On Taking Photographs | Hacker News Reader

On Taking Photographs

oldtowneast.openpluto.com

>> "I took quick notice of a sentiment among the photographer community that would suggest people like my self should stay far the fuck away from their craft. Fancy "I make a lot of money" types all over this arena. Looking down on us pheasants. You scummy poor people with your shitty little cameras."

Maybe I'm blind, but I've never picked up on this attitude. I may have met one or two individuals like this, but I've shrugged them off as holier-than-thou individuals (who exist in all disciplines), not part of a wide-spread attitude in the field of photography.

I will say: There is probably some annoyance among serious photographers at the claims that an iPhone is on equal footing with a high end DSLR/Mirrorless camera. It's true that some mobile phones take a-mazing photos that truly can rival some high-end cameras, but that's usually in a very narrow context, and much of the creative input of the photography process is either automated or simply not cared about. As long as you're not claiming that your iPhone is on par with someone's Sony a7R IV and implying that there's no use for such cameras because iPhones are "replacing" them, then I think most #serious photographers don't give two-hoots what you're shooting with. Different cameras have different applications that they're the best fit for. It's all about what works for you, and part of that, frankly, is the enjoyment (I shoot high-end digital, point-and-shoot digital, manual 35mm film, and kodak funsaver disposables)

Frank Thorp, a professional news/political photographer, shoots with a fancy-pants Sony a9, but also does a lot of disposable film cameras!

I was about to post the same thing. I've been a hobbyist photographer for over a decade, ime the space is super welcoming to newcomers/hobbyists.

I just spent a few lovely days in the desert shooting the bloom happening there (Joshua Tree, mostly Cottonwood area). I've dabbled in photography for about 20 years but I'm a no-talent casual at it. The small bag with my kit is altogether worth only a grand...

My biggest frustration at the moment is that there isn't an ideal home for my photos. I tried Smugmug, but found I didn't use it enough to justify the pricing. It targets Real Photographers and takes a little bit of fiddling about to get it set up. Instagram is Insta-no. Picasa is just another stone in Google's Graveyard. I'm >this< close to self-hosting Lychee, but one of the attractions to photography for me is that it's more about getting out and going places and aiming a camera at things, and I don't really want to corrupt that with the same sort of stuff I already do for a day job.

I'm never gonna sell a photo but friends and family like to see some of the things I've seen. Does anyone have a glowing review to offer for some photo hosting and management service?

flickr is just perfect. why it's not on your list?

Low confidence in the platform? It's been around a while, but has also changed hands a few times and is owned by Smugmug now anyway, and I've got the impression that it is stagnant.

i think it's a wrong impression, try it. it's not super social; for this you can try instagram. but some flickr groups are just amazing. i am learning so much, training my eye...

YMMV but I've been a happy Flickr customer for over a decade. They haven't modernized much so the site looks and feels old, but their pricing is very fair and there are still a lot of folks on it.

I have considered selfhosting myself, but it's a lot of work and features like "auto upload from my phone" and "privacy guard for pictures of my kids, but make login-free links for grandparents" are very nontrivial.

I agree, Flickr has lost its spark. It might be dying, it might not. But whatever it had is gone.

I know it's not cheap, but I've really come to enjoy Adobe Lightroom, as well as the rest of the creative cloud suite. I also don't care about the social aspect of sharing my photos (comments, likes, favorites, etc...) -- so if you already have a CC subscription, don't care about social, and just want a place to post -- look into Adobe Portfolio.

Edit: I'm not advocating that you go subscribe to adobe just for the hosting! But if you already have the subscription but aren't making use of the hosting, it's definitely worth looking into. It's included in the subscription cost. Consider this my glowing review.

Lightroom classic is great. Has the newer lightroom even got luminosity/range masks yet?

Lightroom is also the best I have found. Just this week I was able to send an album from a trip in 2012 to a friend and share some photos of a trail run last year with some new acquaintances at a conference directly from the iPhone app. You also get a no-code portfolio site included. I now just create best of albums for trips and text links to family, friends and coworkers. I don’t see any point in pursuing strangers approval of my photos and rarely is their ever meaningful and helpful critique on sites like Flickr.

Also, for context, I shoot JPEG only on a Fuji XE4 so don’t use the Lightroom editing tools much.

If you have the skills, self-hosting might be the way to go. There are a few options beyond Lychee these days [1].

[1]: https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries.

I haven't used it much lately, but I opted for 500px. Similar to flickr

An inkjet printer is what works for me.

Just like olden time, prints are the end state of my digital picture pipeline.

A side effect is that making pictures is a different experience now. What is interesting on a screen is different from what is interesting as a physical object.

