https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young's_High_Bridge for anyone looking for slightly more information.

Large swaths of Detroit aren’t that great. That’s probably true of any major city, but Detroit is 143 square miles. Manhattan is 23. Thar creates a lot of opportunity to be in a not-so-great part of a city whose population is roughly a third of what it was 70 years ago. The city runs a land bank you can buy decapitated houses from for $1k. Even on the retail market, large swaths of the city are very cheap.

All that said, Detroit might finally be turning around. The city experienced its first year of population growth in forever last year and more and more people I interact with are either visiting the city and spending money there or are actively considering moving there. There are also a lot of Detroit run small businesses popping up and the region has a strong “buy local” vibe to it.

/Someone who lives nearby and would love to see the city succeed.

I just learned these exist! They’re very cool looking.

It is all about trade-offs, but the tradeoffs have to be situational.

Considering only shutter speed and a “static” subject, you have to consider whether or not your subject is actually static. For example, are there flexible things present (plants, etc) and is it windy? For something like a desert landscape with zero motion your shutter speed can be as low as you want it to be (note that you might need to block some light from reaching the sensor using a ND filter). For “still” people you probably don’t want to go too low because we’re constantly in motion. That said, ever rule was made to be broken. Want to photo stars? Don’t use a super long shutter speed - you’ll get star trails. What’s that, you want star trails? Bump shutter speed even more so they look intentionally vs somewhat smeared balls of light. Sports and wildlife are basically the only scenario where you need a fast shutter speed… until you want some motion blur. Granted, motion blue and sports will still probably be a fairly fast shutter speed.

Aperture follows a similar arc - do you want shallow depth of field, do you want to see more of the foreground/background, maybe you forgot your ND filter and want a slow shutter so you have to stop down, maybe it’s really dark so you have to use a fast (wide aperture) lens wide open.

The only thing you universally want to take one way is ISO and that way is low. Unless you want some grain. Or you’re shooting something with motion indoors and you can’t compromise any more on shutter speed or depth of field. Or your lens aperture is already wide open and you still need more light.

When staring off you might want to try shutter or aperture priority, based on the situation, and let the camera handle the other two values. Heck, I still do this 95% of the time 15 years later.

Or random application availability and/or ease of use.

Two cases in point:

• Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they’re just not as good
• Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn’t officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there’s no guarantee that an update won’t break things.

Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you’re somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren’t officially supported.

First, nice photo! Even “old” gear can take great photos. Throw motion and/or low light (with a fast lens) into the mix and you’ll beat a modern smartphone.

The quick lead into the exposure triangle is:

• ISO is basically “gain” applied to the photons that hit the sensor. Some gain = fine. More gain = you start to run into signal to noise ratio challenges
• shutter speed helps you freeze the action, or can also let the action blur on purpose. Examples of intentional blur include panning photos (think auto racing) and long exposures (at night or during the day with the aid of a ND filter)
• aperture. This is the ratio of focal length to lens aperture. Keep in mind it’s 1/x, so as x grows the actual aperture is getting “stopped down” (aka closed/smaller). Wider aperture (aka small denominator) = less depth of field and more light will hit the sensor. Stopping down = more depth of field and generally more sharpness/less vignetting, but if you take this too far you’ll hit diffraction and lose sharpness

You wind up trading values against each other in various scenarios, which is why it’s called the exposure triangle. It’s very much a “you pick two and deal with the third” situation. Which two you prioritize really comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish.

For your barn photo’s exposures, let’s talk tradeoffs. It sounds like you know that your ISO value was too high, especially for a static subject and good light. So how to get it to go down? You could do a mix of:

• using a slower shutter speed. Unless you have a tremor, the rule of thumb is minimum shutter speed should be more than 1/focal length. You could have easily shot this at 1/100, if not lower. That would cut ISO down to around 1600
• open your aperture. f/14 is very closed and likely isn’t needed unless you really want to see something deep in the background/foreground. You’re also likely losing some sharpness due to diffraction

Happy shooting! Feel free to ask follow ups.

What was preventing you? Photo uploads from my phone are super flaky.

Thanks! If you happen to also shoot traditional cameras, speaking in terms of say FF EQ focal lengths works too. It does indeed sound pretty wide, with a sweet spot between 24mm and 35mm FF EQ.

