I started photography in the mid 00s with a D40 and moved to a D5300 in the 10s. My most beloved lens from that era was a Nikon 70-300mm VR FX AF-S f/4.5-5.6 G.

There isn’t really an equivalent of that lens these days as it seems like everyone is making a 100-400 instead and those are generally bigger dimensionally and weight wise. That lens was not particularly sharp once you got out of the center, although it wasn’t much of an issue for me thanks to the APS-C crop.

There are some lens designs that have been basically the same for decades now (hello Sigma DG DN) and are still excellent, but I wouldn’t paint 00s glass as all being mature. I’m using a Tamron 150-500 these days on a Sony FF body and the Tamron focuses way faster, is sharper in the center and across the frame, has great bokah, and offers better micro contrast.

00s glass is in somewhat of a weird spot. It doesn’t have as much “character” as the glass that came before it and it’s also not as technically excellent as the glass that came after it. That said, it’s pretty affordable these days and is completely useable to get great photos. I will say that photos, even taken with the D40, have held up really well.

When I was college back in 2009 I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista on a gateway laptop. I never fiddled with Ubuntu at all. The things that worked out of the box worked reliability and I never bothered fighting with things that didn’t work like the stylus.

The reason why I didn’t make the switch back then was not the OS or the drivers. It was the lack of support for the software I needed for school, like Matlab and orcad pspice. Things have improved substantially since then between first party support (Matlab started supporting Linux with R2016a) and wine/proton letting windows applications run mostly normally without their developers needing to make any changes to support the OS.

IMO the thing that’s most in the way of adoption these days is the lack of mainstream OEM support. Until the masses can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed and the driver niggles sorted they’re not going to switch.

Straight up vibe coding is a horrible idea, but I’ll happily take tools to reduce mundane tasks.

The project I’m currently working on leans on Temporal for durable execution. We define the activities and workflows in protobufs and utilize codegen for all the boring boiler plate stuff. The project hasa number of http endpoints that are again defined in protos, along with their inputs and outputs. Again, lots of code gen. Is code gen making me less creative or degrading my skills? I don’t think so. It sure makes the output more consistent and reduces the opportunity for errors.

If I engage gen AI during development, which isn’t very often, my prompts are very targeted and the scope is narrow. However, I’ve found that gen AI is great for writing and modifying tests and with a little prompting you can get pretty solid unit test coverage for a verity of different scenarios. In the case of the software I write at work the creativity is in the actual code and the unit tests are often pretty repetitive (happy path, bad input 1…n, no result, mock an error at this step, etc). Once you know how to do that there’s no reason not to offload it IMO.

Nope! That’s part of the fun sadly. At least if you’re technical you’ll know that not all type-c cables are the same.

Display port over USB-C is totally a thing. With things like USB-PD USB seem to be getting dangerously close to becoming the standard for everything. The cables are a wreck though and are way too hard for a layperson to tell apart.

Same

Great read, with some amusing asides.

Shots fired!

I think I have two general responses.

I think you’re right in that photography and the style of photographs has evolved with technology. Each of those technological steps has been partially shaped by art (what makes it to market) and taste (what succeeds in the market). Additionally, darkrooms gave a lot of leeway for the look of the final image. This also ties into what makes for a compelling image - you’re often looking for a dramatic scene, a subject that’s a bit out of the norm, and/or unique lighting. Yeah, there are street photographs of everyday people doing everyday things in normal lighting, but they often aren’t that compelling.

In other words, photography is often stylized. I personally think that’s OK, especially when you consider how flat lightly processed photos are.

The good news in today’s world: if you shoot digital you can shoot raw + jpeg and change the look of the image pretty drastically with non-destructive edits. I’ve re-edited photos I’ve taken over a decade ago and changed their look significantly. I can do the same again in another 10 years if it strikes my fancy.

Nice! Cross post to [email protected]

I am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work ‘computer’ time is on my phone these days :(

What were you intending to focus on? To me, this is focused fine but without an obvious out of focus subject it’s hard to tell.

You probably know this, but just in case: if you want more in focus, close your aperture some more.

I suggest something where you get to work with a wide range of the populus. Opportunities are basically all service industry jobs: waiting tables in a restaurant, working retail, working in a hotel, etc. Learning how to interact with wide swaths of humans is an invaluable skill that will serve you well in your future professional career. I would focus on building social and emotional intelligence.

I am a Darktable user and really like it. That said, my workflow is:

• get photos off camera
• cull. I’m using photo mechanic right now, but if I can find an option that lets you sort my the largest in focus face I’m tempted to switch to something else. I shoot some kids sports and want to make sure I get a few good photos of each kid
• move the creme de la creme to their own folder
• add that folder to Darktable as it’s own thing
• edit as necessary in Darktable

I’ve never tried culling with Darktable. Photo mechanic lets you fly through photos using 1-8 to grade photos. At this point my first pass is to find the “this is a decent photo” shots and my second pass is usually just to pare that down. I’ve given after shoot a go, and while I can see why a pro would use it (volume), I prefer manually culling with the exception of the kids sports scenario I hit on earlier.

Processing raw is a lot easier if you use something like Lightroom (Adobe), Capture One, or Darktable (free open source software that’s even pretty easy to use).

I’ll use straight out of the camera JPEGs most of the time, but for scenes with high dynamic range and/or dimly lit scenes I find RAW better thanks to it’s much deeper bit depth. It really helps when you’re pushing/pulling shadows and highlights.

However it fits best in your bag. I have three bags:

• a camera backpack from when I thought carrying all my gear in one bag was a good idea. In this case the camera viewfinder is pointing at the bottom of the bag with the lens facing the top of my bag. Due to space I always keep the same lens attached to the camera in this bag - my telephoto. I also shoved a wide to normal zoom in it, a bunch of memory cards, my speedlight and remote triggers
• a fairly small bag. My camera sits horizontally with its grip facing the top. I can fit the camera and two smaller primes (with one attached) or the camera with a medium sized lens attached
• a medium sized bag that just fits my camera plus telephoto attached to it

These days I try to only being my camera and one lens with me, which means my backpack stays home most of the time. My choice of lens for the day dictates which bag I bring. I do not bring any accessories with me anymore.

I second leaving lens hoods on for front element protection over using a UV filter.

I would probs load up my pockets (extra battery, another memory chip)

Spare batteries make sense, but these days memory cards are so big I do not bring extra cards with me. Granted I “only” have a 24 MP body, but I can fit 4k RAW+JPEGs on my 192 GB of combined storage. That’s a lot of culling.

Weed of the valley! It does smell nice though. We have a bed full of this and mint that I’ve come to accept for what it is: nice smells, insect friendly, and good for fresh beverages.

Taking a photo of the mini moons at night is an excellent idea.

This probably isn’t a popular option, but a lot of the recent hate on Microsoft have been standard practice for Apple for a long time.

Windows 10 free update length? 10 years. Mac? 5-7 years.

Baked in cloud backup? Yeah, Apple has been doing that for a while and a lot of things go to the cloud by default. If you have an iPhone or iPad, things you download go to iCloud by default.

It seems like Microsoft is trying to follow Apple’s model.

I do get not wanting to support windows 10 anymore. The CPU limitations on Win 11 are very dumb, but it’s something Apple has been doing for decades. I will be installing mint on my old desktop.

I give them less grace with OneDrive. That rollout has been very naggy and shitty.

Digitally? Unless that’s off limits in this situation. I’m sure there are analog paths you could take too, I just don’t know what they would be

Disclaimer up front: I have very little background in any of this.

Why not do three exposures on three different prices of paper with a color filter in front of each? Green pigment gets the green filter, etc.