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Photography again

Started by Eight Taiwanese Teenagers, November 10, 2014, 08:32:06 PM

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small_world

I've been thinking of getting in to photography for a while.
I worked with someone who was well in to it and my mate's dad does wedding photography.
I had this idea of doing photography around a theme of post-apocalyptic settings, really, just run down buildings, street signs and other such snaps.

What would be the best all round starting camera?
What would I need to spend on new equipment or for the same price, what would I possibly be able to get off my mate's dad for mates rates?
Do many people do ruins/run down/post apocalyptic type work?

I really like that Edinburgh tram lines photo.
I was coming over the Tyne Bridge last week and the sun was gorgeous, just going down, making the bridge and the quayside below golden.
There were 3 Chinese fellas taking photos of each other at the wrong end of the bridge, in the shadow, so I called out for them to move to the middle of the bridge, they would have got some great photos. But they didn't have a clue what I was on about.

greenman

#121
Pretty much any camera from a phone upwards would be suitable for that kind of work, what you would get with more expensive equipment is higher output quality which comes into play if you want sharpness and a lack of noise when printing larger plus editing more extensively. One thing to consider beyond that I spose would be angle of view, often with architecture ultra wide lenses are helpful.

I was actually talking a few shots around the Bristol docklands yesterday with the consent of the local junk warlord.


greenman

#122

greenman

If you want a more specific recommendation I would say a used Nikon/Pentax APSC DSLR from a couple of years ago when sensor tech hit its current maximum in resolution and dynamic range(or ability to brighten shadows and play with contrast in photoshop without to much loss in quality, useful for the kind of thing your suggesting). Looking at MPB you can pickup a Nikon D3200 for £180...

http://www.mpbphotographic.co.uk/used-equipment/used-digital-slr-cameras/used-nikon-digital-slr-cameras/nikon-d3200-1

As I said with architecture its quite likely you may want an ultra wide lens and there never especially cheap so save money on the camera body whilst not giving up any actual image quality relative to newer and more expensive APSC cameras. Best deal on an ultra wide I can see on that website...

http://www.mpbphotographic.co.uk/used-equipment/used-lenses/used-nikon-fit-lenses/tokina-12-24mm-f4-at-x-124-pro-dx-lens-nikon-fit-1

Lenses hold there value much better than camera bodies as well so if you beside to sell up you'll probably get back most of what you paid if you buy used.

small_world

That's great, thanks for the advice.
My mate's dad is a bit of a hoarder, so I'll ask if he has anything going spare and will post if I've got a choice to make.

I see what you mean about the cost for that lens. Hadn't anticipated that.
Good price for the camera body though.

Thanks again, and that photo from the junk yard is amazing, totally the sort of thing I'd love to be able to capture myself.

The Masked Unit

Speaking as somebody who's got into photography quite seriously over the last 18 months or so and has spent probably the best part of £3k on this and that, buying a full compliment of Canon APSC kit only to then trade it in for a Nikon full frame and replicate the focal lengths I originally had with the Canon, I can say with authority, and I think every photographer will tell you the same, that there are very few photos you can't take (I'll make an exception for wildlife which does require a much longer focal length) with something like the Nikon Greenman linked to, a basic zoom in the 18-55mm region, and a copy of Lightroom and in an ideal world, Photoshop. A tripod will also be a must.

There's always the scope to buy bodies with better sensors, and sharper lenses, and I'd be lying if I said I'd got all the kit I'll ever want, but the best equipment in the world won't make you a better photographer, ever.

Let's face it though lads, this is small_world we're talking about. He's come up with a cover story about apocalyptic landscapes, but  we all know he just wants to render the most detail possible out of an 18 year old vagina. A Phase One it is, then!

greenman

Quote from: small_world on February 04, 2015, 10:08:11 AM
That's great, thanks for the advice.
My mate's dad is a bit of a hoarder, so I'll ask if he has anything going spare and will post if I've got a choice to make.

I see what you mean about the cost for that lens. Hadn't anticipated that.
Good price for the camera body though.

Thanks again, and that photo from the junk yard is amazing, totally the sort of thing I'd love to be able to capture myself.

You could start off with a kit lens like this for a more modest £60..

http://www.mpbphotographic.co.uk/used-equipment/used-lenses/used-nikon-fit-lenses/nikon-af-s-18-55mm-f35-56g-dx-vr-3

Would give you a chance to find out if you need anything wider, optically the kit lens is perfectly sharp and fine for landscapes/cityscapes in that range(about as wide as your typical smartphone lens with x3 zoom).

