No idea what system you’re on, but if you’re on a budget DSLR systems are the way to go IMO. F-mount lenses go back quite a ways and old glass is cheap - especially if it requires an in-body focus motor.

It’s probably a design patent, which is more style focused and helps prevent knockoffs.

I’m not an Apple fanboy, but arm based processors seem to be working out fairly well for them.

I own an Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which was one of the OG snapdragon x laptops released a (two?) and a half year(s) ago. It took a while for folks to get Linux to run on them and there’s enough of a barrier to entry that it’s still not very common. Most of the initial hurdles were due to Qualcomm bootloader shenanigans.

A reminder of more sane times, but also some level of presence

No, but investors tend to treat companies as either growing or dying. If you have a boring and reliable product you’re going to saturate the market at some point, which means that revenue will fall. Arguably there’s still a lot of value in sticking around selling replacements as people break things, but this is nowhere near as lucrative as the growth phase.

You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.

I wonder if pre-shooting, or whatever canon calls their implementation of this feature, would help? Granted, a long exposure should catch it too, but unless you’re constantly going to be taking long exposures…

Same, but I do have some level of worry regarding portability. My solution isn’t local or self hosted, as I was looking for easy and works across Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/iOS. I do not look forward to needing to change to a new password manager in the future, but given the way everything seems to be going it seems likely that I’ll have to at some point.

It depends who you’re trying to protect. Joe consumer doesn’t know what OpenWRT is.

Same

Old.reddit.com has slowly been getting worse. Lots of collapsed comment trees, a similar posts section after the first two comments in a busy comments section, etc.

Nice photos! Two questions on the waterfall: did you hand hold and did you use a ND filter? When I was a lot earlier in my photography journey I shot some auto sports and looking back realized I was at teeny tiny apertures for a lot of the shots. I’ve always wondered how others approach longer exposures in the sun, especially when you don’t know what your light will be. Do you bring multiple ND filters and swap them, do you try to bring one Goldilocks, … ?

Thanks, fixed!

What a well framed photo! And yes, that’s meant as a non-risque double entendre.

For anyone wondering what I’m on about, if you have a symmetrical object with sharp lines in front of you take the time to do something with them. In this photo, OP made sure they were centered/squared to them. This makes for a very pleasing photo.

A bit late to the party but…

Before you take a photograph, think about what you’re trying to photograph. Are you trying to isolate a subject or are you trying to capture a scene? This helps you figure out where you should be focused and how much (or little) depth of field you should try to achieve. For this photograph, it seems like you’re trying to capture a scene with some flours and an interesting rock. As an added bonus, you have some pretty nice lighting going on.

After that you’re on to framing - is the camera square and level to your subject, if the background distracting can you reposition to make it less so, is there an unusual angle you can use to make your photograph a bit more unique, etc. For this photograph, I think this is the biggest area of feedback. Having focus so low in the frame is a little unusual, but it seems to work here. I don’t mind the house in the background a ton, but the pole is a bit distracting - especially because you’re not completely level/square to it. If the pole was unavoidable, I would have tried to make it perfectly vertical. Is there another place you could have stood, and/or another focal length you could have used, to capture your scene? Kneeling in situations like this can be helpful.

Finally, you’re into post. I generally like what you posted. Beyond rotating the image slightly to get the pole completely vertical, my only suggestion would be to selectively desaturate and/or decrease exposure on things you find distracting - like that pole for example. I am not talking about “photoshopping” those things out, only manipulating their colors to make them a little less visually obtrusive. You could do the same with the red house to make it contrast a bit more with the purple flowers that are directly in front of it.

To save the highlights or for the effect?

Depending when back in the day ways for you, be prepared for higher prices. On the other hand, the gear these days is great. If you’re not going to be shooting fast scenes, most bodies will do nicely. Pick up a sharp prime and you’ll be off running. From a purist shooting experience, primes are pretty freeing. A prime will also get the added bonus of primes having good optics and most of them have low night performance.

At your budget, I would suggest used gear. There’s nothing wrong with DSLRs if you won’t be shooting dynamic scenes, but mirrorless have very nice focusing algorithms these days. Coming from Nikon, I would recommend a D7x00 series body and a prime or three. If you want to go mirrorless, Sony has a very deep back catalog of glass. The A7III is still a great camera and can be had at a pretty good price on the used market, which will leave you with space for a nice lens or two.

I posted this a month ago, but it seems to apply here.

First, the best camera in the world is the one you have on you. Have an urge? Take the photo with what ya got, even if that is your phone. On the other hand, try to be more intentional about bringing your camera with you when you venture into the world. This will probably take finding the right lens and overall package size, but I bring my camera and a compact lens with me on most family activities as a result.

Second, for well lit subjects that aren’t moving much and aren’t that far away modern cellphones are generally fine. Yeah, a dedicated camera with a fast lens can create a nicer looking background if you’re simply sharing photos on the web it’s not going to matter a ton. Don’t get discouraged if this is the kind of photography you prefer.

A dedicated camera will blow a cellphone out of the water in a couple key areas. Those include:

• focus speed and control. Even with my old Nikon D40 and D5300 I feel way more confident in my ability to get focus where I want it than either my work iPhone 15 or my personal OnePlus 12. Modern mirrorless are in a league of their own, especially when you pair them with a lens that can keep up with their focusing algorithms
• the ability to capture sharp photos of things in motion thanks to more light gathering, which lets you use faster shutter speeds
• low light. I’m shooting full frame these days and with a fast lens I have no problem hand holding and taking photos of human subjects in really low light conditions
• interchangeable lenses. A long telephoto will give you way better results than a cellphone digitally zooming
• burst rates. Not all dedicated cameras have nuts frame rates, but a portion do. This makes it really easy to capture the precise moment. Yes, cellphones can do this too but since they’re sacrificing light their image quality might not be great

Four examples where I adore my gear:

1. I am the unofficial team photographer for my kids’ youth sports teams. They’re both currently doing baseball. I can sit at the end of the backstop fence, about 100 or so feet from home plate, and fill the frame with the kids batting. Thanks to high burst rates I can basically guarantee a photo of the ball hitting and just leaving the bat
2. We hang out at a lot of museums and go to night events like zoo lights. My gear lets me get great sharp photos, without blur from my family moving around, thanks to a mix of modern camera sensors being fairly low noise, fast glass, and shooting full frame
3. My older kid did a figure skating show this spring. I rented a 70-200 f/2.8 and was really impressed by the photos it was able to capture. Excellent focusing, kids filling the frame, basically no noise, tack sharp photos
4. Absolute control over exposure and a very easy shooting experience makes it a lot easier to get cool shots, like panning photos at a racetrack or even a panning shot of my kid on their bike

Happy shooting! If you have questions, make another post!

Not sure, but I would suspect that AI output would likely be very similar to procedural generation output in that it will need some massaging before it can be used as a final asset.

Procedural generation of content in games is by no means a new thing. Even if the end state isn’t completely procedurally generated, odds are a version of the asset was initially and a human touched it up as necessary. When you’re talking about large asset sets (open world and/or large maps, tons of textures, lots of weapons, etc) odds are they weren’t all 100% hand made. Could you imagine making the topology map and placing things like trees in something like RDR2?

That’s not to say all this automation is necessary a good thing. It almost feels like we’re slowly chugging through a second industrial revolution, but this time for white collar workers. I know that I tell myself that I would rather spend my time solving problems vs doing “menial” work and have written a ton of automation to remove menial work from my job. I do wonder if problem solving will become at least somewhat menial in the future.

Check the post title ;)