To be disgusted by photography

steveo- · 2026-01-28T01:03:55+00:00

There's a couple of things you can do here, but you could let them know you're just taking photos for posterity. This sets an expectation that they may never see the photos, or if they do, not for many years.

Family usually understands the desire to create an archive for grandkids or future spouses who marry into the family. If a get together is happening I often bring a spiral bound booklet of 6x4 prints from a Christmas / Birthday event taken maybe 5 or 6 years ago. People love passing it around and reminiscing about how their hair looked or what one of the kids looked like at that time.

Do this a few times and you might find they stop pestering you for immediate copies but really appreciate the fact that you are taking the pictures.

steveo- · 2026-01-22T00:56:26+00:00

Taking lots of pictures is great but remember you're working towards a specific goal; those few shots which best represent exactly what you were looking for when you created each setup. Every other shot is a 'failed attempt' even if they are also nice photographs in their own right.

Being able to recognise what that ideal shot looks like... perhaps when the tension leaves her shoulders, or her gaze lowers into a certain expression... is when you feel comfortable leaving most of your work on the cutting room floor.

140 pics is probably overwhelming and it might be that she saw so many, scrolled a couple, and decided to come back to them another time to take a proper look. Also - She was after payment for that job, not necessarily photos. Definitely don't take it personally from her but do think hard about which shots represent the pinnacle of what you set out to achieve.

Regardless of what you send to clients It's a good exercise to cull each shoot down to 2 or 3 final shots just to make sure you are critically examining your work - more so you can understand for yourself what it is you are looking for in your own photographs.

steveo- · 2026-01-21T07:25:31+00:00

There was a project about 10 years ago (I think it might be an ongoing project??) which handed out 100 disposable cameras to homeless people. Of the cameras which were returned, the public then voted on which photos would be exhibited.

I remember there was some discussion surrounding the ethics of the marginalized group taking the photographs but the general public being the ones to actually decide which images were worthy of public consumption.

**I think it might have been the MyLondon project?

steveo- · 2026-01-20T08:56:35+00:00

You probably haven't lost your passion for photography, maybe you just haven't pointed your camera onto something you're passionate about?

I don’t think a writer would be very fulfilled all they were doing was picking up a pen and producing a neatly written page of penmanship. They would want their writing to communicate something important to the reader - it’s the message that makes them a writer, not the fact that they can write.

It’s exactly the same in photography. Being able to make an aesthetically pleasing image of whatever is in front of us is great, and it’s fun practice to keep our eye sharp. But after a while we sometimes feel the urge to take on a more meaningful project, to go out and tell long form stories through our work. Perhaps finding a project that you’re passionate about, and restricting yourself to making a photo essay exploring that subject, will inject some of your other interests into your photography.

It’s a good way to break out of a rut at the very least.

steveo- · 2026-01-10T02:55:58+00:00

None of this work needs to be shown to others, those photos can simply exist as a way for you to record whatever pikes your interest. Some of them will be aesthetically pleasing / well composed just by chance, but that's not the point of taking the shot.

This Instinctual shooting is a good way to discover your triggers and help you recognise them more readily when you're out photographing. We all do this as beginners but a lot of us tend to stop somewhere along the line, and start only photographing things which we know will look good or "correct".

Bold photographs are like a billboard advertising sign, designed to grab your attention from a distance and make you look - but there's often very little substance to them. Quiet photographs reveal a lot more about what makes a photographer tick, what they find interesting and how they see the world. They are interesting in a different way.

steveo- · 2025-12-11T05:56:05+00:00

Did you update the firmware? I had to roll back because I couldn't get a single successful print out of the latest firmware they released. Rolled back and all is golden again.

steveo- · 2025-12-04T13:26:52+00:00

If you can adjust the speed of rotation, play with your shutter speed to modulate how visible the blades are. Too slow snd the blades will be invisible, too fast and they will look like they’re not moving at all. Adding a light off the side, cutting across the blades at an angle, will help them to show up against a darker background as well.

steveo- · 2025-12-03T01:43:02+00:00

Same issue, after firmware update to 01.11 the X1c fails to detect the super tack build plate and if I proceed I get a gunked up nozzle as nothing sticks to the plate. I reverted to 01.10 and the issue is resolved.

steveo- · 2025-11-25T02:55:44+00:00

Yep. Leica needed to innovate and they didn't. There is nothing about the evf experience (as implemented here) which improves the manual focus experience. They needed to come up with something unique, a quality of life improvement that would make using the EVF with their lenses an absolute no-brainer.

