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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 22nd, 2023

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  • A couple points.

    1. Lenses are typically sharpest a few stops down from wide open so shooting at 5.6 makes sense in that regard, but if you want a narrower depth of field than what 5.6 provides you gotta go wider (also some photographers use extremely narrow depth of field as a crutch so it can be a good thing to shoot at narrower apertures for variety and to expand your style. You are also more likely to miss focus and not realize it until later shooting totally wide open). It’s up to you as the photographer to make the picture you want, there are no ruless that say you can’t shoot portraits with only the eye in focus or whatever.

    2. Using the viewfinder is a more stable position than using the back screen because your arms are tucked in tight to your body. This will minimize camera shake and help you get sharper pictures, especially if you are shooting at longer focal lengths and are limited by a slow flash sync speed. If you are using a 135mm lens and are limited to 1/125 second sync speed you are probably going to get some noticable blur from the camera shaking if you hold your camera out away from your body and use the back screen. This is much less of a problem if you are using a 50mm lens, could be somewhat of a problem at 85mm depending on how strong your arms are, etc.

    Tapping the back screen to set focus may or may not be precise enough to nail your focal point, depending on the camera, especially if you are shooting wide open. Using eye or face autofocus, or setting a focus point is typically more precise.


  • All of my own stuff I have printed are digital chromogenic prints (digital images exposed onto negative photographic paper with lasers, the paper is then developed in chemicals; also sometimes called silver halide prints). The image quality is great and the printing is cheap. I use Bay Photo. I also do some black and white darkroom printing, but i’m not very good and I can do way more in Photoshop than in the darkroom. I do not sell prints, they are for display in my own home and so I don’t really care about archival life because I have the digital files. I personally am a big fan of Fuji deep matte velvet paper, but the best paper to use depends on the photo.

    I believe most photographers selling prints these days are selling inkjet prints (also called giclee prints). Inkjets have the potential to be higher quality than c prints, but that quality varies depending on the ink, paper and printer used. The archival life of inkjet prints, especially those made with pigment inks, is almost certainly longer than c prints although the actual limits are theoretical because they haven’t been around long enough to actually test those limits in the real world. Inkjet prints range from slightly more expensive to waaayyyyy more expensive than c prints to produce, especially once you start using really high end paper.

    In the past, the highest possible quality of print was a positive to positive chromogenic print (using a darkroom enlarger to print a slide), but as far as I know there are no more positive papers being produced. The archival life of positive papers was greater than negative paper, but I don’t know how it compares to pigment ink.