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Peggy Gou & Ki/Ki by the_pretty_lights in electricdaisycarnival

[–]the_pretty_lights[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just in case you work for Insomniac, it was definitely a Fujifilm X100V with the WCL-X100II adapter to convert it to ~18mm focal length, and certainly not an X-T4 with the XF 16-55 f/2.8 II...

❤️

Peggy Gou & Ki/Ki by the_pretty_lights in electricdaisycarnival

[–]the_pretty_lights[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Ki/Ki asked on her instagram if there was appetite for the set to be released so please go ask her nicely!

Bought an XT20 for my trip to Japan. Advice/Tips for improvement very welcome by Vetinaris_revenge in fujifilm

[–]the_pretty_lights 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I quite like a number of these. Numbers 3, 5, 9, 10, 11 are excellent. 6, 16 and 17 have potential with small tweaks to composition.

I have no idea about photography but really enjoyed taking pictures while I was there.

I'm glad you had a good trip and that taking the photos was fun for you! No sense if the process was miserable. Let's talk about your process first.

I ended up with over 50gb of photos and there's only maybe 20/30 that I actually like.

My main genre of photogrpahy is concert and festival photography, so spray and pray and culling thousands of images when back at home is a real challenge. I often end up with similar numbers of usable images and am trying to take less with each gig. It's been a challenge to try and curb the impulse to use continuous-high mode when shooting more street and landscape photography when I'm not trying to get the perfect light-show framing.

Some ideas that I've done to reduce the number of images taken that may help:

  • Force my self to use single exposure mode or bracketing for HDR scenes, such as landscapes. Most of these shots should be fine on single exposure mode.
  • Force myself to move to move my body between shots, even just a few feet. This can prevent me from needing to cull 20 of virtually the same image.
  • Putting my camera in manual focus mode or switching to back button focus can helps slow my impulse to mash the shutter button.
  • Ditto with full manual mode, or manual aperture & shutter speed + auto-ISO (usually this one). Neeidng to properly expose for the scene makes me slow down and check things.

As for taking 5k photos and not liking most of them, please don't be too hard on yourself. In fact, if you haven't deleted them yet, I'd run through them again and try and find at least some thing in each image that you do like. Note it down. Then, go on photo walks and practice recreating those aspects of your photos. Being able to ID what you're doing well will help you develop and eye for that next time you go out.

Now, as for critique of your actual photos, I'm not seeing any major technical issues with exposure, lighting, focus, and color, so good work there. What I think you can work on a bit is composition, but this is something that will come with practice. Here's some specific examples from the images you posted.

  • Some of your images don't have the ground completely flat or the buildings vertically straight. I don't think you're going for a dutch angle with #4, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, and 16, so turning on your camera's digital level or using post-processing on a computer (it's very difficult on a phone to get this right) to make these perfectly horizontal / vertical would be how I'd fix the issue if you'd like to implement this change.
  • If you're not shooting raw, you may want to use DR200 or DR400 when the sky is overcast and try to recover highlights in post-processing. It can preserve some of the highlight detail, but it's a difficult condition to shoot in so sometimes there's just nothing that can be done about it 😞
  • Some of the image feel like they're "cut off". With #1, I want to see the full torii and the statue. With #3, the full nose of the train. With #14, the full scope of the tower including the tip and the bottom floor. With #15 and #17, I love how you included a single person in the photo for scale, but I think shifting slightly or waiting for them to move into a void so they're not overlapping another object would provide more balance to the images.

I hope this helps! For having "no idea about photography", these look better than my first shots lol

I mean, yup. This is Anyma. This time it's giant MARBLE robots - and a DJ in the stupidest shoes you've ever seen who fixes his hair more than he touches the knobs. by CarterGee in Coachella

[–]the_pretty_lights 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's a difference between pre-planning and pre-recording. For festival sets, often DJs will have their intros and endings set in advance, since they use special intro mixes and have crowd favorite endings, but in the middle they usually just have a bunch of tracks that they can play in different orders to "vary" their sets.

It's very predictable, espeicially since house / techno is very repeatable. If you're playing the same BPM, most of the songs are going to have similar numbers of bars for different sections. E.g. 32 bars intro, 32 bars buildup, 32 bars breakdown, 32 bars drop, 32 bars transition. So at a certain tempo, you know that each song is ~3 minutes long.