Neomod

One for the Canon users. I'd like to get a few cheapo EF lenses (I'm on a budget) and what I'd like to know is are they easy to use, as in what I see through the viewfinder is what I'm going to get?

Edinburgh



Kensington



Oh and finally, what was your first proper camera?

This was mine. Loved it and have just bought one again.


The Masked Unit

Quote from: Neomod on February 05, 2015, 11:38:34 AM
One for the Canon users. I'd like to get a few cheapo EF lenses (I'm on a budget) and what I'd like to know is are they easy to use, as in what I see through the viewfinder is what I'm going to get?

Pound for pound, is there a better lens in the world than this?

http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Cameras/EF_Lenses/Standard_and_Medium_Telephoto/EF_50mm_f1.8_II/

greenman

Quote from: Neomod on February 05, 2015, 11:38:34 AM
One for the Canon users. I'd like to get a few cheapo EF lenses (I'm on a budget) and what I'd like to know is are they easy to use, as in what I see through the viewfinder is what I'm going to get?

What are you using them with? a cheaper Canon DSLR may only have a 95% coverage viewfinder although the back screen will be 100% and I'd expect the same with any mirrorless system you adapted them for.

Neomod

It's an 1100d (the cheapest Canon DSLR). I've just checked and it is 95% coverage.

You learn something new every day.

greenman

Quote from: Neomod on February 05, 2015, 06:52:24 PM
It's an 1100d (the cheapest Canon DSLR). I've just checked and it is 95% coverage.

You learn something new every day.

Pretty common with most DSLR's, you need to pay a bit more to get a 100% viewfinder although the screen on the back will be 100%, really only enough difference there to be notable with something like landscape shooting where you might get the odd tree branch just pushing into the frame.

The Masked Unit

Quote from: Neomod on February 05, 2015, 06:52:24 PM
It's an 1100d (the cheapest Canon DSLR). I've just checked and it is 95% coverage.

You learn something new every day.

See that's what I'm saying about not necessarily needing the fanciest equipment, as your images are generally my favourite ones I see here, and you've got a clearly identifiable, individual style.

The Masked Unit

Quote from: greenman on February 06, 2015, 08:39:21 AM
Pretty common with most DSLR's, you need to pay a bit more to get a 100% viewfinder although the screen on the back will be 100%, really only enough difference there to be notable with something like landscape shooting where you might get the odd tree branch just pushing into the frame.

And frankly you can just get around that by cropping in Lightroom or whatever. Speaking viewfinders though, I'd say the biggest practical advantage of having a full frame body is the size of the image you get through the viewfinder. I looked through my wife's APSC viewfinder the other day and it was like looking at a postage stamp. No way on earth I could go back to that now.

The Masked Unit

So Canon have officially revealed the new 5D models now, but what's really interesting is their new lens: 11-24mm, but for full frame! That's a preposterously wide angle of view and it's rectilinear, which means that straight lines come out as straight lines as opposed to curved like a fisheye. Landscape and architectural photographers will be absolutely creaming themselves. The cost? A mere £2,800!

greenman

Selling for quite a large premium over the D810(£600) but I spose Canon figure there mainly meeting pent up demand from their own userbase who would already have moved to Nikon if they were going to. Looks like its a Canon sensor in it so it'll be interesting to see whether dynamic range has improved, early talk seems to suggest not.

Personally I find the new 760D more interesting, I'v still got an old 35mm F/2 EF lens and when the price drops off a bit that might consider that for a smaller street shooting body. I don't know why more small cameras don't have a top plate LCD, personally I find that so useful for casual/street shooting where you don't want to be checking the back screen or holding the camera to your eye constantly.

The Masked Unit

Yeah, I'm guessing that if you're the type of person that will spend £3k on a body, you're already committed to a particular manufacturer with all your lenses and accessories.

greenman

#137
Quote from: The Masked Unit on February 06, 2015, 11:10:42 AM
Yeah, I'm guessing that if you're the type of person that will spend £3k on a body, you're already committed to a particular manufacturer with all your lenses and accessories.

