Waveform’s Favorite Cameras!

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Why the internet is pissing you off on purpose. New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. But I am a prime hater, so this is a great lens. Dang. Yeah, sorry. We won't have that fight again. We've had that fight too many times. One focal length? Are you serious? One? What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of...

The Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And yeah, don't adjust your calendars. This is, in fact, not Friday because this is a bonus episode. We figured we had some things that we wanted to try. Fair warning, this is probably best consumed as video, so if you're an audio-only listener, I would recommend video for this particular bonus episode because- Yeah, Ian. Yeah, we're playing with some cameras today.

And the images that we've taken from the cameras. And the way we want to frame it is we've got a couple of... Ah, frame it? Yeah. It was unintentional pun. Museum quality glass. I'm going to probably make more of those puns. But we have some of the most hyped cameras on planet.

in this room, and we have been using them. David's been using tons of different cameras. That's right. But did you do the reverb thing in other people's headphones? I just heard a tiny bit of reverb. What? Yeah, there it is. The reverb's funny. But we've been taking pictures with all these cameras, and we figured it was worth talking about the cameras through the lens of the photos we were able to get with them.

i'm really good at these points i don't know if you've noticed it's good um but uh david you're our sort of residential resident resident camera expert actually i uh i have an apartment our resident our resident residential yeah uh camera expert that's right and so we figured we would show you

the photos that we've taken on these cameras, and you can tell us what you think of the images while we talk about what it's like to use the camera to get these photos, if that makes sense. Does that make sense? This is basically us just like yearning for David's approval. So I think this whole episode will go fine. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. You should do compliment sandwiches so that we don't feel too bad about how bad our pictures are. Yeah, I'll be like, the color's great, the image is shit.

But you're, you know. Composition. Horrible. But you tried your best. But you tried your best, buddy. No, I want. This one's going right on the fridge. I want to start this episode with photography is subjective. So if I like something or don't like something, it doesn't mean that it's not a special picture. You are picking a winner at the end. In that case. No, I would like you to do a camera superlative.

or a superlative for each camera by the end of it. So kind of like your, this is best camera for someone might doing this. Okay. Who might be doing something like this. Okay. cool so like if you were writing like a seo driven buying guide for a camera website best camera 2025 Travel, X100V, photography, road trip. Film emulation. Film emulation. Cheap. Kodak. Kodak. Under $100. Laika, Laika, Laika. Switch 2. Switch 2. Nintendo Switch 2.

Yeah. That would be the SEO. So we've each taken a handful of our selects, I think three photos each from our camera of choice, and we've all put them on David's computer. You haven't looked at them yet, right? No. Okay, perfect. Yeah. Who do you want to look at the photos from first? should i know whose pictures they are oh i would like oh well they're all labeled by name so you kind of i mean if you want you can take them all and put them in a separate folder

Are the actual images labeled by name? Yes. I would like you to know because I think in the process of talking about the photos, that's a prime time for the person who took it. There's only one Zoom, I think. Or maybe Alice is a Zoom? No. Just me. They can talk about why they like the camera and things they like the camera. Maybe that's why they're taking photos like they did. Okay. Well, to start, why don't you all pick a number between 1 and 10?

And closest delta will start. Okay. One in 10. Who goes first? One in 100. Let's pick a number between one and 10 to see who goes first. One in 100. I'm going with 99. Okay. Gretzky. Wait, I didn't come up with the number yet. Sorry. You need to do that. Whoever's closest to David's number. So you think of a number. I came up with one now. It's 99. I'm just kidding. All right. One.

Oh my gosh. Okay. 99. Okay. 82. Nice. 42. All right. It was 77. So Marquez is closest. Wow. Okay. I'm going first. Very good. Okay. All right, open that Marques folder on your desktop there, and you should have three images. I want you to start with Marques 1.

Okay, Marquez 1 opening. So I'll do our best for our audio listeners, but really this is going to be a very descriptive podcast. Do you see Image 1? This took a really long time to open. I will start with why. It's 100 megapixels. Why? What camera is it? So, oh yeah, that's a good place to start. So my three images, I feel like a top chef explaining. My ingredient of choice was- What have you prepared for us today, Chef Markers? I've prepared images from a Hasselblad X2D Mark II.

using the 35-100 Prime. Zoom, obviously. This is a brand... Can I interrupt you? Because I feel like there's a funny story before you launch into this, which is this camera came out and you turned around from your desk and faced the office and said... Everyone tell me why I shouldn't buy this. And we all gave you tons of reasons. Anyway, you're right. And then you turn around and you bought it. Yeah. Asterisk. This is not the one I bought.

True. I bought one from B&H, who has pushed my delivery date back by weeks and weeks and weeks at a time. It is currently mid-December. This is a review unit from Hasselblad that I've been shooting with in the meantime.

however i did buy this exact camera in this exact lens they got like three weeks until dji is banned so yeah i am crossing my fingers that i actually get the one that i bought yeah i think they have my money um no so this is the this is a new camera and a new lens that they made I've shot with Hasselblad stuff before. This one has, you might have heard about this camera, you've probably shot with it already, has better autofocus, has built-in HDR, which you will notice in my images.

So I'd like you to open image number one, and I'll talk through why I think each one of them is my select. I'm going to turn the brightness all the way up so we really get that HDR. Perfect. Do you see image number one too? So this image number one here is the first... hour of me owning this camera, me having this camera. And I shot this photo of Adam. This is the photo you said was the best photo you've ever taken.

Is that what you said? Yeah, why are you so sorry? It's subjective. It's subjective. Relax. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So... Number one is, like I said, it is a 100 megapixel medium format camera. This is fresh out the box, aperture priority. I haven't even really dialed any settings yet, but it nailed the eye for autofocus on Adam's face. and adam is completely backlit in this picture so sun is streaming into the background as you can see in the parking lot and in the windows

But in the shadow detail, which I have pulled up a little bit, you can see Adam's face, the black hat he's wearing, and shadow detail like crazy. And feel free to zoom in super far. The zoom, like... Yeah. the sharpness of this photo and quality adam's um table tennis racket is so messed up that it looks like there is like shutter drag near the top But it's just that this is picking up the fibers that are falling off of it. Marques, this photo is 11,000 pixels wide.

This is a JPEG that is 16 megabytes. I have given you all of the pixels. It is huge. But this is... Part of my obsession with imagery, I've been shooting 8K video for years. I love croppability and malleability, and I had to relearn. uh Hasselblad's focus software to really take oh right so you edited this a little bit yeah just to get my exposure right and of course to dial a little bit of HDR in so you can see little highlights in the trucks in the background

It is interesting to see a camera that can shoot HDR that is not a phone. Because we're so used to phone photos. Yeah, it looks a lot better. And you can see more of the benefits of what HDR is good for on a real camera. I think seeing all the shadow detail because he's so backlit is beneficial. I'm assuming you bumped the shadows a little bit so you could see more in there. Yeah.

