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Personally, I found Darktable to be the by far best raw editor I've ever used, and I used quite a few.

I used to think, that digital editing was hard and that I was quite bad at it until I tried Darktable. Darktable is easier and it gives you more consistent and predictable results than any other raw editor. Reason is that other raw editors basically just try to make it look good on the screen and then apply any transformations on top of the "good-looking" copy (Display-Referred workflow), which leads to unpredictable results. I can speak from experience when I say Darktable saves me countless hours in my job. Software really makes a massive difference in your photos and workflow and Darktable's FOSS. So no harm in trying. Yes, I'm shilling Darktable hard because it is so good. Believe me, if you ever had to do any sort of advanced editing in Lightroom or Capture One, you know what I'm talking about when you try twisting the programme's arm into giving you something acceptable and then trying making it look consistent with other pictures.

Best example is highlight recovery. Most programs don't do real highlight recovery. They just give you back what the camera has already recorded, but have deliberately thrown away to give you a good looking copy right when you load the image the first time. Thanks to applying a curve first, and then everything else on top of said base curve. So if you continue to multiply on top of other transformations, you'll essentially multiply more and more errors, and it will really show.

For starting out, stick to the predefined workflow and modules and work away. There's your active modules and then you can add more modules to your active ones. There is a basic workflow when you load every image that gives you a good-looking result, but thanks to everything being exposed to you, the user, you have full control of all of it. Each module completes processing and hands off the result to the next module from bottom to top. So you always know what is going on in your raw workflow and in what order, which is very important. Funnily enough, other raw editors mostly don't tell you what's happening in what order, so you kind of have to make a guess, and just try and see what you get. It doesn't have to be this way, it can be better. If you want to go really deeply into raw editing, read the excellent manual. But if you just want to keep it surface level, that's alright as well. Just stick to the predefined modules and their order and you'll be golden.

TLDR: Darktable good.

"What a great day of 1841 in Ireland."

Phytophthora infestans:

Buttery smooth. I reckon yours is the 1000/11?

That's not a deliberate effect. This is just how the Reflex Nikkor 500/8 renders bokeh. The mirror inside the lens is essentially doughnut shaped and reflects the image back into itself. So technically speaking, there is a massive gaping hole in the middle of the lens. This is why you see the ring effect in the out-of-focus blur.

Edit: Corrected a Typo.

Try Gregory Crewdson. I'm unsure about the genre though.

Fujifilm XH1, bargain bin price and professional quality. And if I had to glue one lens onto it, it would be the 16-80mm OIS. This zoom lens is astonishingly good, it renders just like a bad prime lens, and this is high praise.

I read a Wikibooks article about photography equipment some time ago, so in case you find it helpful:

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Photography_Equipment/What_should_I_get%3F

Edit: I forgot to mention that this lens can also be used as a pseudo-macro lens.

Well, again, for home use it will be sufficient. A4 size is the maximum in my opinion. If you want to go bigger than that, you need a proper camera. Phones aren't made for professional applications, they're made for just quickly taking pictures of things that you may find interesting or just take selfies with your family and for that they're perfect. There are in your pocket when you need them and you don't need to fiddle around with settings.

If you want to do something more advanced like colour grading in Darktable, you need to do a bit more to make usable raw files for that application. Downlaod OpenCamera, set it to RAW and standard, Set exposure-bracketing-pictures to 5 and exposure-bracketing-stops to 3. Make sure Camera2 API is selected in the main options menu for this to show up. Then in Darktable you can merge the five photos you have to one big one and you'll have a surprisingly capable raw file. Just to be clear, you don't need to do this if you just want to take quick pictures that look fine. This is just for something more advanced, if you'd like to color grade and post-process your photos in general.

Edit: fixed typo.

If you're taking selfies exclusively and only want to share them to other people's phones, definitely not. You won't be able to enjoy the quality of your new camera on a screen this small and you'll also need the extreme wide angle that phones usually have. Buy a new phone, it is more than sufficient for that application. Also, if you're living in the EU, starting February 18th, 2027, batteries will be replaceable again, so you should wait for that, if you can.

If you want to enter the hobby or the profession of photography, the answer would be different. But if it is, again, just for phones, phone cameras are perfectly sufficient for that.

If our particular bubble of the universe has remained unmolested for 13.8 billion years, it is safe to assume it will continue to be for the next 1000 years.

I never really used social media, since I was deterred by the contagious cancer that Instagram/TikTok/etc. because of their algos, corporations and bots are. Thanks to Lemmy being different, I thought it would be time to start understanding this.