What are you offering that they can’t offer themselves with their phones? Seriously. That’s the question you need to have an answer for.

In the old days, we avoided zooms because of all the extra glass needed to do the zoom part. A perfectly good prime lens might have 4-6 pieces of glass in it. A zoom lens a dozen of more (like a modern prime). Every extra piece of glass mattered. I guess it either somehow doesn’t anymore, or the cameras are designed to compensate in away not possible with film. I don’t know and I don’t own any of these monstrosities anyway.

But, the OP’s comparison is not really valid, since you really need to compare the weight (and hypothetical size) of 4 old prime lenses to one modern one to get close to the equivalent glass.

Practice and use focus peaking if your camera has it. Also, depth of field can be your friend.

Older cameras and lenses were designed for manual focus. Both in the view finders and in the giant lens focus rings with big rubber grips. Cameras were meant to be used manually before AF came along. It is an unfortunate fact of modern cameras that they are optimized and designed to be used as automatically as possible and only begrudgingly allow manual use anymore. People were good at the lost art of focusing in the manual SLR days because the cameras made it easy and people had plenty of practice at it.

The other problem in play is the modern philosophy of photography where sharpness of focus is seemingly even more important than composition. This is an expected artifact of the availability of finely focusing cameras among people who can’t really take a picture. So here we are.

The internet, the vast majority of the time, is a solution in search of a problem. It’s best not to forget that fact.

Nobody random on the Internet cares about your photos. They don’t care about mine either. They don’t even care about your photos if you have the new Sony Super-camera with the tack sharp 5mm-800mm f.1 zoom that only weighs 2oz. In fact, they especially don’t care about THAT.

My point here is that there is nothing wrong with doing something because you enjoy doing it. You don’t need affirmation from any random person. The enjoyment of your work by your friends and family is the most you should hope for. It’s all that matters anyway. I know the phrase “gig economy” and the existence of “influencers” has convinced everyone with a half decent camera that they are one algorithm away from being crowned the next Ansel, but it’s not true and never will be. Value comes from scarcity, and the Internet has made everything on it abundant. Nobody cares about what you do. Except you. Just appreciate that.

There is no way to know. We had big file cabinets full of news photos from various sources. Internal and external. As did everybody else in the news biz. Most now are likely in some decomposing trash heap at the moment, but you just can’t know how many prints were made and where they wound up. It’s impossible. So your plan to claim them as your own pictures is probably not viable. ;-)

But it is a bit creepy to show up for a date with someone new with a camera and start taking pics of each other. I know I’d feel that was an invasion of my privacy.

To the OP: do not post them and stop doing that. Maybe suggest it as an idea to someone you are successfully dating, but it is not a date ice-breaker. It’s just creepy.

(Not to mention an I am a geeky guy and I live with my parents in their basement red-flag.)

You have fallen into the trap, the lie really, that there is some perfection, some single goal that you must achieve. Generally, this does not come from examples of people who have actually achieved something interesting. The world is full of sheep, seeking to flock with other sheep. Modern cameras have given the sheep “skills” that allow them to flock better. They justify it all to each other by going on and on about their “tools” and how they can focus so perfectly, or stop motion so perfectly, or have super high pixel counts and burst rates. It’s how sheep entertain each other. It is called bleating. All it produces is yet another “perfect” photo of a bird doing something, in absolutely perfect focus, stopped in time, taken from a row of 50 that look virtually identical, but from which this one has been deemed “perfect.”

You can join these sheep if you like, or you can just do what you do and stop judging yourself by what they do. The world doesn’t NEED what they do. It also doesn’t need most of what anybody does. So just do what you want to do. Learn what you want to learn. Don’t lose the enjoyment of it by wasting energy thinking it needs to be “perfect” in some way.

Sit down, figure out what YOU like and don’t like about your photos. Then work on that. It’s that simple. Some of the greatest photos ever taken don’t fit the paradigm of modern sheep photography, and were taken on gear nobody would cross the street for anymore. So you are not really bound by any of it. When you accept that, and start being honest with yourself about it, you can improve.

Are you going to share the prize money with us, since we will be providing the ideas?

Find an analog camera sub-Reddit. Nobody here uses cameras with actual shutters.

LOL.

Everybody wants a way to buy themselves out of having to do any thinking or work, yet they want to be paid well for “doing” so. We can that the $5000 cameras that do everything for you for this, people.

Photography is moribund.

Go to a library and look at books. Books come from an ancient time before the internet told us all to think with a hive mind, so they can be useful to discerning actual ideas.

