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Regarding prime lenses: If you are unable to take good pictures with a zoom pense you clearly have bad technique. And the only true way if taking pictures is on film, it forces to think about composition and exposure. Unless you are into wildlife and birds, there of course anything below a pro-DSLR, or maybe, maybe a pro mirroless action body and 600 mm OEM prime lenses, on a carbon fibre tripod, is clearly not enough.

On a serious note, as long as you like your pictures everything is good. If you make living selling your pics all is good as long as your clients are happy. And nobody cares about the gear used in taking a particular picture, or cooking a meal. No idea why we cannot simply enjoy common hobbies.

All that are reasons I stay away from forums and social media on my hobbies. With the sole exception of a very helpfull forum on the particular brand of my classic car, I need my technical advice from somewhere.

Something I keep in mind: The people who spend most of their time online talking about a hobby, are usually not the ones who spend most of their time doing the hobby.

True! And those talking online about the gear used for their hobby are the worst cases of that.

With one potential exception being mechanical keyboard cultists. After all, the best use of a $1k keyboard is to talk hype about how great it is, and how trashy MX Browns are.

When you sit at the center of an almost impossible ven diagram, you can do anything!

> Unless you are into wildlife and birds, there of course anything below a pro-DSLR, or maybe, maybe a pro mirroless action body and 600 mm OEM prime lenses, on a carbon fibre tripod, is clearly not enough.

DSLRs are far behind mirrorless these days for wildlife photography, especially birds in flight. The autofocus systems of the high-end mirrorless cameras are substantially better than any DSLR, and the frame rates (20-30 shots per second) allow far more chances to get a good shot.

Which doesn't mean DSLRs are useless. It just means you have to take more photos & spend more time to get the same number of "keepers", so depending on what you value (time editing vs time in the field vs money spent) you might want to get a wildlife-focused mirrorless for wildlife.

Tell me! Not sure on auto-focus so, the mirrorless sytems seem to struggle with gast moving objects. If there are eyes to track they beat DSLRs everytime so. Also frame rate can be better, the absence of a mirror really helps. Not that close to 10 fps is bad by any stretch.

Fully agree that mirrorless is the future, took long enough to fully get track.

There are some DSLR snobists, there are prime lense snobists, there are mirrorless snobists, there are frame rate snobists.

In the end the picture matters, whatever helps you get good pictures is good for you.

That beimg said, as of now I'd say a Z6ii is still behind a D780 a bit and quite a bit behind a D6 (I'm a Nikon shooter, so don't ask questions about other brands). A Z9 on the other hand... That being said, none of those options beats the one you can actually afford and know how to use.

Edit: Which DSLR (Edit 2: I mean mirrorless...) gets 20 fps? The Z6ii is at 12. Everything above is, what, 5k plus for the body?

Edit 3: That seems to be Nikon's Z9 with 20-30 fps in continous mode. Up to 120 in small JPEG. Impressive, and with 6k Euros almost reasonably priced when compared to other Nikon top mofels of the past. One can still get a Z6ii and a bunch of top notch lenses. Damn, I shouldn't have looked it up...

The parent comment is saying mirrorless are getting 20FPS and thus are better than DSLR for bird photography.

Yeah it looks like you found them. Nikon Z9, Canon R3, and Sony a1 or a9 (1 or 2).

Yeah, I was thinking of the Z9 for the 20-30FPS. The Canon R5 & R3 are similar framerates, and the Sony α1 is 30FPS (at least for compressed RAW).

Nikon only recently got mirrorless cameras better than their DSLRs. Canon & Sony have had better mirorrless cameras for several years.

I've got a Sony α7Riv and their 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 zoom lens for wildlife. Only 10FPS, and slower autofocus (and no bird eye tracking) but still a great setup for the price. I tend to be in forested areas around small ponds, so while I'd love a big prime lens for more light, being able to zoom out actually gets critical since backing up would lead to falling into the water.

Most of my photography is landscape and architecture while travelling. For that travel part alone I like zoom lenses. If birds aren't too far away, 300 mm on a DX body are good enough, for Puffins at a distance of almost 100 m not so much.

zoom lenses are great, especially for the versatility they offer.

To illustrate your last point, this[1] is a Great Blue Heron photo taken at 280mm focal length, the heron was about 56m away. This[2] is the same bird, from the same location, taken at 840mm focal length (zoomed in all the way, using the 200-600mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter). And after a close crop, this[3] is a pretty decent photo of the heron. Somewhat distracting background and some branches in front, but I prefer not to edit everything out like some people do because I want to convey a sense of what the environment is like.

