Awesome photos, Alex! Love that hair flip! Nice car too, though I personally want to try a Tesla more than anything

Thanks! So many of the hair flips didn't turn out; I had to prefocus before she put her head down and then hoped she was in the same spot at the end or along the way. Posture could have been a lot better too but that's all for next time. And there will be a next time. I'm hoping to visit again in Spring but it may be earlier.

We did some pirouette shots with the skirt but none of those are in focus. She either moved from the focal point or I had it set a little forward. I also think part of it has to do with the very wide aperture, I kept it at f/1.4 and I probably would have been fine at f/2.8. I wish there were other color flowers; yellow is great but I think it's a tad much with the yellow skirt and flowers. So I'm hoping Spring will be better. If I visit earlier, we'll definitely do snow and winter shots.

At the end of the trip we walked away with awesome memories, great shots, ideas to try, and ways to improve for next time.

More on the gear. A 135mm or a 200mm wasn't the only thing I was left wanting after this; I want a camera body with a faster SD card slot and a faster FPS rate. My camera has like a 4.5fps and a 7 photo buffer. It also doesn't record the photos very fast, I think the camera body can only write at SDHC speeds.

So, a new camera body that can shoot faster FPS and either has dual SD card slots OR can write at SDXC speeds is an eventual buy. The 5D Mark IV checks a lot of those boxes. I wish I had 1D X Mark II money, that 14fps is godly, but I'll never really need that sort of speed as I'm not a sports photographer. It's also the sports car of the camera world, if you can't afford the car you sure as hell can't afford to service it. The memory cards for the 1D X Mark II are up in the $200 range. So... yeah...

I do have a 1D Mark II though, hardly use it as it's got an 8MP sensor and I can never figure out how to charge the batteries. You gotta plug them in then press a button on the charger, but if they charge too long then the charger starts to uncharge them or something. It's confusing and I just never put in time to figure it out. It's probably really simple but it's nothing like a traditional battery where it just starts charging automatically.

I recently created an Instagram account to share some of the nicer photos I took, and am currently in the process of reviewing, choosing, and editing older shots.

This one I made in the summer of 2017 and apparently had not watched my composition, so the paddlers ended up somewhere close to the edge and the background weather phenomena were cut off. Fortunately I took multiple shots from the same position with similar settings and all of them were framed differently, so I had some material to work with. I managed to stitch the images together into something more passable:


I might make a topic describing various Photoshop techniques I use (probably all of which will in principle apply to GIMP and similar software), including the one for stitching as used here, if anyone is interested.

Looks great, Nik! What kind of camera was that shot on?

Just followed you!

And that is a very smart way to get more room around the paddlers. I've only done that once and it was with a photo of a hawk in a tree. Nice shot and I'm looking forward to more!

My trusty Sony DSC HX400V! It is a bridge camera with a non-changeable zoom lens and I think a 20 MP sensor. I like it as an all-rounder which serves me for anything from sunsets and portraits to astrophotography, though the latter is a bit problematic. A major downside it has is the noise you can see even at the lowest ISO settings (visible if you zoom in on the image I posted, for example). As far as I know there is no way around that, it is probably due to the quality of the sensor and one of the places where Sony has cut the costs.

I have only recently tried to stitch two images together for the first time myself. It involved scanning a printed photo which would not fit into the scanner. The idea was to make two photos of different halves and mate them together digitally. I learned that aligning two images is rather simple in Photoshop, you just put them into different layers, set the upper one at half transparency and align and rotate as needed via the transform tool. If the white balance, exposure or something else is off, it can be matched manually. To finally stitch the layers together, simply erasing the boundary region with a soft brush eliminates any remaining visible edges. I have done this a few times since then and it seems to work quickly and easily once you get the hang of it - obviously it is best if the framing is good right out of the camera, but this does provide an option to save or improve an image in some cases.