Look for photography collections. Preferably in B&W, which will both tend to be older and focus on concepts like telling a story and composition.

All the internet gives you is ten million examples of hyper sharp, over saturated, millionth of a second exposures, of birds doing something birds do, but that the lucktographers couldn’t be bothered to actually try to photograph.

On a sensor, not necessarily a lens.

One more thing that NOBODY ever mentions: photographers in the 70s were not absolutely obsessed with absolute sharpness and stop-motion. Film just doesn’t allow that really. A lot of the great photos had plenty of flaws by modern standards. Most of the editing in a darkroom was just to get a very good print with good contrast and the intended details. Cropping was common. As was dodging and burning. Further re-touching was done, of course, but it was mostly confined to certain kinds of photographers. Depending on how your pictures were to be used, a lot of further processing was pointless.

We just didn’t think about photos as people do now.

Nobody “slandered” anybody or even used the word idiot. Grow up.

Ok, I looked at those. I find it hard to believe that the one thing, is responsible for the other thing. Lenses don’t work that way. A hair on the lens won’t project like that onto the sensor. This is a mystery to me. Usually you can put quite a lot of garbage on a lens before you will even notice any small degradation, and it doesn’t look like the thing that originates it.

I assume you’ve properly tested your theory and know what you are talking about, in which case, I have no idea what is going one, as I’ve never seen it work that way.

Actually, I’ve done most of those things. Even back in film days before autofocus was invented. You DO NOT need everything automated at 10fps to take pictures, good pictures, even great pictures, of just about anything. If you do, then you don’t know what you are doing. That’s just a fact.

Yes, modern technology can be a great help and does wonderful things, but people were taking great pictures long before even the most rudimentary in-camera light meters came about.

The problem is in the modern belief that there IS a perfect picture that must be captured. That it exists, and that photographers will miss it forever unless they use every tool at their disposal. There isn’t. There are only the pictures you take. That YOU take. Not that the camera takes. Not that Luck takes. If you can’t take a great wildlife picture without auto-everything at 10fps, then you need to go back to First Principles and learn photography again. There is a reason why so many modern photos are technical masterpieces, but have no heart in them. The reason is that nobody took them.

Ok. Charge them for it. Figure out what the hassle is for you. Calculate the fee, then tell the client that that service will be provided for $X if they want it. Then either get paid for doing it, or let them decide to do it themselves. If you are a professional, why is this even a question for you? A professional charges for a service. So tell them what the charge is.

Does it actually affect the photo, or is it just that you can see it?

Did I say “no catalog?” I don’t think so. Of course you need one, but it has to be narrowly defined. A file cabinet with 10,000 drawers is next to useless.

Burst mode of not a necessity for many photos at all. It IS a necessity if you have the modern belief that photography is about capturing some objectively perfect shot that exists, but much be captured for some reward. So you take 50 pictures in 5 seconds of the same exact thing and figure you’ll go through them to find the one that happened to catch that elusive perfect moment. This is simply lucktography. It is meaningless because you, as the “photographer” have done nothing but drive your camera out to some spot, and aim it at something. The camera does everything else. You don’t even have to do the thinking here. It is literally just taking a snapshot with a $5000 Instamatic.

I’ve been taking pictures for probably 45 years now. And I have no where near a million pictures. Also, my ratio of throw-away bad pictures to keepers is nothing like 100:1. You make your choices in this game.

This is the inherent problem of taking a million photos. There is NO solution to this problem that won’t take many many hours to implement, if it’s even practical anymore.

Step one is turning off the burst mode of your camera.

Step two is adopting a proper filing structure when you import your photos. Not a library, but a specific place on your storage medium with a directory tree. You should at least be able to immediately drill down to a specific date with a specific camera.

Step three is tagging as aggressively as possible when you import the images. Every single image should have at least one, if not three or four tags, so that you can find those images by tag(s).

If you’ve done steps two and three, then your problem is only volume, which is solved by not taking 600 pictures of the same things (step one).

If you have not already done steps two and three, then that’s what you have to do. On your old photos and from here out. Nothing further will really matter or be helpful until you’ve done that.

A possible way to approach it, if you did do step two, is to divide the whole into manageable chunks. Start with the current year. Get that under control all by itself. Then, if that wasn’t an unmanageable amount of time, go one year, or six months, or whatever, further back. Get everything tagged and properly organized. Etc.

But no software solution is going to do any good if you don’t have this done.