Rather than the traditional usb thumb drive it's worth looking at portable SSD drives with USB C, tending to be about the size of a zippo lighter but twice as long. The performance even plugged into a USB3 port totally blows away a typical flash drive. The price is more but well worth it. The flash drive capacity is great but the transfer speed is like a dripping tap next to portable ssd's which are still pocketable.

The only thing where it may be weak is in the GPU image processing is very much a parallel task and can be done with a good GPU this these days has 8GB+ of Video Ram.
Photoshop can already use a GPU so it is something you might consider.

Thanks and Merry Christmas .

The samson was a maltese barge crane I think. It had been based in Liverpool for years but now it was getting towed to Malta. It hadn't got far when there was a storm 32 years ago which broke the tow line. This is how it ended up on the rocks. The 2 crew were rescued by an RAF helicopter and it has sat there since rusting away.

Hi all, Darren Spoonley is a local Landscape photographer, to me anyway, who photographs around Munster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVYMMKbwatU

In this video you will see him capture 3 cracking photographs and also see a little how he works. I don't want to give any spoilers but it is worth watching I promise you.

A name you might want to know after is "Samson"

Blackmagic Davinci resolve is available for free or about $300 for the studio version which unlocks some features. It used to be priced at $1000 the fairlight audio built in was originally $25,000 it does require a fairly beefy system to run it without crashing. The softwares cheap but if you are buying editing panels you can spend much more. They do an editing keyboard for $1200 , not essential if your not a pro.

You can try it but if your machine isn't powerful enough it will crash, I built a machine just to run resolve.

The gimbal is capable of 2000 corrections a second apparently. I'm still in beginner mode with it for now. The drone is capable of much more than I've tried. Although exceeding the permitted limits could get me in trouble. An interesting thing is the drone will not go into restricted airspace being geo fenced...

Hi all
I have to give a link to this as strictly not photography but i think its landscape

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAVDqNXeoZk

Hope you like it

You might look into raw power from gentlemen coders (ex apple developer) it maes apple photos close to what it replaced.

Really in post is where to do it. Our cameras have enough resolution that we can crop to what we want.

E.g you could have an f1.4 50mm and be able to crop up to a field of view of a 100mm with no visible degradation. Admittedly if that is your intention you might want to restrict your minimum shutter speed to 1/100th. If your best 100mm is F2.8 then you gain 2 stops by using the 50mm and cropping, now that can be useful.

If you are cropping from full frame to the angle of view of a crop sensor dslr if the pixel sites are bigger on the full frame then there will be less of them compared to the crop sensor with the k1 and k5 at crop size its about 15mpix v 16.8mpix so theres potentially more detail in the k5 image. To be fair with the k5 having an AA filter and the K1 not it's probably a wash.

There is no need to get hung up too much with pixel counts as long as there is enough that we don't see individual pixels. Trying to get a field of view of a 200mm lens out of a 50mm would be a crop factor of 4 or 1/16th of the sensor area. divide 36 by 16 gives about 2.25 Mpix way less than the 8mpix needed for an acceptable resolution.

K1
Pixel or photosite area is 23.62 µm². The larger the photosite, the more light it can capture and the more information can be recorded. Pixel density tells you how many million pixels fit or would fit in one square cm of the sensor. Pentax K-1 has a pixel density of 4.24 MP/cm².
Sensor: 35.9 x 24 mm
Megapixels: 36.40

K5
Pixel or photosite area is 22.75 µm². The larger the photosite, the more light it can capture and the more information can be recorded. Pixel density tells you how many million pixels fit or would fit in one square cm of the sensor. Pentax K-5 has a pixel density of 4.39 MP/cm².
Sensor size: 23.6 x 15.7 mm
Total megapixels: 16.90

In English The k1 has slightly bigger pixels so cropping to the same angle of view the k1 would have less pixels for the same sensor area and a little less noise but in practice you wouldn't be able to tell which was which. So saying the AA filter may soften the K5 image enough so the k1 looks like it has more detail despite the slightly lower pixel count for the same crop.

I don't feel it's enough of a distinction to make a noticeable difference.

use of a teleconverter 1.4 and 2x results in the loss of 1 and 2 stops of light respectively as well as some image degradation due to the increase in elements and tolerances.
Zoom lenses can be slower and softer , so it may be a well judged crop could result in a better photograph.

