Waveform’s Favorite Cameras!

When you run a business, you want the right tools. Enter Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into... with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. Go to Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. You don't normally tune into a late night TV show expecting a rigorous debate about free speech. But somehow, this is the world we live in. This week on The Verge Cast, we're talking about how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has turned his agency into the speech police and why it's falling to people like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel to fight back. That plus the gadgets we are and maybe aren't getting from Apple and others this year and the latest in the chatbot wars on The Verge Cast, wherever you podcast. But I am a prime hater, so this is 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 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 yet 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 yeah video for this particular bonus episode because yeah ian yeah we're we're 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 frame it yeah it was unintentional pun museum quality glass i'm gonna probably make more of those puns but uh we have some of the most hyped cameras on planet earth in this room and we have been using them david's been using tons of different cameras that's right um 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 is funny um 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. But, David, you're our sort of residential, resident camera expert. Actually, I have an apartment. Our resident residential 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. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. I like that. This is basically us just yearning for David's approval. So I think this whole episode will go fine. Yeah, I like that. You should do compliment sandwiches so that we don't feel too bad about how bad our pictures are. Yeah, 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. 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 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 uh this is best camera for someone might doing this okay you might be doing something like this okay cool yeah okay 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. Perfect. Under $100. Like a, like a, like a. 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. We 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. Well, what you can do... I mean, if you want, you can take them all and put them in a separate folder. Are the actual images labeled by name? Well, so... Yes. Oh. I would like... And I would like you to know because I think in the process of talking about the photos, that's a prime time... That's a prime time for... Or is it a Zoom? The person who took it. A Zoom time. There's only one Zoom, I think. Or maybe Alice is a Zoom? No. Oh. 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 we'll start okay who goes first let's pick a number between 1 and 10 to see who goes first 1 and 100 I'm going with 99 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 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 marquez folder on your desktop there and you should have three images i want you to start with marquez one okay marquez one opening so i'll do our best for our audio listeners but really this is going to be a very descriptive podcast you see image one this took a really long time to open i will start with why it's a hundred megapixels why what camera so oh yeah that's a good place to start so i my three images i feel like a top chef explaining uh-huh uh my ingredient of choice what have you prepared for us today i've prepared images from a hasselblad x2d mark ii uh using the 35 to 100 prime or zoom obviously yeah uh 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 and this exact lens. They got like three weeks until DJI is banned. Yeah, I am crossing my fingers that I actually get the one that I bought. I think they have my money. No, so this is a new camera and a new lens that they made. um i've shot with house of blood 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 uh so i'd like you to open image number one okay and i'll talk through why i think each one of them is my select i'm gonna turn the brightness all the way up so we really get that hdr perfect yeah you see image number one too so this image number one here is the first uh hour of me owning this camera of me having this camera and i shot this photo of adam this is the photo you said it was the best cam photo you've ever taken is that what you said yeah why are you so okay it's subjective it's subjective right yeah yeah yeah so number one is uh like i said it is a hundred megapixel medium format camera this is uh fresh out the box aperture priority i haven't even really dialed any settings yet but it it nailed the eye for autofocus on adam's face and adam is completely backlit in this picture so sun is streaming in in 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 adam's quality is adam's um table tennis racket is so messed up that it looks like there is like shutter drag near the top yeah it's a but it's just that this is picking up rolling shutter fibers that are falling off of it marquez this photo is 11 000 pixels wide this is a jpeg that is 16 megabytes i've 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 crop ability and malleability and uh i had to learn 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 and the trucks in the background yeah it is interesting to see a camera that can shoot hdr that is not a phone yeah because they're so used to phone photos yeah it looks a lot better and you can see more of the benefits of like what hdr is good for on a real camera um i think seeing all the shadow detail like because he's so backlit is beneficial i mean i'm assuming you bump the shadows a little bit so you can see a bit yeah see more in there yeah a lot of dynamic range like the gradation through like you can see the blue in the sky it's incredible how much is actually in that's true that's true in a totally backlit shot like this right yeah so that's that's photo number one okay i feel like uh 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 yes it's one of the first again this is in the first hour of testing this thing is is your reason why this is your favorite foot because i i took a little peek by accident at one of your other pictures and i just the thumbnail i like 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 hauselblatt 