Later on the same walk, a Grey Catbird landed right in front of me. Fully zoomed in to 840mm I couldn't even get a good portrait shot showing the head and shoulders, just the head. So I zoomed out and got this[4], which I could easily crop for a good portrait. No need to back up and risk scaring the bird.

Money is one obstacle to a big prime lens (the Sony 600mm f/4 lens is $14,000!), but another obstacle is weight and bulk. I wouldn't want to give up having a zoom lens ready on a camera, to allow for otherwise impossible compositions. So I know I'd end up carrying two cameras, one with a 600mm behemoth and the other with the 200-600mm zoom, and my shoulders would hurt. And they'd be bulky and getting in my way, etc.

Primes are nice, but they're not perfect for every situation, and gatekeeping photographers for not having primes is stupid.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52188406196 [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52188661399 [3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52187390672 [4] https://www.flickr.com/photos/193634150@N07/52187392882

This are some nice pics you shot there!

I ran into some situations were a lens shorter than 24mm would have been nice, and some where something beyond 300 (400 on a DX body) would have been nice. 20mm prime lenses are cheap enough, the telezooms not so much. Currently my preferred one is a Tamron 150-600 G2. Weather sealing is nice, and the Sigma Sport is just too heavy and large, especially since I mostly shoot handheld / without a tripod. Funny so, that the Tamron is much less available used than the Sigma Sport.

And if, if, I had 14k free budget to burn on a lens I would still burn max. 1k on the elns and the reminder on travelling to nice locations where I could use said lens. But then I am no professional.

Purely on the coffee note: freshly grinding coffee is by far the best $-investment vs quality-improvement you can make. A $10 (or cheaper!) blade grinder makes a noticeable improvement over pre-ground for nearly everyone, and you can absolutely just stop there and enjoy the step up and that grinder will probably last as long as your drip machine.

Very little after that will achieve such a large improvement, and no matter what it'll cost a lot more money and time (e.g. to find and buy better coffee beans).

Don't forget to grind that coffee in a hand crank burr grinder, so you can control every aspect of the process. And don't even THINK about using water that is even a degree away from 200F (I know someone who uses boiling water -- the monster!)

While you're at it, if you're drinking tea, of course follow the RFC. Pouring the hot tea out of the pot and then adding milk is absolutely barbaric.

It cracks me up how defensive people get about what tools you use, meanwhile I'm just gonna keep building things because your audience doesn't give a crap what tools were used to make the actual end product.

This is so true. And that also defines "pro" tools, those tend to be the best money making devices, and not the technically best devices. They speed up work, maybe hold longer, or are a tad more ergonomically. Because all of that matters if tools are being used for hours every day to earn a living.

In the end, it is the end product that matters. And that is influenced a lot more by the person and ingeredients / raw materials then it is by the tools being used.

>The pineaple-pizza-thingy seems to be mostly a joke, for example.

Tell me you haven't visited Italy/don't know any Italians well, without telling me you haven't been to Italy.

Something I believe is that persistent satire and sincere belief are indistinguishable in many settings, and that persistent application of satire tends to cultivate sincere belief in the same thing as the idea spreads around. Not that I think Italians look down on Hawaiian pizza as a result of satire, that's more that Italians often see a national dish that's been heavily evolved overseas in a negative light, and Hawaiian pizza is the shining example of it to be seized upon. Chicago Deep Dish being another. But online it's definitely an issue - Ironic shit-posting of dumb things eventually leads to areas chock full of people with those exact beliefs for real. That's how meme magic works. Meme something, no matter how dumb, persistently enough, and it'll enter the collective conscious as a sincerely held belief.

> Hawaiian pizza

I've always found that name amusing.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza :

> Sam Panopoulos, a Greek-born Canadian, created the first Hawaiian pizza at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, Canada in 1962. Inspired in part by his experience preparing Chinese dishes which commonly mix sweet and savory flavours, Panopoulos experimented with adding pineapple, ham, bacon, and other toppings. These additions were not initially very popular.

> The addition of pineapple to the traditional mix of tomato sauce and cheese, along with either ham or bacon, later became popular locally and eventually became a staple offering of pizzerias on a global scale. The name of this creation is, in fact, actually not directly inspired by the U.S. state of Hawaii at all; Panopoulos chose the name Hawaiian after the brand of canned pineapple they were using at the time.

