Beginner amateur photographer here (emphasis on the amateur - zero desire to monetize my photos or start a business). Several months ago I bought a Sony A6000 after doing some research on cameras for beginners. The camera was fine but to completely honest I wasn't very enthused with the pictures coming out.

Then I bought a 50 mm prime lens, and what a difference! Compared to the kit lenses, my photos started coming out the way I envisioned them. They say you should never blame the gear and while I agree with the general sentiment, photography became a lot more fun after acquiring my nifty fifty.

My question to all the photographers out there is, what next? For context, I mostly enjoy shooting people from close distances (1-5 m) away. However, a lot of my shots are of groups of people doing sports-like activities so when there's more than two people I have trouble capturing it all with my current setup. Any recommendations are much appreciated!

I'm not sure how big the astrophotography community, if any, is on ~tildes but I'd figure I'd open a topic up and see! Astrophotography is one of my hobbies, and it was brought to my attention (see link for two quasars near the M3 globular cluster) that it's actually pretty easy to photograph quasars. The same are visible in my attempt at photographing M3. Anyway, my question here is does anybody know of any particular interesting or distant quasars to photograph? I assume most will just be "dots" but it still sounds like fun since they're among the most distant objects you can see. I assume most quasars would be broad spectrum, so no filters are really needed, but I'm also curious if there's any bright yet redshifted objects you'd need infrared to capture.

My setup is an Astro-Tech AT80EDT 80mm Refractor f/6. I just got the f/0.8 reducer which I'm excited to take for a spin. It's a chonky piece of glass. My camera is a ZWO ASI585MC which does decent enough for deep sky.

Edit: To add, using something like http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ is great for finding interesting objects once I've already taken a photo, but it's less helpful to plan my shots.

Personally I find it annoying when someone watermarks their photos, but I have a hard time justifying that annoyance when, not only are they entitled to attempt preventing people from stealing their work, they are entitled to do whatever the hell they want, categorically.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experience with the topic, especially if it helps me understand and be more accepting of photographers who watermark or digitally sign their work.

As a hobbyist, I do digital and film photography, but I tend towards film unless the situation calls for it (like doing motorsports photography, for example).

I'm curious how many of this smaller community shoot film, and what everyone's relationship with film is. Do you shoot casually? Professionally? Part of this post is trying to gauge how much interest there could be in the occasional discussion of analog photography subjects. Would love to hear anything you have to say on the subject, be it film itself, gear (liking or collecting gear is not a bad thing!), or the process of shooting on analog formats.

If anyone is in the CA Bay Area there is a film group (organized through the Meetup app) that does semi-regular meets that we'd love to have more participants in.

Feel free to drop a link to wherever you post your work, if you do. I've really been enjoying posting on Glass for the last 6 months. It's paid but sure as hell beats Instagram, in my opinion.

Where do you share the art that you make with the world? Do you use a social media site? A personal website? Do you keep it all to yourself? Is your art something that can't be shared online so easily?

I'll start, Sony A7C, w/ Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 as my main lens. Have a Sony 28-60mm f/4 as well, though its more for where I need a really compact setup.

Looking to get a Tamron 20-40mm f/2.8 for a little extra fov when indoors, while still having some reach. Planning on getting the A7CII when it comes out supposedly later this year according to sonyalpharumors.

TLDR:

I need a website that let's signed in users vote on each others photos, and stores that data on who voted for what in a database.

Background

I run a facebook group of about 2,000 members. This group is designed for analog (any non-digital format) photographers to swap high quality artistic prints with each oter. The community was essentially dead and the admin wanted to throw in the towel so I took over. We've made progress, the group growth jumped by over 500% in the first month after I took over.

Right now trading prints doesn't work well. People make a post using the facebook selling format, and those who are interested comment with the image they'd like to trade for. The problem is that the posts get limited visibility due to facebook's algorithms, and stale posts hang around. All of this reduces over all activity, and the majority of posts don't end up in a trade.

My solution is to do a trade event with everyone participating at the same time. Since facebook doesn't lend itself to this I'd like to whip up a quick site for the event. My time is so limited these days I really don't have the capacity to build something from scratch, and the group certainly doesn't have any other developers to help out with it (it skews heavily on the older side).

I'd like to find an open source project that lets users sign in (sign in using facebook would be a bonus) and upload/vote on images. After the voting closes, I'll write code to pair everyone up in a way that optimizes for everyone getting to make a trade. If Alice votes for Bob's image, and Bob votes for Alice's image, they would get paired up to make the swap.

I feel okay writing the code to map out swaps, but I'm pretty terrible at web design and especially at front end design. I've looked across github, but I wanted to reach out and see if anyone could recommend something that I might of missed.

I don't expect to have 2,000 members participate, I think it may be as few as under 100, so hopefully I won't need to worry about scale.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Photography is a bit of an odd form of art, especially if you're not doing anything 'weird' with it. Occasionally I'll be thinking about photography as a hobby and a bit of dread sets in about how every photograph I could think of has already been taken and done better than I could. And so I think, what is the point? Why do I enjoy photography?

So, after a few highly coherent 3am thinking sessions, I have come to my conclusion. My "philosophy", if you can call it that, behind why I enjoy photography is that I use it as a way to appreciate what I see and the world around me. I don't consider myself an artist because I just use photography as a way to display something beautiful that already existed. (Not that I don't consider other photographers who do similar stuff to me artists, that's just how I view myself.)

If there are any other photographers on here, amateur or professional, I am interested in hearing your beliefs and what meaning you put towards your photography, whether its general or for specific photos.