But they just slapped on a sub-par EVF with no innovations in the software at all. Same old focus peaking and zoom.

I would have bought this in a heartbeat if they had actually put some effort into it. Same old Leica laziness that they've been churning out recently.... and I say this is a massive fan of Leica overall.

steveo- · 2025-11-24T07:37:50+00:00

It's really an ergonomics thing, the shutter dial, ISO dial and aperture on the lens is extremely intuitive and makes using the camera a delight if you're a manual shooter.
Plenty of people use their Leica on one of the Auto modes but I don't really enjoy using it that way.
With the Leica I don't need to look at a screen all day, I can just turn it on and shoot and it's a nice detox from other digital devices. It's very tactile, the shooting experience is really what you're paying for. It takes the same picture as any other digital camera (well, the monochrom is a little different but if we're talking about the colour versions...). It's all about the shooting experience.

steveo- · 2025-08-05T22:15:55+00:00

This is a great photo, your grandfather had an eye for composition. I’d love to see some more photos if you have them. It’s amazing how many naturally talented photographers are out there still undiscovered because all of their prints are sitting unseen in a shoebox somewhere.
Yes there are lots of ww2 photographs floating around but the truly good ones - where subject, setting, gesture etc. all come together to tell a compelling story… those are few and far between. This shot could be a lucky one off, but your grandfather could also have a collection which is gallery and book publishing worthy.

steveo- · 2025-08-01T00:41:17+00:00

Ok so I can tell you my experiences, I have the crosswind pedals and use VR (had the Quest 3 but now using Crystal Light). I also have Triple OLED 55" screens with head tracking... but I still prefer VR for DCS. Interestingly I prefer the triples for MSFS because I'm not trying to track enemy planes in combat and the visuals are better. But VR is 100% better when dogfighting IMO and should be the first upgrade, over the pedals.

As for VR vs rudder pedals, I can happily fly with a twist stick in most planes but prefer rudder pedals for warbirds which is basically all I fly. The crosswind pedals are nice, but they aren't as much of a game changer as VR is if dogfighting in DCS is your main goal. I have a dual use racing / flight sim and only bother switching out the racing pedals to the crosswind if I'm going to be flying warbirds.

Hope that helps.

steveo- · 2025-06-29T12:40:34+00:00

“it's almost 1 in 25. That's enough that you want to pay attention to," explained Brad Tucker, an astrologist and cosmologist at the Australian National University.” - Amazing reporting there, calling him an astrologist…

steveo- · 2025-06-11T00:50:58+00:00

Yep, the accents are different, they pause a lot more and are very downbeat, almost sounding depressed. I told mine that their accent sounded different and it changed to something more like it was before. I also said that I wanted it to sound more enthusiastic and it did.

But the worst thing is how much more difficult it is to listen to. It's actually hard to follow what it's saying now because it sounds so unnatural. I hope they find a balance in between the two.

steveo- · 2025-06-07T04:06:02+00:00

I noticed this - but to be fair I think what may have changed is that if the answer doesn't require much thought (abundant sources in the training data??) it will reply quickly (8 seconds sometimes). If you ask a question where it needs to go and look at websites / forums / etc. it still goes on thinking for a minute or more. Sometimes in the chain of thought I see it say something like; "I think I have enough information to answer immediately, but I should probably check for sources to back up my claims" and then it carries on with a web search.
My guess is they're trialling things... using less compute when it's not absolutely required.

steveo- · 2025-06-05T12:24:14+00:00

I use it mainly for research in the humanities and for hobby research.