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 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 uh 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 but 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 from the 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 yeah 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 gives me an heif and i took the h 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 uh exposure so the heif has the tone map for the hdr built in yeah does the raw only apply a tone map once you bring it into the focus software does the raw only apply because i 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 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 going to pop in like hdr or whatever and i can also see the end of like when it's going to 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 heif or whatever or hif 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 yeah 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 sun glowing off of the trash bag next to Andrew. Beautiful, beautiful. It does, 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. 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 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 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 like squatting squatty potty crouched on the train tracks it's like the dog i walked past this morning um 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 suit i like an f22 one that looks a little more distracting and how much yeah so i like this one cool my picture from that came out terrible oh well but i also had a 20 bloom filter on like with golden hour blaring the best one oh i hate bloom filter 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 carney new jersey yeah it's about 40 feet to the left of the last photo gps overlay puts me in the same place uh no this is also golden hour shooting uh 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 going to be a wallpaper. No, yeah, for sure. I like this more than that first photo of Adam. Yeah. Thanks. This is literally a picture of grass. And you like it more than me. Most of my photography is pictures of grass. So, yeah, no, I think the color, 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 have 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 into the rightmost branch and you can count the individual berries on it how many megapixels is this camera 100 each one is a 100 megapixel shot you can see the like little white markings on the bark of the like tree yeah yeah the the detail that this keeps is just wild it is crazy it is is that why you prefer this camera marquez just the detail 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 possible. Yeah, it's a shame that it's digital. I can't tell if these white spots on the back of the cattails are haloing 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. Because 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. So very nice, Marques. Thank you. There's my three photos of a little HDR to brighten your day. I'd say if I were to rank these. Oh, sure. Photo three at my favorite Photo two at my second favorite And photo one is my third favorite Podium Top three And yeah number one is number three For me It's not because it's Adam I love Adam It just because I never get to see you outside of work Can 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. Like some... Whether it be a subject, whether it be a setting change on something. What would you like to see out of that camera? 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 like capture the breadth of the scene and uh 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 then pull out and it crops okay oh sorry he's like no it's just my brain raw version 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 uh that's my favorite type of photography mostly because it's super controllable and you can kind of be as creative as you want and 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 gonna say do you plan on as your mind changed on that like you want to bring this with you and shoot more on 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 very the body is 7 000 or so um it is cheaper than the last generation surprisingly even with the tariffs the lens is a lot also a lot of money but I'm 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 not even two zoom with your feet bro crazy yeah Support for the show comes from Shopify. So the early days of starting a business are equal parts exciting and terrifying. It's a big risk, but it's the one worth taking as long as you have the right tools. And if e-commerce is part of your new business, then here's a tip. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform used by millions of businesses around the world. They say that they can help you tackle all those important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to have multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Let Shopify be your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. You can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash waveform. Go to shopify.com slash waveform. That's shopify.com slash waveform. It's time to level the up. I'm Robin Arson and I light fires. I'm an executive founder, bestselling author, ultra marathoner, mother, proud Latina, and I'm not done yet. Announcing Project Swagger, my new weekly podcast, your transformation toolkit. I'm going to cut through the noise and give you actionable takeaways each week in under 30 minutes. Elevate your hustle with routines, strategies, and mindset shifts that I have pressure tested. I have burnt down this Beyonce candle like all the way to the bottom. We have been trying to manifest. Carves are not the enemy. I probably have a piece of bread or a bagel with me at all times, and I am not exaggerating. Tune in on February 24th for episode one, Building the Skill of Self-Talk. This is the foundation. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go. When you look beyond the headlines at the trend lines, what is really going to matter? Even if you're not worried about AI per se, you certainly ought to be concerned. Do we have the cultural, you know, strength and resilience to get it right now? Imagine we had to write a new constitution today, put aside AI. Like, how good a job do you think we would do? I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we're joined by economist and author Tyler Cowen. We discuss China, the AI race, and aliens. