A full year ? A lot of social upheaval and chaos BEFORE that would happen. We have learnt to deal with loadshedding.
Back to photography. I wonder if he developed and printed that one?
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Not just a US problem. Also, one that has been long in the making.
I recall a family TV show when I was a teen. The candidates were asked to draw a duck on a white board. A young woman who had been introduced to the audience as working in a supermarket drew a duck with four legs. She obviously wasn’t 100% sure, though, erased a pair of legs but couldn’t figure out where the remaining pair should go, so redrew the erased pair after all. She admitted that the only ducks she had ever seen were the frozen ones they sold in the store, and there seemed to be four limbs.
Many years later my brother’s girlfriend came along on a visit to friends of mine who had chicklets in their backyard at the time. She told us afterwards that those were the first ones she had ever seen. And she was 20 then.
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Oh yes. :-|
But I had the opposite happen to me once: for a work trip in a then seldom-visited far-away land in pre-digital times I bought a new camera and 15 rolls of 36 exposure colour films, 100 and 400 ASA. I was aware of my non-existent skills and assumed I’d be lucky if I came back with perhaps 30-50 decent pictures. Imagine my huge bank-breaking SHOCK when all exposures of all 15 rolls turned out ok! I had to borrow money to pay for the prints.
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I am often surprised, when looking at old 35mm prints, at how good they turned out, considering my inexperience and the budget equipment I was using. I think we were just more careful back in those days. Taking pictures was a special event. Not like today. When my son and his family showed up for Christmas, he promptly announced that, “We are NOT going to do another photo shoot, like we did for Thanksgiving!”
People are exhausted of taking pictures in my family. Even though I may be shooting family portraits with my pro gear, fourteen people will want to get the same photo with “Their Phone”. “Here, get one with my phone!” is a phrase heard ad nauseam whenever anyone suggest that we get some family photos.
Back in the film camera days, this was not the case. People were more patient and calm when we took our time to get the photo right because they knew it was a special event.
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Actually, that 3-1/2 inch floppy disc 
is still the “save” icon on Office products.
I’d be happy to have a camera that actually focused on the subject instead of the background. Sometimes, I’ll muddle through with manual focus just because I get tired of fighting with the “background AF.”
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My Sony Alpha cameras have this problem a lot when shooting in the forest. I can have a subject dead center, and it will pick the background every time if I leave the focus point set to Wide. This is why I keep my focus point as center Small Spot-Flexible. I also set my metering to center small.
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For macro, I have a (used) Laowa manual focus lens. In some ways, I think this is easier to work with as the tiniest moves can make a huge difference in getting the shot. And, I’ve gotten better with time. If the subject is active I’m probably going to 4K video. Burst mode is not a flash-supportrd option.
My goal is always that 2048 pixel limit in iNat, so when I’m shooting on my 24MP Sony Alpha, I am very aware that I have about a 1/3 frame area to crop to. .
Sometimes I wonder how it must be to work with a 48MP camera. I mean, the forgiveness level in that resolution!
The Laowa is manual exposure too so since for macro I almost always have the lens pegged at the f22 max for DOF, and the shutter for flash speed at 1/200, the only auto I might allow for exposure is ISO.
Thanks to my RAW software (in particular PureRaw) I can usually dig out what I need even if what I see initially doesn’t look too great. Meh, it’ll do fine.
Shooting for iNat specs is so forgiving too. I’m not looking to sell calendars or enter contests and that alone is very liberating in terms of creative freedom and overall enjoyment.
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Don’t make me want to upgrade…I can’t afford it. But manual focusing on birds is such a pain.
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With my Nikon P950, for birding, I tend to use the ‘faux’ manual lens side focus knob and peaking.
It’s not nearly as easy, fast, or controllable as a true manual lens and that’s why I find myself wistfully dreaming that one of these years, they’re going to release a bridge superzoom with a true manual override right on the barrel like lenses of yore.
