LandOfWiles

Thanks elviajero. In that case, I think I will just call them in advance. 

Does anyone know if Thai visa offices will accept proof of onward travel with a date equal to the visa duration plus 30 days (based on getting an extension)? This will be for a SETV from Penang. 

I'm guessing they do not, but happy to be wrong. 

50 minutes ago, rijb said:

Barista included?

Yeah you :-) 

I had a Delonghi machine that I bought from Amazon for about £50 several years ago; it's now about £90 but still very cheap compared to those above. These machines don't require much skill to operate and if you use a good coffee, such as Lavazza, then you can easily make a top notch long espresso style coffee that easily compares to what you would get in France or Italy. 

I'm skeptical about those that like coffee yet claim they don't like Starbucks. Not because I think that Starbucks make great coffee but because it's hardly terrible coffee either. I will happily drink instant coffee if that's all I can get my hands on. Maybe my tastes are more flexible than others or maybe I don't feel the need to define myself by the coffee I drink. 

There's a couple of good articles related to this snobbery on the You're Not So Smart website. Here's a quote from one on selling out, which mainly focuses how people move away from things that become popular but also covers how we look to distinguish ourselves through selection. 

Quote

You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level.

Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/04/12/selling-out/

Also see this one in which wine tasters took part in various experiments. Although they were duped (red dye in white wine and switching bottles), it at least shows that our tastes are not as discerning as we'd like to believe. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are-not-so-smart-why-we-cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/

16 minutes ago, FracturedRabbit said:

I delete most of the photos that I take; but I still have 80,000 sitting on a drive. I currently use Lightroom, but perhaps you could recommend some free software that will help me manage that....?

 

Many of us consider the further processing of images after capture an important and enjoyable part of the hobby, not to "butcher them to death" but to make them reflect the image we were trying to capture. As Calach said, these tools help you understand the technical aspects of photography, they are fun to use, and open up all manner of creative possibilities.

 

Adobe has more than 9 million subscribers for its Creative Suite, I doubt many of those subscribers are "professionals".

Touche! My tone was a bit off in my first post so apologies for that.

I am not against post-processing, in fact as I mentioned I do make several tweaks to my own photos. But spending needless cash on applications is not good advice to give a newbie IMO. If all you want to do is, like me, capture what the eye could see then I fail to see why you need Lightroom. If you use Canon then the DPP software should be more than enough. In fact, any app with brightness, contrast, levels, white balance and cropping features should do for the majority of cases. The one exception would be HDR. The Photos app on Mac has all the features I mentioned, as does Paint.NET,  GIMP and plenty of mobile apps. I have recently been using two of these web apps from this web search. These web apps offer a free version that include most features that a photographer needs. You can pay a small subscription (e.g. $5 / month) if you want more advanced processing such as filters etc. It would be interesting to know what you use Lightroom for that doesn't exists in any free alternative. I may have missed some stuff that I don't use myself. 

Regarding using apps for learning: surely the best way to learn photography is by going out and using your camera? The camera is the starting point after all. You don't need much theory to get going but understanding the the Exposure Triangle, aperture, ISO and metering would be a good start. The manual will explain most of this. 

Finally, I would bet vast majority of these Creative Cloud subscribers are professionals (individuals and enterprises). Create Cloud is huge and caters for graphic design shops, advertising and marketing agencies as well as media companies and a whole load of other industries. I even have an annual subscription for my work and I am software developer (I use the web Fonts). There will be a lot of subscriptions for universities and training companies too. 

Forget software for now. Here's what I would suggest instead: start taking photos. Then ask yourself how they can be improved. If the answers don't lie in your camera then you likely need a better camera, but they probably do. Mastering exposure and choosing the correct settings for a given shot is what learning photography is all about - not butchering your photos to death in an advanced image editing application, which is really the realm of a graphic designer. These tools are great but they are mainly aimed at professionals. A professional aiming to have the absolute best looking magazine cover, for example, might go as far to remove the sky from a shot and replace it with something more appealing, but it's hard to understand why any amateur photographer would want to do this. 

With that said, here's some common tasks you will still likely need an application for:

- correct exposure 

- correct contrast & brightness 

- correct white balance 

- crop

Fortunately, there are many free desktop, web and mobile applications that do all of these for free. Your camera might even come with basic software that will do all of these and more. 

Once you've mastered the basics and know how to make small tweaks to your photos then by all means experiment but don't waste any money on photoshop or lightroom just yet. They are too advanced for a beginner and you might find you never really need them anyway.  

Does anyone know browncow? In her (rather his) opening post she documented all the common problems that many male farangs face with female Thai partners. It was a crude piece of trolling! Thai farang relationships are almost exclusively farang man to Thai woman. Any Western woman that has fallen for a Thai man would almost never experience the problems in this opening post. Western women don't go to Go Go bars filled with unscrupulous Thai men dancing around poles (there's nothing wrong with that of course ) . In the very rare cases they do meet where a relationship might be possible, they meet in offices or some other professional setting and the Thai man is a stastical outlier. It's hard to imagine any case where they would come to TV for advice. 

This thread seems to have been created to mock those that have to support their partners financially. If you are happy, then just ignore the obviously unhappy moron that created this post. 

Note: I stopped reading after page three because I could not take any more. 

I recently arrived at the Vientiane visa office at 11am and the place was almost empty. I was in an out within five minutes. I was application number 250 and I had to wait about 90 minutes for that number to be called the following day. I would not go there too soon for pickup if you have a similarly high number. The Thai tourist visa is currently free in case you didn't already know.