I’m always a big fan of a strong backlight on furry animals like this. try to catch them at golden hour with the sun mostly behind them. you’ll either need a bit of fill light or to bring the shadows up a touch in post for it to really pop in that situation. if the dog is patient you can literally just use a piece of foamcore board to bounce the sunset back into their face. in this photo i even had the sun flairing into the lens a little. it helped that i was shooting up a hill. made it easier to line up the sun, but i was still laying on the ground to get this.

as I mentioned in the post you’ll want to open that aperture to get a nice dreamy shallow look like this. you also want to get as close to the subject as you can while maintaining a good frame (fill the frame) and make sure the background is far away. an open field works great for something like this. you should also always try to be at your subject’s eye level as a general rule of thumb. yes, being higher or lower can work, but there needs to be intent behind doing it.

shooting very large dogs like that will make it much harder to get a photo like this one. the 45 1.8 will seperate the subject well, but it won’t blow it out into a dreamy blur like this when aimed at moose dogs. you’d need something longer like a 135 1.8 or an 85 1.2. that said, you can still make a very nice looking portrait, it just won’t quite look like this.

you also don’t want it to be overly sharp. sharpness tends to make the fur look less soft and cute. if it’s like a doberman doing a nobleman pose then you probably want a sharp look, but if it’s a cute little puppy like this one i tend to remove sharpness in post or shoot on vintage glass.

it’s not cheating to use treats to pose them. it’s not unreasonable to take a nice picture of the owner holding them. if all else fails, just chase them around at their eye level on burst mode. try to catch the sun lighting then up nicely from behind.

In theory, if we’re growing beyond Linux nerds and harcore communists, this should be one of the biggest and most general communities as well as one of the most likely to see slop get upvoted.

ai kittens and puppies make up like 30% of Facebook traffic on their own at this point. if we’re worried about ai slop taking over THIS is the community to watch.

the etiquette is to find the original yourself, it’s usually not that hard, just reverse image search it, or not post it. why would you feel so obligated to share a comic with no author that someone else made?

it’s easy to be a shitty person without intending to. that’s why we need to police our own actions and be conscious of the effect we have on others. when sharing the already stolen art we are perpetuating a problematic cycle. just because you didn’t start it and many others are doing it, that doesn’t make it less wrong.

sharing someone else’s dumb joke is one of the lowest forms of interaction anyway. i have numerous friends that have devolved into that being the only way they communicate with others. i mostly just don’t talk to them anymore. i really don’t care about the reels they send me. no one should ever feel like they have some kind of right to post someone else’s art.

i also generally hate the anti self promotion rules so many subteddits have. the ones that don’t are objectively better that the ones that do. what would you rather see? one more shared content mill whith the same 50 posts over and over and exclusivity stolen art. or something like r/comics with like 10 artists that all use it as a common platform to share their work.

you may find the content that is currently popular there questionably horny, but that’s more of a reddit demographic problem than an issue with letting artists self promote. in just arguing that i prefer a platform like that where you interact with the artists and new authors pop up and disappear regularly. you also get unique interactions like the artists quickly throwing together a comment reply as a bonus panel.

my point is that this place could be a better community than so much of reddit if we use it as a history book and learn from its victories and mistakes. it starts with policing ourselves and each other towards these goals. not reposting unatributed slop is one of those things we should not be doing if we want a good community.

as a media professional i can tell you that the non destructive editing features are huge. that used to be the first thing I’d point out as a specific reason i didn’t use gimp.

the ui/ux is still the biggest problem, but honestly THIS was a big part of the issue. how tedious is was to make itterarive adjustments.

may the kindly lords of foss save you if you did work for a client and they wanted you to change something minor. if you did it all destructivly in gimp, you basically just had to start over. now you can organize by linked layers and vector layers to create layer masks and adjustment layers. it’s most useful for photo manipulations and composites, but I’m sure most advanced users will find it solves something for them regardless of what they make.

this isn’t enough to get me to switch, but it’s a great step in a good direction. I’ll always be supportive of that.

hence my drawer of converters having Whole partition just for vga converters. I’ve needed all of them at least once.

i did mean 11, My pc is plenty powerful it just doesn’t happen to include a tpm chip. i have no issues with power. it handles 4k 120p 10 bit timelines fine. upgrading right now in this market would be asinine if software wasn’t pushing me into 11.

man I’m facing either needing to get a new pc in THIS market to use 10, or find an entire new professional software workflow to do my job. professional video on Linux isn’t real. hobbysist video sure, but pro video work with partners just isn’t realistic on linux.

this is the first thing that’s actually pushing me hard.

i mean with those games it feels like you get one every game third generation at this point.

elder scrolls 6 is going to become halflife 3 at this point.

hmm it’s more like if the supermarket closed… you still need food (social interaction). so where do you get it now. like you ate out sometimes before, you let others cook for you every so often. but for many, discord is their primary means of keeping in touch. you need to find something to replace it. so we’re all debating if we grow our own food or drive 4 hours to the next closest which already has going out of business signs up.

not wanting to use a platform that someone prefers is the easiest way to lose touch with someone these days. like i struggle to socialize with tiktok people these days just because i don’t get their references and they can’t send me their memes. if they’re also an imessage diehard we probably just haven’t talked in a while.

hmm idk, i only know like 2 people in my life that still use Facebook heavily. i know it’s different in India though.

