Nestwr's Photography Diatribes

2026 Ultravirage festival, Grenoble, France Dear reader, I was born in 1998. That makes me younger than dial-up, Good Will Hunting and mass market autofocus cameras. Consumer digital cameras took over the world before I became literate. I have never touched a camera without autofocus capabilities and the first film camera I remember seeing was the one some hipster brought to a protest last week . I love autofocus. I point my camera in the general direction of something, I half-press the button and, about two thirds of the time, the camera successfully autofocuses my lens on what I want to have in focus. It works 60% of the time, every time . Whenever I work up the courage to switch my workhorse Sony 18-135 OSS over to manual, I regret it immensely. The focus-by-wire is unresponsive. No matter how precise I was with placing all the focus peaking dots, my subject would always look out of focus, especially when viewing the photo on a screen other than the substandard Sony A6300 monitor I...

  Protesters, with the Alps in the background. As a beginner photographer, you often come up against a bit of a wall. You want to photograph people, but that's where the art and money really are, especially in the age of AI. You might not feel like bothering your family or friends, or you might not have any. You might be doing street photography for practice, but pointing your camera at a stranger is fill-your-britches terrifying . What if I told you there are people out there, roaming in public, doing interesting things you'll want to photograph, all while wanting to be photographed? Protests look interesting. A protester with a home-made sign. Even if your subjects aren't directly posing for you, they are being — dare I say — performative . Protesters at the front of a march stand tall with their chest high, and eyes on the horizon. Before your subject left their home, they put on an appropriate or appropriately interesting outfit and they cleaned themselves up. They migh...

Light trail from car tail lights. As the modern photographer that you probably are, I bet you've experienced the following scenario. You have a business/side hustle/hobby doing photography and a client/freeloader that you're working for. Somewhere between pre-shoot arrangements and the shoot itself the client comes up to you with a big smile and says "Hey, that's a nice camera! Could you take a few clips too while you're at it?". Oh brother . Okay, fine, every modern camera is good at video, you might as well. You know how to frame, compose, design, edit. You've binged TV and maybe you're old enough to have gone to the cinema on a regular basis. How hard could it possibly be? On an artistic level, transitioning to video isn't that hard! I would even go so far as to call video easier than photography, as you don't have to worry as much about background separation (the subject moves!) or implying motion (the picture moves!). On a technical level,...

Wouldn't we all love to keep  every  photograph we've ever taken? Not just the keeper shots,  but every missed shot too ! Every missed focus, every foray into hand-held one-leg tip-toe slow-shutter earthquake photography, every shot of a person whose expression and demeanor is so bland you might as well get them out of the way and make the brick wall behind them into a subject instead. Just in case a photo ends up being important in the future! Of course, we're not amateurs, those rubes who find themselves content with the comforting simplicity and space efficiency of  JPEG  files. We're professionals, dammit! We must shoot and store everything in  RAW , just in case a new editing technique we learn years down the road allows us to reveal the hidden beauty in a photograph that's languished for years in our private collection. Storage companies reserve the very best of their wares for us esteemed professionals. We massage our egos with shopping carts full of...