u/jamerTag

Ohhh I like the 50mm a lot. I assume you took these wide open given how strong the bokeh is?

What lenses?

Yes that is pretty normal but you can trim their nails as well to reduce the scratching by a lot. This also helps them if their nails are so sharp that they're getting caught on fabric

Lol how wrong you are... The Fuji has aperture but the iPhone 17 doesn't. Once he gets the 18 they'll look the same

Not the part where Hila is IDF scum and he's zionist scum lol?

Where I sit it is enough water to soak me through. I wear a swimsuit when I do this.Honestly the shower thing is more akin to what this would be than the waves. You put the whole camera with lens fully under the shower water?

I'll just spill the beans and say I am talking about Promontory Point which looks like this. I wouldn't be quite where those boxy rocks are because that is very dangerous but that is the kind of splash I'm talking about. This does mean I would take droplets straight to the front of the camera, top of it, and maybe a little splash under

https://preview.redd.it/d6qukq9k9bxh1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c78c486b5b5e5c43a9ea0fcd3cf34b53791a77b

OK true yeah there's no way being that close he could perceive what he was about to shoot at all

Honestly for me I am happier the more good pictures I get regardless of how many shots I've taken to get there. Now I take every shot I think might have potential and I sort things out afterwards. I find while I have a lot to sort through you can learn a lot from bad photos as well as good photos, and finding a diamond in the rough is a joy each time. Then, I send my favorites to my best friend and see what she thinks of them. I also think showing your photos to non photographers that you know irl is helpful. They have different standards but also a decent sense of what photos are good and not. Its ultimately this type of person who makes up most of the follower count or big shot photographers. Look at what they say their favorites are and try to identify what made those photos more impactful. At least for me this has made me more excited to keep taking more photos even though I only get one photo I love for every 100 or so

Genuine question. Is it really so bad to go for "spray and pray" shots? I dump my SD card now before every shoot and last time I went out I took ~1200 photos in 2.5 6hours. Granted I was shooting birds where you want to do bursts but honestly a lot of moving subjects I will quickly flip to burst and fill my buffer. It has a low success rate for sure but I have the memory in my card and this gives me the chance to find the photo with the best technical qualities like focus and to form composition via a crop. Then if my burst gets me a luckily good composition I can learn from that and see how I might plan similar shots in the future.

I try to think about composition but it's boring thinking for too long about it so sometimes I see something I feel has potential and if it's moving I take a burst and if it's static I shoot at a variety of apertures and exposure settings and then evaluate later.

Wait why tripod and faster SS? Shouldn't ibis be fine at 82mm 1/160s? I shoot even slower at 150mm with OIS only on a relatively cheap lens and don't get really bad shake.

Faster SS would help with the rain here but then if it's faster the tripod doesn't really help much anymore, no?

OK so I checked out s5ii as a platform for this and it looks like I wouldn't actually get more equivalent stops for the same money near as I can tell. Dynamic range would be wider I think but it looks like for ~$3k it's either the Om5 + pro lens or the s5ii with one of the sigmas but those will still be at f/5.6 at 300mm. The FF gives me two stops over the MFT sensor but then I lose those stops on the lens. I know the s5ii isn't that massive but still the setup overall is then bulkier whilst still capturing approximately the same quantity of light. I do see that L mount has more options to get more stops but the prices for that are really quite steep.

I suppose the remaining debate would be the pro vs a speed boosted setup which theoretically achieves one additional stop for the same money at the cost of autofocus and weather sealing which are ultimately wants and not strict needs to take good photos

I sort of left that up to dxo in a way. I just followed the links to obtain a trial, I'd imagine they would give trial users such a feature to draw us in but I'll have to check if I actually have it or not

This winter is supposedly going to be mild but we pretty much will always have some time at -10C or below and a very long time at <0C so definitely a bit chilly

https://preview.redd.it/srfcohvjbiwh1.png?width=1022&format=png&auto=webp&s=09fb0d1d564f5104c43ccf312c12c096eb1f8d1f

Yes but it's a torturous comparison haha. The low light performance gains are undeniable but I'm not sure the s5ii can fit in the bag I take on planes and I'm not sure how I'd feel about the body being so much bigger when using it. Much to consider

You're right, I'll still be limited with the pro and in a perfect world I'd be upgrading by more like 3-5 stops instead of just 2. I need to do some more research and testing but bumping to 6400 iso and using dxo might be one way to grab an additional stop. I also do think when the birds are chilling I don't strictly need to hit a super fast shutter speed but my current lack of ibis means on those shots I currently suffer from noise, camera shake, and underexposure all at once.