A lot of dynamic range. A lot of dynamic range. The gradation through, like, you can see the blue in the sky. It's incredible how much is actually in the exposure. That's true. In a totally backlit shot like this. Right. Yeah. So that's photo number one. Okay. I feel like you didn't...

seem to love it well that's my fault that's just because i'm in it but it's like it's yeah it's because it was one of the first again this is in the first hour of testing this thing is is your reason why this is your favorite because i i took a little peek by accident at one of your other pictures and i

Just the thumbnail, I liked it more. Is the reason that you liked this photo so much more the technical aspects of like, oh my god, everything is in the tone curve? The reason I like this photo... is because so one i've shot with Hasselblad a lot in the past and you have to be very intentional about nailing your settings on each exposure and

and like being super super slow with every shot and this one i pulled it out the box put the lens on and just started shooting to the built-in internal storage and this was an effortless capture that i think is impossible on 99 of cameras so i was just like this sort of power in a zero skill photo was impressive to me that's that's why i like all right yeah yeah yeah uh yeah okay let's go to photo number two all right photo number two is vertical it is uh 11 000 pixels tall this time

And this is me shooting Andrew shooting a photo. I don't know if the photo Andrew shot while in this photo is going to end up on the screen. You can really see the HDR on this one. Yeah. Okay. So the photo now is a pretty symmetrical shot of down these train tracks. Andrew is crouched in the middle of the train tracks taking a low photo. He's mostly in focus. It's got the leaves falling in the background.

trees the train tons of garbage because it's carny and nothing is lost to dynamic range again you see the hdr you see the pump sky and the highlights of the rails uh but there is a ton of dynamic range as well and uh this was not cropped at all i nailed the the frame in camera yeah wait i have a question about this one yeah does well the camera in general does the camera give you two files like one

Yes. Okay. It gives me a RAW and it gives me an HEIF. Cool. And I took the RAW each time. The HEIF looks good and it's sharp.

But color-wise and dynamic range-wise and obviously malleability-wise, I was playing a little bit more with exposure. So the HEIF has the tone map for the HDR built in. Does the RAW... only apply a tone map once you bring it into the focus software does the raw only apply because it because a rod is not a container so it can't store the tone map data it allows me to change a lot

It specifically, and if I'm reading the UI right, it allows me to change when the data is lost to HDR, like pure highlight, and also when exposure is gone separately. So it's like if I move the... the whole exposure up i can see the top of the exposure like a little bracket of like when it's gonna pop in like hdr or whatever and i can also see the end of like when it's gonna be pure white oh and they're separate david can you explain

for i mean our listeners definitely all know what this is but i do not i probably what what is a tone map okay yeah so a tone map is basically so in an image you have multiple you have like a luminance like value and you've also got like color saturation values a tone map for HDR is basically looking at the bright and dark areas and saying like these areas need to have

more tonal range here. So in order to have HDR, you like in the container, the HEIF container or the HAC container, you have the regular JPEG or... H E I F or whatever, or H I F or whatever it is. And then you apply the tone map on top. And so I'm assuming the focus software can also create a tone map for Ross while. the camera itself is creating an hdr tone map just for the heic file got it so it's almost like an extension to the lookup table that's like yeah right it's like an hdr

Tone map. Thank you very much. It was built in. It only does this for certain shooting modes. I'm trying to remember which ones. I think full manual it won't do HDR. Oh. But everything else will. Interesting. Either way, yeah, it worked out, I think, beautifully for this image. You can see the...

The sun glowing off of the trash bag next to Andrew. Beautiful, beautiful. To be fair, it also does glow down the entire train track. The rails. Yeah, I was going to say this photo really... accentuates the hdr in that the train tracks are glowing but there is still detail in them which kind of shows off the benefits of HDR there. It's like it's super bright, but you still have that detail, whereas normally that would just be lost. Yeah.

I really, I think the Hasselblad natural color profile that they built for this camera is also shining here. Because if you zoom into the areas like near his feet where like the grass and the wood is and the dirt.

it's very very nice looking dirt like it's uh it's just that very natural natural color that isn't like too saturated or too washed out yeah it's kind of a good a good middle ground the white balance was uh also sort of warmed a little bit oh okay because just because it was golden hour and it just looks really good when it's warm like this yeah and the trees look great yeah yeah yeah

All the garbage everywhere is so detailed. Unfortunately, yeah. When he took this picture, I was like, does it look like I'm taking a picture? He's like, yeah, you can totally tell. I don't think you can tell. I just look like I'm squatting on the train tracks. It's like the dog I walked past this morning.

but yeah very this one so i shot a couple versions of this while you were squatted there i shot like one at like f22 and then one at f10 and then this one's at like f9 i think is my wide open one or not wide open it's my most open one oh really i think it looks Did you shoot a shallower one? No, this is the shallowest one. Okay. Sorry. I shot like a F22 one that looks a little more distracting in how much is in focus. Yeah. So I like this one. Cool. My picture from that came out terrible. Oh.

But I also had a 20% bloom filter on like with golden hour blaring. That's the best one. I hate bloom filters. Make everything look like you smeared a little Vaseline on it. Yeah. All right.

we're moving on to the last marquez photo last but not least this one i took in a very exotic location i'll let you guess Kearney, New Jersey. About 40 feet to the left of the last photo. GPS overlay puts me in the same place. No, this is also golden hour shooting almost all the way closed. But I just feel like the light coming through the plants here, everything being in focus.

and the sky doing this really nice thing with the clouds in the background i shot this and thought this is one of my nicest wallpapers yeah it's gonna be a wall no yeah for sure i like this more than that first photo of adam yeah um thanks this is literally a picture of grass but it's okay and you like it more than most of my photography is pictures of grass so

um yeah no i i think uh the color is the natural color really shines here as well the fact that you can see all the detail in the clouds is really nice it really gives it that sort of like fine art photography look yeah I, I think what might've been interesting is going to the other side of the cattails and shooting against the light since the HDR really like, you know, allows for that. Yeah. I have a couple of those. It was getting some lens flare too. Oh yeah. Kind of crazy. Okay.

And I think the gold of these cattails could kind of come out a little bit more. If you want to really be wowed by the resolution, zoom all the way in to the rightmost branch and you can count the individual berries on it. How many megapixels is this camera? A hundred. Each one is a hundred megapixel shot. You can see the little white markings on the... bark of the tree. Yeah. The detail that this keeps is just wild. It is crazy.

Is that why you prefer this camera, Marquez? Just the details? This is why I keep saying this is the greatest camera ever made. It's because it lets me capture as much as I possibly can to then have the most flexibility in post.

So as long as I nail focus and roughly get the exposure and the framing that I want, the rest is... is possible yeah it's a shame that it's digital i can't tell that if these like like white spots on the back of the cattails are haloing from sort of some from some sort of artifacting or if it's

Just light. That's part of the plant. I think they have this sort of a cottony like seed that comes off and the light's going through them so you can see them all really well. It's coming from behind right now. The sun. The sun, yeah. Literally takes like a couple seconds for my computer to re-render parts of the image when I move around. You can be like zoomed in and be like, that's a nice picture. And then you just...

Keep zooming out and you realize it's like one sixteenth of the frame. Very nice, Marques. Very nice. There's my three photos with a little HDR to brighten your day. I'd say if I were to rank these. Oh, sure. Photo three at my favorite. Cool. Photo two at my second favorite. Cool. You can say it. It's okay. Podium. You can say it. Let's go. Top three. Top three. And yeah, number one is number three for me. It's not because it's Adam. No, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah.

I love Adam. It's just because I never get to see us at work. Can we do a... Yeah. Something you would like to see Marquez do with this camera that could potentially...

