Well, I’m not confused, but I may be explaining myself poorly.
“Stopping down” refers to using a smaller aperture, in order to let in less light. This also has the effect of increasing the depth-of-field, making what appears in focus extend further on the Z-axis.
Using a lens constructed for a full-frame sensor on a crop-frame body gives you the effect you are describing where you are using the best part of the lens. The outer parts of the lens cover an area that lies outside of the crop-sized sensor and also produces that zoomed-in effect of 1.6x or 1.5x depening on manufacturer.
Because larger sensors are physically larger and usually have significantly higher resolution, it is more sensitive to the “circle of confusion”. This makes it easier to create creamy, soft backgrounds with beautiful bokeh, but harder to get deep focus in macro photo, for instance. You get a similar effect as you move from wide angle to telephoto, why a 200mm lens at f/2.8 is so beloved by wedding and fashion photographers.
Working with medium format film/sensors is another notch up and is even more demaning of the lenses required.
Again, this is to the best of my knowledge and hopefully mostly correct.
This is true, but there are definite physical effects of changing sensor size and the size difference between a full-frame camera sebsore and that in a phone is extreme enough that the phone camera makers have developed so-called “computational photography” to close the gap. And, to be fair, they’ve succeeded in may areas. That said, there are still differences between images take with large-sensor/lens cameras and phone cameras. Whether they matter is personal choice.
More-so than the “two nearly identical shots; which is shot on iPhone?” comparisons, I can so often look at some photos and say to myself “no way that was taken on a phone” because it falls outside the sweet spot. Like just about any wildlife shot.
Yes! And critically, in my view, I get to control which computations and how much.
Some people don’t want to spend the time “in post” and that’s fine, but I spend time on my photos like some people spend time on their coffee. Each to their own!
Back in the day I used iView / Expressions Media / Media Pro as it went from independent to Microsoft to Camera One to abandonware. It was, IMHO, an excellent cataloging tool.
I was also using Photo Mechanic to ingest, edit (in the sense of selecting the best images and deleting the rest), and adding metadata (especially keywords). The Photo Mechanic Catalog tool was legendary vaporware at this time.
Once iView finally stopped working (it was 32 bit IIRC) , I searched for a new cataloging app, I tried aquite a few, and eventually found NeoFinder, and ancient (version 1 released in May 1996!) Mac app that wasn’t perfect but did what I needed to do. It is still in active development and the developer has since added more photo centric functionality (including migration tools from Media Pro). It has a one time license fee of $39.99.
And then the version of Photo Mechanic with Cataloging exited the vaporware stage. And I got it at the introductory upgrade price.
So now I have two cataloging tools.
And I can recommend both.
One final comment, to fully take advantage of a cataloging tool it really helps to keyword your images. This, and other best practices for Digital Asset Management can be found in Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book.
There are lots of options. The most capable in my estimation is Photo Mechanic 6. It takes some time to learn (lots of YouTube videos). But a really great standalone app is “A Better Finder Rename 11.app” that works super fast and is quite reliable. But with power comes complexity. You can find templates for it and create your own. And it digs deep down into files for all sort of metadata (Image creation date, camera model, aperture, etc.) to help rename and sort.
Those would be my two top recommendations. Bridge is pretty good at it too.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t wondering about tools for renaming. But you are right that Photo Mechanic and A Better Finder Rename are great renaming tools. I have and use both of them.
The articles I cited talked about the content of a photo’s filename. For example, I decided to rename a sample raw file from the new Nikon Z9 camera that I downloaded from the DP Review website with an original filename of “DSC_0302.NEF” to a possibly more meaningful new filename of “dpr20220103-Z9-0302.nef”
Bummer. I suppose that with more and more cameras getting GPS built in the market for such a utility is dwindling. From one that was likely not very large to begin with.
very interested in this area, so your Apple watch provides regular update (more often than iPhone) on GPS coordinates. Then how do you this information to update the photos from the big camera. I think I may have missed part of the workflow here
Oh my. The things I learn. I’ve been an active Lightroom user for many years and had no idea this was a thing. I guess I need to re-do all my prior trips!
I’ve used Open GPX Tracker for general purpose GPS tracks.
I also have a couple of other apps but cannot find them in the app store any more. They are Motion-X GPS which I’ve had for many years, and Geotag Photo 2 which is explicitly designed for tracking for photography.
Okay, I understand. But as I used to preach at work, “file names are not metadata.” Of course this is photo-specific. There’s so much metadata you could include in the name, but unfortunately, the name is easily changed. (I once had thousands of photos renamed to .nef and hoo boy what that a pain to fix!
Be that as it may, If you get to know the tools in Photo Mechanic, you can change the name based on tons of variables Photo Mechanic can pull out of an image.
I’m curious, why is it you’re looking for this philosophy of naming images? What are you feeling like you’re missing?
First, I’m not much of a photographer, so we’re talking about a low-volume workflow here. And I was coming off a couple of years of using Lightroom and not wanting to be stuck in their catalog any longer.
Second, keeping metadata out of my filenames implies an index of some sort or a bunch of externally applied keywords and ratings (aka “tags”) that haven’t appealed to me the numerous times I’ve used them. I prefer a small set of folders with meaningfully named files in them. The Finder, the Houdahspot search app, and the EagleFiler app are my main organizational tools.
And finally, to answer your question, while I had some ideas of what I wanted to immediately know about a photo beyond its camera-assigned name (e.g. DSC_4455), I wondered if someone else had come up with anything interesting. Just the typical “has anybody else done this before” approach.