For perspective, I usually print small at 4x6. It is faster, easier, takes less space.

More importantly it is less precious about things.

Good luck.

For me this mostly depends where my friends and family are online which invariably ends up being Facebook. I still use Picasa for local storage and simple edits and Gimp for more complex edits. Google Photos is handy for an automatic cloud backup of android phone pics and I have tried creating sharable albums there but they don't get many eyeballs when I share a link. Youtube channel for grandkid videos. I have a starred folder in Picasa for my best shots and every so often I copy that to a thumb drive to distribute to various family computers and the living room TV for use as a screensaver.

Flickr is still going.

I'm in the middle of getting my family using Nextcloud and the Memories app for that. No idea how well it will work long term, but it's an idea.

> My biggest frustration at the moment is that there isn't an ideal home for my photos.

As a hobby photographer, I share my public photos on my own site [1] and syndicate to Pixelfed, Instagram and Glass [2]. Glass really has potential (photographer-oriented, small fee), but it has yet to stand the test of time.

For my private and "share with friends" use case, I'm still looking for a solid solution. Two options I'm considering are my NAS and OneDrive (where I have a 1TB space due to my Office subscription).

[1] https://photos.darekkay.com/

[2] https://glass.photo/

"You don't take a photograph, you make it. — Ansel Adams"

cool quote. When I was learning to use my film slr years ago, I remember reading ansel adams's books and wishing I could afford an expensive 4x5 or bigger view camera and had a really good darkroom able to process the film and prints. :)

Whenever people complain that this or that photo are postprocsessed/edited (not "straight of our camera"), I always tell them that postprocessing already exists decades before Photoshop. Those were what Ansel Adams and friends did hours in the darkroom.

Straight out of camera jpegs are also postprocessed, but the decisions are made by software running on the camera instead of interactively. Anyone complaining about this has a poor understanding of the technology.

Of course, there are legitimate concerns about deceptive manipulations of photographs that purport to be documentary in nature.

I once assisted a photographer who spent weeks, in some cases months planning a single photo, scouting locations etc, then hauled her gear (big format film) there, and took the photo which more or less turned out as she imagined. After spending time in the darkroom and then post-processing the scans on her giant Mac, that is ^^ But she knew what exact photo she wanted, and how to get it, and then "just" worked her ass off to do just that.

It's not what I like doing -- even if I had it in me -- because I like finding things, and also looking at things nobody thought of, until there was a photo of them; but it still deeply impressed me. It really was as if she was painting with light.

> Lastly, and perhaps the most disappointing, is I sort of forged myself into this narrow channel of thinking that had me under this spell of distaste for creative pursuits and surrounded myself with scenarios and people that reinforced this idea. One guy having a bad day is one thing, but a group of them acting as a support network and echo chamber for like-minded low vibration individuals is a completely different shit-show. It turns into a pissing contest of who can achieve the most disgraceful acts of human existence, and other acts completely absent of self-respect, morality, or both, and somehow maintain this as a lifestyle. That's getting a little bit too far out of focus tho.

I'll be honest, this paragraph piqued my interest. I feel like a dive into the implied and hinted story here would be fascinating. And likewise a meditation on how one enters this mindset and the effects it has on a person would be incredibly thought provoking.

Any group that can create 'others' has these tendencies. If you like podcasts, checkout "My year in Mensa' where the host passes the mensa test and then finds that all the nice mensa members you meet in person seem to be online trolls. Same thing really.

I've encountered something like this attitude, though it's more a reverence for the newest, flashiest gear in online forums. Certain camera brands bring it out in people, like certain car and computer brands used to.

Oddly, photography is generally an asocial pursuit, at least as an amateur. So what does it matter what the photographic community thinks. If you're in business, they aren't customers, and if you show your work, they aren't the audience.

I've been taking photos since I got a Casio QV-10 which took 320x240 photos, and lost them if the batteries ran out of charge. I've had about 10 cameras along the way, and each one was an incremental improvement over the last.

Constraints make for good art, and after my Nikon D40 DSLR broke, I got a really cool photo[1] with a $100 point and shoot and playing around. (The L20 has a "action mode" where it keeps taking frames until you tell it to stop), so I laid down in front of "The Bean" and made a hemispherical panorama, with the aid of Hugin[2].

There's still plenty of fun to be had, and you can get amazing cameras cheap these days.

[1] https://flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51858792421/in/datepost...

[2] https://hugin.sourceforge.io/

I regularly want to go back in casual photography but camera really became expensive and the format that interest me the most (micro 4/3) has a really uncertain future

Reply on news.ycombinator.com