Oh, like something the camera would be good for? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether it be a subject, whether it be a setting change on something. What would you like to see out of that camera? I think landscape photography with more... like possible layers and subjects because the landscape photography that you did here is sort of like there's only like two major things you know with the cattails um

The benefit of a camera like this, both because it's so high megapixel and because it's got so much tonal range, is that you can create all of these different layers and you can zoom into different areas and really capture the breadth of the scene. And things that are already sort of tight and zoomed in, you don't get as much value out of that resolution as much and also the tonal range.

Is taking photos. Is this distracting? A landscape of my, the landscape of my face. I feel like this is, I hate to bring it to like short form, but this is a like, uh, short form trend right now where it's like. You see this beautiful photo and it pulls out and it crops. Sorry. It's just my brain raw version of knowing what you're talking about. What I see, what I take. And it's so annoying.

All right, Marquez, is there anything else you would like you have plans on doing with this camera? Yeah, I just want to get out more with it. I do want to do more product photography with it. I think that's my favorite type of photography, mostly because it's super controllable and you can kind of be as creative as you want.

nail a single shot so i'm going to do definitely do more of that but also just kind of take more photos in general keep it in your back pocket remember when you first saw this you were like i will not take more than 700 photos with this camera Did I say that? It was something like that. I've taken that many this week. I was going to say, do you plan on, as your mind changed on that, like.

you want to bring this with you and shoot more often yes i want i've been trying to shoot more with a real camera than not more than my phone but more with a real camera less with my phone in like shots that i want to be good and the lens is a 35 to 100 2.8 right it's 2.8 wide and i think it's four all the way in all the way in yeah yeah it's uh expensive

The body is 7,000 or so. It is cheaper than the last generation, surprisingly, even with the tariffs. The lens is a lot. Also a lot of money. But I am a prime hater, so. This is a great lens. Dang. Yeah, sorry. We won't have that fight again. We've had that fight too many times. One focal length? Are you serious? One? Zoom with your feet, man. Not even two. Zoom with your feet, bro. Crazy, yeah.

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All that on Version History wherever you get podcasts. All right. So, Ellis. David. Tell us about your camera. David. I'm glad I'm sitting next to Marquez for this.

because how many megapixels did you say yours was? Is it 102? It's 18. Yeah, it's 102. This camera has 18 megapixels. 18? Okay, that's fine. Does your camera have in-body stabilization? Yeah, I think it's like seven stops. Yeah, mine doesn't have any. None. No, no. Does your camera have a full frame sensor? No, it's bigger. It's medium format. Yeah, mine doesn't. APS-C. Your camera have autofocus?

yeah that's crazy i mean i think mine does but i don't have any lens that use the autofocus okay yeah um let's go What other features does your camera have? Alyssa's camera is just like a box with a hole in it. Pinhole, baby. Digital pinhole. Yeah, I generated images. No, just kidding. My camera has a three-inch screen. Okay. Max shutter speed of 1 over 4,000. Pretty slow. Workable. 4,000 is fine. Get this. My camera has... It's normal. Aperture priority.

That's great. Check that out. That's great. A continuous shooting mode of 4.3 frames per second. If you hold that down for two seconds, the camera crashes. Sick. That's not a joke. Sick. This...

is the 2012 Canon EOS M in Panda. By the way, the worst colorway it comes in. Colt camera, because it's actually quite good for video.

Yes. So would you like to know why I bought this terrible camera? For video? Yes, because there's a community of people that do this sort of crowd-developed open-source thing called Magic Lantern. Where old... canon cameras it's like an open source firmware hack that puts lots of really cool features in this camera the most famous of which is 14-bit raw video yeah

It's very noisy raw video, but it's 14-bit. Works better in 10-bit. You can overclock the SD card, which I did not know was a thing before this. And I also bought this camera. because I was really interested in getting into vintage glass and the EOSM system, which I believe is called ESM, has one of the shortest flange distances. of any

So a flange distance is the distance between the sensor and the lens mount. If you have a very short flange distance, then you can adapt more lenses because while those lenses have a longer distance between the end of the lens mount and the sensor, you can just...

put pieces of metal of various thicknesses that will allow it to be perfectly spaced you see and that's exactly what i thought when i got into this and no one told me that everyone who makes lens adapters is terrible at it and you will spend so much money going through lens adapters that do not let your camera focus. Now, Marques, should I tell that? I'll tell that story at the end because, oh my gosh.

And it was Belarus. Marquez, you hate prime lenses. It's not that I hate primes. It's just there's no reason. Right, right, right. So if you were to pick a focal length to be stuck at, what would you pick? Huh. Probably somewhere in the medium telephoto, like 35-ish range. Yes. Marquez, would you mind reading the focal length?

of this lens why is it an eight is this an eight and a half that's an eight and a half millimeter lens let's talk about equivalency okay let's talk about equivalency everybody okay eight and a half millimeters that's also a tv lens it's a for an That is a mid 70s security camera lens. The sensor on a security camera is a real small. Yes. So eight. OK, here's another thing.

So when people talk about focal lengths, when people talk about focal lengths, you know, they talk about like 8, they talk about 23mm, 35mm, 50mm, 100mm, whatever. That...

There's an equivalency that is dependent on the size of the sensor. So if you have a small sensor, a shorter focal length is actually a bit longer. So famously, Fuji... makes aps-c cameras aps-c is about half the size of a full frame sensor size and so because of that you have to do 1.5x or not half the size but you have to do a 1.5x multiplicative in order to get the actual equivalent focal length so if you have a

23 millimeter fuji lens it's actually like a 35 millimeter full full frame equivalent there's a lot of math you have to do here because this is a lot of math well this is by one by 1.6 okay wow Security camera lens on an APS-C sensor. Nonsense. Have you looked through the viewfinder? There is no viewfinder. Have you checked it out? Yeah, there's no viewfinder. Is your camera a viewfinder? It does. Yeah, mine doesn't. Fire it up.

image circle is tiny the image circle is quite literally an image circle yes something other people another thing people don't know When cameras project onto the sensor, they actually project a circle. They don't project a square because sensors are square. There have been people who have experimented with making circular image sensors before so that you lose less resolution. What I'm hearing... is that you guys are thrown away.

precious pixels exactly and meanwhile i'm over here winning yeah so we got the it's a circle of images and so when you want to actually you know when you take it into the editing program you got to crop into a square aspect ratio inside of the circle. It's called calculus. That's what they do in calculus. I think the simplest way to describe this is

Looking through the view or the screen of Ellis's camera right now looks like the opening scene of Pirates of the Caribbean. Where you're looking down the barrel of the gun. I would describe it much more as like a pirate telescope. Anyway, do you have any more questions about this camera before we look at some pictures? Yes. How much did you pay for it? I paid. I got it from what's it called? MPB or MBP.

It's the one that's not MacBook Pro. So I guess that would be MPB, which is like a used camera site. It came with two batteries, a charger. a strap it's missing a lug so i haven't really been able to use a strap yet um and i think i paid about 250. pretty good yeah um it might have come with yeah i think yeah notably that magic lantern software all of the film students when i was in college had canon t2is or t3is or whatever gh4s yeah yeah and

Yeah, it's just a totally different software that allows you to shoot in RAW. Well, it's not just that. It's like... It's this open source firmware that comes in different modules. So if there's features you want to add to your camera, you go and you grab those specific modules and then you add them. So if you want like focus peaking, for example, grab it.

you put it in the camera. If you want the raw video, you grab it, put it in the camera. If you want like crop modes, you grab it, put it in the camera. So it lets you sort of build out the software of the camera for whatever you're sort of doing that day. Hugest asterisk. you will brick your camera doing this. Like you will. Like, I don't know how I haven't bricked this camera yet, but you will. So just only do it to cameras that you don't mind just like shredding. And also, I just want to say.

