A little goes a long way

I had some X100V raws from a trip to SF earlier in the year, so I loaded them into X Raw Studio and that gave me a little better idea of how to get what I was hoping for on last night's brief excursion. The whole exercise sort of reinforced my affection for the Classic Chrome simulation. I'm not entirely sure I'm "doing it right," but it feels easier to layer up from its base—the better to pull things forward—than Velvia, which is a little too much for my tastes.  It also reminded me I need to revisit a habit I...

May 12th, 2024 Photography

Misadventures in Velvia

Al and I went to see Blood Simple at the Hollywood Theater last night. That was pretty awesome. Even better to have an emcee before the movie who actually knew M. Emmet Walsh and had some fun stories about him. I took my X100V along because I just got a black mist filter for it and the Hollywood district is the perfect place to grab a few shots with one of those, just to see what it does. I also broke a small rule and changed several things at once: I forgot I'd set up the X100V to experiment with a...

May 12th, 2024 Photography

About the smashing

I once had a friend who hated Apple in a way I had never come across before. At first I confused it with the  recreational hatred an Ubuntu nerd might profess for Microsoft: Something you could mildly push back against or laugh off as theatrically overstated. He was not theatrically overstating his case.  Apple's existence in the world pained him. He asked me to please make a version of my site's RSS feed that excluded any posts about Apple so he wouldn't have to see them, or know that someone he otherwise respected and liked would be willing to write them....

May 10th, 2024 Life

Rise of the Rangeoids

I read a rumor site that says Canon is doing a fixed-lens Canonet QL revival to compete with Fuji’s X100, and that maybe Leica's next D-Lux will take a similar turn. After going down the Nikon Zf research rabbit hole it seems like fixed lens rangeoids have a better chance of retaining the design consistency Fujifilm managed with the X100 series than a refactored ILC body. Like, will they toss in an aperture ring? If Canon makes them premium enough to be credible sidekicks for higher-end ILCs, will they risk the interface shear of a pre-PASM design? Or are we just...

May 8th, 2024 Photography

Long-term commitments

I listened to a recent installment of Citations Needed about "the rise of the war on drugs 2.0" that was usefully recalibrating. Citations Needed is on my list of "priors confirming" listens, but this installment was  interesting because it spent some time talking about Measure 110. I'm thinking about it this morning because I've been paying closer attention to the county DA primary campaign. The Oregonian has a report this morning that it's a "tight election battle" (its own polling says it's 50/31, Vasquez) and that voters are sour, grouchy, etc.  The Citations Needed take is largely that liberal politicians are...

May 5th, 2024 Politics

Rainy day time with X Raw Studio

I don't think I'd like it as my primary workflow tool, but I do love X Raw Studio for modeling in-camera effects on a Fujifilm camera. You hook up your camera (it becomes a very expensive image co-processor), load up a raw file in the software, and have access to all the in-camera settings you'd find on the camera itself: You can cycle between film simulations, tone settings, etc. then name and save the preset to your camera. Whenever a new simulation lands, I'm always squinting and trying to make sense of how it fits in with all the others. With...

May 4th, 2024 Photography

Lazyweb: Tools newsletters?

Is there anyone out there doing a tools recommendations newsletter or site that doesn't feel like a lazy affiliate link skimming operation? Where I am coming from: I learned about the Leatherman back when the Leatherman company made one product, and you called it "a Leatherman," from a blurb in Whole Earth Review, which was a magazine you would go buy from a newsstand or subscribe to and that did not receive revenue from saying "a Leatherman is this handy folding pliers/knife/screw driver thing." They had other ways of making money to tell you that, and thanks to that arrangement you knew...

May 4th, 2024

Dinner on an M-Class Planet

This week I started a new manager on my team. We worked with each other at Puppet—I promoted him to management on my IT services team—and the mission I had on my way out of Puppet, to the extent I was allowed to have a mission by our acquirers, was to help him and his folks make the transition to a private-equity-backed midwestern software concern. I'm turning over a year at the place I landed. When I look up and look around, I realize how much of an adjustment I had to make. The first several months there were pretty hard....

