Normally I would recommend a 50 or a little higher for portraits but if it’s going to be your only lens 35 isn’t a bad choice (on aps-c).

The 85 or 100 might be nicer to use for macro not because of the 1:1 but because of the farther working distance. But they are going to be borderline useless for day to day portraits. For studio portraits maybe it would work but I definitely wouldn’t want it as my only lens.

If you’re specifically worried about magnification on the 35, consider grabbing some extension tubes. They’re really cheap, and you don’t need an enormous set if you’re starting at 1:2.

Part of me wants to say get the 24 macro and the 50 1.8 which is like the cheapest lens they make and would be a pretty good portrait lens, but wide macros are weird, and 35 is such a do everything length it’s hard to go wrong with it.

I’m going to be the dissenter here and say that you probably don’t need to do anything unless it starts to get worse. If you want to make it pretty then yeah, re-season it. But functionally it’s probably fine.

The seasoning on a cast iron pan is there for two basic reasons:

1. Inhibit rust

2. Make the surface less sticky

If you start to see rust, or it’s annoying because food keeps getting stuck - then think about re-seasoning. Maybe if you semi regularly use it to cook acidic food like tomato sauces. If it doesn’t bother you when you’re cooking it’s fine. Especially if you leave them in the oven all the time, where they might get stuff dripped on and then baked on.

Unfortunately you aren’t really cooking your eggs hot enough to season the pan. Feel free to try though. Probably putting oil on it does nothing. Best case it works, and worst case a meteor hits the earth killing all life and your pan is mildly sticky.

If you do decide to re-season I recently discovered that Dawn Powerwash (the real one not the weird recipe you can get online) does surprisingly well at stripping old seasoning.

Yeah, I think the ones my friends have are about that size. I wound up with the next size up and it’s just obnoxiously large so I try to warn people, lol.

On the other side of the coin, large electric pressure cookers get kind of enormous. If you use your immersion circulator to do large batches, like 30 individual cheesecakes for a party or large cuts of meat, you’ll run out of room very quickly, which means batches which would take forever. Whereas an immersion circulator can be stuck in a cooler or even the bathtub and cook a lot of food at once. A small pressure cooker and an immersion circulator is a lot less space than a large pressure cooker. If you only ever cook for a few people a combo unit would be fine, but I find myself pulling out the immersion circulator much more often for events.

I say this as someone who bought a large pressure cooker because it was a really good deal and now struggles to store it, lol.

The 18-150 is a super zoom, so it gives up some image quality to give you everything in one lens. It goes from reasonably wide to very telephoto in one swoop. Optically, that much zoom means they have to make compromises somewhere, so it’s not the sharpest lens, and at the 150 end it’s not exactly what I would consider bright - but most people only use that outside in the daytime when it doesn’t matter. They’re really popular for people on vacation or who want very little kit, and if you’re just posting pictures to the web you probably won’t notice the flaws.

If you’re buying used damage is pretty much always a concern unless you’re buying from a reputable used dealer who has checked out the lens for you. Especially since you’re a beginner thats probably your best opinion. If you’re buying personally you’ll want to inspect the lens thoroughly for issues, and it’s best if you can meet in person and try the lens on your own camera and look for flaws in any images you shoot. If you’re buying online just make sure they have a good return policy and that they seem to honor it.

Small list:

• Make sure it zooms smoothly, and if you hold it with the lens pointing down the zoom doesn’t creep from where you left it. (Or doesn’t do it too bad, some lenses do that brand new)
• Make sure the focus motors work ok - there’s a lot of variance in how different motors sound, so finding a review with audio of them can be helpful.
• Make sure the aperture works properly.
• Make sure the filter threads are ok, as well as any hood bayonets.
• Make sure the mount is ok, all the contacts are ok, and it communicated with your camera properly.
• If the lens is supposed to have seals make sure they’re in place and in ok shape. If they aren’t check if they’re user replaceable, and negotiate accordingly.
• Make sure the front and back lens elements are clear and free of scratches. Sometimes there can be tiny minor scratches in the coatings that are only visible in some light, they often don’t have a large impact on image quality but negotiate accordingly.
• When you look down the lens it should be clear and clean. If you see any cloudy areas or mold run away.
• Find a better list than this online, there has to be one this is just the basics.

With all that said, I have a few lenses that I’ve bought knowing they have issues and like 90% of the time it’s hard to notice in actual photos.

