I am totally guilty of infodumping. When it’s about a topic that sparks joy (in me), I call it geeking out as in I geeked out about about my Star Trek card game at the party and no one seemed to understand or mind too much.
This Star Trek card game. It’s called Fleet And Federation and imagines what would happen if a setting like the original series was a well-edited reality show (which allowed me to mix in navy events and Hollywood development events into the mix). It’s a co-op game that tries to operate as a fast(er) action TTRPG, the end result of occasionally getting face time with my old gaming crew but not having time enough with them for a proper TTRPG campaign (or even a run)
I worked on it a long while before giving up for lack of local playtesters and venues. In retrospect (having since learned more design theory online), F&F would suffer a bit from quarterbacking, but otherwise was fairly viable a working game.
That said, I was quite proud of countless diegetic elements of the game and would sometime have to explain it to someone, but first explain what the hell F&F was so that they’d know what I was talking about, and by then their eyes were thoroughly glazed over.
so you know photography right, doing it in your phone is easy but it pales in comparison to professional quality, and it’s mostly not because of the device, for your photo-taking machine to bring meaningful difference you need a certain skill level.
Here’s a few tips how to improve dramatically even with just your phone! Manual is great and all but whatever algorithm your phone uses will always give you an ok photo, and you want to take both good and shit photos! Variety is the spice of life after all
turn on the 3x3 grid on your camera screen. Then try to allign people’s eyes, faces etc with the top line horizontal in whatever orientation you use. Objects of interest go along them as well, or even in the bits where they cross. Landscapes look best when you get the horizion running the bottom horizontal line. For more information check out rules of composition
now photography is all about light, without it there would be no photo after all. Here’s the 3 key setting that are fun to mess with:
go to “more modes” or similarly named menu in your camera. Select pro, here a few fun setting will appear
ISO controls brightness and grain, the bigger ISO the brighter the photo but the more grainy too
shutter speed control the lenght of exposure to light your photo gets, the longer shutter speed the brighter the photo but the steadier your hands need to be to compensate (with a very long shutter speed you can also take those fun light drawing photos, but that often needs a tripod or some sort of steady spot for your phone)
f stop, in phones you get maybe one or two options for that but this controls the depth of field and, you guessed it, brightness. The lower the number the more open your lens is and the more light flows in, but your depth of field gets smaller (blurry background)
most of photography is learning how to balance those 3 settings! All of them have their use, a sports photographer will use much different settings than a studio portait photographer.
though perhaps the most important rule of photography (and all of art) is that there are no rules, just guidelines, when hearing about a “rule” your first thought should be to see what happens when you break it, so then you can understand why it’s a “rule” and perhaps even think of ways to break it with intent so the critics of the world can go “ahhh how clever” at your work :D
I’m not a girl nor autistic (though adhd) but I hope this brings you some fun :3
So basically, a lens captures a large area of light and projects it onto a small sensor.
When you turn the lens around, it captures a very small area the size of the sensor it’s supposed to be used with, and projects an image into the camera that is way too large, resulting in what you see being a severe crop.
Which means, the shorter the focal lenght (and the further away the lens is from the camera, for example using bellows), the more „magnification“ you get out of this crop.
Now, this means three things:
You lose a fuck-ton of light, and since you’re required to close the aperture by a lot to get any kind of usable depth of field in such a configuration, you will sometimes not be able to see what the hell you’re even doing, because it’s so dark.
This is manageable with a 50mm lens, but obviously gets worse the more you crop.
Since you’re using old manual lenses, have fun with capturing a busy insect with all the right settings before it buggers off. Using continuous shooting and a flash that can keep up with it is invaluable.
And lastly, you can’t even use the focus ring anymore if you mount a lens backwards. Your focus distance is now fixed, and equivalent to the flange focal lenght the lens was built for.
This means your only way of getting the subject in focus is to move the whole camera back and forth, which gets increasingly difficult the higher your magnification, since the depth of field is so incredibly thin, even more so if you keep the lens wide open to see what you’re even doing.
But it’s fun, and so much cheaper than dedicated macro lenses :D
You could just get a reverse-ring to mount one of your existing lenses backwards, but I want to steer you into the rabbithole of vintage lenses anyway
Ebay has loads of all kinds of them, and many are in no way behind modern lenses in terms of image quality, while being super affordable.
But then there’s also lenses people specifically seek out because they aren’t perfect, and exhibit visual quirks that make them interesting for creative work.
The soviet Helios 44-2 for example has some strong spherical abberations going on, producing what most people call a „swirly bokeh“.
This lens has been used in some scenes of The Batman, and they even modified their expensive anamorphic cinema lenses to look more like the Helios.
ouuuu, I do love playing with how my photos look like before the light even reaches the sensor. I think one of my friends once got himself an old soviet lens, I’ll have to ask him about how it shot
Another one I like a lot is my Pentacon auto 50mm 1.8 multi coating. If you can find one in good condition, this is a great looking lens you should be able to get below 50 bucks. At least that’s the kind of price I remember last time I checked.
And it uses (like the Helios) the m42 screw mount instead of a proprietary bayonet. So that’s a big plus for fans of open standards, even if it’s absolutely irrelevant today, since you’ll need adapters anyway.
But my favourite might be the Minolta Rokkor 50mm 1.4, that is just a nice lens. There’s also a 1.2 variant, but it’s harder to find and more expensive.
guess I’ll need to start hunting for vintage lenses lol! I’ve only stuck to modern ones so far to expand my range but you’re tempting me a lot with those comments :D
I have a Samsung phone! But it’s one or two years before the smart-moon-photographing-software scandal, so I have to actually figure out how to use the advanced settings of the camera.
Hey phased array radar, like what’s used on Aegis cruisers, fuck yeah. Beam steering works pretty well on WiFi routers that use it, so the phase modulation is pretty inherent to that use (or not). LIDAR = RADAR but with lazurz yo, and that shit’s trés cool. Damn tech can be fun!
Soooooo 🥹 when calculating voltage drops on our elevation maps? -squee-
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