Facebook has seen stagnation or user drops in most mature markets, it’s still growing in growing markets. India especially represents like half of all Facebook now.

no idea where you might be from, but this is not a globally universal issue. this will likely play out differently in different markets.

they didn’t say they were wrong, just an asshole.

it’s like someone died to a live wire and you correct their family that it was the amps not the voltage that killed them. you’re not wrong, but you’re a tone deaf dickhead.

yes, the vast majority of web traffic is phones using apps. no person that uses this platform is an average user.

even if your family hates tiktok it’s still massively popular.

especially among the youth who probably only have a really shitty locked down chromebook from their school and the recently developing world. in the global south most people never got a decent computer. they all got phones instead. once you’re on a phone everything pushes you towards apps.

well that’s why most people use apps instead. the real internet is so hostile without a guide.

especially now that you can’t use the mainstream browsers and do it. the barrier to entry has gotten so high that i don’t blame kids for being put off by computers and prefering their phones for everything. tiktok has annoying ass ads, but no apps are as bad as the average news website…

it reminds me of trying to learn about cars growing up. i didn’t learn about cars growing up. i tried, but everyone i tried to learn from spent the whole time complaining about all the anticonsumer practices that made cars shitty these days. all the hoops you have to jump through to work on them yourself anymore. how the manufactures went out of their way over the course of years to take what used to be a fun tinkerers hobby for the everyman and made it incredibly difficult and expensive to do yourself.

my take away was “I hate cars”. so when i hear teenagers these days say that they hate computers i get it. they fucking suck now and there’s this 8 foot fence of knowing how to make them suck less before they can even start wanting to learn about them. but it’s going to take them a very very long time to get good enough with the computer that they can accomplish anything on it better than on their phone. so we have trucks full of ladders that can scale that fence, and even if we lose our ladders we know how to scale that fence barehanded if we gotta. but the kids just walk around the fence because they don’t value what’s inside. why would they?

so I’m just waiting for the old pc based intent to slowly wither away as we age with it… places like this becoming out last bastions in a world that requires validated apps on phones.

yeah, they really lost their early edge on the granny gamer market lol. they’ve all jumped ship to those bejeweled like games and virtual jugsaw puzzles. maybe wordle if they’re bookish.

i think there are little things you can play in some of their messaging platforms, but they change so much on those so often that these kinds of users probably ignore 90% of the interface. i think those hit more with the gen z and gen a younger crowds. especially when it can also become social media content. tiktok is great at that.

i guess, but it woulf require the least likely people to adopt a new and expensive technology. think about how long it took for the older generations to catch on to the internet and smart phones. they may be glued together now but it took 20 years and every single other person on earth getting one to make it happen.

warcraft for your lonely aunt is a fine idea. making that vr was poorly conceived. it would have to work on a phone AND be more compelling than just taking on call or text.

but also, the early adopter types that are more or less necessary to get something like this off three ground were never going to like it. that’s us. you can’t create a new tech market segment that wasn’t explicitly asked for without at least considering the nerds. meta has negative trust among nerds. we all saw this as the marketing and data collection tool that it is meant to be.

it was never going to happen. at least until they have full control of all of our devices and platforms and can just say we need it to continue existing in society now. that or b2b contracts are the only ways i could see this ever taking off. it would take some serious marketing voodoo bullshit to convince any sizable businesses that this would increase profits.

i need to switch but am being lazy. i joined world because when i first joined every other instance had major uptime issues. after like 2 weeks of jumping around and only getting it to load half the time i decided to say screw it and just join the biggest one.

I’m sure it’s better now.

the promoun discussion blew up on that community because of a user that many accused of being a troll.

they (drag) said that they(drag) had no personal pronouns and should be referred to as dragon (technically they [drag] wanted to be called dragonrider because their [drag’s] partner was a dragon.) this meant that saying words like “you” or “they” or “your” was incorrect. to address them (drag) one would need to talk like “what is drag’s opinion on dragselve’s pronouns?”. instead of “what are your pronouns?”

i genuinely can’t tell if they’re (drag is) a troll, i just think that’s too much to ask of people. it’s legitimately hard to talk without using personal pronouns at all. that said, I’ll still try when addressing drag or anyone else. i just think drag is setting dragself up for disappointment if that’s how drag wants others to address drag.

i can’t get the ada post to open right now, and can’t actually remember what their final stance was. i just remember when that all blew up. i had no real skin in the game, it wasn’t terribly relevant or important to me, but i did try to talk it through with drag and see if i could understand it all better. the conclusion i came to was that drag and i should probably just hang in different circles haha. you don’t have to get on well with everyone. I’m not trans or anything like that. my opinions shouldn’t matter for the rules of trans focused community. i just found the whole situation interesting to see unfold.

(case and point: i just went through to try and re-proofread this to make sure i didn’t misgrender drag and realized that i still had on my 4th sweep. then i realized that to change all of the personal pronouns in this comment that should be drag into drag would make it unreadable to anyone who doesn’t already know the situation. i put those in brackets to maintain readability)

oh wow, i thought for sure it came later. i should stop making snap comments when m waking up.

no one cares about the plights of those living in backwater stone age dictatorships. the modern world must move forward on its own.

we Americans have to get used to being left behind and left out of conversations by real adults now.

there were very very very few platforms where you could post and share streaming video online when YouTube was new.

it was certainly the only free option. the internet was quite young then if you don’t remember.

other platforms rose up around their success, but I’m pretty sure YouTube was more or less unique when it started.