RedHuey

What are you offering that they can’t offer themselves with their phones? Seriously. That’s the question you need to have an answer for.

In the old days, we avoided zooms because of all the extra glass needed to do the zoom part. A perfectly good prime lens might have 4-6 pieces of glass in it. A zoom lens a dozen of more (like a modern prime). Every extra piece of glass mattered. I guess it either somehow doesn’t anymore, or the cameras are designed to compensate in away not possible with film. I don’t know and I don’t own any of these monstrosities anyway.

But, the OP’s comparison is not really valid, since you really need to compare the weight (and hypothetical size) of 4 old prime lenses to one modern one to get close to the equivalent glass.

Practice and use focus peaking if your camera has it. Also, depth of field can be your friend.

Older cameras and lenses were designed for manual focus. Both in the view finders and in the giant lens focus rings with big rubber grips. Cameras were meant to be used manually before AF came along. It is an unfortunate fact of modern cameras that they are optimized and designed to be used as automatically as possible and only begrudgingly allow manual use anymore. People were good at the lost art of focusing in the manual SLR days because the cameras made it easy and people had plenty of practice at it.

The other problem in play is the modern philosophy of photography where sharpness of focus is seemingly even more important than composition. This is an expected artifact of the availability of finely focusing cameras among people who can’t really take a picture. So here we are.

The internet, the vast majority of the time, is a solution in search of a problem. It’s best not to forget that fact.

Nobody random on the Internet cares about your photos. They don’t care about mine either. They don’t even care about your photos if you have the new Sony Super-camera with the tack sharp 5mm-800mm f.1 zoom that only weighs 2oz. In fact, they especially don’t care about THAT.

My point here is that there is nothing wrong with doing something because you enjoy doing it. You don’t need affirmation from any random person. The enjoyment of your work by your friends and family is the most you should hope for. It’s all that matters anyway. I know the phrase “gig economy” and the existence of “influencers” has convinced everyone with a half decent camera that they are one algorithm away from being crowned the next Ansel, but it’s not true and never will be. Value comes from scarcity, and the Internet has made everything on it abundant. Nobody cares about what you do. Except you. Just appreciate that.

There is no way to know. We had big file cabinets full of news photos from various sources. Internal and external. As did everybody else in the news biz. Most now are likely in some decomposing trash heap at the moment, but you just can’t know how many prints were made and where they wound up. It’s impossible. So your plan to claim them as your own pictures is probably not viable. ;-)

But it is a bit creepy to show up for a date with someone new with a camera and start taking pics of each other. I know I’d feel that was an invasion of my privacy.

To the OP: do not post them and stop doing that. Maybe suggest it as an idea to someone you are successfully dating, but it is not a date ice-breaker. It’s just creepy.

(Not to mention an I am a geeky guy and I live with my parents in their basement red-flag.)

You have fallen into the trap, the lie really, that there is some perfection, some single goal that you must achieve. Generally, this does not come from examples of people who have actually achieved something interesting. The world is full of sheep, seeking to flock with other sheep. Modern cameras have given the sheep “skills” that allow them to flock better. They justify it all to each other by going on and on about their “tools” and how they can focus so perfectly, or stop motion so perfectly, or have super high pixel counts and burst rates. It’s how sheep entertain each other. It is called bleating. All it produces is yet another “perfect” photo of a bird doing something, in absolutely perfect focus, stopped in time, taken from a row of 50 that look virtually identical, but from which this one has been deemed “perfect.”

You can join these sheep if you like, or you can just do what you do and stop judging yourself by what they do. The world doesn’t NEED what they do. It also doesn’t need most of what anybody does. So just do what you want to do. Learn what you want to learn. Don’t lose the enjoyment of it by wasting energy thinking it needs to be “perfect” in some way.

Sit down, figure out what YOU like and don’t like about your photos. Then work on that. It’s that simple. Some of the greatest photos ever taken don’t fit the paradigm of modern sheep photography, and were taken on gear nobody would cross the street for anymore. So you are not really bound by any of it. When you accept that, and start being honest with yourself about it, you can improve.

Are you going to share the prize money with us, since we will be providing the ideas?

Find an analog camera sub-Reddit. Nobody here uses cameras with actual shutters.

LOL.

Everybody wants a way to buy themselves out of having to do any thinking or work, yet they want to be paid well for “doing” so. We can that the $5000 cameras that do everything for you for this, people.

Photography is moribund.

Go to a library and look at books. Books come from an ancient time before the internet told us all to think with a hive mind, so they can be useful to discerning actual ideas.

Look for photography collections. Preferably in B&W, which will both tend to be older and focus on concepts like telling a story and composition.

All the internet gives you is ten million examples of hyper sharp, over saturated, millionth of a second exposures, of birds doing something birds do, but that the lucktographers couldn’t be bothered to actually try to photograph.

On a sensor, not necessarily a lens.