I suppose this one has a bit of a backstory. I am now studying in a city that is somwhat larger than the town I grew up in. Lots of stuff to see and enjoy, but so little time for all those things. What I have grown to like, though, is walking instead of taking the public transport - you just get to explore and enjoy more of those tiny details that usually get lost in the everyday rush.
So here I am, walking from my university to the train station, headed home. And this is the view that opens up to me as I am crossing the rails: Of course, this is one of the moments where you don't have your camera with you. So the phone had to do. I snapped a good two dozen frames at different exposure settings, nevermind all the passers-by throwing strange glances at me. And I got to work right away as I boarded the train, combining 8 of the frames into a HDR image on my laptop.
I would like to blame the fact that I did all this from start to end while I was on the move, but I do not quite like the way I developed it, somehow the colors and the mood are somewhat different from what I experienced when I saw the scene. As such, I would really like some feedback - have you tried to do similar things with your smartphone? What could I improve next time? How do you develop your raw frames into well-exposed HDR images? What specific settings may be off here?

PS: (shameless self-advertisement) Click the image for the instagram post. I will link all my images to their instagram siblings from now on.

That's actually insanely beautiful, Nik! There is some blur in the clouds a little, but besides that I really think it looks like a wallpaper for a train simulator game or something. The way the light is hitting the trains and even the brush/vegetation on the right makes it very colorful.

Wow that's really cool! If the trains weren't so modern and if it were black and white, it would kinda look like it was taken during the industrial revolution.

Here's a picture I took by accident a few weeks ago. I was initially going to delete it, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it! I completely forgot about this topic until now so that's why I'm super late at posting it.

P.S. commandblockguy even uploaded it to reddit a while ago as a 'blursed' image.

Just chop off the top, train sims should focus on the trains, not the clouds

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Better make that into an actual shell if it isn't already...
And have it bug you about Upgrading to Windows 10

I love that train yard shot; if you squint you may be able to see a Kerm!

Valley to the loch by Nikky, on Flickr

Took this Infrared photo of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah while on my road trip to Minnesota!


Reflections by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Made some friends and started taking portraits. I used a technique where you use a telephoto lens and shoot a matrix of photos and stitch them as if they were a panorama. The perk is that you get to keep a pretty shallow depth of field while having a "wide angle" view of your subject.

It's not great, but the effect is there! Shot it with my 85mm but want to buy a 135mm, not just for this but for use with portraiture as a whole and for Milky Way shots.

IMG_6225-Pano.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Shot this with the 35mm while walking around and exploring downtown. The friend I made had also just moved to the same city so we're definitely each other excuse to get out, explore, and do stuff.

IMG_6487.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Finally got around to a self portrait in the snow. Managed to nail the focus too! Controlled the camera over WiFi and it wouldn't let me AF so I had to slowly dial the focus in by pressing arrows on the phone/app to bump the focus forward or back.

I had wrapped up and was about to walk back when some clouds covered the sun. So, I went back to my spot and took more and got this. Then it snowed today so I'll def be trying this again to see how well falling snow picks up on camera (probably not very well).


Self Portrait by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Those are really good Alex! Is that picture taken near the same place you went with your friend?
I'd love to see more IR shots, it kinda looks like you're trying to x-ray the skeleton of the mountains.

It's a different park! I knew the park above didn't have the trees I wanted or really the trails so I ventured somewhere else. I couldn't explore very much since the trails were "groomed for skiing" so I'd need ski's, I just stayed within the parking lot and picnic area. Haha

Working on more IR. It's kind of a bad time to take them since there's no foliage around but I'm keeping my eye out! Expect more starting in Spring.

It seems like you take a lot of time to take these kinds of photos. What benefit do you get out of photography?

I also like photography a lot and personally I like taking pictures of nature, animals and birds (because it is easier to take candid shots).

I don't know what reason is there that other people take pictures but personally, I don't get any benefit in doing photography, I just do it because I like doing it. It is like capturing a moment that I find fascinating and then seeing it again in the future and feel good about the time when I took that picture.

So sorry for disappearing on you. Life got busy and I put Cemetech on the back burner, and thus, failed to follow up on things unless I'm pinged as a reminder. :/

As for a benefit, I get none. I take photos because it's an excuse to get outside and do something. To take a drive to a lake, a park, or a point of interest hours away. It's an excuse to visit the same park day week after week, month after month. Seasons change, weather changes, and even going back at a different time of the day for the next visit.

It's fun to go visit something with one lens. Then to revisit weeks later with a different lens and see what I can capture.

I don't do this for money, I don't market/push the prints I have in shops. Instead, I pursue photography because I enjoy it; I thoroughly enjoy driving, hiking through the landscapes, and just getting out. My cameras are a great motivator to go do those no matter the weather.