The photo with the dead tree in the water is really satisfying - well done. A large print and put up on (a shaded) wall sort of thing.

The other photo, of the far side of a lake, doesn’t really work for me - there’s the tree lines and their reflections pointing to the centre, but there’s nothing there to look at. You needed someone waving, or a large treasure chest (X marks the spot) or something.

Mmm, yes, you’d rather expect a path for the eye to start at the edge and move to the focus.

Yes, that again works, but needed that log.

Out of interest, did you also take a shot while in front of that patch of herbs? It could be taken as obscuring things, rather than deliberately breaking up the man-made parts (which is what I guess you intended).

Mmm, lens hoods are vital lens protectors - I’m not sure mine have ever usefully stopped glare, but protecting from knocks - invaluable!

For all depth of focus is more with a telephoto lens, I’d guess that’s still the cause of the issue. I’m just delighted the bulk worked so crisply, I’ll forgive the camera/physics a few hairs :)

Yes, depth of focus is greater, removing one issue of macro photography (at least, unless you’ve the hang of focus stacking and the post-processing required).

Well, yes, I suppose there’s that…

Cat making itself comfortable in an entirely inappropriate place (loft?) checks out.

As far as I’m concerned, post away, daily, or even (a little!) more frequently.

As to the photo - it obviously meets your stated goal, but the sun coming through the trees and providing some shadow boundaries, to me, is an important lift to the picture. It suggests to me that, while sticking to your goal, always look for an additional lift, without it needing to be consistent across the set.

Sun, sea and sand … and cloud !?!

A potent combination - I’ve had unexpectedly pleasing photos along the same lines

Canon’s DPP4 starts displaying RAW files from Canon Camera’s processed as if by the Canon camera, as a feature, for precisely that reason: a good starting point.

Even if it didn’t, the “ideal” recipe for displaying a RAW file as a JPG is probably relatively straightforward (how to form the luminance histograms, level of noise reduction & sharpening, etc.) and likely to give what appears to be the same results. I’d expect you’d only usually spot this with extreme pixel peeping. If the process was not straightforward, it would slow displaying the JPG in camera, and thus slow down the whole photography experience, so that’s not going to happen!

As an alternative to buying your own printer, if you can cope with the delay, there’s many firms out there that will do really nice prints from digital photos at surprisingly low costs, delivered pretty fast.

Give how much I’ve wasted on unused colours of ink and printers just breaking entirely, that is how I now do the few photos I want hard copies of.

In passing, if taking shots to record precise colours (you mention glazes), I hope you’ve worked out you want some known colour reference cards or the like in every shot - nothing, whether digital or film, is going to give you accurate colours or luminance without post-processing.

Fun photo and to me a really satisfying composition of elements!

Macro lens?

Anyway, I do like the contrast of the sharp detail on the grass and the bokeh in the background. What would have been glorious would be adding golden sunset light to the grass tips, but sadly light just doesn’t do that, does it?

Embarrassingly low effort, but I just use Google Drive Shared Folders, read-only mode, and forgo any curation of what is seen (e.g. no imposed order, text, etc.).

In passing, this might read as a suggestion to go buy one of these filters. I would actually suggest thinking long and hard before doing that. Really, their only use is photoing the sun on a clear day, and so:

• Eclipses - a very slightly jagged dark circle out of a bright circle
• Sunspots - black blotches on a bright circle
• Conceivably solar flares, but I’ve never even tried for them (and probably even at their strongest, at the best angle, less than 5% of the diameter of the sun - I’m worried by my google results on that!)

On the flip side, these things are expensive (needing to be optical quality)and likely limited to one diameter of lens.

There is something deeply satisfying about making your own solar observations, but you may feel replete after very few photos!

Solar filters are the way. Thousand Oaks site has comments like:

"TRANSMISSION: 1/1,000th of 1%. Solar image is yellow orange. Safe for both visual and photogenic use. "

I can’t entirely guess what your normal daylight settings would be, but I’d guess your attempted settings are not much less than 1% transmission of that.

Also, even if everything is digital, I’d refrain from pointing an unfiltered camera at the sun for more than a couple of seconds in case of heat damage from focussed light.

Just in case it helps with further online research - according to Wikipedia, a super telephoto lens is one with a (maximum) focal length of over 300mm, a superzoom lens is one with well over x3 difference between shortest and longest focal lengths.

So, those lenses discussed so far are definitely super telephoto, but are mostly, or all, not super zoom.

Alas, I can’t help on actual subject of your interest: mine is bird photography and so rarely want to be at anything other than maximum focal length (and I even found a 600mm Prime lens pleasing and effective to use). For sports, I can well imagine a good zoom (if not super zoom :) ) is very useful, to swap quickly from overall pitch to individual player.

Top two look weird from aggressive playing with histogram tool, moving the top and bottom limits right in to where the sun’s range of brightness runs. I was a bit surprised it emphasised the orange so much, given I wasn’t tweaking the RGB curves.

Heh, no, just a lack of a fourth interesting photo variant.