Awesome people taking awesome photos: the photography thread (Page 5) | General Discussion | Forums | Final Fantasy Online

Final Fantasy Online

You are not logged in. Log In or Sign Up.

Final Fantasy Online Forums > Community Discussion > General Discussion

Awesome people taking awesome photos: the photography thread

< Prev 1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 Next >

0

05.31.2013 1:55am

Thread Creator

Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you

Seconding the love for the 50mm f/1.8. It's got some serious limitations, but for the price and the aperture, it's freaking insane. I shoot with it 90% of the time (9% my 70-300 IS USM, maaaaybe 1% with the 18-55 kit lens.) The only caveat I have with it, it breaks easily. There are easy repair instructions, though.

I shoot in RAW exclusively, but that's mainly because my entire workflow is through Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, so it's no hassle to convert.

(I would seriously kill for either any or all of the 10-16mm, 70-200 f/4 L IS, or the 24-105mm f/4 L IS. Alas, being poor...)

0

05.31.2013 2:41pm

Amer
pew pew pew

One of the ladies I work with does photography jobs on the side and she has the 24-70, i think it is, L lens. She let me hold it once. I was terrified. She mostly just does portraits though. She wishes she had the 70-200 f/4L too.

At this point I just wish I had a full frame. I take a lot of indoor pictures and would love any improvement in low-light and ISO I can get. I've limited the t4i so that auto ISO only gets up to 400, and I can use 800 if I need too, but anything higher really starts to suck for noise in an indoor but not actually dark situation. If I shot in RAW all the time I think I could clean it up better.

Unfortunately this also means I'm using the pop up flash alot. I really would like to get one for the shoe that I can bounce.

0

05.31.2013 5:25pm

Kellios
Yikes and away!

Nice! I have the 50mm f/1.4 and I'm constantly amazed at the quality of the bokeh, sharpness and picture quality I get out of it. I also got EXTREMELY lucky and managed to get the 16-35mm f/2.8L for over $800 off its normal price. I still can't believe how lucky I got with that. It's such a fun lens too (the bike/couple, the Japanese pavilion and the pier shots were with this lens).

I also have an older tamron 28-300mm (no IS), given to me by my dad. Though been using it less and less lately, especially since the picture quality nowhere near as good as the 50mm or the 16-35mm. I only got a full framed camera within the last year, and it blew my mind the first time I looked through the viewfinder, but still got great shots with my old crop sensor too.

Amer, for lower light indoor shots, do you mess at all with the exposure settings? Could help a bit in getting the lower lit areas to pop better. And yeah, shooting in RAW too will help.

0

05.31.2013 6:07pm

Thread Creator

Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you

I had an (even older!) Tamron 28-200mm that I hated. When I picked up my 70-300mm, I went Office Space on the Tamron. Although, if you're shooting a crop-body, the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 non-IS is supposed to be an absolutely fantastic lens. Most aftermarket manufacturers are crap, but there are occasional gems.

The 20D is at the sweet spot for crop-body sensor density (higher density = worse low-light performance), but when I was shooting sports, I would routinely shoot ISO 1600 and pull by two stops, then push them up again in Camera Raw (effectively shot at ISO 6400, but not as noisy) and clean up in Photoshop using the Noise Ninja plugin. Journalist's perspective again: these were for publication on the Sports page, not to show off how much of a kickass photographer I was. Crap photos containing the game-winning play were still okay.

I don't know about used camera equipment prices where you are, but I'm satisfied with my old 550EX flash (provided I can actually keep batteries in it, because goddamn does it eat them).

0

05.31.2013 6:57pm

(Edited on 05.31.2013 at 7:10pm)

Kellios
Yikes and away!

Yeah, I bought my 16-35mm used. Absolutely buy used! Just only when you know whoever had it previously took good care of it. I'm very lucky and live really close to the headquarters of borrowlenses.com, and they often sell some of their gear. Buying through a private buyer through craigslist or something I'd be a lot more skeptical, but I know people who have scored many amazing deals with that too.

I can't decide what I want my next lens to be. Not that I'm buying anytime soon... but one of my coworkers has the 85mm f/1.2L, and it's incredibly sexy and totally have my eye on it. But like you guys, the 70-200mm is so tempting too...

Ahhh, photography. Because having expensive hobbies is just the best.