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your 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? uh is it 102 it's 18 102 this camera has 18 megapixels 18 okay 18 megapixels does your camera have in-body stabilization yeah i think it's some like seven stops yeah mine doesn't have any none um no no uh does your camera have a full-frame sensor no it's bigger it's medium format yeah mine doesn't aps-c okay uh your camera have uh autofocus yeah no mine is continuous 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 is your camera this is camera is just like a box with a hole in it pinhole baby any little pinhole yeah i generated images no just kidding my camera has a three inch screen okay max shutter speed of four thousand one over four thousand it's pretty slow workable uh four thousand's fine get this my camera has normal on uh aperture priority that's great check that out that's great uh a continuous shooting mode of 4.3 frames per second okay if you hold that down for two seconds the camera crashes sick uh that's not a joke sick this is the 2012 yes canon eos m in panda by the way the worst colorway it comes in cult cult camera because uh it's actually quite good for video yes yeah 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. Yeah. 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 eos m system uh 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, you should I should I tell that? I'll tell that story at the end because oh my gosh um and it was belarus uh 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 sure what would you pick huh probably somewhere in the medium telephoto like 35 range yes marquez would you mind reading the focal length of this lens why is this an eight Is this an 8.5mm? That's an 8.5mm lens. Let's talk about equivalency. Let's talk about equivalency, everybody. Okay, 8.5mm, that's also a TV lens. For an 8mm? That is a mid-70s security camera lens. The sensor on a security camera is real small. Yes. Okay, here's another thing. So when people talk about focal lengths, when people talk about focal lengths you know they talk about like eight they talk about 23 millimeter 35 millimeter 50 millimeter 100 millimeter whatever uh-huh that that that equivalent 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 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 23mm Fuji lens, it's actually like a 35mm full frame equivalent. There's a lot of math you have to do here. That's not a lot of math. Well, this is a security... By 1.6. Okay. Wow. Yeah, the... 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 doesn't. Yeah, mine doesn't. Fire it up. Yeah, I love this. It's 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 throwing away precious pixels. Meanwhile, I'm over here winning. Yeah, so we got the – it's a circle of images. And so when you want to actually – 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 James Bond. Oh. Where you're looking down the barrel of a gun. I would describe it much more as like a pirate telescope. 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. And I think I paid about $250. Pretty good. Yeah. It might have come with, yeah. Yeah, notably that Magic Lantern software, all of the film students when I was in college had Canon T2i's or T3i's or whatever. gh4s yeah and yeah it's just a totally different software that allows you to shoot in raw well it's not it's it's not just that it's like um it's 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 uh focus peaking for example grab it you put it in the camera yeah if you want the raw video you grab it put it in the camera if you want like crop modes you grab and put in the camera so it lets you sort of build out the software of the camera for whatever you're sort of doing i'd say hugest asterisk it 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 fits in my pocket. Great battery life. Everything about it is so excellent. This Panda colorway is just. Yeah. 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 is 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 yeah i really wish i had gotten a like um 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 uh 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 modding 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 4.3. Before we look at Alice's photos, I think that this is a good example 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's 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 add that contrast. but if you keep everything in the middle of the tone curve which is like the the highlights are on the right side the shadows are on the left side and then the the middle is the middle gray area of luminance um 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 six bit color or something um they could not accept 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 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 um you know vignetting was famously used to draw your attention into the center of the image in ellis's case it's uh it was forced upon him feature not a bug but can i say something real quick sure all of the photos that you're going to 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 the image of a chair in the studio but it's got very nice afternoon lighting also we can see the 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 yeah well i like that uh yeah so there's some like really bright areas on the chair the the robot room is very very dark there's an air of mystery in there you know you don't really know what's in there um i would say overall i really like the specular nests of the highlights there's some nice shine in the areas that are brighter there's like a lot of sheen going on this is a little bloomy yeah there's also a lot of chromatic aberration around the edges of this lens yeah how is that chromatic aberration is basically like color separation in certain areas so if you look at um 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 of uh 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 like it's like a style yeah it's like almost like there are there are youtubers i won't say who but who add like chromatic aberration filters to their videos yeah exactly sort of 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 piece, 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. 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. Ellis, where are you going with this? 