Hah, that's great. Hawaiian pizza always made sense to me since I grew up in the UK in the eighties, where pork/gammon with canned pineapple rings was an ordinary evening meal (bear in mind, this was close to the era of Salmon Mousse, many culinary crimes were committed around that time). I guess the association between pineapple and Hawaii is in and of itself kinda odd too, since I think they're native to South America.

Hawaiian pizza was probably the most popular pizza in Australia in the 80s also.

Even though I'm a bit of a pizza snob I still enjoy a Hawaiian pizza occasionally, somehow the combination of trashy shredded processed ham and pineapple just works well.

Try sprinkling some chili flakes on top. I didn't expect it to be good but it's amazing.

There are lots of weird stories behind famous dishes. Like the Pu Pu Platter that is seen in American Chinese restaurants. The version everyone knows comes from Trader Vic's, which basically had (Americanized) Cantonese food like char siu and spring rolls with vaguely Pacific islander names. Then it started appearing in American Chinese restaurants.

I have been to Italy, a fair bit, and as far as I can tell their attitude is "pizza is a flatbread that you use to stretch out whatever other ingredients you have on hand". There are certainly regional traditions, and obviously pineapple isn't any of them, but I don't see why they'd object to you putting whatever the hell you want on your pizza.

Caveat: I haven't been south of Rome, and I gather that there may be more pizza grumpiness further south.

Having worked closely with Italians from all over Italy, living in London - every one of them I spoke to felt passionately about food being a specific way. Nothing would get my Italian colleagues more riled up over lunch than a British interpretation of an Italian classic dish. There's clearly a very strong traditionalist food culture in Italy.

JFYI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28327893

> Tell me you haven't visited Italy/don't know any Italians well, without telling me you haven't been to Italy.

Seriously who cares what Italians think, are you that neurotic? Hawaiian pizza is great.

At this point American pizza isn't an Italian food, it's American/global. No one thinks "pizza" when you say, "lets's get some Italian".

In the more populous parts of America, Italian pizza is one of six or seven varieties one can find, generally (though not on the West Coast) dominated by the local take.

I've had pizza margherita in Italy, and at least three large US cities: the one in Rome was better, but frankly, that's probably because I was in Rome when I ate it. It was the same sort of pizza you get from Italian pizza joints in the States.

Once said that not necessarily all pizza in Italy is good, when it is good it is simply another thing from "international" pizza, I believe mainly because of the ingredients used that - generally speaking - are simply not available (at the same level of freshness/taste) outside Italy and in some cases not even everywhere in Italy.

A typical example is "mozzarella di bufala" that is easily available all over Italy, but if/when you taste the fresh one in the area around Caserta and Naples you will understand how it is different.

I'm sure I didn't have the best possible Italian pizza, it was good but hardly my most memorable meal in my (alas, quite brief) time in Italy.

All I'm saying is that a pizza margherita at an 'Italian style pizza joint' in the States is the same recipe, wood-fired oven, buffalo mozzarella, and so on. One would need to pay extra for the bufala, but the low-moisture cheese we Americans call 'mozzarella' is never used, it would be fresh ball mozarella.

Whereas a good New York slice can't be had in Italy for love nor money! (I suspect this isn't actually true; I found a Mission burrito in Guanajuato Mexico, good food has a way of getting around). Now, you can say that's like trying to find a General Tso's Chicken in Hong Kong, but I enjoy that dish as well.

In fact Italian pizza stores love selling pineapple pizza to tourists!

Whatever gets a euro from a tourist is whatever they will sell.

When I was in Italy, all the pizza shops sold pineapple pizza, for a slightly higher price, cause it sells that well to North Americans.

> mirrorless cameras are clearly ulterior.

I'm going to assume this is satire but in case this isn't, modern mirrorless cameras are far superior to dlrs for most applications these days. my z5 does everything my previous dslr does and gives me realtime exposure preview. And don't get me started on the Z9. With that camera, the dslr's's days are numbered.

I personally really don’t care about this judgements. But an interesting thing to me is that all the claims are pointing to a category of people. I wonder why some people what to be categorised, like, even if “real programmer use vi”, why do I want to be a “real programmer” if I don’t like vi? What’s the charm of the arbitrary tag?