I hate the way this camera looks. I love this guy. I've taken it to multiple countries. It's in my pocket. Great battery life. Everything about it's so excellent. This panda colorway is just hideous. This is taking me really, really, really far back. But the first camera I ever really got to shoot YouTube videos was a Canon T2i. But I was on the fence way back in 2009. between that and a okay pentax

I'm not going to remember the modeling, but a Pentax that would have been if I had gotten it black and white, like white, mostly like this one. Yeah. And I'm so glad that I didn't get the white camera. If I could go back knowing what I know now. Because like really, this was like the first camera I ever bought. And I didn't really know what I was going to enjoy about owning a camera, what I was going to enjoy about photography. I really wish I had gotten a like...

like an older micro four thirds Olympus camera. I feel like it would have had all the things that I would have wanted it to do. It would have been just as adaptable to a vintage glass. It would have had a much larger family of ecosystems. It would have had a viewfinder. I would not have had as much fun.

it because that doesn't really oh yeah it's a screw mount there's no latch you literally like screw it in oh wow i guess it is a circle it's fine but yeah so if you think you want to do this i would highly recommend looking at similarly priced

old micro four thirds before we look at ellis's photos um i think that this is a good example uh of a of talking about contrast because the thing about marquez's camera is that it has so much dynamic range that everything's a mid-tone. Everything is in. And the HDR NES gives you a lot of flexibility, right? Because you can make the brights brighter, you can make the darks darker to, like, add that contrast.

But if you keep everything in the middle of the tone curve, which is like the highlights are on the right side, the shadows are on the left side, and then the middle is the middle gray area of luminance, it looks very flat.

And to actually get dimension out of images, you need to have contrast. Now, older cameras like the OSM, who had, I don't know, probably shot like 6-bit color or something, they could not... except the highlight detail of being outside you know so as we're probably going to see in a couple of these photos we're going to have some clipped highlights that's fine sometimes like sometimes you want clipped highlights excuse you i know how to use that thing no i know you know how to use this thing

i'm not saying it's your fault anyway let's uh hold on i want to find the dxo mark I want to see how many EVs Marquez's camera is for dynamic range. It doesn't look like it. I think it's like 16. It's 16. I think so. Mine is also 16. I'm just kidding. It's 11. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right.

Let's look at Ellis' photo number one. Let's do this, everybody. Okay. PNG. So some nice vignetting in the corners. Thank you.

You know, vignetting was famously used to draw your attention into the center of the image. In Nellis' case, it was forced upon him. Featured on a bug. But... Can I say something real quick? Sure. All of the photos that you're gonna see today... are completely untouched very nice they're all raw in camera we talk about famous canon color historically has gone back pretty far to be pretty good for a very long time so

This is an image of a chair in the studio, but it's got very nice afternoon lighting. Also, we can see the sky detail, surprisingly. It's pretty good. They're a little blown out on the chair. in like a small area it's more that the shadows are Non-existent? Yeah. Well, I like that. Yeah, so there's some really bright areas on the chair. The robot room is very, very dark. There's an air of mystery in there. You don't really know what's in there.

I would say overall, I really like the specularness of the highlights. There's some nice shine in the areas that are brighter. There's like a lot of sheen going on. This lens is a little bloomy. There's also a lot of chromatic aberration around the edges of this lens. What the hell is that? Chromatic aberration is basically like color separation in certain areas. So if you look at... Contrast. Because there's...

White light has multiple wavelengths of color, and technically when they come together, they create white light, but if they get separated slightly because the lens does not perfectly converge those rays, then you get... you get chromatic aberration and in the window here there's some blue chromatic aberration coming out it's everywhere

It's cool. It's beautiful. It's like almost like there are YouTubers, I won't say who, but who add like chromatic aberration filters to their videos. Yeah, exactly. And they'll do it around the outside to bring attention to the middle. But it's like anytime there's a super, super high contrast. You can see the RGB split around it. It's kind of like a style. Yeah, they're trying to be like E. My take has always been the negative sides of like bad.

technology or non-advanced technologies can be used as stylistic choices in the future when you have the option to use them you know now before you continue with your review david

Not just is this a cult camera because of Magic Lantern. I'm actually a member... of another cult. Another cult that has very fringe conspiracy beliefs that many people dislike. I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the carpet in this picture. What does that have to do with the cult? I would like everyone to look at the... amount of textural detail in that carpet. And that is because I am a member of the conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorist group that believes in microcontrast.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that this lens and this camera are micro contrast beasts. What the hell is a micro contrast? David? It's a little contrast. It's a very unproven thing. Is it the one one thousandth of a contrast?

Because, okay, lens characteristics are very... Some of them are... are big differences right sometimes you'll have the famous helios 44.2 lens that has swirl around the edges that's a very obvious lens decision in the production of the lens a lot of other lenses when you get to like sony lenses right because they're just trying to make like you know the sharpest possible lens it's it's optically close to optically perfect but a lot of people don't want

optically perfect now micro contrast what people would describe it as as is the look of 3d pop So you know how you can look at some images and you're like, oh, that's a great photo. And then you look at some and you're like, whoa, it has like spatial like texture and it's sort of like coming out of the image. It's a conspiracy theory. It's a conspiracy. People argue about it and.

camera forums yeah and they talk about they talk about the existence of it and the non-existence of it they talk about how some lenses are better for it where other lenses are worse for it they'll post like like like data analysis like trying to prove yeah that this lens has more micro

contrast and another person would be like no you're you're reading noise and the sensor yeah it's not it sounds like trying to like quantify soul in a song yeah yeah okay it's pretty much the same thing yeah like how much does the image like pop off the screen you know I get the textural feeling that you're saying that you're talking about. You could taste that carpet. You could taste it. No. Your dog's peed on that carpet. And thrown up on it. There is definitely a lot of...

color noise in the carpet. Yeah, there's a noisy camera. So it's possible that the noise has to do with 3D pop. Not to just make you explain 10 million... camera things. This is not a backside illuminated sensor. What the hell is a backside illuminated sensor? It's where the back of the sensor, it has light shown onto it, which gives it more dynamic range. Perfect, thank you.

It's a newer thing. Less noise. And by newer thing, I mean like seven years ago, but this camera is way older than that. Yeah, less noise in the shadows. My favorite thing about this picture before we move on is I love the way... the reflection of the chair comes out of the floor and how the camera, the lens plus the floor gives it this crazy sort of ghost bloom. I think that's a really compelling part of this image.

No, the bloom out of this lens is very nice. All right. She's popping. So this next photo. I like this photo. Before you open it, the next photo is taken on a different lens, a much more standard camera lens, which is why this is going to look much more just like normal portrait photograph. I lied. Oh, beautiful. Thank you.

