Photo shoot anything lately? Random Photo Thread

Photography has been one of my hobbies... although I have not had time for it in quit a while. Here a few night time shots.

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If you like tractor stuff, or old trucks and trains.






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Couple snaps from my cell that came out pretty good...

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Monarch on goldenrod, but what I was amazed at was just how many other pollinators were also on the goldenrod.

Eastern Blue birds taking up residency in one of the nesting boxes I put out last spring.
Black capped chickadee photobombing! lol

NHSleddog said:

Only in New England,

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How do you open the left one without it all falling out?!?

Awww man take the small one mix it with cream cheese and you got a killer dip
good for veggies and other things

couple more from last year. All very quickly taken with iphone 8 which I don't care for. I picked up a new phone in December which I like better, much better camera.

Somewhere I have a couple of wildlife crossing water. One, a BIG buck whitetail crossing the river, about 1/2 mile wide. The other a fox squirrel, same river, same place actually. Sucker got to the boat and stopped, looked up at me as if "I'm tired, carry me" (I know better...they can be pretty mean), then carried on swimming all the way the remainder of it's journey. With the size of the fish in there, I'm quite surprised it made it-and yeah I watched it the whole way (from the boat to the bank). Once on the bank he slowed down a LOT, kinda walked up a fallen tree and laid down. I don't blame it!

NHSleddog, what is that stuff, canned snow?

D2Cat said:

NHSleddog, what is that stuff, canned snow?

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That is the almighty fluffernutter [emoji14] That stuff was a mandatory staple in our household growing up Usually in the form if peanut butter and fluff sandwiches. But a dab in hot cocoa works also

It's basically marshmallow paste

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I have one picture someplace, maybe on the old putter of a cow moose and twin calf's swimming across a small lake we were fishing along the French River. They are some big critters

Took this one morning in July, while grooming beaches at Presque Isle State Park in Erie, PA.

This thread makes me a little sad. Back between 2008 and 2012 I was very heavily into photography. I ran a photography community website, similar to this forum and site, but all centered around camera's, equipment, editing, composition, and techniques. I ran that site for 2 or 3 years out of my own pocket. I was also traveling all around every weekend taking photo's. I sold many large prints, and could have probably made a business out of it. Alas, I bought my house at the end of that time and slowly began to slip out of the hobby until around 2017 all my equipment sat in my office just collecting dust. Thousands and thousands of dollars of camera's and lenses and bags and tripods and everything you can imagine. I made the tough call to sell it all, so I pitched it all over local facebook yard sale pages and in just a couple weeks sold it all. So, I sold myself out of the hobby. I always told myself I may return one day. Im still passionate about photography. I spent years studying it and mastering it. One of the primary functions of the website community I ran was photographers posted their latest pictures and everyone else would critique the work and rank it using a built in ranking system on the site, then you could set up best of 10 this month, best of 100 this year, etc. It became a real competitive thing with a lot of serious photographic minds all churning out thoughts and ideas. I miss all that some days. Anyways, thanks for allowing me to vent that sad note Ill keep enjoying the snaps.

NHSleddog said:

Beautiful composition in that photo.

To Tornado - I feel your pain. I dropped out of the hobby for a decade. Boy things have changed.

The thing that always got me with photography is you are capturing a moment in time that will never be the same again. It is 100% unique and always will be.

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Yea. The motivation for me was capturing the beauty of nature and wildlife - which was my specialty. Capturing the perfect photo was like painting on a canvas. I would often spend hours in the same spot waiting for the right light, and shooting the same area under different weather and lighting. I have about a dozen of my photographs hanging on the walls in our counties local court house. I still get weekly comments from folks on those photo's and Its always nice to hear. Sometimes I regret not doing more in the hobby than I did. I had several local people who pushed me to do photography workshops, and I almost did it but then my life started to change once I bought my own house. I met my future wife at that same exact time as well, so priorities began to shift for me. I've always been one to jump from passion to passion as well so its kind of a habit of mine. I will get into something really heavy for a few years and consume it day and night, then eventually move on to a new passion to consume. Its part of my personality. Maybe one day I will return to photography. I kinda jumped out right when things were at a high point. My photography website had just been featured in a photography magazine in Europe, traffic was spiking higher and higher, but my real life situations shifting dampened my interest. If I cant do something 100% i tend to not do it at all, so I ultimately shut it all down. It was a lot of work keeping it all going and it just became a chore rather than a passion.

One thing I will say about the photography scene that began to really negatively impact me was the extensive use of post editing. I am very very good with adobe photoshop. Ive used it since I was 15, and it served me well in photography of course, where I expanded my ability even more with it during those years. Most all of the big landscape photographers use extensive post editing - and the results are stunning and gorgeous, but part of me started to feel like it was almost too fake. Replacing skies, adding clouds, changing the entire lighting. All you needed to do in the field was have an excellent composition - that was always the critical starting point, but once you have an excellent composition of a subject you can do all the magic in photoshop and turn a very average photo into a contest winner with extensive post editing. The results can be breathtaking and very beautiful for sure, and I loved creating these images, but at the same time it began to erode my passion. You start to feel more like a graphics artist than a photographer. It was a double edged sword for me. I think some post editing is a must always, but the things being done today are really pushing things to a level that is almost merging 2 art forms - digital art and photography. I love both fields, but I dunno, its hard to explain how you can enjoy creating something then also feel like its a bit empty. This is what runs the scene at the top levels of wildlife and especially landscape photography.

I did a little with hobby photography, but a lot of time was spent in the darkroom preparing publication prints of electron micrographs, which in their own way are quite beautiful. I learned from a scientist who would say to me when I was pulling a print off the dryer drum, Umm, don't you think that's a little soft? Or something similar. You only have the one negative to work with but you could do so much with paper grade, exposure time, type of developer, etc. I loved watching the image appear in the developer bath. Expensive though to get it perfect, blew through a lot of paper, about a dollar a print as I recall. I had one of my pictures requested for a cover on the J of Neuroscience many moons ago. Adobe Photoshop is cheaper, but the prints are typically much lower resolution. I'll look for an image to post some time.

Never really got 'into' photography. The cost to develop a roll of film coupled with only 1 or 2 pictures would turn out. Though, with the digital camera's and cell phones the quality has really gotten better and you can easily delete the 'practice' shots. You people take some really nice pictures.
Regards,

Ping said:

Never really got 'into' photography. The cost to develop a roll of film coupled with only 1 or 2 pictures would turn out. Though, with the digital camera's and cell phones the quality has really gotten better and you can easily delete the 'practice' shots. You people take some really nice pictures.
Regards,

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While film still has some die hards, the vast majority of the scene is all digital now, and has been for many years. Even the few I knew who still liked shooting film done most of their professional work with digital cameras. With digital of course comes all the post processing capability and the vast powers of photoshop, love it or hate it.

NHSleddog said:

Beautiful composition in that photo.

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Thanks NHS. Just a rank amatuer on a tractor with an iPhone lol. I always see these sunrises come up and think "even my mother could take a nice sunrise pic here." (She was the world's worst photographer, it was laughable.)