489: Gear as a Motivator, with Tyler Stalman

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The Sony menus are bad and they should feel bad but David blames me.

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Sony’s menus are the bitter peel you have to cut away to get to the sweet image quality inside.

Don’t fact check me on that analogy

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I checked your YouTube channel and notices the Kronaby watches. They look awesome! I have destroyed 3 Apple watches and still have a naked wrist while waiting for the latest model Apple Watch to drop. But these Kronaby watches look amazing and offer me the smart capability I like. I have to check their timer function since I use this a lot.

BTW the link the their website from your YouTube channel has expired…

Thanks for letting me know about the dead link, I’ll get on it!

Kronaby are great, I still wear mine about 1/3 of the time. I love the company but I do have to mention they had some financial trouble recently and were bailed out. So that means they’re still going strong, but it is worth being aware of.

This raises the question what are you wearing the ⅔ of the time ?-)

I guess I’ll need to go on Watch Power Users next :laughing: I wear the Kronaby traveling, Apple Watch when I’m working, and a Hamilton when I want to be fancy.

Occasionally a Braun and Timex for fun

Having gone deep into raw photography at one point, I wanted to add in my thoughts.

My recommendation is that if you are the type of person who routinely edits jpgs and enjoys that process, move to raw asap as the benefits of ‘free’ white balance correction and about 2(+) stops more exposure correction are amazing benefits.

Personally, I found that once I moved to an Olympus EM-1 with electronic viewfinder, my jpgs off the camera were beautiful (Olympus colours match what I aim for) and so I abandoned raw. I only do crops and minor edits now so I save hours of ‘work’ after a birding holiday.

So, if you consider yourself more of a ‘nimble’ photographer and can live with the idea that you haven’t wrung the last 2% out of a photo, I believe you can happily stick to jpg.

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I don’t disagree with this thought, I felt the same about my Nikon Df the images were superb, but the tool fought me tooth and nail. In the end I went Fujifilm and got the manual dexterity I sought in the Df and jpegs I could easily manage in my workflow.

This was a really enjoyable episode!

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The Kronaby watches look great!
Functional, but not distracting is the ultimate goal for me in every device.

Opportune timing for me. I recently got my first big camera, a Nikon D3500. So far I’ve been using it in automatic mode, shooting RAW because everybody says that’s best. But this episode helps me get more.

Sony tech offers a lot for the money (and small size) - excellent hardware but the menuing and general button placement on the bodies are worse than most other cameras. Nikon and Panasonic probably have the best menus overall.

Check out Nikon’s DigiTutor site for the D3500. Lots of good tips/tricks:

https://imaging.nikon.com/support/digitutor/d3500.html

Also, ‘Michael The Maven’ puts out comprehensive video guides on YouTube to many camera models. Here’s his 100-minute guide to the D3500:

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Sony cameras feel like Nintendo games.

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@Stalman, thanks, enjoyed listening to this episode! A couple of things jumped out at me when you were talking about LR:

You said about having to have the drive plugged in to do edits, did you know that if you generate smart previews then you can do edits without having the drive containing the original RAWs plugged in? It’s something the smart previews do but isn’t supported by the standard or 1:1 previews. To export; I think it’s best to plug in the USB drive so it can access the original image although I did manage to export a jpg without the external drive plugged in (I guess there’s a limit to the quality of an export from a smart preview…?).

The other thing, I wasn’t quite sure if you’re aware of; although you cannot open an LR catalogue from a NAS you can do so from a USB drive / stick. You should be able to plug a USB drive with catalogue & images into one machine, do some stuff, close out of LR, eject the disk, slide it to another machine and launch the catalogue right from the drive & process away without actually having to copy anything to the internal drive.

Not sure if either of those two things help make life easier at all?

Unfortunately (afaik) simultaneous multi-user Lightroom still isn’t an option though. :frowning:

Really enjoyed this episode.

I’ve been running Lightroom for my dSLR stuff alongside Apple Photos for my iPhone and old point and shoot stuff (and my old film camera scans).

I’ve been playing with Luminar 3 as a plugin for Apple Photos and found it to be really powerful. After listening to this episode, I’m tempted to do more of my RAW edits this way rather than my Lightroom import, edit and export workflow.