Yeah, right.
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Listen to me. It took me years to upgrade from my Sony A6500 APS-C camera, but I am so glad I did. If you want to upgrade, let me save you several years worth of research and endless reading viewing of reviews. The Sony A7IV is what you want. Hands down, not a question. It is the absolute best bang for the buck on the market. It is a balanced camera that does both Stills and Video very well. You can find them on sale for under 2k or get a used one for 1.5k
If you are into birds, here is something that I did not know when I bought the A7IV. It not only had Animal Eye AF, it has a special BIRD Eye AF. And it really works! It picks up on a hummingbird bird eye in flight!
I shot this image Christmas morning while I was drinking coffee on the porch, not even trying. This was on a dark cloudy morning and completely unexpected. This is a Rufous Hummingbird and extremely rare in my area. In fact, this is the only one I have seen in my life. I performed a 75% crop and I added some brightness and contrast, but did no artifact removal on it at all.
600mm
f/6.3
ISO 640
1/200
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Well, if I’m going to fantasize about gear I can’t possibly afford, I might just jump to the A1.
But I do have a question about the A7IV — do you shoot silent mode or mostly with flash? I heard that the A7’s sensor is relatively slow (with the e-shutter speed) and I wondered if burst shooting in this mode produces a lot of shearing effects or just how limiting that is.
Oh, awesome shot – and find!
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I would have to have at the least a well trained large dog…
It took me many years to save up enough money to buy the A7IV. You might not know this, but nature photography does not sell very well as stock. I get $0.10 per sale on Shutterstock for shots way better than this one, and may only sell one or two shots of a hummingbird a year. It is not my main source of income by far. It is just a hobby that I make a little money at. My agreement with my wife was that, I would only send the money that I make from it on equipment. I made the money to buy this camera with my A6500.
The A1 is 6k, verses the A7IV that you can get for round 1.5k. Personally, based on my one year use with the A7IV, I see no reason to go for the A1. Is it better? Yes. But what you are getting for that premium price, you may never notice.
When and if I upgrade, I will probably go for a Medium Format camera, for the larger sensor and improved low-light performance.
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I shoot only in silent mode with no flash. I have not noticed anything like what you are talking about.
The shot of the hummingbird was shot this way. If the conditions had been brighter, and I would have had time, I would have gone up to 1/6000 shutter speed. If I had increased the shutter speed on this shot to 1/4000 it would have turned out looking like this, which is fine for looking at, but not sellable
.
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Thanks for those answers. You’re tempting me to buy a lottery ticket! Cheers.
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You are very welcome. Have a happy New Year!
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That reminds me – have you tried DxO’s PureRaw? If not, you should give it a spin. It truly is amazing for high-ISO shooting. There’s a free trial. Run some of your grainiest high-ISO RAW shots through it and let me know what you think.
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I will definitely do that. I use Capture One for RAW processing, and it has a lot of manual controls to reduce low-light artifacts, but I have been hearing a lot about these AI driven programs like Topaz Labs.
Thanks for the tip.
So I gave it a try. It did a really good job on this shot. Much better than what I could do in Capture One. Thanks again for the tip.
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Speaking about innovations that made nature photography easier: RAW editors.
I didn’t keep the test pictures of a butterfly, taken in the shade of woods with an m4/3 camera which is notoriously not as good in low light conditions as a full frame. In addition, I deliberately yanked the ISO up, flicked exposure compensation to unhealthy levels, and upped the shutter speed as high as it would go. Needless to say, the resulting photos didn’t deserve to be called that. They were an unrecognizable mess.
Then I attacked the RAWs with the trial versions of various editors. Of course in real life a screwed-up photo will always remain screwed up, there is no way any software will be able to work miracles and turn it into a good photo. BUT I managed to retrieve enough details of the butterfly that permitted identification, and that is after all the entire purpose of my taking pictures.
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