This is the second photo. This is the second photo. Same flower. Same camera, different lens. Wow. Beautiful. Straight out of camera? Straight out of camera. That Canon color is really popping. I'll tell you that. Oh, Marquez has a thought. Marquez has a thought. Nothing. What is this? Is this pondering? Does anyone want to guess what exotic location?

I capture these beautiful tropical flowers in. Your backyard. Is that cars in the background? Yeah, this is the parking lot outside of our building. Oh. Yeah, so to give some... verbal description of this this is flowers with the petals sort of hanging down at the bottom of the flower with the bulb in the center kind of like they're very colorful they're orange and green they are pink flowers um the one on the left the highlight

are clipped so you know you're right they could use a little more dynamic range but Overall, I think the bokeh, which is the out-of-focus areas in this image, are very creamy because this lens gives a lot of that bloom that kind of gives it to the bokeh. And the colors are wonderful.

And yeah, if there was a little bit more dynamic range on that left flower, I could definitely see this. Actually, you know, even without that, I could see it on my wall. Yeah, thank you. It's very beautiful. This one to me looks like a Windows XP wallpaper. And it's shot with a Canon FD 50 mil, which is a complete cheat code of a lens. If you want to pretend like you're a really good photographer, get a Canon FD 50 mil. Yeah, the FDs are famously great at micro contrast.

right that's what they say i'm a micro contrast machine in the conspiracy world um that is a 50 mil with a the 1.6 crop factor so it's more like a 70 mil which is a really funny thing to have as a prime on your camera to only have like a 76 millimeter lens. Yeah. Yeah. I really like this photo. Thank you. Very pretty. Sweet. All right. Let's look at the third picture from Ellis here.

We're back to the TV lens on this one. Bang. Bang at city. Population. This is where the micro contrast starts to look incredible. We've got a believer over here, folks. Yeah, so this is a photo of a tree that's lost all of its leaves in the center with trees that have not lost all of their leaves around it, as well as the sky and a cloud. And yeah, it's really popping.

The contrast is popping really nicely. There's some nice shadow detail. The blacks are very black. There's a little bit of peaking in the top right. It's kind of got it all. Would you say it's filmic? Yes. Because the thing I was going to say...

The reason I don't like digital cameras generally is that shooting foliage with digital cameras sucks because there's this process called demosaicing, which we have talked about in a studio video before, where you take the photo and the sensor is like... R-G-R-B, R-G-R-B, and it's this repeating pattern, and it takes in these light values, and then the software has to basically put the image back together based on...

repeating patterns that it notices but because of that really really fine detail is not good for digital cameras because the areas of contrast get lost in that restructuring of the image and film uh is just a die so it's very granular in its like tonal shifts whereas digital cameras generally have this problem where it's like all the the fringing on the edges is like very you know it just looks very like

I feel like it's very tied to the resolution of the shot, too. It's related. The more resolution you have, the more smooth it can appear to be. But it's digital. Yeah, but it's still digital. Whereas this, and I think... Ironically, the negatives of this camera are what give it more of that filmic look because of the chromatic aberration.

the the wavelengths of colors are actually slightly separated so that direct contrast fringing that you'd normally see on a good camera are not there and so it looks more um more smooth more film like the the

trees look more like real trees than you would get from like a high quality camera. And it lets you get away with how noisy the sensor is on this camera. I think in a lot of environments, this camera and this lens together are just... frankly like unusably noisy um but when you have i don't know some sometimes it just uh just works yeah i like this photo has simultaneously a ton of dynamic range and almost no dynamic range at the same time it's really interesting

I like it. And then you don't have to review this one. I just thought this would be a good thing to bring up. And the bonus pick is one that I actually took with you, David. Oh, yeah. No, I lied. This is not a picture I took with you. Oh, no. But when you point this camera into... the sun it shoots rainbows yeah and i just think that is swell that's cool yeah um they use that in movies sometimes yeah it's got a really cool effect so david going forward

What would you like to see me do with this camera more? Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, this one's hard. This one's hard. Because it's nonsense. It's just like, it's so purely artistic. Yeah. So it's like, he's telling you how to be an artist now. Correct. You're taking like highly artistic pictures. Ellis, this first picture, I think everyone in this office has taken a photo of...

The robot armchair. That's why I included it. I love this photo. It looks so good. I assumed one of you guys would also bring a photo of this chair. I think everyone's taking that photo. Just like... just the light is nice the light that comes through especially now when it's at like four o'clock and we're in the office when golden hour hits as long as that wind turbine yeah isn't spinning and causing it to like flicker in that area like

It's just a beautiful little corner of our office. A little alcove. Yeah. Very nice. There's even a dead Astro Bot. Yeah. That's my favorite part. Yeah. All right. It's Adam's turn. Membership means more with American Express Business Gold. Earn four times membership rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month.

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Tell me about your camera. It is I, Adam. I'm at the big boy table. This is the Ricoh GR4. It is one of the most hyped cameras on YouTube. and i love it so i have been shooting with this for a month or two now ish something like that and this thing is exactly what i want from an everyday camera it is like one step above my phone but a thousand steps below Marquez's camera also prime oh that's why it's so far below but like I can take this thing out of my pocket and no one bats an eye

Quite literally a pocket camera. Yeah, no, it is super small. It's super thin. It literally fits in my pocket. I don't even need to string it on like a sling or nothing like that. That is... basically the only reason i wanted this camera i know nothing about it technically it was just i saw the pictures that were coming out of it and people were like i was like okay those are good pictures and then yeah i was seeing people just

put them in their pocket and i was like that is what i want the rico gr series of digital cameras because they also made grs of film cameras which by the way were even thinner than that And the only way it was able to fit the film canister was in the grip area. But the body of the camera was thinner than the film canister. But if you put that in a hole like the iPhone, that means it's only as thick as its thickest point.

Adam, is that the regular version of the GR or is that the blurry version of the GR? It is the regular. I want to get a blurry adapter thing. Yeah. Or there only is a regular. Yeah. Oh, OK. The three has the HDF. Yeah. Yeah. So 50 mil. Yeah. This is the rear. It just came out. The newest camera out of all. Yeah. Yes, it is. It just came out.

And the Ricoh GR3, it got really popular because the Fuji X100V popped off and then the X106 was popular for a long time. And this became the counterculture camera to that, which is why it's now popular. Everything's a circle. Everything's a counterculture. And... Instead of releasing the GR4 for many years, Rico just decided to make multiple variants of the GR3. So they made the Diary Edition. The Street Edition. They made a Street GR3X, which is a 43mm lens, I think. The Diary Edition.

which was like a cream color, but they made an HDF version, which is high diffusion filter, which basically makes the highlights bloom. I love that one. Yeah, which you can like... turn on and off when you want to, which is nice. And then the GR4 right now just has the regular version. They did announce a black and white version, which I want really to have an orange button.

I don't know. Does it only cost half price? Yeah, it's probably more expensive. Probably more expensive. Never mind. Because they're going to make them in a lot lower volume. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I don't think I'll ever understand that. Did you watch our studio video? Making a black and white camera costs more. Oh. It's lower volume. You know? It's lower volume production, but it's... I know they take one part off. You gotta really want it. They take one part off.

which is yeah you have to really want black and white yeah yeah that type of like that's your thing like instead of just sliding saturation yeah you have to want that yeah yeah anyway gr4 um it's apsc it is a 2.8 Lens. And it's got internal memory. Is it a prime? It is. Yeah, 18.3 millimeter APS-C, which is like a 23. Isn't it a 23?