Honestly the best advice is to just get out there with something and start learning. Don’t spend too much money and don’t commit until you know what you want.

That sounds like a job for the kit lens. The r50 should come in a kit with a 18-45, which is worth using for a while. If you have to buy something the 18-150 is a tad on the slow side (f stops wise, not actual speed) but it should be able to do most things reasonably well, and it should fit in your price bracket. You could get a wide and a longer macro, but you’d be looking at the real cheap prime manual focus lenses (which I like, but they’re not exactly beginner friendly).

It’s really worth really double checking if you can find a used one though. Kit lenses are incredibly common, and way cheaper on the used market because of it. They’re a great starting point until you have enough experience to know what you really want, and a couple hundred USD can go a long way toward something like a fast portrait prime lens or whatever you decide on.

But did they mean Quettabytes or Quebibytes? Because the difference is only around 250 000 times the size of the Internet.

As far as I remember it isn’t, it’s just a named specific large number, like Avogadro’s number or Graham’s number.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

In case you wondered where they came in the list like I immediately did:

• quetta Q 10^30
• ronna R 10^27
• yotta Y 10^24
• zetta Z 10^21
• exa E 10^18
• peta P 10^15
• tera T 10^12
• giga G 10^9
• mega M 10^6
• kilo k 10^3
• hecto h 10^2
• deca da 10^1
• ——
• deci d 10^−1
• centi c 10^−2
• milli m 10^−3
• micro μ 10^−6
• nano n 10^−9
• pico p 10^−12
• femto f 10^p−15
• atto a 10^−18
• zepto z 10^−21
• yocto y 10^−24
• ronto r 10^−27
• quecto q 10^−30

To be fair, if Lemmy’s discoverability wasn’t trash you could probably have both. I would love to have a bunch of small instances that were focused on individual topics, like Star Trek or anime or knitting or gardening or whatever and just jump between them. It feels like that’s what federation was built for.

But because Lemmy is so small right now and discoverability is so bad it seems like almost every instance is either intentionally a tech / general purpose one or so adjacent it might as well be. As long as there’s just one community for that thing that people can find that would be great, but instead there are like 10 spread around 3 different instances and 8 of them are dead and 1 just bot reposts the subreddit - and it’s really hard to tell which is which. Like, if everything was actually on one instance at least you could just list everything.

https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database

I almost always recommend the Phillips Ultra Definition bulbs, but they only do 2700k and 5000k. If you want something in between you might get stuck paying quite a bit more for a specialty one.

Put the foot down on your camera if you’re going to leave it open. Not for any technical reason, it just looks better. Or don’t I guess if you like it that way.

That’s basically what computers do.

The rule is a holdover from monospaced type like from a typewriter. On a computer with a decent font and renderer it will generally make the spacing a little larger than an in-between-words space, but not a ton like double spacing would. Basically typesetting is way more complicated than people realize but since we solved most of the problems computers have with it in like, the 70s, most people don’t tend to realize it unless they have design training.

The follow up post is significantly more interesting to me, as it basically mirrors the comment section.

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/price-of-snark/

Having buttons.

No french animation? Cause The Illusionist is a hell a of movie.

Almost everything in your house has a manual. The furnace, the ac, the water heater, the water softener, the coffee maker, the fridge… they all have manuals. If the people before you weren’t responsible and you don’t have a packet of manuals somewhere, go through everything and download them. They all say exactly how to do maintenance for each thing, and how often.

Other than that it’s mostly looking around and making sure nothing is actively being eaten. Take a flashlight and look around in the attic and basement or crawl space or whatever your can’t normally see and make sure things aren’t moldy or rotting. If you catch things earlier it’s always cheaper and easier.

It’s significantly easier to do with a straight razor. The chin and moustache area would take way more time and effort to do properly, and are way easier to mess up and cut yourself on. So it’s lazy, just ancient lazy.

They don’t show the labels because the brand didn’t pay. If you see a label with a brand on it they probably paid.

For a cooking show it’s probably not going to be worth the time and effort to get a contract in place for every ingredient, so you only see it occasionally.

To be fair, people are generally coming around to it and it’s kind of on it’s way to being a cult classic now. People say this about everything but it was actually ahead of its time in terms of its visual style and the way it deals with the serious elements within the wild cartoon visuals.

Weirdly, I kind of think Marvel movies like Guardians might have been the thing that tipped the scales. The breakneck editing is still way ahead of anything I’ve seen since though.