I’m always a big fan of a strong backlight on furry animals like this. try to catch them at golden hour with the sun mostly behind them. you’ll either need a bit of fill light or to bring the shadows up a touch in post for it to really pop in that situation. if the dog is patient you can literally just use a piece of foamcore board to bounce the sunset back into their face. in this photo i even had the sun flairing into the lens a little. it helped that i was shooting up a hill. made it easier to line up the sun, but i was still laying on the ground to get this.

as I mentioned in the post you’ll want to open that aperture to get a nice dreamy shallow look like this. you also want to get as close to the subject as you can while maintaining a good frame (fill the frame) and make sure the background is far away. an open field works great for something like this. you should also always try to be at your subject’s eye level as a general rule of thumb. yes, being higher or lower can work, but there needs to be intent behind doing it.

shooting very large dogs like that will make it much harder to get a photo like this one. the 45 1.8 will seperate the subject well, but it won’t blow it out into a dreamy blur like this when aimed at moose dogs. you’d need something longer like a 135 1.8 or an 85 1.2. that said, you can still make a very nice looking portrait, it just won’t quite look like this.

you also don’t want it to be overly sharp. sharpness tends to make the fur look less soft and cute. if it’s like a doberman doing a nobleman pose then you probably want a sharp look, but if it’s a cute little puppy like this one i tend to remove sharpness in post or shoot on vintage glass.

it’s not cheating to use treats to pose them. it’s not unreasonable to take a nice picture of the owner holding them. if all else fails, just chase them around at their eye level on burst mode. try to catch the sun lighting then up nicely from behind.

In theory, if we’re growing beyond Linux nerds and harcore communists, this should be one of the biggest and most general communities as well as one of the most likely to see slop get upvoted.

ai kittens and puppies make up like 30% of Facebook traffic on their own at this point. if we’re worried about ai slop taking over THIS is the community to watch.

hmm, while I’m doing menial/mindless tasks i really like educational podcasts and audiobooks. i can pay attention just fine while doing yard work or driving to work. i find music doesn’t occupy my mind enough while doing things like that.

I’ve just straight up told an employer before that if a smart phone was required to do my job then they needed to provide me a company phone.

they found other options for me, but it really pissed off my supervisor. eventually i left because he was an asshole. gave them a -1 day notice and just stopped showing up. i do freelance work now. they deserved that hit.

is already so bad. i do astro timelapses and it’s all you see anymore. they stand out so much now, if the quantity gets 100x’d it’ll be a nightmare.

it will blot out the stars…

i did mean 11, My pc is plenty powerful it just doesn’t happen to include a tpm chip. i have no issues with power. it handles 4k 120p 10 bit timelines fine. upgrading right now in this market would be asinine if software wasn’t pushing me into 11.

man I’m facing either needing to get a new pc in THIS market to use 10, or find an entire new professional software workflow to do my job. professional video on Linux isn’t real. hobbysist video sure, but pro video work with partners just isn’t realistic on linux.

this is the first thing that’s actually pushing me hard.

i mean with those games it feels like you get one every game third generation at this point.

elder scrolls 6 is going to become halflife 3 at this point.

hmm it’s more like if the supermarket closed… you still need food (social interaction). so where do you get it now. like you ate out sometimes before, you let others cook for you every so often. but for many, discord is their primary means of keeping in touch. you need to find something to replace it. so we’re all debating if we grow our own food or drive 4 hours to the next closest which already has going out of business signs up.

not wanting to use a platform that someone prefers is the easiest way to lose touch with someone these days. like i struggle to socialize with tiktok people these days just because i don’t get their references and they can’t send me their memes. if they’re also an imessage diehard we probably just haven’t talked in a while.

hmm idk, i only know like 2 people in my life that still use Facebook heavily. i know it’s different in India though.