Add in the potential loss from selling off 2-3 expensive EF lenses and a saving of £600 isnt so attractive, plus the hassle of having to learn a new control setup. When I shifted from Canon(550D) to NikonDD800) I was having to sell of a bunch of EF-S lenses anyway so no it didn't make much difference.

The killer for me with all these extremely wide lenses is the inability to use filters easily as I probably use a 2 stop grad for about 50% of my landscape shooting and polarisers and ND filters a decent amount. Besides that I personally find much beyond 16mm on full frame is something I want quite rarely, generally for architecture or shots very close to large trees that are quite easy to compose with stitching.

Another couple of holiday shots from La Palma




mobias

#138
Quote from: Neomod on February 05, 2015, 11:38:34 AM

Oh and finally, what was your first proper camera?



Vintage camera chat. Now we're talking!

First camera was a Minolta 7000 I got for my 16th birthday from my dad way back in 1987. This was a mega present as this camera was legendary back in the day and very expensive. It was the world's first proper autofocus camera and it had a built in 3fps film autowinder. It also had, for its day, a very sophisticated honeycomb light metering system. It was a real miniature computer built round a camera and it laid the groundwork for how technologically driven photography would become in later years. A ground breaking bit of design. Incidentally Sony's A7 series was designed as a kind of homage to the look of the Minolta 7000.

   

I had that camera for two years and then sold it and got the pro level Minolta 9000. I worked for a whole summer and saved up before I was able to afford one. It was a phenomenally expensive bit of kit back in 1989, I could only afford one second hand. The 9000 was for a good few years the most technologically advanced camera on the market, from any manufacturer. It even had the capability to have a special back put on it so it could record still video for playback on TV. A curiosity about it was that it was  and still is the only autofocus camera ever made that had a manual film wind on lever. This was because Minolta thought pro users would appreciate the extra battery life not having one as standard would give. The 7000 took four AA batteries and ate them very quickly. The autowinder draining about 75% of their power. The 9000 had an autowinder as an optional extra.

My 26 year old Minolta 9000




mobias

Another old camera of mine is a Minolta 7000i. Minolta updated the ageing 7000 in 1988 with a version that had a faster autofocus motor, faster autowinder and a whole new design. A curiosity of this camera was the introduction on Minolta's memory expansion card system via a side door your open up. It has oddly similar look and feel to installing a memory card in a modern digital camera.

The idea of the memory cards was to expand the functionality of the core camera. It also meant you could save certain frequently used parameters, pretty much like you can with a modern camera. This was all hugely ahead of it time back in the day though.
One thing I'll say about this camera is that its the most ergonomically well designed camera I've ever used. It just fits in the hand so well. Other aspects of tis design aren't so great though. Minolta held onto their dreadful sliding buttons as a means to navigate the menu and change the aperture and shutter. By this time Canon had brought out the T90 and the dawn of the scroll wheel had arrived with that camera. Still in use today.

 



I really love camera design from this era. There was a real modern approach with curved sweeping lines. I really don't like modern camera design's obsession with the retro 60's/70's look. It seems such a huge step backwards.

greenman

Quote from: mobias on February 06, 2015, 09:30:38 PMI really love camera design from this era. There was a real modern approach with curved sweeping lines. I really don't like modern camera design's obsession with the retro 60's/70's look. It seems such a huge step backwards.

I would tend to agree with this, the original non walrus scrotum leather bling digital Leica M's and the X100 looked good if unoriginal but its become an increasing dull tide wave of retro since then.

The best looking camera ever made for me was the Leica R8/R9, tempting to buy one at current prices just for the looks...


mobias

Quote from: greenman on February 07, 2015, 02:01:12 AM

The best looking camera ever made for me was the Leica R8/R9, tempting to buy one at current prices just for the looks...



Yeah thats a beauty. I'm hoping there's a real move away from the overly retro look. I remember Nikon got somewhat criticised by some reviewers  for being overly retro when they brought the DF out. Its as if decades of industrial camera design have taught people nothing. I like my fair share of dials and buttons on a camera and not having vital features hidden away in sub menus, something I always hated my little Sony NEX camera for, but  I'd like camera design to go back to the sleek sexy curves of the late 80's early 90's. Looking froward rather than backward.

A Nikon DF.


touchingcloth

My first camera was a hand-me-down from my dad - the Olympus OM-1n which he bought for himself as a wedding present at fairly staggering expense.