Is this 28 on the... What is the... 28mm equivalent lens on B&H. I don't think that's really true, but okay. Either way, I like it. It's like the perfect equivalent for like run-and-gun type stuff. Yeah.

personally i do a lot of pictures of like watches like my watch shots and having it be a little wider that way looking down is awesome while i'm wearing nice when i use the gr3 the one thing i didn't well the thing i didn't really like about it one does not have a viewfinder

which Alice's camera also doesn't have. It's hard for me to shoot without a viewfinder. That's half the fun. You don't know what you're going to get. The screen does not like flip out or anything. The screen is just fixed. So it's really hard to shoot from like...

David, stop looking at your pictures. Just vibes. Just press the button. But like Adam said, when it's just like a run and gun really quick thing, I think it's pretty awesome. The thing, again, the thing I like it, the thing I like the most about it is...

that when i take it out of my pocket no one has to pretend to act a certain way like when i had my my real i had a sony a6500 a few years ago and i had like a giant lens on it and i would take that to family parties and anytime i would take it out

It's like people pose and they start smiling and they're like, wait, let me fix my hair. That does not happen with this camera. I just pull it out and I can take pictures and everyone's like, oh, look at that cute little thing. It's also like stark black. Yeah. Very unassuming. Low key. Low key. Super low key. And also this video.

Oh. Yeah, you want to guess what it does? What kind of video? I feel like that could do 1080. 1080. Yeah, 1080. Just 1080. Yeah, that's fine. Mine doesn't do video at all. That's fair. Literally won't even shoot 720. That's true. Yeah. Okay, let's look at Adam's pictures. Yeah.

Picture numero uno. Is a spot that David is very familiar with. This is Central Park. Adam and I have been here together many times before. Or is this Prosper Park? No, it's Central Park. We're looking at a fall scene. there is some fall color leaves and there's some dead trees importantly this is not the grass part of the park no no it's the water part of the park yeah it's a water park um water park

He exposed it for the highlights so that the left side of the image is quite dark, which adds a nice level of contrast. But the reflection in the water of the color of the trees is very pretty, very nice.

and um central park baby i did nothing you know it doesn't have a ton of resolution so it does fall apart pretty quickly when you zoom in yeah but don't do that but don't do that it's got all the answers um but overall i think this guy's good yeah this guy's good another reason why people like these rico cameras is the straight out of camera color is also quite nice that is also very nice yeah like it i also have it set to also give me the raw if i do want to mess with it but

thus far i have not felt the need to yeah like what it does is pretty spot on to what i would do yeah right there's also a different setting you could do for black and white which is cool oh really yeah cool all right all right very good okay we'll look at image number

Two here. Numero dos. Numero dos. This would go crazy with HDR. Oh, shit. This would go... No, Marques, no. Come on. You know I'm right. It's the opposite of what I want for this photo. You know I'm right. This would go crazy with the HDF version. That's what I'd go crazy with. This is, again, a picture of the corner that...

ellis had it's like a little chair a little rearranged a little rearranged yeah different vertical aspect ratio but yeah so the sun is shining through the windows is reflecting off of a picture of a car and it's got a really big highlight spot which would look with the high diffusion filter version. Yes, give me that, Rico. The color of the greens are incredible in this. Look very nice. The highlight roll-off and the shadow sort of like the grays to dark colors are nice.

um yeah this is just a it's very nice golden hour shot and i think the greens are amazing here and hdr would look terrible It would be blast. It would be so much brightness. It would be insane. Yeah. Yeah, I like this photo. It's very nice. I like the white balance. The green in the helmet is almost the same as the plant. Yeah. That's good.

All right, and then photo number three is... Oh, this looks good. Now, I will say, pretty much any camera in... extremely perfect lighting like this like controlled lighting is gonna look awesome but this is just a quick snap this is an example of why adam loves this camera

It's a quick snap. Clearly, he didn't really, like, you know, try to make it level or, you know. I actually tried very hard, but thank you. It would have been easier to see if, you know, you could see the screen or through the EV that it doesn't have.

But there's a photo of Marquez doing the Smartphone Awards live. A little BTS. It looks really good. Looks really nice. The color is amazing. The color is really good. Yeah. I had to take advantage of the set that... everyone had because yeah everything was too nice it looks great nice lights um i also like the the highlights on the that are bouncing out the ping pong table

funny that we kind of use the ping pong table as like a like a bounce card by accident um but it looks great this would also go a hard in hdr because the key light that key light over there stay with me is just blasting into the camera as well as onto the subject and And yeah, this would really cook my irises. You want to move everything to the middle of the tone curve? Okay. What's the difference between a circle and a sphere? Depth. What creates depth?

Z-axis dimension. What creates dimension in an image? What creates... Contrast! Shading, Marquez. Shading. Shading. No, you're right. You're right. It's still here. It's still here. It's still here. That was the longest reverb of all time. Anyway.

Anyway, that's why I like this camera because I could do things like this because if I had to pull out a whole other Camera lens you would have heard it going off. It would have been this looks great this is nice i saw you in the corner of my eye shooting and i was like i'll just i'll pretend i'm not yeah yeah just ignore ignore him yeah it's fine that's what everyone does very good yes i think

um for the person that wants like adam said you know something you could just pull out of your pocket literally your pocket because this is literally a pocket camera no one's gonna like be posing for every shot you can just quickly do this you know a lot of the people that use the

Did you just take a photo? I don't know. I wouldn't know. People use the GR, like, they really are into street photography. They're, like, walking around New York going, like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Not really even paying attention to what they shoot. Just kind of, like, trying to get that, like, hyper fast motion in the moment.

That's why they make the GR3X, which is the street edition, which is a longer lens that's 43mm or 40mm. It's a little more street focal length. I mean, a lot of people use 28 for street too, but... so yeah it is um weirdly like twice the price of what the gr3 was yeah they like basically doubled the price and i think they only did that because they knew how popular it was getting which is annoying um

But the images look fantastic. Thank you. I spent a long time between this and I wound up getting an X106. Spoiler. There's a thousand videos comparing the two, right? Yeah. And I knew it was small.

But when we got it, when Adam got it, I was like, wow, this... It is impressively compact. And the build quality is really solid, too. I assume being that small and... the threes were cheaper i was like this probably feels cheaper it does not at all it's a i feel like a lot of the videos i saw comparing the two with the x100 series and this one they were like you know it's a lot smaller blah blah but like it's they're still both relatively like no this thing is small

Also, fun little trivia, Rico and Pentax are the same company owned by Epson Group, the scanner company and the printer company. They also own Happy Hacking Keyboard. They do. Really? Which is really weird. Very random thing for them to own. It's a cool portfolio. Besides the scanner part. Besides the main thing. That's the part that makes the money so they can do all the other things.

adam i uh i like these pictures thank you very good i think i heard that i won this competition so now i noticed david being much nicer no sandwiches

He said, I want any mid-time. All right. Let's bring Andrew up here. All right, Andrew, let's talk about your camera. All right. I'm going to preface this with... Preface. I think I am the least... camera knowledgeable person here by a long shot i've understood about 10 of the things you guys have said in this entire episode um but i love watching all you guys take photos so it inspired me to want to

buy a camera recently also having a daughter helps a lot I take most of my photos of Lane this probably isn't the best camera to do that but it's small and I always have it so like that's a great camera to do that autofocus yeah with how fast she is has been tough sometimes but i only brought in pictures of other things i've taken photos of because it's still fun to pretend like i know what i'm doing all right so i wound up getting this like i said i was between a gr

3 and an X100. The 6 was the newest one at the time, obviously, and I was looking through a lot of used ones. And people were selling them for like more than what they came out at, which was crazy. And I got lucky enough that someone who actually listens to the podcast was like, yo, I haven't touched mine in forever.

let me sell it to you shout out to him shout out abraham that was awesome to my beers and cameras event yeah dude he's awesome he's really talented we were following each other we were going to follow each other on instagram and he was i was like Oh, you follow, or Andrew follows you? And then he was like, oh, yeah, I sold him his X106. I was like, oh. It is, like, kitted out, yeah, so it has a nice little, and it has a nice...

