Perfect is the enemy of good.
Related to what you said, but not necessarily this post: I was so damn frustrated with my neighborhood community the other day. We had a vote on whether or not to repurpose a huge grass field that takes up a ton of water and sees very little use. We’re wasting a ton of money (and water) watering this pristine empty field.
The main argument for keeping the field was “we waste water in other areas of the community as well. The common-area sprinklers were on when it rained the other day. We need to address all waste before making a decision about this empty field.”
There are a lot of people that don’t realize you can make incremental progress towards a goal.
right. I feel like the world is desperate to pretend we aren’t standing on the shoulders of giants. who wants to reinvent everything, every time. use the paths already there and find shortcuts along the way, then mark them and leave them for the next traveller.
This is why I write down everything when I’m setting something up that’s new to me. Even if I go off someone else’s tutorial I put it in my own words. That way when I come back to it later I’ll understand it and if I run across someone else that’s trying to do the same thing I have at least one step by step guide to offer them.
Recognizing that for a second would destroy the basis of private property. How can you say “this is mine” when it comes attached to the work of a million others?
I “do astrophotography.”
…I strap my phone to a telescope and I’ve been loving it lol
I did macro photography for a while by flipping my tele lens ans holding it up to the mount the wrong way.
The best part of learning astrophotography is not so much in taking awesome pictures … it’s the excuse to spend hours and hours sitting outside in the dark and staring up the night sky every night. To me the pictures are a bonus.
Absolutely! Just learning the positions of everything now and being able to describe them to people during the day has been pretty awesome. “Useless” knowledge, but I’ve always loved space lol
It’s not ‘useless’ knowledge … if learning about the wider universe outside our small planet makes you realize what your place in this reality is, then I really don’t think it is useless, rather it is critically important because it makes our small insignificant existence in this vast universe far more special and humbling to the point where we look and see everything and everyone around us as so miraculous that we should do everything we can to enjoy this time that we have together in peace, love and harmony. It makes you realize its all we have and all we’ll ever be.
Definitely not useless knowledge.
Keeping looking at the stars, I’m watching the same sky as you.
Hey, nobody would have questioned the worse quality cameras that astrophotographers were doing this with 20 years ago. Even though it’s your phone now, it counts!
Phones are arguably some of the most powerful consumer cameras ever built. That Nikon or Canon might have more funny buttons and settings, but your phone camera is pretty powerful on its own.
In some ways phone cameras are very impressive, since CCDs are now cheap and good enough that they’re no longer the bottleneck. All the computational photography stuff they do boosts their capabilities even more.
The thing that really limits them is the size and optical quality of their lenses.
Hell my phone camera now is advanced enough that it has the ability to do “astrophotography” on its own without a telescope. The pixel series of phones after 4 has an astrophotography mode, the “ai” processing slightly corrects for star trailing. It’s been pretty crazy to just point my phone up and catch Andromeda or the Orion nebula!
God this is so true. I teach compuster science, and I always make a point in one lecture to show the students how many tabs full of basic questions I have to open when grading their assignments. Nobody can memorize all of this, and it’s so important to shake off that feeling of not being good enough just because you have to look something up.
me: does a thing because I like it and I get kinda not shit at it.
Everyone else: HaVe You cOnSIDErEd DoinG ThaT PRofEssIONaLLY? YOu cOULd mAKE so MUCH MOneY.!1!
me: fuck off. I have a job. I do this for me.
everyone else: Do What yOU LOve anD You’lL neVER worK A dAy IN Your life.!
me: turn your hobby into your job and you don’t have a hobby anymore. There’s no faster way to hate your passion than to monetize it.
There’s a word for that: jobby
As you said, it’s not healthy to turn every hobby into a jobby. The best thing about hobbies is the lack of urgency and technical criteria. The whole point is to do it for fun.
I feel so seen!
I do not want my customer’s money deciding how I do my favorite things! That’s for ME.
I’ve got extremely good dexterity and my favorite hobby is flow arts which is a visual spectacle. This results in lots of attention and I’m always hearing that I gotta make money with it.
As someone who occasionally does professional photography/ filming, the auto setting on your camera is fine if you’re just snapping pics. Where you’d want manual is if you were taking a larger series of photos and wanted to apply the same effects/ processing to the batch.
As someone who never did photography professionally but as a hobby, I learned the manual settings when automatic failed to take a good photo.
the automatic setting might give you 1/30 of a second when photographing fast moving animals or 1/500 with aperture 2.8 when photographing landscapes, neither of which will give you good photos :/
Aperture, shutter speed and ISO aren’t very hard to understand and applying them correctly will give you a lot better photos.
There is also semiautomatic modes which allow you to specify part of that triad without needing to exactly know how best to adjust all three.
I figure it depends mostly how much time you have to take your shot. Though im not sure how fast someone can get with manual mode with practice.