Facebook has seen stagnation or user drops in most mature markets, it’s still growing in growing markets. India especially represents like half of all Facebook now.

no idea where you might be from, but this is not a globally universal issue. this will likely play out differently in different markets.

they didn’t say they were wrong, just an asshole.

it’s like someone died to a live wire and you correct their family that it was the amps not the voltage that killed them. you’re not wrong, but you’re a tone deaf dickhead.

yes, the vast majority of web traffic is phones using apps. no person that uses this platform is an average user.

even if your family hates tiktok it’s still massively popular.

especially among the youth who probably only have a really shitty locked down chromebook from their school and the recently developing world. in the global south most people never got a decent computer. they all got phones instead. once you’re on a phone everything pushes you towards apps.

well that’s why most people use apps instead. the real internet is so hostile without a guide.

especially now that you can’t use the mainstream browsers and do it. the barrier to entry has gotten so high that i don’t blame kids for being put off by computers and prefering their phones for everything. tiktok has annoying ass ads, but no apps are as bad as the average news website…

it reminds me of trying to learn about cars growing up. i didn’t learn about cars growing up. i tried, but everyone i tried to learn from spent the whole time complaining about all the anticonsumer practices that made cars shitty these days. all the hoops you have to jump through to work on them yourself anymore. how the manufactures went out of their way over the course of years to take what used to be a fun tinkerers hobby for the everyman and made it incredibly difficult and expensive to do yourself.

my take away was “I hate cars”. so when i hear teenagers these days say that they hate computers i get it. they fucking suck now and there’s this 8 foot fence of knowing how to make them suck less before they can even start wanting to learn about them. but it’s going to take them a very very long time to get good enough with the computer that they can accomplish anything on it better than on their phone. so we have trucks full of ladders that can scale that fence, and even if we lose our ladders we know how to scale that fence barehanded if we gotta. but the kids just walk around the fence because they don’t value what’s inside. why would they?

so I’m just waiting for the old pc based intent to slowly wither away as we age with it… places like this becoming out last bastions in a world that requires validated apps on phones.

tell that to the passenger strapped next to the dead guy for however many hours.

honestly, theirs looks so much better. i can actualy see the the appeal.

i bet they could find some way to premake the hair animations on icons like this. like they really only need to move in 2 directions. you could make that look pretty good with like 200 canned animations. different speeds and start/stop styles is all you should really need. at that point it’s not too different from creating a walk loop for a video game. you’d just be calling up various premade animations with a system to string them together believably. it’s totally doable. certainly no worse than other “live wallpapers” that were a popular included feature about a decade ago.

yeah, they really lost their early edge on the granny gamer market lol. they’ve all jumped ship to those bejeweled like games and virtual jugsaw puzzles. maybe wordle if they’re bookish.

i think there are little things you can play in some of their messaging platforms, but they change so much on those so often that these kinds of users probably ignore 90% of the interface. i think those hit more with the gen z and gen a younger crowds. especially when it can also become social media content. tiktok is great at that.

i guess, but it woulf require the least likely people to adopt a new and expensive technology. think about how long it took for the older generations to catch on to the internet and smart phones. they may be glued together now but it took 20 years and every single other person on earth getting one to make it happen.

warcraft for your lonely aunt is a fine idea. making that vr was poorly conceived. it would have to work on a phone AND be more compelling than just taking on call or text.

but also, the early adopter types that are more or less necessary to get something like this off three ground were never going to like it. that’s us. you can’t create a new tech market segment that wasn’t explicitly asked for without at least considering the nerds. meta has negative trust among nerds. we all saw this as the marketing and data collection tool that it is meant to be.

it was never going to happen. at least until they have full control of all of our devices and platforms and can just say we need it to continue existing in society now. that or b2b contracts are the only ways i could see this ever taking off. it would take some serious marketing voodoo bullshit to convince any sizable businesses that this would increase profits.

how about a wait and see model that i like with all megacorp pushed updates now. that way i can decide if i want their latest batch of ai bullshit, or read the headlines about which cpus their vibecoding bricked this time before it’s too late.

unfortunately automatic updates require a small amount of trust that the update will not break things or change things without permission. Microslop currently has negative trust.

maybe this is good for the average end user, but dissallowing powerusers from doing stuff like this is exactly what annoys me about apple. now microslop is even worse about it…

i just want to actualy control the things i own and not be told how to use my computer.

aah, but it didn’t say steam, it said boiling water.

smaller gas generators based on internal combustion engines don’t boil water though, right?