epic!

@U04V5V0V4 and @U08ABGP70 would love to know what goes into the two of you taking great shots. What do look for? How much is down to (any?) post processing?

Getting the shots: mostly I just walk around the neighbourhood. I sometimes do a bit of post-processing but nothing that takes more than a minute per chosen pic - small cropping / filter application

any rules you follow when framing or cropping a shot?

For me, it's a real mix... The above was an opportunistic iPhone pic on a walk with no post at all... Sometimes the shots I post are planned, taken with either my Leica M10 or Canon EOS-5D MkIII, and then there is usually some post-processing, though almost always more for the Canon as imho the sensor washes out a lot of contrast, where the Leica's sensor is excellent for "as seen" fidelity and I can often use the photo straight from the camera. For both of those cameras I use Lightroom Classic on my Macbook Air M1, though I will sometimes transfer images to my phone via Leica Fotos if I am using the Leica and edit on Lightroom on my iPhone. The iPhone photos I post are almost always unedited - the AI wizardry in the phone's camera covers a multitude of sins!

As for framing and cropping... If I stop and think about it I do use a lot of "received wisdom" but these days I am doing it without consciously thinking about it - I've been taking photographs from an artistic or at least artisan perspective for over 35 years and at this point I am doin' what I do... There are a number of useful "rules", like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headroom_(photographic_framing) (which really can apply to non-portraiture just as much as portraiture imho), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabatment_of_the_rectangle, and a few other thoughts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_room and the opposite thereof, which would be consciously using negative space. In landscape photography there is always merit in varying the amount of foreground, either for interest or framing, or both, and equally in limiting the amount of sky. Also it's totally worth framing or cropping to exclude annoying or distracting features. These thoughts are actually applicable to almost all framing, not just landscapes, to be entirely transparent. And all of these ideas / rules exist on part to be broken when the mood / circumstance / subject lends itself to their subversion, and while it pays to know them well in order to do so effectively, there have been times when they are brilliantly yet inadvertently broken by photographers, so I would not want to be all gatekeeper-y about any of this.

Final thought... Phone cameras these days use AI and image compositing in order to handle automated exposure, so the lighter sky and darker foreground are mystically in balance in the output. If you want to achieve the same results with a "real" camera, there are filters that will help, especially Neutral Density Graduated filters, and there is always exposure bracketing and then compositing images from bracketed exposures - similar to focus-stacking.

Hope that all helps - happy to go into more detail if you want / need. 🙂

that is a massive amount of help. Thank you.

My pleasure 🙂

Rabatment is a new one on me. I sort of new about head room and lead room

nods My other favourite rule / framing phenomenon that springs from a reasonably idiosyncratic genre is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCckenfigur which often utterly subverts rabatment / rule of thirds compostion, though not always... Thus in pursuit of actual Rückenfigur with a human subject, or applying the same ideas about an inanimate subject, one can often uncover a solid creative reason for placing the subject dead centre, even though "on paper" that might be deemed less appealing.

Oh, and my art teacher (way back) taught me about the ideas in Rabatment of the Rectangle without using the technical term, he just told me to find the square or squares in the rectangle of the frame and then use them to line things up, so it was actually decades before I learned that there was a name for it!

I thought it was his personal insight!

and it also denied you being able to read around it more widely

Well indeed - never thought about that!

We've all got some homework! Thanks @U08ABGP70

my pleasure 🙂

Thanks! I have wondered a bit what it would take to create a ts repl. This is Rust and stuff. But maybe I can get an idea about the general approach.

rust?

CC: @U5KMTEAS2

I see Rust files there: https://github.com/alex-dixon/vscode-typescript-repl/tree/main/packages/ts-repl-transpile

I have thought about creating a repl exeperience for JS many times, but always get stuck due to lack of experience in this field. It's easy to use something like treesitter, figure out the code that was highlighted and evaluate it (if there are no external dependencies). I have no idea how to do it if there are external dependancies.

One of the other issues with JS is that ES6 is not amenable to snippet hot-reloading, you either reload complete modules or not, redefining functions such that their changes can be seen in where they were called outside of the module doesn't work