0

06.01.2013 3:55am

Amer
pew pew pew

SC, are you just using Noise Ninja or the whole Photo Ninja suite? I've been looking for possible lightroom/PS alternatives with the whole "creative cloud" thing adobe is bringing out. I've heard good things but haven't tried.

0

06.01.2013 7:13am

Thread Creator (Edited on 06.01.2013 at 7:39am)

Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you

I'm just using the Noise Ninja plugin. I just don't "get' the whole Lightroom-esque workflow it seems everyone recommends. I don;t know if you can purchase Noise Ninja anymore, though.

I have two workflows:

A) I'm laying out a newspaper. My editor sends me the photo she wants me to use, typically a JPEG (sometimes stranger things, which I convert to JPEG). I open it into Camera Raw straight out of Bridge, it gets eyeballed to the correct results in Camera Raw, it gets saved to disk straight from Camera Raw. If it's excessively grainy and/or blurry, I'll go ahead and open in PS to t\run Noise Ninja and/or unsharp mask. Then it gets dumped into InDesign, and any exposure mistakes and conversion to CMYK winds up corrected during export, with some very finely tuned export settings. It's quick, it's dirty, it works great.

B) I'm correcting personal/commissioned photos. It's opened in Camera Raw to convert, then directly dumped straight into PS with no tweaks. Then I spend some time tinkering (seriously if you are shooting skin tones, go buy a copy of Skin 2 by Lee Varis and Rick Sammon, it's worth the money), a copy gets saved in PSD and the final product is saved in JPEG. Only rarely do I mess with Noise Ninja doing this.

Edit: just to show some examples:

I couldn't find any of my finals from my buddy's wedding, but here's his wife from New Years. This is what I get using the second workflow and pretty much everything recommended in Skin 2. This coming from a photo shot under incandescant, when the dumbass photographer (ie. me) left it set on daylight color balance.

This is demonstrating the effectiveness of Noise Ninja. Left was underexposed by 2 then pushed back up in post, effectively ISO 3200. Right is Noise Ninja Only applied, automatic setings. Not perfect, can be improved (unsharp mask helps a lot), but it does work.

0

06.01.2013 11:31pm

Amer
pew pew pew

I'm not really a fan of Lightroom's workflow either. I copy all the photos to my computer anyway, so having to import them into lightroom kind of sucks. I like the non-destructive editing, but at the same time I'm aggrivated that I can't save an edit and then go back to raw and do a different version without losing all my changes. Photoshop is much more powerful, but at the same time has a greater learning curve and is just harder to use from a UI perspective.

Apparently my above complaints with Lightroom are taken care of in Ninja Photo but I haven't tried it. That is some impressive noise reduction in the comparison.

0

06.09.2013 1:17am

Zubis
Registered Member

Killarney National Park, Kerry, Ireland

0

06.09.2013 2:48am

amaron
No answer, must be that deaf bitch.

Zubis said:

Killarney National Park, Kerry, Ireland

These pictures are what I picture the all of Ireland looking like. Like a real life Ronfaure/Jugner Forest :P

0

06.09.2013 10:04am

Zubis
Registered Member

It's usually wetter :P We're having a good summer so far.

0

06.09.2013 7:07pm

Kellios
Yikes and away!

I seriously need to visit Ireland.

0

06.09.2013 8:42pm

Zubis
Registered Member

Ah, it's not that nice here.

/trollface

0

06.09.2013 11:39pm

(Edited on 06.09.2013 at 11:44pm)

Mavilu
Yep, still gaming

And then you try to scare us away from Ireland by telling us the weather is unpredictable, pshhh....

The picture of the moss and the flowers makes me think of the Elder Wyrm from FFXII. (I can't post pictures anymore, nor can I write on separate lines either, anyone else experiencing that?)

0

06.09.2013 11:47pm

Zubis
Registered Member

Well this is the nicest June we've had in four or five years, we had floods this time last year. Sadly, our two days of summer are over, here's the rest of the month.

My Flickr account if you want to see some more.

< Prev 1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 Next >

Jump to

© Copyright 2024 Final Fantasy Online, All Rights Reserved
Home | Articles | Games | Forums | Shop | Contact Us | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Become a Facebook Fan

Follow us on Twitter