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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Look, if someone told me this was good I don’t have the hubris to tell them they’re wrong without trying it.

    This takes so little effort it’s almost worth trying on a whim when making banana bread or something.

    If this is as horrible as the other reviews imply I’m gonna be a little mad because I’ll feel like they trolled me. I will leave a review to express this.

    So I get it. I understand them.






  • 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.





  • 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.






  • 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.





  • 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.