Thumb grip from PolarPro. That's dope. I bought this, I think it's from Open Glass Studio, a little grip on the side. Nice. And then I have, it's not on right now, but I have the Moment Cinebloom, the 20%, which is a lot. It's a lot. And the PolarPro short stash filter, that came with it also. What does that do? Gives it a mustache. That's what I thought it did. It's like a polarizer and also one fourth.

whatever that means diffuser diffuser yeah it's fun the diffusion stuff has been super fun i don't think any of my photos have it yeah but um diffusion is like we talked about earlier with the high diffusion filter it just

makes everything softer and blooming it actually helps with digital cameras because we talked about the fringing in digital cameras it's like it's it makes it better it's just vibey man it's vibey yeah the p the reason people buy x100 is because they don't want to edit their pictures very much and the film

simulations are great. Are you speaking from experience there? Yeah. Like Adam also, I take everything in RAW and JPEG. I haven't touched a RAW photo since I've done it because the colors are super fun out of this. They're just like... Yeah, it's fun to take photos of Lane with it and take photos of stuff. Right now, Christmas time with lights and stuff and like...

one of the diffusion filters is just so much fun to the point where I'm like, I need to put this away and probably spend time with Lane versus just taking photos of her. Star filter. There's star filters that the specular highlights like the Christmas trees will like, they'll like turn into star shapes.

Okay. Yeah, it's cool. You'll have to show me one of those. All right, let's jump into here to see if I can pretend I'm artsy. Oh, wow. Oh, by the way, this is a prime, right? What's the focal length? 23 millimeter. It's like a 35. Yeah, like 35. Dude, this is a cool photo.

Put a little mat around this and it would look great. Oh. A white border. Yeah. This was, I was actually just like at a birthday party and there was this... basketball court that just like you could tell has aged a bit and i thought the colors of it looked really nice patina nicely the sky was

beautiful that day. And there's just no one standing there at all. And the grass was just so green. What film simulation did you use? Classic negative? I think almost all of these are classic negative. This may have had the short stash filter on it. Still don't know what that means.

it's just the guy i think it's he's a youtuber and i think he made a filter with polar pro got it um so it's his filter yeah when i preview this it shows it with like a matte and uh yeah this is really nice looking picture compliments yeah classic negative is a really sandwiches david sandwiches i hate um Which is not at all in this picture. No, this is a great picture, Andrew. Thank you. It's nice.

Yeah, I think I use that. It is so much fun to mess around with recipes that people make. Following the different Fuji subreddits. Fuji X Weekly. Yeah, and Fuji X Weekly and just going through all those and being like, all right, I'm going.

out and shooting blah blah blah today so I'm gonna start shutter speed but if you pick it up and spin that's ISO it's pretty cool yeah so Fuji recipes are basically just like preset settings because in the camera you can change the the base film simulation which they have like they're emulating different

old films but then you can change like the saturation the saturation of the blues you can make it softer you can change all these settings and so people will create their own recipes to emulate either old films or just, like, a style that they like. You know, they'll call it, like, Italy in the summer or something. Pacific Blues is one that I have that I really like. Pacific Blues actually was a film, though. Was it? Yeah, it was a real film. But...

they've become very popular people share their recipes online there's now an app that someone showed me at my beers and cameras event where you can uh you can just connect to the camera and it will flash the recipe onto the is it the fuji app no it's not okay then i'll have to get it's a third party app

It's not hard to enter them in. It's all just through the menu settings and stuff. It takes a while, though. Yeah, it's a lot of just, like, you know, the joystick fiddling around and stuff like that. You can save some presets. That'd be awesome, yeah. You will notice, for some reason, I only take... portrait. Vertical photos. Vertical photos only. Maybe I should have bought the Fuji X half. Bro. But yeah, I don't know why I only take vertical. Damn, this is...

this is great which is making it harder to view on a laptop screen because it's the second photo is of some berries on a bush um it's shot at a pretty shallow depth of field probably probably f2 yeah and it's snowing so you can see like the flurries of snow so it's probably like a 1 15th or 1 30th

of a shutter speed. The benefit of this camera too is that it's got IBIS and so you can handhold it for like a whole second and it's awesome. It's awesome as long as things aren't moving which when I'm taking photos of Lane changes everything. The metadata? It was. It was super bright. This was midday. It just started snowing when we were in Salem, which is why that house... The snow kind of looks like elongated, but...

I think it was just big snow. Big snow. Big snow flurries. The house in the background is just like every house in Salem is just this beautiful house made in the like 1800s. And it's just a... beautiful place the colors in this photo are awesome thank you i really like the pictures I shouldn't take any credit. Well, and this is why people buy these cameras, right? Because you can just get stuff like this straight out of the camera with no editing. OK, now say something bad. I'm feeling jealous.

damn it could possibly i would possibly straighten this slightly different because you can see the lines in the back are not they're like angled a little bit. This is something I think I have a big issue with is I do feel like a lot of my photos are slightly not straight. And then sometimes I have problems Do you use any of the auto-straightening features? I don't use auto-straightening. Okay. So on these cameras too, on the...

On the screen or in the viewfinder? Oh, you have that on. I have the 2D one on. The 3D one feels like it takes up so much of the LCD. It does, yeah. But maybe I should do that. Yeah, I would just... try one of the auto straightening features there's also um like there's perspective correction in things like lightroom where you just drag a line down one of the straight lines and it automatically fixes it

It goes crazy, actually. Yeah, it's cool. I use it a lot. Because sometimes I'll go into the rotation tool, right? And I'll be like, that line looks off. fix that into a line in the rotation tool and be like now this line looks off and I don't know if that's me that's perspective issues because you're shooting this mostly straight on but that house is like in the background and there's like curvature between the foreground and the background so

yeah i would use a perspective correction tool okay which lightroom has i'll have to find that because i think that would help me with so many i also am terrible at taking a photo head-on of something i feel like i'd mostly take photos now at an angle because when i'm head-on i realize i'm like three degrees off at some point yeah and i can't unsee it in a photo and it feels like it ruins the photo yeah yeah this is great this is a good picture yeah very nice

Ooh, Andrew. I think this is all subject. This is not correct. Andrew came up with this idea for this bonus episode, and I think he's selling the show off. I know, seriously. Link in the description to his store. Wow.