It's one of my favourite pieces of industrial design ever, and obviouslt borrows quite heavily from the look of Leica's rangefinders. It's teeny tiny for a professional SLR, which was mainly achieved by eschewing most unnecessary bells and whistles, or features as some manufacturers insist on calling them. There's no autowind on the thing (though the bottom plate is designed to be removed to fit an autowind-cum-rapidfire mechanism), and the only electronic gubbin on it is the light meter, which does spot metering and that's your lot. The flash hotshoe unscrews from the prism housing, which gives the camera a nice clean look when you don't actually need a flash.

If someone produced a full frame digital camera in a body like that, I would obtain a large number of credit cards to fund an ill-advised purchase.

mobias

Another of the must have high end cameras of the mid 80's was the Canon T90. In terms of its over all design it was fairly ahead of its time. In fact its actually not that different in design and layout to some of Canon's current cameras. Because of its curved shape it was a difficult camera to manufacture apparently.
It was another extremely technologically advanced camera of its day but whats interesting about it is that its not autofocus. Canon were slightly later to the table with their first autofocus camera the EOS 650.


touchingcloth

Canon's EOS-3 and a small handful of other cameras released in the late 90s/early 00s had eye tracking autofocus, where the focus point was switched depending on where in the viewfinder you were looking. It worked remarkably well by all accounts, and I'm a little surprised it's never made its way as a feature into a DSLR given how universally clunky focus selecting is on just about every camera on the market.


CaledonianGonzo



Dancing girl in local costume, Potosi, Bolivia.



Probably her mum or something. I dunno.



Definitely her dad.

greenman

#146
Quote from: mobias on February 07, 2015, 10:18:54 AM
Yeah thats a beauty. I'm hoping there's a real move away from the overly retro look. I remember Nikon got somewhat criticised by some reviewers  for being overly retro when they brought the DF out. Its as if decades of industrial camera design have taught people nothing. I like my fair share of dials and buttons on a camera and not having vital features hidden away in sub menus, something I always hated my little Sony NEX camera for, but  I'd like camera design to go back to the sleek sexy curves of the late 80's early 90's. Looking froward rather than backward.

A Nikon DF.



Never really appealed to me much in terms of looks although I spose you could argue its more of a mix of old and new rather than a pure piece of retro, offers an alternative control system and design as well rather than being the only kind of design in the system.

Speaking of that Nikon's SLR's of the late film and digital era are some of the best looking cameras around today, the kind of thing that will likely be remembered as the real design of the era rather than the man fashion retro releases.


greenman

Quote from: touchingcloth on February 07, 2015, 02:30:49 PM
Canon's EOS-3 and a small handful of other cameras released in the late 90s/early 00s had eye tracking autofocus, where the focus point was switched depending on where in the viewfinder you were looking. It worked remarkably well by all accounts, and I'm a little surprised it's never made its way as a feature into a DSLR given how universally clunky focus selecting is on just about every camera on the market.



I'm guessing dropped due to fear of eye strain lawsuits. My favoured option for quick selection would be using 3D tracking to focus/recompose whilst also allowing for continuous AF. For things like street shooting where you want to rise the camera to your eye and then take the shot ASAP I find that works very well.

mobias

I just did a bit of reading up on the eye tracking thing. Apparently the way Canon implemented it in their film era cameras would be impossible in digital cameras so the feature was dropped when digital took over. By the sounds of things although it worked reasonably well but it was fairly clunky and not as sensitive to eye movement as it needed to be.

Perhaps not surprisingly the idea is still very much alive and in development. There were rumours back in 2013 that Sony would release a camera with eye tracking autofocus but as of now its yet to appear.

http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/sony-eye-tracking-af-coming-in-2014/

greenman

Quote from: mobias on February 07, 2015, 06:09:39 PM
I just did a bit of reading up on the eye tracking thing. Apparently the way Canon implemented it in their film era cameras would be impossible in digital cameras so the feature was dropped when digital took over. By the sounds of things although it worked reasonably well but it was fairly clunky and not as sensitive to eye movement as it needed to be.

Perhaps not surprisingly the idea is still very much alive and in development. There were rumours back in 2013 that Sony would release a camera with eye tracking autofocus but as of now its yet to appear.

http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/sony-eye-tracking-af-coming-in-2014/

What would have been different with film? with an SLR surely the standard viewfinder AF system is the same regardless of the capture medium as its achieved by directing light though part of the mirror.