It was a muggy and slightly-rainy day when I was trying to take pictures of birds, and then this random squirrel popped up out of nowhere and was sat completely still for a good 5 minutes. At one point I was wondering if it was a statue or not with how still it was lol. Anyways, that's why I was at 1/800 shutter and 800 ISO for this, when I could have dropped down to 1/200 & 200 ISO and made the background less noisy.

This was fairly opportunistic, as when I looked outside the window when I woke up, there was a bunch of leaves kicking about in the garden and it hasn't rained in ~2 days, so I decided to try taking some funny fumo images and ended up with this.

(See above)
I also took this in vertical for anyone that wanted to use it as a phone background.

I tried taking some pictures of the moon late on a night from my bedroom window some weeks earlier, but at one point during the day the moon was visible (rare occurance of it not being cloudy lol) and I decided to try and get some less terrible photos, resulting in this one.
It should be noted that this was done handheld since I didn't (and currently still don't) have a tripod lmao.

I was taking pictures out of one of the windows of my house, getting random cats, squirrels, and distance birds (pigeons mostly) and then a random crow landed in the tree barely 6-7 metres away and sat there for a good minute or so. Naturally, I took like 15-20 pictures (lol) before it flew off. This was the best one I got IMO.
I also decided to have a go at editing it in RawTherapee - basically an open-source version of lightroom - mainly trying to get rid of a bunch of the noise, but also make the colours slightly better and get rid of some of the vignetting.

For a good couple weeks, I'd been trying to get another picture of the moon with my Sigma 150-600 (since I'd just recently acquired it), and I finally managed to get a day where it wasn't incredibly cloudy.
However it does seem that this lens doesn't have good focusing ability in regards to the moon (lol). Either that, or me sticking my heavy ass lens half out a window and barely being able to keep it steady really does affect picture quality at this distance (of 400,000km lmao)

On the 10/05/2024 (Normal date format) the UK (and likely half of Europe) could see the northern lights. I only got told about this around midnight, and likely only got the tail end of when it was brightest as a result. I thought it was a prank for a good while at first, because even with my eyes I couldn't see anything except a faint white smudge (which I initially thought was a cloud/plane trail). But then when taking pictures of the stars, I discovered a faint purple glow on some images. Anyways, long story short, I took a bunch of images and this is probably the best one I got.

Looked outside my window while laid in bed (it was cold in my room) and saw a nice bright full moon that I was gonna take a picture of - until I ADHD procrastinated for like a good 15 minutes scrolling Twitter (lol). It got cloudy very quickly, and so I decided that I didn't want to wait until potentially full cloud cover blotted out the moon entirely, and started mass taking photos. I got a few good ones, but this one is the best (IMO) despite the kinda crazy 3200 ISO (I don't have a tripod so I'm laid on the end of my bed holding as steady as possible lmao).

My first use of a DSLR was in college (UK) when I was doing Creative Media and we had to make a fake advertisement. One of the people I worked with ended up buying a Nikon D3300 and so I got to use that a bunch. Anyways, many years later, I wanted a 'real' camera (aka something aside from my phones camera lol) and decided on the D3400 instead (slightly longer battery life mainly). If you want a cheap DSLR to have some photography based fun, then I'd recommend this tbh.
(I have also discovered that the sensor in the D3300 is garbage btw compared to the D3400's)

So this came with the camera, and it's a pretty decent lens ngl. Super fast AF speed (being an AF-P) and a decently wide zoom range, taking you from ~90deg to ~45deg (so fairly wide to a standard level of zoom). The only downside IMO is that it's a f3.5-5.6, so shooting indoors is going to require you to crank up the ISO or drop the shutter speed quite a lot (compared to shooting outside in broad daylight).

So basically, I absolutely love this thing. I originally found an AF-S 55-200 on eBay for ~£65, which was pretty good ngl, but then I came across this for £168 (from Japan, normally like £250 in the UK) and it's been incredible to use. 300mm of zoom is wild, and it's in a small (being an APS-C size lens) and lightweight package (weighing ~400g) with some really sharp optics. If you want to take long distance photos on the cheap, the D3400 and this lens is gonna be about £350 in total and absolutely worth it IMO.

So I got this tbh because I saw 'f1.4' and had to have a low f-stop lens (lol). Optically it's, ehhh - maybe mines a bad example, but focusing on anything past ~4 metres seems to be slightly out of focus? Also there's a good amount of chromatic abberation on 'sharp edges', which is unfortunate, but it's also f1.4! It means I can take all kinds of wacky photos with out of focus backgrounds, or in terrible lighting conditions!

My first purchase from mpb - a website I'd never seen mention of and accidentally stumbled upon when searching for something else. Honest opinion (from 1 purchase lol) is they're pretty good and much cheaper compared to eBay. Anyways, this lens is pretty good as well. I had my fill with my 70-300, and was trying to get even further reach. I did a bunch of research and, for my money (quite literally), this lens is the best you're gonna get for less than £600. It's sharp at 600mm, the stabilisation is good, and the focus is... okay... The one major downside is it's a 600mm meant for 35mm FF cameras, so it's big (34cm @ 600mm) and heavy (2kg!).

NGL, when I was buying the 150-600, I wanted a monopod (because a tripod would be big and bulky when being carried around) and so I found the category for monopods on mpb and went 'Price: low-high' and bought the cheapest one lmao. FWIW it's actually pretty good (in my short amount of usage anyways) for my 2kg Sigma 150-600, though I wouldn't trust it at full extension with anything heavier. The bottom tube you can extend feels a little flimsy at full extension, so I tend to only half extend it to avoid breaking it accidentally lol.

Was talking with someone who recently acquired a Sony A7RII - since they only have a 24-240mm lens - about how insanely expensive getting a longer lens for the camera would be. Anyways, I was scrolling mpb and saw 'Samyang 85mm T1.5: £49' and was expecting a lens with some form of fault, or to be abused beyond belief. It was neither (though rated 'heavily used' despite looking perfectly fine...?), and seeing '85mm' and (essentially) 'f1.4' in the same sentence made my brain do weird things and I bought it lmao. It's a fantastic lens from the little I've used it so far, but manual focus with an f1.4 is crazy hard without resorting to Live View lol.