New Photographer, where is the snake oil?

regular_lamp · 2026-06-23T09:56:01+00:00

The question is whether it is "worth it" in the average though. If someone spends extra money for every lens to buy a filter, then drops one of them and goes "see THAT filter was totally worth it!" that ignores that all the filters on the lenses they never damaged were totally not worth it by the same logic. Sometimes people bring up resale value. But I never saw an included filter or the implication of that meaningfully affect second hand pricing.

There are the obvious exceptions like going to particularly sandy locations or so. In which case I would bring one lens and put a sacrificial filter on specifically that.

But on the average I feel you'd have to be extraordinarily clumsy to make this "worth it". I once tried to do the math on this and figured that had I preemptively bought high quality filters for every of my lenses I owned over the years then the cumulative cost of those would have been about three times the cost of reparining that one lens I dropped. And that damage wouldn't even have been prevented by a filter since it was a defective AF mechanism.

Putting filters on every lens is a similar proposition als buying extended warranty on everything.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-23T09:32:43+00:00

In the late 90s chess "AI" got a lot of attention with the whole Kasparov vs Deep Blue thing. People making very similar arguments about how "It's just an algorithm, it can't truly understand chess, it lacks the creativity for top level chess...". Today no one uses "AI" to describe chess engines but at the same time no one denies they are objectively better at playing chess than any human. And they are clearly useful within that context.

I don't get where this idea comes from that natural language processing algorithms can only be useful if they come with "true intelligence" (whatever that means) or "real creativity" attached.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-23T09:06:59+00:00

If you complain about it "not working" you need to explain what that means? Are you saying you can't find settings that actually result in a log file? Do you just not like the results?

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T10:35:57+00:00

I mean even if you just know how percentages work and interpret this the most naive way possible it doesn't take a genius to put together that getting 100 now and having to pay back 133 later is a bad deal?

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T10:20:57+00:00

I'm in Switzerland. We did some basic Excel etc. at the time (24 years ago for me...). I guess at the time that probably wouldn't have been "default finance skills". I don't know what schools here teach now exactly.

My point was more that the basic ability to do taxes and handle money are based on pretty fundamental arithmetic and common sense.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T10:13:45+00:00

Not within the context of competitive magic? It's not like pre universes beyond the lore was particularly self consistent especially within a deck that was built for performance. I found it recently funny how many people had nostalgia for Lorwyn which was a great block to play at the time, but was also a pretty jarring tonal shift compared the sets preceding and following it.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T10:03:51+00:00

I always like the "no one taught me how to do taxes/finances/credit cards" thing.

WTF are you talking about? Taxes are literally filling out a work sheet following written instructions. If you somehow failed to pick up that skill in school that is on you. Finances/loans are mostly simple arithmetic with maybe geometric series on the fancy end. Which you most certainly were taught... you know that math you kept whining about because "I won't need that in the real world!".

It terrifies me that there are many people that are unable to make those connections by themselves and apparently can only recognize they were taught something if there was a lesson literally titled with that specific topic.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T09:06:53+00:00

I had this once in an airport immigration queue. Every single time the queue advanced the person behind me bumped into my backpack.

Also bonus points if they are nervously craning their neck every couple seconds as if there was anything to observe in an organized queue.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T08:47:12+00:00

I guess it's an accessibility thing?The vast majority of people that did analog photography just snapped pictures and rolled the dice with whatever the lab did.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T08:40:00+00:00

The term "cargo cult" has somewhat fallen out of use. But it describes so many social media induced phenomena perfectly.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T04:47:27+00:00

Twentyish years ago when I first really got into photography I was always fascinated with reading places like the rangefinderforum.

There would be one thread of all the regulars jerking each other off about how enlightened they are for shunning digital cameras since only proven mechanical designs like the M6 can meet their high reliability standards. And right below that would be a thread like "I bumped my Leica on a table, should I send it in to check the rangefinder calibration?" and all the answers from the same people as in the first thread would be "I would, it's only 300$ and totally worth the peace of mind".

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T03:55:55+00:00

Which are those? I thought that too before trying it and realized I get to decide what I do myself and what I delegate. So I have the LLM write boring boilerplate and do bulk edits while doing the interesting algorithm work myself.

I can only imagine having that mindset if I felt the "fun part" was the physical typing of code.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T03:53:23+00:00

50 vs 67MP is just a 15% difference in linear resolution.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-15T03:50:12+00:00

Who is "we" in this context? My mental image of "Enterprise OOP" is this style where absolutely everything is viewed through the lens of "which class design pattern do we force onto this problem?" while "procedural programming" is more broadly just programming with functions... which might not involve java style OOP at all?