I think we all have a fair understanding of crop factor, e.g a 50mm lens has a field of view on a aps-c DSLR of 75mm with a crop factor of 1.5 and if that same lens was used on M43 then the field of view would be that of 100mm with a crop factor of 2.

How many pixels do you need for a photo? It's been said that for an 8 by 10 at a normal viewing distance 8Mpix is enough and as image sizes go up and viewing distance increases our eyes resolve less detail so you can print larger without needing more detail, although if you put your nose against the print you would see the decreased quality. Admittedly for me it would be a blur without the right glasses, my close focus is not what it was when I was younger...

I have a 36mpix K1 and a 16Mpix k5 (full frame and 1.5 crop) The pixel pitch is virtually the same although the k1 doesn't have an AA filter to blur the pixels a little so maybe it is a little sharper in practice. So the main difference in these 2 cameras is the area of the sensor. The k5 has a sensor 2/3rds the size of the k1 and a m43 has a sensor a 1/4 of the size of the k1. Ok strictly speaking the aspect ratio is different on the m43 but if you choose to use the same aspect ratio as the SLRs then its about right.

So digital zooming or cropping if i crop with my k1 (it does have a number of crop modes inbuilt) but let's do it in post. If i crop a third from the top and a third from the side. I then have an image with pretty much the same resolution as my k5 if the crop is exactly centered there really is no noticeable difference. The field of view is now that of a 75mm lens if I used a 50mm lens. If I crop by half (2x crop) i'm at the size of an m43 sensor a quarter of the area. 36, 18, 9mpix left in the image so still enough for an 8 by 10 and a field of view of 100mm from that same 50mm lens.

I don't think it's going to be acceptable to crop much further but still that's taken a 50mm lens and allowed a zoom to a 100mm field of view and still given an acceptable result.

You would probably want to use a shorter shutter speed if you were cropping to a 100mm field of view say 1/100th minimum for the 50mm lens as opposed to 1/50th with no crop but that's just 1 stop difference on the minimum 1/2 a stop if you just go to the crop sensor sensor size.

Even with a Zoom lens with a variable max aperture might it be better to shoot wider and crop rather than zoom in and maybe lose a couple of stops of light. You might compensate with ISO but you will be losing dynamic range and increased noise.

So can a shorter fast lens, replace a longer lens, a teleconverter or a zoom? Might it even be better?
What do you think?

Here is a question.
lets say its an f4 - f5.6 zoom lens and you have the camera set at f5.6 at the wide end and the exposure in manual. Will the aperture still be at f5.6 if you zoom to the full extent? Is it possible to keep a constant exposure with a variable aperture zoom lens?

Another rabbit hole, most phone (if not all phone cameras are a fixed aperture) leaving iso and shutter speed and nd filters for controlling the exposure. with the short focal lengths and small sensors this works surprisingly well, diffraction isn't a problem since you can't stop down and the depth of field is enough that missed focus is rarely a problem.

With proper zoom lenses having a variable aperture can be an issue, for video especially as the light may change from 2.8 at the wide end to f5.6 at the long end. Even for photography at f2.8 at the wide end exposure dropping 2 stops can often mean the difference between an acceptable iso level to one which is noisy plus you likely will need an increase in shutter speed at the long dark end. So a 75 to 300 might lose 2 stops of aperture and 2 stops due to increased shutter speed.

Zooms are a bit of a compromise, lens elements tend to have to move and sharpness can vary too often worst at the wide and telephoto ends. Often a zoom will change barrel length as the focal length is changed, you may suffer with Zoom creep and focus breathing.

On the other hand constant aperture zooms tend to be heavier and more expensive but also more accurate in focus and better IQ , at a price.

Of course lenses are variable in design and quality, and the more lenses you carry the more weight. You should consider where you are going to use the lens and the typical lighting available. However even after buying a lens, when you are going out to shoot figure out what you will need to avoid becoming a pack horse. One thing about zooming with your feet is it can make for a much lighter camera bag :)

None of the post processing programs produce excellent results without a good photograph There has to be something about it which grabs your attention.