Enthusiasm, check!

[Zero_Exponent]

The random quote on the welcome page was about the importance of enthusiasm. I had it in abundance today, because I got to play around with the extension tubes that came with the camera set I bought from Curious awhile ago. I was telling him earlier, it was like a kid in a candy store – I want some of those, a few of those, ooh I always wanted to try that …

http://img842.imageshack.us/g/xmascactusflower3.jpg/

… I think I’m gonna have to suck it up and get a pro flickr account soon. Not really keen on the imageshack albums editing, or the slideshow for viewing them. Be warned, it is slow to load, for me anyway, and unless you are using a fullscreen window, it is tiny!

[Curious]

i have a flickr pro account and for $25 it works for public sharing. i don’t find the latest revision all that great. i really dislike their photostream thing but ennuipoet (i believe) says he has his in sets and collections and that works well for him. i do have some sets but a lot of what i have is just random stuff. perhaps a set of random is in order.

as i told you i really like the flowers and the snow. with your lighting you got better DOF than i have on my macro flowers.

[Kestrana]

I like the organization Flickr offers and it’s a more active community than pretty much any other photo sharing website. But I agree that their latest round of revisions weren’t all improvements.

[ravnostic]

I still suggest Godaddy domain registration, which comes with free hosting (technically it’s google-ad supported, but if you just use it for ‘a place to host my pictures’ that issue doesn’t factor in.) It’ll give you up to 10 gigs of space, which is quite a bit, esp. if you save your pictures in a ‘save for web’ format.

Apparently, though, it’s not a popular option among the farktographers.

And though I have deluxe hosting with much more space and multiple domain support and no ads, it’s done nothing to get me to actually build a website for my pictures.

[lokisbong]

How much is the Godaddy option? because the pro Flickr is only 25 bucks a year for completely unlimited photo storage and upload. and I agree with every thing Kestrana said about it.

[ennuipoet]

How much is the Godaddy option? because the pro Flickr is only 25 bucks a year for completely unlimited photo storage and upload. and I agree with every thing Kestrana said about it.

I use Godaddy to host my website at 6 bucks a month and the bandwidth is not unlimited…Flickr is the best way to go money wise.

[ravnostic]

How much is the Godaddy option? because the pro Flickr is only 25 bucks a year for completely unlimited photo storage and upload. and I agree with every thing Kestrana said about it.

I use Godaddy to host my website at 6 bucks a month and the bandwidth is not unlimited…Flickr is the best way to go money wise.

Godaddy hosting does have unlimited bandwidth at all hosting levels (it wasn’t always so, it’s a competitive marketplace.) Including the free ‘basic’ hosting you get with a domain name.

A domain name is like 12 bucks a year. If you create a webpage, you’ll have google or myspace ads, if you don’t pay for the hosting. If you just use it as a place to put pictures and then post them on fark,the pictures don’t show ads. You also get other free stuff, none of which I personally use.

The ‘basic’ hosting is 10 gigs storage. I happen to have deluxe, for which I pay $5 a month (same as totalfark), and I host multiple not-so-fancy sites with it (deluxe allows multiple url sites.) I’ve had it for 4 or 5 years, including the time when MySpace was popular and I used it for my blog photos (I had a popular blog); it’s also my backup drive for all my important pictures that I’d not want to lose in a fire or if my laptop were stolen. In that time, I’ve accrued almost 5 gigs of data storage. I suppose I could have uploaded every image I’ve taken at full res, and I’d far exceed the 10 gigs, but as it is, I’d be doing fine on the basic plan, minus the multiple websites.

One day I’ll actually build a website for photos, and I’ll use more space, but if all you need is a place to host pics, it’s certainly economical. There is a free application called ‘Coppermine Photo Gallery’, but I haven’t checked it out.

[orionid]

I use the combination of Godaddy, Flickr, and Smugmug. I like Flickr’s community, forums, groups, etc. I put my higher res stuff there in higher res. Eventually I’m going to build a webpage with gallery and shopping cart in the photo section, but right now I do that with smugmug. The webpage will also have some of my other ramblings/hacks/etc.

I pay for Godaddy hosting, but wrapped it all into a bundle with 3 domains, ad-free hosting (20 gig/month limit), and unlimited email. It was $540 up front for five years, which calculates out to $9/month total.

For the individual contests, I put my 640xWhatever on Godaddy and link to bigr at flickr, and have never come anywhere near my bandwidth limit. I think my highest peak when we had back to back epic threads with some, ummm, filehosting for friends, was 4 gigs in a month.