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 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 Sony lenses because they just trying to make the sharpest it it optically close to optically perfect but a lot of people don 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 things pop coming out of the image um it's a it's a conspiracy theory it's a conspiracy people argue about it in 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 will be like no you're you're reading noise in the sensor yeah it's not it sounds like trying to like quantify soul in a song yeah kinda yeah okay it's pretty much the same thing yeah like how much does the image like pop off the screen you know i i 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, this is a noisy camera. 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. I mean, that's... 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. 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. Yeah. I think that's a really compelling part of this image. Yeah. No. The bloom out of this lens is very nice. All right. She's popping. So this next photo, before you open it, 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 is a thought. Marquez is 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 uh 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 highlights are clipped so you know you're right they are could use a little more dynamic range but overall i think the the bokeh which is the out of focus areas in this image are very creamy yeah because this lens gives a lot of that um that bloom that It 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, even without that, I could see it on my wall. Thank you, David. It looks very beautiful. This one to me looks like a Windows XP wallpaper. And it's shot with a Canon FD 50mm, 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 50mm. 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. That is a 50mm with the 1.6 crop factor, so it's more like a 70mm, which is a really funny thing to have as a prime on your camera, to only have like a 76mm lens. 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 uh bang city see this is relation this is where the micro contrast starts to look incredible we've got a believer over here folks um yeah this 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 the the it's really popping the the the contrast is popping really nicely there's some nice shadow detail um the the blacks are very black there's a little bit of peeking in the top right it's kind of got it all you know um 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 the studio video before where you take the photo and the sensor is like rgrb rgrb and it's this repeating pattern yeah 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 uh 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 tack i feel like it's very tied to the resolution of the shot it's like the more resolution you have the more smooth it can appear to be yeah but it's digital yeah 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 that 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 yes camera like 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 um and then you don't have to review this one i just thought this would be a good thing to bring up and this this the the bonus pick is one that i actually took with you david oh yeah uh no i lied this is not a picture i took with you oh no but when you 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 get 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 because it's nonsense it's just like it's so purely artistic yeah so it's like you're taking 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 yeah about 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 the light is nice. The light that comes through, especially now when it's at 4 o'clock and we're in the office when Golden Hour hits, as long as that wind turbine isn't spinning and causing it to flicker in that area, it's just a beautiful little corner of our office. The little outcove. Yeah. Very nice. There's even a dead Astro Bot. yeah that's my favorite part yeah all right it's adam's turn all right adam yes tell me about your camera it is i adam i'm at the big boy table this is the rico 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 marquesa's camera also prime also prime oh that's why it's so far below yeah 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 a super It's 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, OK, those are good pictures. And then I was seeing people just put them in their pocket. And I was like, that is what I want. The Ricoh 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. That's crazy. 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. Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi. Real quick, Adam, is that the regular version of the GR, or is that the blurry version of the GR? It is the regular version. I want to get a blurry adapter thing. The four there only is a regular. Yeah, yeah, right now. Oh, okay. The three has the HDF. Yeah, this is the Riko GR4. It just came out. I think this is the newest camera out of all of them. Yes, it is. It just came out. And the Riko GR3, it got really popular because the Fuji X100V popped off, and then the X1006 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, Riko just decided to make multiple variants of the GR3, So they made the Diary Edition, which is like a... 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 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 bad. Does it have an orange button? I don't know. I think he means the photos are black and white. It's probably more. Probably more. Never mind. Because they're going to make them a lot lower volume. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I don't think I'll ever understand that. Did you watch our studio video? Black and white? 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've got to really want it. They take one part off, which is... Yeah. You have to really want black and white. Yeah. Yeah. That type of thing. Like, that's your thing. Like, instead of just sliding saturation. Yeah. You have to want that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, GR4, it's APS-C. 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 that a 23? It says 28. I don't know. What is the 28 millimeter equivalent lens? Equivalent. It's kind of wide. 