It happened unexpectedly, unannounced. One day I was minding my own business, reading email, and one popped into my feed. Oh, no, another ad. But this one was different. It was from that venerable king of creative editing software – Adobe. It was a reminder that my subscription for my Photography Plan would renew in a month. Ok, great. Then I saw it, at the bottom.
Continue reading “The End of Photoshop – For Me”Back in 2020, I did my first blog post on AI, commenting that while many saw its emergence as a threat, I didn’t. With the choices available to them, people like me could elect how much if any machine-learned automation might become part of our lives.
It’s five years later and I thought I would revisit that idea again, again from the perspective of a senior retiree. I do recognize that other lifestyles and financial circumstances might result in a different viewpoint, but this is mine.
Here’s how AI has impacted me in the last five years and how it might impact me in the future.
Continue reading “Why AI is No Big Threat”Frankly, it’s a question I’ve never thought about. Ever since I starting shooting digitally, and ever since I became aware of software available to edit, I’ve edited. But I’m preparing a short talk for a group of hobbyist photographers and I’ve discovered that some of them don’t edit, have never edited and have never considered editing. I find that fascinating. We will talk more about why they don’t edit in a bit.
There is a long standing debate about in-camera skills vs. post-processing skills. From the early days of photography, and rightly so, it was decisions about framing, composition, exposure, and using natural light and shadow properly that determined the end result. I agree with that perspective and continue to refine my skills in-camera. But artists being artists, more options were discovered for adding a unique look, a mood or an effect to that end result. Today, the options can be almost endless, including AI driven editing technologies. So let’s explore that a bit further.
Continue reading “Why Edit Your Photographs?”Happy New Year all! Playing with those Christmas gifts? Here’s the story of one of mine.
Any hobby that relies on technology will eventually bring you to a point where you need to contact Technical Support. I’m pretty savvy and can solve most technical things on my own. I frankly prefer to do that, as I learn better that way how to avoid the problem next time.
I had a situation recently though that made it necessary to seek help. I purchased a piece of equipment before Christmas through my favourite telescope shop. The item was made by SkyWatcher, a reputable, well-known and trusted brand. Sadly, the item did not work at all out of the box and despite my best efforts, I could not solve the problem. So I contacted technical support, first at the shop where I purchased it, then through SkyWatcher. Here’s what happened…
Continue reading “When Technical Support is No Support at All”If you check the sales numbers of the top camera manufacturers worldwide over the last 15 years, you will see that sales have dropped by more than 90%. The market for traditional camera sales has clearly bottomed out, with most of us relying on our cellphones now to capture those memorable daytime visual experiences.
In contrast, the market for astrophotography is exploding, particularly in the 30-40 year age groups. Inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, sales have skyrocketed. While still technically a niche subject, the number of companies now that offer specialized astrophotography equipment, along with the number of companies that will design and build a custom home observatory for you, is growing by leaps and bounds. There are also star parties around the world each year where enthusiasts gather to share experiences and ideas. YouTube searches for astrophotography confirm the growing interest, although there is a strange unexplained dip between 2018 and 2020.
My last blog post talked about a move away from technology to more analogue options, especially for young folk. This bucks that trend bigtime. Why?
Continue reading “Why is Astrophotography So Popular Now?”Spoiler alert: I prepared this a few months ago, as you can tell from the images and clips (we are in winter here in Canada). Things have changed a bit in terms of the equipment used since this was prepared but the message is the same. Read on to the end to find out…
One of the things I have always found a bit ironic in photography is that as you become more and more proficient in the craft, you might seek out better equipment typically, and then, also typically, you TURN OFF all of the advanced automatic features of that better equipment and go “full manual”. I’ve never really understood that. Why would anyone do that?
I decided to try a totally different approach with an area of activity that is growing for me: vlogging. Instead of turning everything off, I’ve put together a basic but decent rig and turned ON all of the automatic functions I could find. I’m doing nothing manually. I think it’s working really well so far. Read on to see what I’ve done. I’ve included a few video clips as well for your entertainment.
A very Happy New Year, everyone! Hope that you all have the best year ever in 2024!
I had an interesting experience recently. Many of the YouTube channels I follow have a tradition of publishing their predictions for the coming year, as well as their assessment of the best and worst products of the past year.
In one such review (and I won’t name the channel), the reviewer put out a poll to their viewers and asked them to weigh in on the best and worst cameras of 2023.
I’ll just analyse one of the results: the worst camera. The camera voted as the worst camera of the year by that crowd of several hundred (wonder what statisticians would say about that response rate with a subscriber base of 50K…), with 54% agreeing, was the Canon EOS R100. So just above break even. And that was deemed worthy of a dedicated video. Ok, then.
The Canon R100 was released in July 2023 for a retail price of $799.99 CDN, with the included RF-S 18-45 f/4 kit lens. The camera was marketed as an entry level, first interchangeable lens camera, for new content creators and those moving from their cellphones to their first real camera. It was marketed as the replacement for the T-series of DSLR’s and the M-series of early mirrorless cameras (which have since been discontinued). It provides a low cost entry point with some, in my view, admirable features taken from its higher end brothers and sisters.
