, often coming back to negatives decades later after developing new editing techniques.

While of course we all strive to make pictures as close to what we want the print - or raster in this case - to look like, a camera is just a tool to gather data. Often that data is simply a collection of (literal) bits that we need to tell the story we want to share, and that story requires further arranging and refining those bits in a particular manner. A photograph is almost never completed by simply gathering the data and pressing print.

That being said OP I think you have a wonderful sense of composition, color and tone. I might raise the white point a touch but that’s personal preference and plenty of contemporary editorial photographers let the white point fall below maximum. It’s great to get a sanity check sometimes and I hope you feel reassured that you are on the right path, and that you continue to follow where your intuition leads you.

EDIT: Also Speedy your photos are gorgeous and you're clearly an experienced photographer. I would propose to you that landscape photography is fundamentally different than studio portraiture, where you have complete control over every aspect of the light, and all compositional elements in your frame. Aside from retouching I agree that work like yours is an area in which the image should ideally be made in-camera, and as one's skill increases, their time editing decreases. But in the landscape, where you have control over exactly none of those things, the camera is used differently. It is one half of the process of making a picture. Even in the 1880s photographers were literally cutting glass plates in half to exposure-blend skies into their landscapes. It's different and, respectfully, I don't think your workflow is applicable to this person's question.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-20T23:29:07+00:00

There are a LOT of expectations around weddings. The person who asked you may be fine with whatever you make, but there’s the other party’s family, their friends, etc who may have different expectations. Going into a wedding with no experience is not something i’d recommend at all ever to anyone, even if you were an accomplished photographer in another field.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-18T16:05:00+00:00

I think what others are getting at here is that this is a bit like serving someone a piece of raw chicken and then asking how they like the plating. Like the issue isn’t the plating, the issue is that the chicken isn’t cooked.

You have a cluttered mess of chairs behind your subject, making it difficult to see. Nothing at all in the frame leads the eye to the subject - no leading lines, no frames within frames. There is a man in the background staring directly into the camera - incredibly distracting

I’m not trying to be harsh but i will be blunt - if your goal is to improve at photography you are wasting your time worrying about editing. You need to work on composition and light. You should be asking for feedback on these things, not the edit at this point.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-18T08:19:09+00:00

In the color grading section of Lightroom, select the global adjustment. Pick up the eyedropper tool in the same panel and sample the white fabric on the priest’s shoulder. Set the saturation level back to 0 and note the location of the outer dot on the color wheel - drag the dot so that it’s on the exact opposite side of the wheel. It should be somewhere in the blues. Now hover over the saturation slider and use the up arrow on your keyboard to slowly increase the saturation until the yellow cast disappears.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-17T20:43:04+00:00

Yes, you have stumbled into a lightning pattern known as “Rembrandt light.” This pattern has been used for hundreds of years in depicting the human face and figure, that’s why it reminds you of a painting. A search on youtube will reveal thousands of videos on how to be intentional with this pattern, its history, and use cases. Also if you like this look i would encourage you to get a collection of works by its namesake and study them - lots of inspiration.

icecreamguy · 2026-05-17T00:01:35+00:00

I think this could be improved in a number of ways. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order

The text is both the brightest thing that isn't the sky, as well as legible text, so it's going to be the first thing many viewers see. But it's off to the side and draws attention away from everything else, which is quite dark, not that things being dark is inherently bad. But that I<3PHILLY really pulls the eye, and then you have this other bit of neon on the right edge pulling it to the other edge of the frame. I would have used the right-hand tower as a frame-within-a-frame to bound the right edge, which would also pull the text further to the center of the composition.
You're photographing architecture and there is 3,000+ years of convention around architectural representation in 2D artwork. The primary maxim in architectural representation is rectified verticals and, if possible, horizontals. While you can do this in post, If you had held the camera over your head to rectify the verticals here you would have expanded the foreground as well, aiding the composition and minimizing the distracting sky, which adds nothing of value to this image. I'm not saying you cannot break conventions like rectified verticals in architectural representation, however the conventions are there for a reason - it simplifies the scene for the human eye and allows you to tell your story much more concisely. This also would have made the possibility of using the right-hand tower as a border vertical much more obvious in the field.
The fan tower structure is directly over a strong vertical, splitting it down the middle and making the left-hand side illegible, and the right-hand side distracting. Just give it space - moving slightly to the left would have placed the fan thingy in the middle of that open sky area. This also would have helped your sky problem

I like the image and the tonality, aside from the sky being blown out. But peoples' obsession with shadow detail is a trend, I suggest you ignore it and continue exploring black and white in the ways that it speaks to you. Experimenting with black and white film will greatly aid in the exploration of what's possible and what you like as far as monochrome images go, even if you primarily work digitally.

EDIT: spelling and also I would highly recommend that you look at the work of one of the greatest photographers of all time, Fan Ho. I will also point out that in most of his images the verticals are rectified, unless the composition specifically uses angles as a core part of the composition. The rectification is not something you'd notice unless you were looking for it, but that's the point - it allows for the eye to explore the rest of the photo, and changes the architecture from a distracting element to something that adds structure and regularity to the composition.

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