[Zero_Exponent]

Didn’t mean to start a discussion on flickr vs other image hosts, but that’s what I get for bringing it up.
I tried to view that slideshow on another computer, and it took five+ min to load, and some images were cut off or fuxxored. I resized 20 of them to around 200kb. I’ll post the link for that:

http://img16.imageshack.us/g/resizeof1xmascactusflow.jpg/

or if you like, here’s the individual links:

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/8061/resizeof1xmascactusflow.jpg
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/585/resizeof2belljarreflect.jpg
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/6644/resizeof3belljar2.jpg
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/1441/resizeof4chromakey.jpg
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/7738/resizeof5fivegreenlight.jpg
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/2743/resizeof6jarheads2.jpg
http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/5157/resizeof7pipecleanerspe.jpg
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/1946/resizeof8pipecleanerspe.jpg
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/1285/resizeof9snowflakes.jpg
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/2599/resizeof10snowflakes2.jpg
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/1250/resizeof11tinyshells.jpg
http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/1076/resizeof12tinyshells3.jpg
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/6480/resizeof13glitterpile.jpg
http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/4706/resizeof14shinybottom.jpg
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/4245/resizeof15horseracesnum.jpg
http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/3323/resizeof16horseraces.jpg
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/3619/resizeof17aloevera.jpg
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/347/resizeofgreententacle.jpg
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/6247/resizeofrose.jpg
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/5707/resizeofwizzardcastsasp.jpg

Please check em out if you’ve got a couple minutes. I’m new at this macro stuff, so feedback is very welcome 🙂

[Kestrana]

I really love macro photography so I’m excited you’re getting the opportunity to explore it. The angle and set up of a lot of your shots are intriguing.

One thing I would suggest is to think more about your main focus; a lot of your pictures seem to have a soft focus or the focus isn’t on what I as the viewer would consider to be the logical subject of the photo. I don’t know if your macro lens is auto or manual focus, but I always use MF when shooting macro and I usually take 2-3 shots of each photo with slightly different focus adjustments even when I think I have it in focus, because it can be really difficult to tell looking through the camera and in review if it’s truly as crisp as I can make it. This is especially the case when taking photographs outdoors, a tiny gust of wind throws it all off.

The only other feedback I can give you is I would like to see the bell jars and other items on black or white backgrounds.

[ennuipoet]

One day I’ll actually build a website for photos, and I’ll use more space, but if all you need is a place to host pics, it’s certainly economical. There is a free application called ‘Coppermine Photo Gallery’, but I haven’t checked it out.

I didn’t know godaddy was unlimited bandwith…I am totally wasting that! Coppermine is a craplication, I tried using it when I first set up my website, it is complicated, limited and balky. I use Lightroom’s flash apps to make galleries…though right now I don’t really have much up, my website is kind of a placeholder though my pblog is updated daily.

[LeicaLens]

Zero-Exponent
My wife glanced over my shoulder at the computer as I was looking at your last picture (wizard cast). Her reaction: “Ooh, that’s pretty”.
So you must be doing something right.

[ravnostic]

ZE I like where your going! I agree with Kestrana on the focus thing, and can say from my personal experience with the Darlot–macro focus is a bee-atch. I’m holding a 1 lb lens in front of the other lens attached to a camera, good for another 16-40 oz (depending on lens) while keeping whatever focal length I got going going and maintaining infinity focus on the camera body’s lens. Oh, and one finger must be free to click the shutter. Oh, and because of all this, a tripod is out of the question.

But I’ve gotten a lot better at the steady hands bit. Had to give up a lot of alcohol, and some prescription drugs, and then there was that vibrating…I digress. Occasionally, I even take a shot that I like. I’m sure the focus will be precisely where you want it, soon. Necessity is the mother, and all that.

[Zero_Exponent]

Kestrana, that’s a fair criticism. A lot of those, I was just excited with the depth of field – so much shallower than my little Fujifilm 😯 – and how close I could get. I used MF for pretty much all except one of the bell jar ones. A lot of the soft focus was intentional on my part … as I say it’s new for me to have the shallow DOF, so I definitely overdid it a bit – I’ll tone that down as I get more practice, I’m sure. However, some of them would be boring to me if there wasn’t the blurry foreground and background – the pile of glitter turned out cool because you can see the shape of the pile and there’s some nice bokeh in the background. Also stuff like the pipe cleaners shots would also be “meh” if everything was in focus IMO.

Thanks ravnostic, I quickly realized that handheld shots would be tricky, so almost all were with tripod or resting on a steady surface – with 10sec timer to boot. Out of those 20, the rose was the only handheld.

@LeicaLens YES! I actually impressed a woman!
*fist pump*
That was the last shot on my memory card. I like the idea, but will be redoing it to get a hopefully better result.

[Kestrana]

Well because of the shallowness of the depth of field you’re going to get bokeh no matter where your focus is. The one of the glitter pile really confused me as an observer because the focus was in a narrow band in the middle of the picture, I wasn’t sure where you were going with that. I’m by no means an expert in macro photography but if I can use my flower from this week as an example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kestrana/4994382241/
You can see the water droplets just to the right of the center are already blurry and I actually cropped about 25 pica along the right hand because it was blurry and distracting from the in focus subject of the water droplets and stamen.

[Author]

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