But the complaints of this particular group included: no flippy screen and no touch screen and no high speed burst rates or high megapixel count. So obviously a piece of crap. Seriously?
This made me wonder about the standards generally used by these reviewers to assess best and worst. At the end of the day, it takes a lot of skill to offer an objective view of a product, particularly when you yourself are an advanced user of typically much more sophisticated products. Tony Northrup, long regarded as one of those with a lot of this skill, called the EOS R100 a “capable” camera. So why such a difference in views?
In this case, I think it boils down to the simple task of crowdsourcing an opinion. The channel in question is known for mining the opinions and research of other people and makes its name by packaging those for delivery and saving you the time of going out to do your own research. It doesn’t really offer unique perspectives – only those published by others. So it’s not surprising that an opinion on best and worst of the year would be sourced the same way.
Apart from that, I wondered why there was this chasm of divergence in views between Northrup and this other channel. I guess it comes down to what you personally mean by best and worst. The biases that you apply to an opinion are the foundation for debate in a democratic society and we relish those. I certainly do. But I also expect to see a factual basis for a particular viewpoint. And maybe even an agreed standard way of assessing something that purports to provide a ranking at the end of the day. That didn’t happen here in the case of the poll. No standard questions were provided, no guidance on what to consider and what to leave out.
Separately, another channel I very much respect (and which also will not be mentioned) conducted a poll of viewers as well to determine the best cameras and lenses for the current year. Not surprisingly, the cameras and lenses that won top prize just happened to be the ones used by the channel owner and the majority of its viewers.
Manufacturers are partly to blame for this divergence in views as well, shaping expectations of the next great thing by plugging speed, capacity, automation and the quality of the results. At the highest price points, that makes sense. But those same expectations now seem to be applied to more budget friendly options, and is the source of most of the “indignation” and complaints found online when a budget product does not deliver what Joe Public feels it should. In this case, it’s a ridiculous list of expectations in a camera that costs less than 10% (with lens) of the highest price models in the same family (without lens). 
In fact, Tony Northrup, in one of his most recent videos, made the case that its time to stop pumping out more megapixels and more speed, and instead make the gear more usable, with things like built-in face recognition security to help prevent thefts, LCD screens you can see in the sunshine, internal storage and reliable wireless transfer of files.
And I guess as a final comment, those same manufacturers (and channels like the one mentioned) are creating an even bigger problem, convincing us (or trying to) that we need those extra features and capabilities just to be functional. In 2015, I purchased a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, which at the time was regarded as one of the best DSLR cameras on the market. It has 20 megapixels, no flippy screen, no touch screen, no high speed burst rate and no tracking of human, animal or insect. I still own the camera and still use it regularly. It gives me the same great quality images I expect from any Canon pro camera. It’s still listed on Canon’s website. But I guess against the standards of the aforementioned channel, it wouldn’t even make the list of has-beens. 
That said, in all fairness, I also own two of the EOS R series cameras: the R5 and the R6 Mark II. Both serve very specific purposes and fill very specific needs. It was NOT the hype that lead me to these purchases.
The bottom line: take reviews and gear rankings with a grain of salt. Understand the basis of the opinion and judge if the person giving the opinion is worth listening to. It wasn’t in this case.
A few days ago, I published a single image that was the result of months of elapsed time (days of actual time) and represents the most effort I have ever put into a single photographic image. The image? The Rosette Nebula, a hydrogen gas cloud in the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy. These gas clouds are either stellar nurseries or the remnants of stellar explosions. Either way, they populate the sky with amazingly photogenic objects.
These gas clouds either emit or reflect light. As such, we should be able to photograph them as we would other subjects, right? While all the photographic “rules” apply about exposure, composition, white balance, sharpness and colour saturation, they are multiplied exponentially when dealing with objects that, in this case, are a whopping 5,000 light years from us in distance.
Continue reading “Space: The Final Frontier (Part 2)”
YouTube video content creators often refer to themselves as “hybrid shooters” because they use cameras that combine still photography and videography in the same equipment. The term has been mis-used for a long time, and I feel it necessary to set the record straight.
This is especially true today because in this age of multi-channel content creation, I feel that a hybrid shooter is really someone who uses multiple devices to create content, not just one device built with multiple capabilities that is repurposed strictly for video. But first, let’s explore a bit of history.
Continue reading “Hybrid Shooting”One of my goals as a retired senior citizen is to indulge all of the interests I’ve developed over the years, now that I have the time and frankly also the money to do so.
I’ve had a long standing love affair with all things in space and space-related. By that, I mean all things off our own planet. From the early days of the Gemini and Apollo programs in the US, I’ve been gripped by a fascination around what and who could be out there. And of course, Star Trek and its offshoots only served to romanticize the idea that strange, wonderful adventures and discoveries could lie beyond our atmosphere.
I had some good fortune when younger to connect with people that worked on these challenges, at least from the point of view of humans living in space. But I’ve come to realize that humans in space is more of a challenge than we know how to solve right now, and I will never live to see permanent residence of any human anywhere other than on the Earth. But there are other ways to explore beyond our tiny speck of a planet, and I have settled on astrophotography as that method for me.
Continue reading “Space – The Final Frontier”Fine Art, Architecture, Landscape and Event Photography
oldgirlphotography.ca 