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 and 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 yeah 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 elisa's camera also doesn't have yeah it's hard for me to shoot without a viewfinder that's not the fun you don't know what you're gonna get the screen does not like flip out or anything the screen is just fixed so it's really hard to shoot from like different angles stop looking at your pictures just vibes man just press the button but like adam said when it's just like a running 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 so 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 it's also like stark black yeah very very assuming low key yeah super low key it also does video oh yeah you want to guess what it does what kind of video i feel like that could be 1080 yeah 1080 just 1080 yeah not even 4k mine doesn't do video at all that's fair yeah literally won't even shoot 720 that's true yeah yeah 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 positive park no it's um 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 water park um water park he exposed it for the highlights so that you know 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 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 now 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 we'll look at image number two here numero dos numero dos this would go crazy with hdr oh this would go no mark has no come on you know i'm right the opposite you know i'm right it's the opposite of what i want for this phone i'm right no this would go crazy with the hdf version that's what i go crazy yeah yeah this is again a picture of the corner that ellis had 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 great with the high diffusion filter version um the color of the greens are incredible in this look very nice the 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 so much brightness it'd be insane yeah um yeah i like this photo yeah it's very nice i like the white balance the green and 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 going to 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 the ev it doesn't have um but there's a photo of marquez doing the smartphone awards live little bts uh It looks really good. It 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 everything was too nice. It looks great. Nice lights. I also like the highlights that are bouncing off the ping pong table. It's funny that we kind of use the ping pong table as like a bounce card by accident, but it looks great. This would also go hard in HDR because the key light over there, stay with me, is just blasting into the camera. as well as onto the subject. And yeah, this would really cook my irises. You want to move everything to the middle of the tone curve? What creates... 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... Micro contrast! Shading, Marcus. 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, yeah. I hate HDR. That's why I liked 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 too much. 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 yeah so 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 that you did you just take a photo i i don't know i wouldn't know people use the gr like they 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 like hyper fast motion in the moment that's why they make the gr3x which is the street edition um which is a longer lens that's 43 millimeters or 40 millimeters it's a little more street um 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 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 also thank you i spent a long time between this and i wound up getting an x106 but like i was going 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 it's very aggressively compact yeah and the build quality is really solid too like i assume being that small and the threes were cheaper i was like this probably feels cheaper it does not at all it 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 a lot smaller blah blah but like it they still both relatively like no this thing is small also uh fun little trivia rico and pentax are the same company owned by epson group the scanner company and the printer company back to print wow they They also own a happy hacking keyboard. They do. Really? Which is really weird. Very random thing for them to own. Their portfolio. It's a cool portfolio. Yeah. Besides the scanner part. Besides the main thing. That's the part that makes the money so they can do all the other things. Yeah. Adam, I like these pictures. Thank you. Very good. I think I heard that I won this competition. So now I've noticed David being much nicer. No sandwiches. Just no sandwiches. Just straight compliments. 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 um 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 that's i autofocus yeah with how fast she is it's 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 gr3 and an x100 um the six 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 yeah and i got lucky enough that someone who actually listens to the podcast was like yo i haven't touched bind in forever let me sell it to you shout out to him shout out abraham that was awesome 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 he is like kitted out yes it has a nice little and it has a nice thumb grip from polar pro it has i bought this uh 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 cine bloom the 20 which is a lot it's a lot and um and the uh polar pro short stash wow filter that came with it also so uh it's uh gives it a mustache it's like a polarizer and also one fourth oh i do need a polarizer 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 yeah the reason people buy x100s is because they don't want to edit their pictures very much and the film simulations are great and 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 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 yeah you'll have to show me one of those all right let's let's jump into here to see if i can pretend i'm artsy oh wow by the way this is a prime right what's the 23 millimeter it's like a 35 yeah like 35 dude this is a cool photo i this is a little mat around this and it would look great oh a white border yeah this 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 yeah and there's just no one standing there at all and the grass was just so green film simulation did you i think classic negative i think almost all of these are classes classic negative yeah this may have had the short stash filter on it um 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 oh got it um so it's his filter yeah when i preview this it shows it with like a mat and uh yeah this is a really nice looking picture compliments yeah classic negative is a really nice sandwiches david sandwiches i hate um hdr which is not at all in this picture no this is a great picture andrew thank you it's nice um yeah i think i use that i have been it is so much fun to mess around with like recipes that people