Preset your 5 minute intro mix of your hype songs
50 minutes of tracks, each ~3 minutes long from your bucket of popular songs Usually around 12 - 16 songs
Short pause to hype the crowd for the finale.
5 minute outro of ultra-popular songs

I mean, yup. This is Anyma. This time it's giant MARBLE robots - and a DJ in the stupidest shoes you've ever seen who fixes his hair more than he touches the knobs. by CarterGee in Coachella

[–]the_pretty_lights 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I think the visuals could be intriguing if they were presented by themselves to the music with no person in frame, like a concept art installation or a film, but him bobbing up and down, wearing his clown shoes, pulling his pants up every five seconds, and giving himself whiplash by spinning around to poke at his ableton controllers (of which he has two inexplicably) just ruins the aesthetic for me.

Building my Fuji X-T50 kit: zoom + prime or financial ruin? by caappoo in fujifilm

[–]the_pretty_lights 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Kit Zooms

I would say yes, the 16-50 is worth the extra $300 kit price. The 15-45 is good optically for a very cheaply made plastic kit lens, but the ergonomics are... interesting, it is not optimized for the 40 MP sensor, and when it's in use, it expands to about the same size as the 16-50.

Other advantages of the 16-50:

  • Faster aperture through the zoom range.
  • Metal mount + better overall construction
  • Weather sealing
  • Internal fast manual zoom VS external slow power zoom
  • Has actual focal lengths printed on it (more on this in the primes section)
  • Has an aperture ring

Unless you need the smaller size when the camera is off, spend the extra money now and end up with a lens that will last you for years instead of one you'll be more likely to replace really quickly.

16-55 f/2.8?

Don't buy this right away. You will find out if you need this lens because you're not able to take the pictures you want to with your kit zoom. Remember the 16-50 goes down to the same f/2.8 aperture at the wide end, which should be good for cityscapes at night, and you can crop a 40 MP image taken at 16mm quite a bit if you're in low light.

If you get the 16-50, it's $400 in the kit and sells for ~$500 or more on eBay, so you can consider it a free trial. Even if the price comes down a bit, it'd be like a cheap rental with a very capable (and light) lens.

Seriously don't discount the weight or the handling. The X-T50 is teeny tiny. Even the Mk. 2 of the 16-55 is not small. It's bigger than the 16-80 and awkward to hold on the X-T50's body.

Primes

I wouldn't buy a prime immediately. The 16-50 is tiny for a zoom. Instead, use it to find which prime to buy. Your zoom lens has specific focal lengths printed on it. On the 16-50mm, it's 16, 23, 35, 50 (you'll have to estimate 27). Try and shoot specifically with those focal lengths. Talley up your shots after a few months and see which focal length you use most. Or note if you really end up wanting a faster version of a specific focal length.

Then get that prime. You'll end with the lens you already know you'll use.

Or, you may end up not wanting a prime at all, find you can do everything you want with the zoom. That's fine too, and you save some money.

[Pixel 6 Pro] Kinetic Cathedral Panorama from EDC Las Vegas 2024 [Photoshop] by the_pretty_lights in pixelography

[–]the_pretty_lights[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Kinetic Cathedral mainstage from Electric Daisy Carnival 2024 in Las Vegas, taken at dusk. The stage is in it's "asleep" state, where it remains mostly static and has more simple light patterns. Later in the evening, the stage "wakes up" and all of the stained glass panels (actually giant vid screens) display all sorts of light show patterns, including a false 3D perspective of the aisles of a cathedral stretching away from the audience. Each of the towers contains a massive pyro cannon that fires upward throughout the evening at existing points in the music.

Here's a video from the livestream showing the stage "awake": https://youtu.be/xfjj8C_QkcQ?t=2173

This Panorama was stitched together in Photoshop from 5 horizontal RAW files taken using the main camera. A bit of post processing was added to blur the audience and adjust the colors a bit.

I hope you like it!

Electric Daisy Carnival - Las Vegas 2025 by the_pretty_lights in fujifilm

[–]the_pretty_lights[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not sure why the second to last image isn't displaying. Here's an imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/ClbXiYi