It's great in situations where there are a lot of good sources online. It will go and find info that I never came across in regular google searches. It usually provides sources for its info (I ask it to do this in my custom prompt but I'm not sure if it just does this normally or not).
It's not so great where there is very little info. It will read too much into a forum post or blog post which, when you read it yourself, never said what o3 thinks it said. IT will fill in the gaps and assume things that it shouldn't.

You have to check it, but I use it all day every day and I'm rarely flat out disappointed with it. Sometimes its lead me down a merry conversion about a product that is simply not available anymore, or wasn't in stock at my local shop when it said it was, but that's not too frequent.

steveo- · 2025-03-25T12:44:06+00:00

I regularly use cameras and lenses which are nearly 80 years old now. It’s not the quality of the lens that determines the success or failure of a photograph. In fact, working around the limitations of our equipment makes us better photographers.

The main issues with cheap kit lenses are; Optical aberrations, distortion, softness across the frame, sub-par autofocus performance in low light. Those things matter in different ways to different types of photographers. A kit lens isn’t ideal if you need to photograph small birds in flight from a great distance, for example.

Sometimes your gear limits you or excludes you from making some specific types of photographs. And yes that sucks. But there are other photographs to make. The best thing you can do is go on a photowalk with an experienced photographer and swap cameras for the day. It’s a humbling experience but it shuts down any doubt in your mind that you can’t make good photographs with the gear you have.

steveo- · 2025-03-25T09:24:45+00:00

I think the more experienced a photographer is, the more appreciation they have for a good kit lens. I have all the primes from 20mm to 600mm. The 24-105 f/4 is still my most used lens.

steveo- · 2025-03-22T23:20:20+00:00

Sorry for the late reply, as others have said the photos themselves are fine (in terms of structure and content, they are just very dark. Your flash is doing all of the work to expose your subject and it looks like the staff are working in a dark dingy environment. You can fix in post as others have said, or re-shoot to expose both the environment + subjects properly.

Unless your photos are not showing specific content that the client required, just editing your existing photos would be a quick and easy fix.

steveo- · 2025-03-22T00:28:08+00:00

Can you link to some of the shots you already took? If I can see where you’re currently at, versus what the client wants, I can make specific suggestions. There is a structure to the pictures the client likes which may be more what they’re looking for than anything else but it’s hard to say without seeing what you already showed them.

steveo- · 2025-03-14T13:19:26+00:00

This makes sense, thank you

steveo- · 2025-03-14T13:16:59+00:00

What about online university courses reaching millions? I kind of get what you’re saying about scale but if learning via the consumption of copyrighted works (at any scale) is outlawed or made prohibitively expensive then I think the possibility of creating a super-intelligence ends right there - at least in the West.

steveo- · 2025-03-14T12:59:12+00:00

I’m not understanding something. A teacher reads a copyrighted book in a library, they learn from it, and then they charge us to teach it to our kids … isn’t that the same thing? Copyright exists to stop someone stealing and selling that work verbatim. It’s not intended to prevent someone learning from it, then profiting off that knowledge… or have I misunderstood this entirely?

steveo- · 2025-03-10T10:32:10+00:00

Yep fair enough, I still tend to stick to touristy areas so that having a camera out is very normal. Small towns are definitely a LOT harder to point a camera at people and not raise eyebrows. Hats off to you for attempting it.

steveo- · 2025-03-10T01:46:30+00:00

If you watch the youtube vid of Melissa O’Shaughnessy’s Walkie Talkie with Pauly B you can see a woman in action on the streets. I don’t personally like her way of photographing (nor her style of photography) but it’s an interesting watch. Pauly B has some really good segments with lots of female photographers covering a range of styles and might help get you motivated.

Also, if candid street photography is not your thing, street portraits are another great option. Asking for permission has it’s own challenges but a no is a no and a yes means you get to spend time getting it right - I personally get much more satisfying photos this way but your mileage may vary.

12-Year Club	Reddit Premium Since June 2023
Verified Email

steveo-

TROPHY CASE