sadly more and more sites are rejecting many of the easily accessible mail forwarders and temp email services.

I mean, I’m sure they have an accent, but in America you’d be considered racist for disparaging someone over that.

Maybe that’s the cultural disconnect.

I’m always a big fan of a strong backlight on furry animals like this. try to catch them at golden hour with the sun mostly behind them. you’ll either need a bit of fill light or to bring the shadows up a touch in post for it to really pop in that situation. if the dog is patient you can literally just use a piece of foamcore board to bounce the sunset back into their face. in this photo i even had the sun flairing into the lens a little. it helped that i was shooting up a hill. made it easier to line up the sun, but i was still laying on the ground to get this.

as I mentioned in the post you’ll want to open that aperture to get a nice dreamy shallow look like this. you also want to get as close to the subject as you can while maintaining a good frame (fill the frame) and make sure the background is far away. an open field works great for something like this. you should also always try to be at your subject’s eye level as a general rule of thumb. yes, being higher or lower can work, but there needs to be intent behind doing it.

shooting very large dogs like that will make it much harder to get a photo like this one. the 45 1.8 will seperate the subject well, but it won’t blow it out into a dreamy blur like this when aimed at moose dogs. you’d need something longer like a 135 1.8 or an 85 1.2. that said, you can still make a very nice looking portrait, it just won’t quite look like this.

you also don’t want it to be overly sharp. sharpness tends to make the fur look less soft and cute. if it’s like a doberman doing a nobleman pose then you probably want a sharp look, but if it’s a cute little puppy like this one i tend to remove sharpness in post or shoot on vintage glass.

it’s not cheating to use treats to pose them. it’s not unreasonable to take a nice picture of the owner holding them. if all else fails, just chase them around at their eye level on burst mode. try to catch the sun lighting then up nicely from behind.

In theory, if we’re growing beyond Linux nerds and harcore communists, this should be one of the biggest and most general communities as well as one of the most likely to see slop get upvoted.

ai kittens and puppies make up like 30% of Facebook traffic on their own at this point. if we’re worried about ai slop taking over THIS is the community to watch.

the etiquette is to find the original yourself, it’s usually not that hard, just reverse image search it, or not post it. why would you feel so obligated to share a comic with no author that someone else made?

it’s easy to be a shitty person without intending to. that’s why we need to police our own actions and be conscious of the effect we have on others. when sharing the already stolen art we are perpetuating a problematic cycle. just because you didn’t start it and many others are doing it, that doesn’t make it less wrong.

sharing someone else’s dumb joke is one of the lowest forms of interaction anyway. i have numerous friends that have devolved into that being the only way they communicate with others. i mostly just don’t talk to them anymore. i really don’t care about the reels they send me. no one should ever feel like they have some kind of right to post someone else’s art.

i also generally hate the anti self promotion rules so many subteddits have. the ones that don’t are objectively better that the ones that do. what would you rather see? one more shared content mill whith the same 50 posts over and over and exclusivity stolen art. or something like r/comics with like 10 artists that all use it as a common platform to share their work.

you may find the content that is currently popular there questionably horny, but that’s more of a reddit demographic problem than an issue with letting artists self promote. in just arguing that i prefer a platform like that where you interact with the artists and new authors pop up and disappear regularly. you also get unique interactions like the artists quickly throwing together a comment reply as a bonus panel.

my point is that this place could be a better community than so much of reddit if we use it as a history book and learn from its victories and mistakes. it starts with policing ourselves and each other towards these goals. not reposting unatributed slop is one of those things we should not be doing if we want a good community.