make yeah um following the like different fuji uh subreddits fuji x weekly yeah yeah and fuji x weekly and just going through all those and being like all right i'm going out and shooting blah blah today so i'm gonna start yeah uh shutter speed but if you pick it up and spin that's iso oh that's cool 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 um 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 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 um 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 camera 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 it takes a while though yeah it's a lot of just like you know the joystick fiddling around and you can save some presets that'd be awesome yeah yeah um you will notice for some reason i only take uh portrait vertical yeah vertical photos only um maybe i should have bought the fuji x half but um bro but uh 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 115th or 130th of a shutter speed the benefit of this camera too is that it's got um ibis and so you can hand hold it for like a whole second and it's awesome it's awesome as long as yeah things are aren't moving which right when i'm taking photos of lane changes it's what oh metadata it was it was super bright this is midday it just started snowing when we were in salem which okay which is why the house like it kind of looks like elongated but i think it was just big snow big snow big snow flurries um the the house in the background is just like every house in salem is just this beautiful house made in the like 1800s yeah and it's just a beautiful place the colors in this photo are awesome thank you are like the pictures well i shouldn't take any credit it's probably 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 okay now say something bad i'm feeling jealous um 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 this is something i think i do maybe do this in post 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 straightening the auto straightening features i don't use auto okay also on on these cameras too um 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 um but maybe i should do 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 okay yeah it goes crazy actually yeah it's cool i use it a lot some because sometimes they'll go into the rotation tool right and yeah 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 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 picture yeah very nice oh andrew i think this is all subject this is not andrew came up with this uh with this idea for this bonus episode and i think he's 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 the 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 uh 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 yeah it looks really nice sure i would i like the angle that you took this a lot i would 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 but i'll just make it for you just that's wait that is a lightroom thing you said i could yeah they'll probably add that to photoshop soon um 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 uh i like the yeah 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 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 till 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'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 uh 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 the hood ornaments from different angles and then i'll pass a cool car and be like oh i'm gonna try to get this picture and i just cannot get it it's so difficult yeah 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 gonna dump 200 photos and be like one of these is cool and i hate the rest of them and 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 and i know why that's not that but i don't know how to get that to be there 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're doing you're like wow well that's almost why i 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 like 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 so give me your uh your h2s which are the best for what oh yeah i say h2 if you're writing an article in h2 headlines just like the bold part 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 so 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 uh yeah take photos of that at a wedding and people are just going to instantly love it you know i've been on photo shoots where the photographer is taking like three to five thousand photos on the main camera and then every once in a while just pulls out an x100 and then goes back to the pro shots it's like and then only sends the x100 photos uh i'd 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 marquez is some recipes but yeah not like fuji yeah it has some recipes marquez's camera is best for the like pro pro pro that wants like 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-tone Most mid-camera? Ellis' camera is the best for cult members. For microcontra? Yeah, for microcontra. Yeah, the thing I do like about Ellis' camera a lot is that in the photography community, people will argue and complain about what camera is best, whatever, whatever. But there's also this subset of people that just try to do insane s*** with 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 like everything is perfectly exposed everything's perfectly sharp everything is the autofocus is great this is great blah blah the resolution's great so it's almost like a differentiator to see something that is well composed but with a trash camera that has like low dynamic range How much money people spend and how much time people spend to like get that chromatic aberration that's in my lens. Right. I think the tinkering aspect of Ellis's camera. Yeah. 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 a possible x2d from 2012 35 to 100 no yeah it's uh it is definitely subjective that is the that is the beauty of it it is it's basically it's art and the art will 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 so 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 uh like looking at a lot of our photos and maybe you have suggestions for how some of us can take better photos as well uh leave your compliment sandwiches below and uh we'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming pretty soon see you soon happy christmas peace Waveform is produced by Adam, Elena, and Ellis Rubin, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And our true outro music was created by Vain Still. Happy Honda Days, everybody. Merry Toyota. Lexus, December to remember. Sales event.