Turning leftovers into fried rice generally results in one of my favorite foods. That’s not to say I don’t like more upscale options too, but man.

It sounds like the design goals Nikon and Canon were using were similar, yes. On a crop body, it’s great for capturing things far away. I used it for motorsports. It was also a good people lens, but at 110mm FF equivalent you had to have some space to use it.

Wish I’d had more ambition to get out this Summer, there’s been a LOT of sunspot activity that I’ve missed.

I can relate to this. Especially when it comes to reach and close focus, your gear can get in the way of the shot. I feel like a lot of this hobby is clearly identifying your use case (reach, close focus, speed, etc) and then weighing the lenses that satisfy that use case against their tradeoffs (size, weight, image quality).

Over in e-mount land, I have Sigma’s 35mm f/1.4 (the old HSM version) and Sigma’s newer 35mm f/2.0. The extra stop is nice, but I rarely need it and f/2.0 is half the length and weight. Guess which lens gets used more often.

Sometimes you find great deals, sometimes you find Chinese garbage. Luckily I never paid much for garbage.

The nice thing about buying used is you can usually sell it without much of a loss. I’ve been treating this as “longer term renting” gear to help me find what I want.

Agree on older gear being cheaper. I’ve taken many a great photo on my D40 ($50-75 on MPB) and D5300 ($225-325 on MPB). Depending on the focal length desired, there are solid used F-mount lenses around for fairly cheap as well. My go-to was the AF-S Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G IF-ED VR, which is a FF lens, but it still isn’t that heavy. I think I got mine used for $350 10 years ago and have to imagine the price has continued to come down. There’s a lot of fast thrid and first party glass available cheap too.

… There’s a setting to auto play gifs I just found. Does it not work and/or loop?

Inline gifs!

Cross posts, or links around Lemmy generally, also open in an embedded version of my default web browser (Firefox), which present the native Lemmy UI. This is a bigger one for me, but I don’t run into it often.

Rheobatrachus, whose members are known as the gastric-brooding frogs or platypus frogs, is a genus of extinct ground-dwelling frogs native to Queensland in eastern Australia. The genus consisted of only two species, the southern and northern gastric-brooding frogs, both of which became extinct in the mid-1980s. The genus is unique because it contains the only two known frog species that incubated the prejuvenile stages of their offspring in the stomach of the mother.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric-brooding_frog

TIL. That’s pretty nuts

Homes in Detroit look awesome and are super cheap, especially for what they could be. They’re going to be a ton of work and if you have kids the schools are horrible though :(

The gentrified pockets look amazing, but drive quite a premium.

<e>I meant to reply to your reply further down. oh well</e>

I wonder if it’s just the era of architecture. Detroit has some truly interesting looking homes. Here’s a random collection from a quick trip around street view:

Detroit or another rustbelt city?

That’s cool! I also wasn’t trying to say whether or not it was or wasn’t you, I really just wanted more context on the photo. I’m assuming that it’s actually two skulls?

https://www.aliceferox.com/blog/2021/7/21/comfortable-to-die

Looks like it’s probably an art project, but still a neat idea.

I like the tri-photo format, and photo collages in general! The mix of aspect ratios is a nice change of pace.

An attempt while mobile: !beebutts@lemmy.world

An actual link: https://lemmy.world/c/beebutts

Very nice. This FOV is very trippy, but I appreciate the nice diagonal.

I work at a big company. We have tons and tons of problems to go solve that are getting little attention in addition to having a lot of redundant and/or “what would you say you do here” type positions. Most of this happens by accident, but it’s nearly impossible to unwind and redeploy those teams. My guess is that the big reasons why is because of leadership not wanting to look bad - a mix of “why did you staff this to begin with?” and “why did you let this go on for so long?” When these groups are eventually found during a reorg they tend to be let go vs redeployed, which makes it even harder for the remaining groups to do anything. The cycle is truly silly.

You already have the things you said you like, so be happy I guess. Newer sensor generations are always incrementally decreasing noise, but it’s not that dramatic. Newer lenses are constantly improving sharpness, increasing AF speed, decreasing vignetting, decreasing loca, etc but they’re pricey. The only thing that really stands out to me is sensor based image stabilization offered on mirrorless bodies. You can get some fairly long, and thus low noise, exposures with surprising sharpness hand held these days. M43 cameras are the clear winners here, but even on APS-C and FF sensors, the stabilization offered by sensor based stabilization is better than that offered by lens based stabilization.

The plus DLSRs, especially before the D40/D800 was that they were extremely repeatable. As soon as additional features, like face/eye AF got added to the mix, it all got… very hairy. “Will my camera find a face? What if it looses that face?” Aside from Canon and Sony, most modern mirrorless still struggle with front or back focusing some when using face/eye detect. Electronic View Finders can be very cool with all the information they display (level information, histograms, even flashing blown highlights/shadows in the case of Olympus, etc), but unless you’re looking at a pretty modern (or $$ used) body, they tend to not be very high resolution. My A7II is serviceable, but it’s not that great - especially when manually focusing. But speaking of manual focusing, one of the cool things an EVF can do is focus magnification for the thing you’re focusing on as you adjust focus. Blackout free shooting with an electronic shutter on an A9 makes panning photos a lot easier for me since you can see the thing you’re tracking continue to move.

/many random thoughts

All that said, used F-mount lenses are getting cheap - especially if you have a built in AF motor which you do…

All good!

There are options!

M43 cameras can be a lot more compact but once you start really sweating equivalence it does get a bit messy. Modern FF mirrorless cameras, and their lenses, will also offer size/weight savings over a DSLR. Here’s a very quick size comparison. Note that there is a newer version of that Sony 24-70 that reduces weight to 659 grams (vs the 1,070 of your Nikon DSLR lens). I find that my Pixel 3a is pretty good for bright light with moving subjects, but as soon as my subjects start moving and lighting drops my dedicated cameras make a world of difference.

Agree on using a speedlight, but if flash is in the picture stabilization won’t be as necessary. I wrote up a fairly similar reply on the .world version of this post.

Happy you found it interesting/entertaining!

Your D800 remains a very capable body. The three advances since them are quieter mechanical shutters (not all brands embrace them equally), pretty solid electronic shutters (so you can pass on the loud mechanical shutter when needed), and face/eye/subject recognition (makes getting the shot a lot easier). There have been some advances on the ISO noise front too, but these have been slow and steady IMO.

If you frequent dimly lit places and your kids are constantly on the move, it’s hard to beat a MLIC with a fast prime. I do occasionally miss my speedlight, diffusers, and umbrella for the effects it could create but I get by in dim light pretty well without them.

Coming from a D40, D5300, and getting back into kids with a J5 it’s kind of funny to find myself standing by a A7III, but it’s a great value these days and delivers more consistently eye/face in focus photos than a Z6II.