May 3rd, 2024 Work

The VSCO camera

I've always kind of wondered about where exists in Fujifilm's mind the line between the looks you can get from the film simulations + the in-camera adjustments and then what you can get with the  effects settings (like "Toy Camera.") I got a little shirty a few days ago about the Fujifilm recipe guy's impassioned defense of jpeg photography, but one piece of spleen I held back was just how incredibly fussy some of those recipes can be to get the whole "vintage" look. It takes time in the menus, looking back and forth between the recipe and the little camera...

May 2nd, 2024 Photography

Look to your left. Now look to your ri ... No. Sorry. Keep looking left.

I've been a longtime reader of The Nation. I don't remember when I first subscribed, but I can remember it on the magazine pile as far back as the '80s. I've only been reading Jacobin for a few years. My attitude toward The Nation shifted once Jacobin was on my reading list, in part because of my own political shifts, and in part because of how the two compare. I've long had an uneasy relationship with The Nation. Its politics are generally "just fine" to me in the way that the politics of a lot of left-liberal policy nerds are "just...

April 29th, 2024 Politics

MultCo commission primary: Something to think about

With the primary next month, May is a consequential month for Multnomah County. I had dinner with friends over the weekend and was  surprised at how opinionated they were about the county commission race.  Most people I have talked to over the years have barely registered county commission races. I know I was pretty indifferent to them for years. That indifference may have come from a few places: It's a Democratic county, for one. I don't know what would have to happen for a Republican to win a seat here. So if your politics only descend to the partisan level, then...

April 29th, 2024 Politics

Garmin Fenix 7 Pro Solar

I went through a phase where I felt very irritated with the Apple walled garden. Apple Watches, in particular, were bothering me, because of their dependency on having an iPhone. I was also unhappy with battery life, even with an Apple Watch Ultra. After using a Garmin Instinct 2 for a camping/hiking season, I ended up landing on the Garmin Fenix 7 Pro Solar. The Instinct was interesting because it's super rugged and sips battery: You can go weeks and weeks on a charge using it as a fitness tracker. If you forego the need for always-on features you can get...

April 28th, 2024 Tools

A few notes about the behavioral interview

I was very lucky, years ago, to have worked at Puppet when it made a big investment in behavioral interview training, which was an interview style  I'd managed to evade throughout my career up to then, partially because I had done a "freelance converted to full-time" thing a few times, and partially because I had the mixed blessing of narcissistic interviewers when I was coming in through the front door somewhere. When I interviewed at Puppet, one of my interviewers was a very aggressive behavioral interviewer even before we eventually got to training in that style.  It was a tough 30...

April 25th, 2024 Work

"Ours Was the Shining Future"

Here's a review of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.  Sounds like an interesting read.  “"The completely justified anger that civil rights and feminist leaders felt toward reactionary elements in the labor movement, he concludes, unfortunately helped to produce a backlash that pushed many unions and working-class people away."” Damage we still live with today. When you look at it all through this lens, the so-called heterodox types are just a re-litigation of those cultural grievances, on behalf of "working people" by credentialed SubStack entrepreneurs who thought college loan forgiveness was "elitist" because things like community...

April 25th, 2024 Books

Straight-out-of-camera ephemerality

Not too long ago Luke posted a link to this thing about how "the raw vs. jpeg debate needs to end." I don't think it's a great piece in part because it doesn't really do justice to Team Raw and in part because I'm a human being and frequently fall prey to informal fallacies, such as the one that leads me to say, "of course some guy who sells 'recipes' that make your photos irrecoverable if you ever decide that a caricature of 'the film look' was a bad artistic choice thinks it's insulting to tell people otherwise." "It is difficult...

April 23rd, 2024 Photography