Also, fwiw this isn't the darkest of nights I'm talking. Since I'm shooting in a city there is virtually always artificial light present

I didn't mention but the weather sealing and choice of OM is also so the setup is more rugged against freezing temps. Idk if Nikon or Canon has an offering that will be cost comparable for 300mm equivalent+ that is genuinely rated for operation at below freezing. Most I see go down to 32F and the Om5 hits 14F. In reality, I will likely be pushing that and shooting in even colder conditions at times

I haven't heard of an "entrance pupil" before, will have to dig into that.

The concept of analyzing how noisy a duck is gave me a little laugh

Yeah I tried DXO but it didn't seem that much better compared to what darktable gives me. I'm gonna give it another shot and maybe try taking some pictures that will let it shine more. I kinda suspect my real issue is that when I've used high ISO my SS is still slower than ideal so I end up with an underexposed photo with camera shake and noise all at once, and while dxo handles the noise OK it can't do all that much for camera shake. Meanwhile, my photos without shake don't need much denoise so the difference in quality is hard to see. This could be one area where having IBIS on the new body as opposed to the G7, which lacks it entirely, helps to make higher ISO more viable for me than I realize.

Aa far as a rain cover... To be honest I didn't wanna fuss with one or worry about damage from misusing one and I do have budget for weather sealing but I'm sort of dialectically testing my purchasing decisions here. Probably more important is I was also planning for freezing weather as well as precipitation. I'm hoping to shoot in the dead of winter this season and in Chicago where I am that means ambient temps will cruise below 10F or even 0F at times. I do plan on having a dry bag for condensation and know weather sealing can't truly prevent that.

150mm is a little short I agree but I am shooting primarily at park spaces in Chicago, and birds in those places are pretty chill with humans, you can get a lot closer to them than other spots. I can't get a nuthatch to fill the entirety of my frame or anything but it'd be pretty hard to track one if I could. Sometimes I crop just a wee bit for little birds, a tele adapter would probably remove the need for that for me.

On a side note, I did try out DXO recently and honestly I didn't find the denoise to be that much better compared to darktable, and I also found the work flow for photolab to be a little weird the way the software tried to set itself up for me. Do you feel it's really that much better than everything else? I still have the trial so I was planning on giving it another shot

You're right, my bad. I was going quickly and using AI which grabbed the wrong spec. I normally pull up multiple tabs and do a full comparison but I'm at work so I'm being covert. Someone else said go try out the pro at a store and my store can facilitate this so I suppose I will just try doing that and see how I feel about it relative to my current lenses

Oh sorry if it wasn't clear, I meant a prime 200mm. I know you can't get the same zoom with a wider aperture and have it be the same size. I basically want this guy here but on MFT and with weather sealing. It is significantly shorter than the pro, a little skinnier, and lighter.

Edit: I was wrong about the sizing, this guy is actually comparable to the pro

https://preview.redd.it/al9wrrrr9hwh1.jpeg?width=479&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cbbcfa7c0f28c1e7aeda019d9a83c1c31a06259a

Yeah I was assuming no cropping in which case you're right it's a big difference. Looks like you deleted which is fine but the Sony was cropped then? I figured it was just like a 300mm on the OM and 600mm on the Sony to get same framing

OM = 20MP on MFT so 20MP/(17.3mm x 13mm) vs Sony = 50mp on FF so 50MP/(36mm x 24mm)

Or ~9MP/cm² on the OM vs ~6MP/cm² on the Sony.

All things considered, these aren't that different so as far as sharpness goes when viewing on a small screen or paper the differences are really in the weeds. Plus, pixel density stops giving you additional sharpness at a point because small pixels have downsides as well. If pixel density was the most important thing, then phone cameras with ridiculous MP/cm² would be outperforming all the larger formats which use a far lower density.

Where you would likely see a huge difference is in print format. As you go for a larger and larger printed image, the Sony will start to look significantly cleaner than the OM as you stretch those pixels across paper. Or, if you viewed both images on a much higher res screen then you'd be able to see the differences more. On the average laptop or phone screen the limited display may not even have the pixel to really replicate the density of the Sony image, and with every pixel being so tiny your eye just can't perceive much difference.

I think this comment is like 90% correct, someone who knows more than me will likely embellish on the nuance