The colors on this are awesome. Where'd you find this? This is in Salem also. Okay, so this is a payphone that has a ton of spray paint and different stickers on it. And then the wall has a big mural on it, but they... Colors of the mural are the same as the colors both spray painted on and on the stickers of the payphone. So it looks really cool.

Looks really nice. Wow. We drove by this. Dang, dude. And then I, later when Lane took it up, walked back to go take a photo of this because I was like, that just looks really cool. It like matches the mural. And it's cool because like the... the phone cord is like ripped off. Like this is very clearly a thing that hasn't been used in forever. And people just like vandalized it slash turned it into what felt like an art piece on the wall. That is probably my favorite part about.

carrying an actual camera versus myself like you drove past it and you were like i'm coming back for that i need this i need that picture the cool thing is that this is also a 40 megapixel camera so you can like you can zoom in pretty decently Looks really nice. I like the angle that you took this a lot. I would be interested in seeing what the perspective of straight on would be. Which, you know, is just something you could do in Gemini 3.

I'll just make it for you. Wait, that is a Lightroom thing. You said I could just... Well, not like that. Yeah, they'll probably add that to Photoshop soon. Yeah, the colors of this are great. I think noticing...

How the colors play off of each other is a big part of photography. And I like the 45-degree angle that you took it at is also really nice. Thank you. Wow. I think that's a crutch for me. I think I like straight-on photos. I just keep... messing it up do you have like a uh a piece of advice to making sure you're straight on straight on is difficult because our eyes notice any of those like small tilts more so using perspective

correction is very helpful for straight on stuff because the symmetry is so important and we we notice that a lot more when it's straight on okay so it's hard it's kind of hard to get a straight on photo that looks like incredible you know You just have to make sure it's perfectly aligned. But the way I do it, so the way I do it when we're doing robot shots is like, because so often the robot's not exactly straight with the object. So what I do is I...

push the robot all the way to the table till it presses flat on the edge and then pull it back and don't go off that axis. I don't think I could do that in real life. Just like walk forward until I'm flat and then walk all the way back and try and be perfect. Yeah. My train tracks are pretty straight. I think they were too. Yeah, they're pretty straight. Yeah. Thank you. I think I also, I would like, I don't know if you have a quick piece of advice because I don't have an example.

All of my good photos are center subject, center frame. Uh-huh. And I don't know how to... I feel like correctly... balance a photo which is probably why i'm taking so much vertical because it feels easier to do that rule of thirds is a good like default um yeah maybe i'm just not finding it correctly in In the shot, in the framing of what I'm looking for. Yeah. I feel like the eye for something. I see all you guys take photos of these like.

corners of like a bench or and all that and I just like walk around I'm like I don't see that yet I feel like that with like car photography like I see a lot of people take great pictures of cars like the hoods the hood ornaments from different angles and then I'll pass a cool car and be like oh I'm

and try to get this picture and I just cannot get it. It's so difficult. I think that's what I've been trying to do lately is I want to take this camera out all the time when I'm walking around. Yeah. Because when I get back, I'm going to dump 200 photos and I'm going to be like, one of these is cool and I hate the rest of them. But if I hopefully just keep doing it, maybe I'll have the eye for how I could have gotten that cool scene into a cool picture. Yeah, it's a lot of like, I think...

when you're learning you can just you can um look at a lot of photos that you like and try to understand why you like them just be like what what is it about this image that i find compelling you know and then try to recreate that It's the exciting piece of the beginning of skill development where your taste is above your skill. Yeah. I know that that's good. I know why that's not that, but I don't know how to get that to be that. Right. It might be the biggest detriment of working here.

Like when it comes to media things, the talent and the gear that we have here is so insane. Anyone here at any time can probably think like, I can do that. I watch this, do it all the time. And then you do it and you're like, wow. Well, that's almost why, like, the X100 is such a good camera for, like, 99% of people, because it does so much for you, but it is, it's APS-C, you know, it has less dynamic range than other things. Like, Marquez's camera, like...

With the HDR capabilities, the amount that you can do with that extra dynamic range if you want the creative control to actually do that is awesome. you know and you have all that creative control and what you can do later whereas this you know it's a much more compressed sort of like amount that you can do with it but it's so much better straight out of camera for a lot of people

So give me your H2s, which are the best for what? Oh, yeah. What's an H2? If you're writing an article in H2 headline, it's just like the bold part. Oh, Lord. I'd say the X100 series is probably the best like starter camera for anybody, which. Also, pros use it as their secondary bodies to just have fun with.

you know it's both a starter camera and just to have fun camera i saw a wedding photographer doing it they had their main camera was some crazy canon or whatever and then they just had one of these slung over their shoulder i mean

Yeah, take photos of that at a wedding and people are just going to instantly love it. I've been on photo shoots where the photographer is taking like 3,000 to 5,000 photos on the main camera and then every once in a while just pulls out an X100 and goes back to the pro shots. And then only sends the X100.

photos uh i say that adams is probably the best for just run and gun like street work just being as pocketable as possible you know wanting some just like quick snapshots of their life that they don't have to because even on the x100 you're deciding on what uh, film recipe you want to use. And like, you're still doing some work to get it where you want it to be. But for, for the GR4, it's more about just like in the moment being there. Um, or because of some recipes, but.

Not like Fuji. Yeah, it has some recipes. Marques' camera is best for the pro, pro, pro that wants the most out of the camera possible. The most resolution, the most dynamic range to play with, the most to like... Flexibility. Yeah.

flexibility to like craft an image with if you really like mid-tones and then um ellis's camera 100 megapixels of mid most mid camera ellis's camera is the best for cult members um who for micro contra want yeah for micro contra uh yeah the thing i do like about ls's camera a lot is that in the photography community

There's, you know, people will argue and complain about what camera is best, whatever, whatever. But there's also this subset of people that just tries to just try to do insane with like the worst camera possible just for fun because it's like worse. But. Worse is also better in 2025 in a lot of ways because everything's good. Everything's good. We're so used to seeing everything with like everything is within.

Everything is perfectly exposed. Everything is perfectly sharp. The autofocus is great. This is great. The resolution is great. So it's almost like a differentiator to see something that is well composed but with a trash camera that has low dynamics. How much money people spend and how much time people spend to get that chromatic aberration that's in my lens. I think the tinkering aspect of Alice's camera sounds like so much fun. That's the kind of stuff.

That's super fun. And then when you go take the photo, that's good and know what you had to do to get to that point. Right. Makes the photo. This is why I always say Ellis would be great with an Android phone. But whatever. Sounds like what I'm hearing. the best camera you can buy in 2025. is the one you already have. No. No, no, no, no, no. It's the Hasselblad X2D. It's a Canon EOSM from 2012. It's a 35 to 100.

No, yeah. It is definitely subjective. That is the beauty of it. Basically, it's art, and the art, no matter who you are, will be subjective to who you are. And there's probably a little bit of each of these cameras in somebody's favorite camera. Yeah. I'm jealous that your camera has LiDAR autofocus. I think that's dope. Yeah, it's great when it works. That's true.

Well, yeah, thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed and liked looking at a lot of our photos. And if you have suggestions for how some of us can take better photos as well, leave your compliment sandwiches below. And we'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming pretty soon. See you soon. Happy Christmas. Peace. Happy Honda days, everybody. Merry Toyota. Lexus, December to remember. Sales event.