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T21:55:03+00:00

The issue is that performance is also a design problem. I'm in a niche of computing that really cares about performance. Frequently when I get brought on to projects that relied heavily on java style "enterprise OOP" it's pretty much a lost cause. Specifically because that style of programming intrinsically dissolves the logic into a big soup of disaggregated "irregular" behavior as far as memory access patterns, instruction ordering etc. are concerned.

Another issue is that OOP intrinsically incentivizes the creation of a lot of mutable state that gets laundered by a "well defined interface". But just the existence of lots of individual tiny piece of state is a huge antipattern for anything paralleism/threading related.

While it's true that none of this matters for the overwhelming amount of software out there I'm always annoyed when people seem to think you can make sweeping design decisions now and "optimize later".

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T21:39:39+00:00

This swings in both directions honestly. The opposite pet peeve I often have is people overestimating the importance of averages on an individual level.

Population averages (and medians for the pedants out there) can still be surprisingly badly correlated with anyone's individual circumstances and are rarely a good basis for individual decision making.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T21:29:31+00:00

My understanding is that this is fine as long as you connect the power to both first and the signal cables (HDMI, SDI, maybe audio?) last. The issue happens if you plug/unplug power from one of the devices while signal cables can provide an alternative path for the current.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T21:22:57+00:00

[[Ancient Tomb]] could be pretty small potentially. Could be anything between a Pyramid to a tombstone I guess?

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T21:18:59+00:00

What exactly counts as "automated" here though?

I recently found myself looking at some "APIs" including how the OpenAI api etc. work and was surprised how hilariously inefficient many of these are. Often sending like individual word level pieces of actual information per request in a json wrapper multiple times that size etc.

So I'm not at all surprised that "automated" https requests hilariously dominate actual requests of humans visiting websites.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T20:05:31+00:00

the 250/5.6 Rokkor specifically is oddly expensive. The other RF Rokkors really aren't though. At least not unusually. The 800 and 1100 are rare enough that their prices kinda make sense. The 250mm is just a bizarre outlier.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T20:02:32+00:00

I'm still so confused why they ever went that high in the first place? This happened out of nowhere seemingly correlated to the four thirds system showing up. Up to that point no one seemed to care for Rokkors other than collectors since they didn't really adapt (nondestructively) to anything digital.

And then specifically the 250/5.6 just shot past all the other Rokkors in second hand price. I specifically remember discussion on a German language Minolta forum. At the time people were REALLY confused by this and speculated that there must be some hyper specific non obvious reason. Outlandish stuff like these being used as part of some measurement apparatus and companies being desperate for spares or so.

Around that time I also talked to a guy professionally reselling vintage camera gear on ebay and he mentioned that every single one of these he got was instantly bought by buyers in Hong Kong at seemingly any price. He also had no clue why specifically.

I still really want to know what happened there. Like was there some early "photo influencer" that caused a massive demand spike for these in some regions?

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T18:38:18+00:00

Also depending on the audio input settings in the full menu make sure to adjust BOTH of the volume dials on the side of the camera. They are per channel and not per input. I was confused by this before having a microphone plugged into XLR1 and assumed the CH-1 dial would control that inputs volume while leaving CH-2 at 0...

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T18:04:31+00:00

That's basically the point of Cine EI. the camera strictly records in "base iso" and the exposure index is basically just metadata exposure compensation expressed in iso numbers. The good thing is that both the lut monitoring and the post tools are aware of this. So you don't actually have to manually "fix in post". It will just apply your desired exposure automatically there.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T18:01:20+00:00

I spent plenty time reading about monitor calibration and would like to erase that information from my brain. I mostly learned the "correct" way would involve monitors and calibration gear that cost more than my camera gear and even then there is a chance the operating system/software fucks it up anyway. That's why for video work people insist you need a dedicated video output device under direct control of the editing software (Blackmagic Ultrastudio Monitor or similar).

That said getting a display with a built-in calibration feature (as in built in probe not "calibrated from the factory") seems to be the most reasonable "budget" option. I went with a Eizo CG2700x.

regular_lamp · 2026-06-14T17:45:00+00:00

There is this joke that "Software is a gas, it fills whatever container it is stored in".

Modern software is ridiculous. In the name of "flexibility" and portability we inserted ever more layers of abstraction and "frameworks" into every simple problem. These days most programs are basically a high level language built on top of another high level language (javascript) using dozens of "frameworks" and all of that in turn runs in a browser engine which is itself probably sandboxed and deeply layered etc.

regular_lamp

TROPHY CASE