What kind of angle of view do you think you get with this setup? I imagine it would be pretty wide, but could be way off.

Glad you found the reply helpful!

It sounds like you have the right lens for your situation. With sports I feel like you’re always going to be compromising on focal length (too tight for close action, too wide for far action). It sounds like you’re reviewing your EXIF info, so you can certainly use past data to help inform what focal length you’re using the most.

I would personally lean on shutter priority unless you can guarantee that you’ll never over-expose. Clipped highlights obviously aren’t recoverable. I don’t know that I trust myself enough to watch the histogram and we’ve had many games that were partly sunny - oscillating between direct and indirect sun. It would be nice to be able to say “increase shutter speed if necessary otherwise bump ISO” but that’s sadly not a real shooting mode.

My 150-500 is a fairly slow lens, but since it’s on a FF body it’s amazing what it can see through. Chain link fences don’t completely disappear, but they’re a lot less visible than they were on my somewhat faster 70-300 on a crop body.

First, keep your camera in AF-C and shoot in bursts. Bursts do two things: increase the odds of getting a sharp photo and maximize the chances of capturing just-the-right moment (for example, a catch). Do not use AF-S. I suggest not attempting manual focus, but you do you if that’s what you’re into.

3D is what Nikon called “tracking” on their DSLR bodies. It tracks your subject as it moves around somewhat decently. I’m not sure how well it works on a D7500 with lots of potential subjects, but the idea is that you put the focus box over your intended subject, engage tracking, and the camera will follow the subject around as it moves. You can learn how this works easily in your house. Put a cup on a counter, engage tracking, and pan the camera around while keeping the cup in frame. Your camera should keep a focus box over the cup. If it doesn’t, odds are you didn’t engage tracking so try again until you get a feel for it.

I would use either 3D tracking or single point AF. For single point AF, simply keep the focus box over your subject and you can basically guarantee it will be in focus. Assuming your lens can focus fast enough, you can’t miss. This is how I shot 95% of auto racing, along with youth sports before I got a long lens for my new (to me) FF body. You really can’t miss if the focus box is over your intended subject and there’s nothing obscuring your line of sight.

Do not use auto area, 9 point, etc because you’re going to want to control where the camera is focusing when there are lots of people on the field. Most cameras will generally go for the closest subject, but the action point could be behind them.

The minimum required shutter speed depends on the pace of action, as well as whether or not you’re trying to introduce some blur intentionally (eg motorsports). 1/1000 is probably a good starting point. Evaluate your photos and go from there. I can’t imagine that the 1/1600 you were shooting at was the cause of soft photos, unless you have fairly pronounced hand tremors.

What lens are you using? You’re going to want a decent amount of reach. I’m a big fan of the Nikon AF-S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR on a crop body and used it for many years on my D5300. It is a FX lens, but the focus is fast and accurate, the VR is good, it’s pretty light for what it is, and since you’re using the center of a full frame image circle on your DX body you’re going to have zero vignetting. I shot it 100% hand held and never had any issues doing so.

I’ve recently started taking photos at youth sports and I can tell you that you’ll want the reach if you’re at any distance from your subject. I often wound up 100-115 feet from home plate and spent quite a bit of time at the 500mm end of my 150-500 lens on my current FF body.

Assuming your lens is sharp wide open, set your camera to S and let the camera manage ISO and aperture as needed. Don’t step down unless you have to. Unless you have a fast prime, odds are you’ll need all the light you can get.

Finally, know the sport you’re shooting, anticipate the action, and if you can move around try to position yourself so you’ll have good line of sight on that action. Players looking in your direction is ideal, but you’ll at least want to be able to see their eyes looking at whatever they’re focusing on. Bonus points if that thing is also in frame.

With sports, capturing the action takes front seat to composition. That said, you’re going to generally want to be up or downfield from the action so people are facing you when the action inevitably comes your way.

That’s cool! I also wasn’t trying to say whether or not it was or wasn’t you, I really just wanted more context on the photo. I’m assuming that it’s actually two skulls?

https://www.aliceferox.com/blog/2021/7/21/comfortable-to-die

Looks like it’s probably an art project, but still a neat idea.

Nice photo and good work on the edit to make the water pop. Cellphone cameras are pretty good, but I still prefer a dedicated camera for most situations.

