This afternoon I tested my camera for the solar eclipse in April. The camera is a Fujifilm's Finepix S and a KT Industries Welding Plate Shade 10. Put the weld plate in front of the camera lens and the camera would not work. The weld plate cut off ALL light to the camera. I had the camera aim at the sun. Clear afternoon here in Northern New York. I remove the weld plate and the camera was working fine. Have read that some people have said use a weld plate at shade 13 or 14. 13 or 14? Ok, people what should be done?

I'm in the process of creating a subset of my best family and travel photos to give to my family as JPG's. I'm a Lightroom Classic user, so all my photos are accessed via LRC. If you are a Lightroom user, you know that it is a non-destructive editor. All the edits I have made within LR are stored in the LRC catalog, and have to be exported to produce the set I'm going to give them.

There's one odd thing I've noticed when exporting - it makes the exported files bigger than the original JPG's - sometimes a lot bigger. One possible explanation is that when LR is exporting, adding the edits stored in the catalog may be causing the size increase.

I did a few experiments yesterday, changing the "quality" slider setting on the export screen for several JPG's, and noting the resulting file size. I've attached a screenshot of the results. Here's a couple things I've noticed:
- In each case the 100% quality setting is larger than the original file.
- Sometimes even the 0% quality setting is larger than the original file.
- The smaller the original file, the more massive the size difference, percentage-wise.

So, some questions:
1. Is the size increase vs. the original in fact due to adding the edits before exporting?
2. What does "quality" even mean in this context. The 0% quality photos looked pretty fair on screen.
3. I've been using 80% quality for the exports I've done so far, considering it a good trade-off between file size and the ability to print in a fairly large size. What do you recommend?

Laowa 10mm f2.8 Autofocus lens coming Feb. 20 for Nikon Z-mount; L-mount, Sony E-mount and YES finally Canon RF mount. Are you interested if it has excellent image quality and low distortion in a rectilinear lens ?

It may the first third-party-allowed Canon RF lens that folks may actually want. Sigma is also set to announce new lenses on Feb.20/21 , that also may be for RF mount, as well as Nikon Z-mount, L-mount (Leica, Panasonic, Sigma), and Sony E-mount .

https://photorumors.com/2024/02/14/venus-optics-will-announce-the-laowa-10mm-f-2-8-zero-d-ff-autofocus-full-frame-lens-on-february-20th-the-worlds-widest-f-2-8-full-frame-rectilinear-lens/

Priced likely around $700 USD for the Laowa 10mm f2.8 Autofocus rectilinear lens.

Laowa lenses are known for excellent image quality, but have been mainly manual focus until now. This may be an excellent autofocus ultra-wide rectilinear lens for many applications.

Great news for us all.

Cheers and best to you all.

I went up to Lake Yates, Alabama, late yesterday afternoon (Feb. 16th) and on the way home at dusk, a great horned owl landed in a tree. I got a few hasty handheld shots with my Nikon D7200 out of the driver's side window of the car before the owl decided to fly away. I know these are grainy and not the clearest pictures because of the high ISO and the fairly extreme cropping, but I was thrilled to see this magnificent bird. Not only that, I was amazed how well (in my opinion) the shots turned out using the Nikon SB-500 Speedlight mounted in the camera's flash shoe. I eliminated the "redeye" using Photoshop Elements but I like the effect, so I included both the redeye version and the corrected version.

EXPOSURE DATA: F8, focal length 140 mm (maximum zoom), ISO 3200. Shutter speed and distance for the perched shots: 1/80 (no exposure compensation) at an estimated distance of 35 or 40 feet. For the inflight shot, the shutter speed was 1/60 second (again, no exp. comp.) at maybe 25-30 feet.