Chen

I have been doing the sit-forward-on-the-edge thing for years without ever registering it.

It is a rented flat's built-in desk sadly, otherwise I absolutely would.

Reviewing the rejects deliberately never occurred to me. That is a good habit.

Top edge at eye level is the standard advice and it is slightly too high for a lot of people, especially with progressive lenses — you end up tipping your head back to read through the bottom of the lens all afternoon. If you wear varifocals, try the monitor 10 to 15cm lower than feels right.

Move the subject away from the backdrop. Two metres is not much — at four the background falls off on its own, and if you cannot go further, put the background in shade and light only the person.

Two months of four times a week from nothing is a lot of new load on a joint that does very little else in daily life. Some of this is simply that your wrists are not conditioned yet, and it does improve — mine took about three months. Do a minute of wrist prep first: gentle circles, then palms down with fingers pointing back, then the same on the backs of the hands.

Check whether you are gripping. Heavy CAD work makes people claw the mouse and the tension runs up the forearm into the shoulder. Deliberately let the hand go slack for a few minutes and see whether the burn changes — if it does, the mouse is probably too small for your hand or too heavy in its glide.

Two separate things are happening and both are normal. The back screen is a 3 inch display showing a downsampled image, so almost anything looks sharp on it and it is not evidence of anything. The real issue is that at f/2 on a 50 at two metres your depth of field is a couple of centimetres, which means the eyelashes and the cheek genuinely are at different distances and the camera picking either is plausible. Use eye detect AF if the body has it, and if you are focusing and recomposing, stop — swinging the camera after focus moves the plane by more than your depth of field. Then shoot a ruler at 45 degrees on a tripod at f/4 and you will see immediately whether it is technique or a front/back focus problem with the lens.

Modern fast primes are pretty good wide open. The softness people blame on the lens is usually missed focus, and a tripod test separates the two in ten minutes.

Consistently behind across distances means back focus, and most bodies have a micro-adjustment for it, or you can send body and lens in as a pair for calibration. If it only misses at close range, that is a different and more annoying problem.

The cushion is embarrassingly effective. Got three seconds today.

That works once you can already parse. At one word in twelve it just gives you faster noise.

Start with content far below your reading level. Kids shows, slow news, anything where you already know about 98 percent of the words. Listening does not improve by fighting hard audio, it improves by hearing easy audio at speed until parsing is automatic. I wasted four months on films I could not follow before I worked that out.

Expose for the highlights and lift, but do it properly: expose so the sky just holds detail, shoot raw, and lift the shadows in the raw converter rather than from a JPEG. The greyness you are seeing is partly that lifting shadows flattens contrast, so you have to add contrast back locally on the face afterwards. Noise is a real limit though — two or three stops of lift at base ISO on a modern sensor is fine, five is not.

For portraits I would rather bracket the background and blend a single frame of the person in. Faces and blending do not mix well.

Separate vote for the anti-fatigue mat, because it is the thing people skip on the grounds that it looks like an accessory. On concrete or tile it is the reason your feet and back can tolerate standing at all. Mine was about 35 and the difference showed up the same afternoon.

Consistent with what changed things for me. Squats did more for my hips than any hip opener sequence ever did.

For products a sheet of foam board plus a diffusion panel covers it for under 30, which leaves the rest of the budget for the flags.