Most instances will prevent you from uploading “large” files. For lemmy.world, I think the cap is around 2 MB. It’s actually somewhat frustrating because my (most/all?) client apps allows you to upload photos, but the upload will fail 90% of the time. There doesn’t appear to be an API to check for this size limit and/or the client(s) aren’t using it and resizing a temp copy of the photo before upload. I often wonder if this is contributing to a somewhat low post level… I make the vast majority of my posts from my PC for this reason if they’re going to have more than one photo.

It’s pretty annoying in 10 too. I had a big scratch folder on my desktop and one day it decided to start syncing with one drive after a restart and one of those setup/welcome like screens.

I appreciate the reply!

If your subject isn’t very far and tiny, you can hand hold relatively comfortably.

My subjects are 40"-48" or so tall and 75-100 feet away from me depending on the field. I thought my 50-400 was serving me pretty well, but I went through the EXIF data and realized that about a third of the photos I had taken were at 400mm. I haven’t taken any photos at the field with the 100 foot distance yet either…

I did get a small rig baseplate to make my a7iv’s grip tall enough so my pinky fits comfortably.

Ha, I did the same on my former A7III. My pinky seems to fit fairly well on the A9II, but I do find myself missing the massive grip on my former Z6II.

I’m 5’11" and kind of chunky, but if you’re a lot smaller the lens may not be as easy to hand hold.

I’m 5’10" and reasonably fit, but I haven’t actively worked out in a very long time.

I did swap for the Tamron 150-500 today and did a tiny amount of shooting with it. It’s a 4 pound lens vs the 50-400’s 2.5 pounds or the Sony 200-600’s 4.65 pounds. I did briefly handle the 200-600 today and the zoom was amazing and the weight wasn’t that different than the 150-500. Having the zoom ring further toward the front of the lens, since it’s always “extended”, might actually make it better handling than Tamron’s 150-500 in hindsight. Maybe I should swap again and then wrap the lens to make it not white, lol.

My main concern is fatigue from shooting a full 1.5 hour game.

I wouldn’t be too worried about how you look. Just carry on with the things you enjoy, and get those overly profession photos of your kids’ sports.

I really appreciate the entire end of your reply. If this wasn’t for pretty young youth sports, the 200-600 would be the lens to have. It’s not like the 150-500, or even the 50-400, is that much more compact when they’re fully zoomed. My wife likes to rib me about being the creepy camera guy, but the other parents on the team seem to really appreciate the photos. At this age the expressions the kids make are priceless and you’re not going to see them without reach, but I’m wary of taking it too far. At this point I’m just the guy with some disposable income. One of the parents did ask if I was a professional photographer and was surprised when I said no.

I could see the sigma being a great lens for the right person. 600mm does sound nice, but I suspect 60mm brought some weight penalties with it.

The one time I needed a wide lens at a soccer game I was competing with a wall of parents with cellphones for end of season team photos. I had a 70-300 on an APS-C body and there was no way I could get a wide enough shot without backing up behind the wall of fellow parents. 60mm on a FF body would be better than that, but most phones seem to be 24mm-35mm FFEQ so it probably still wouldn’t have worked out. For this kind of reach I’m OK trading a loss at the wide end for size/weight since 99% of the photos I’ll be taking will be of things far away.

How do you like your 200-600? Do you hand hold it often or do you use a mono (or tri) pod? The 50-400 I’m using now is about 300 grams heavier than the 70-300 I was shooting with previously and I’m somewhat feeling the weight. The 200-600 is full kilo heavier than the 50-400. I think I would probably adjust, but it seems like a lot of lens to being to a youth sports event. For now, 400mm is serving me pretty well but it’s likely I’ll want more ready when the kids are on bigger fields.

That thing is big and heavy, lol. I’m currently rocking Tamron’s 50-400. I could see maybe switching to Sony’s 200-600. The Sigma is more than twice the weight of the 50-400. Sony’s 200-600 is 500 grams lighter and I don’t think the extra weight is worth the wide end that I’ll only occasionally use with this kind of mass/reach.

I did try out Tamron’s 150-500 and didn’t think the extra 500 grams (roughly 50% heavier) was worth it for only 25% more reach.

Subscribed to the second and link. I like to lurk/sort by subscribed and new and will try to comment when I have something to contribute. Niche communities are hard to form without a decent user base, but a general recommends community seems like a great idea.