Let go and let camera

Tonight Al and I decided to take a long walk to the corner store. I grabbed the Ricoh GRIIIX on a whim. The first thing I learned is that I have forgotten how its Snap Focus setting works, so back to the manual on that. But I was also curious about how I'd react to anything I took if I refused to change it and just accepted what the camera gave me for tones. Bumping vibrance, contrast, and clarity are pretty much reflexive for me at this point, but I made myself sit on my figurative hands long enough for the...

May 21st, 2024 Photography

Podcasts circling about the ideological accretion disk

Al and I listened to a pair of podcasts while we were on the road over the weekend. As usual, I'm going to skip what the podcasts were or even what they were about because neither piece of information would be helpful.  What I will say is that they were both about A Current Topic of Intense Interest to Many. One was about The Current Topic from a slightly more ideological or theoretical point of view. The other was about The Current Topic, but in the form of a very lightly structured interview where the subject spoke mostly uninterrupted about their...

May 20th, 2024 Politics

Mary's Peak, Hoka Anacapas, Alsea Falls

We camped down at Alsea Falls this weekend. The highlight of the trip was our hike up Mary's Peak. Alsea Falls is a great place to camp. It's a federal camp ground out past Philomath. The sites are all roomy and a little bit isolated from each other, especially site #1. The host puts together carts with firewood you can self-serve. It's just quiet and small and isolated. It's a short drive from Alsea, OR, a very small town that has a mercantile, a cafe, a school, and some homes. The mercantile is one of those places you find out in...

May 19th, 2024

after a few months with Scribbles ...

... I still like it a lot. How did I adapt to WYSIWYG writing?  Just fine. I even look forward to it.  How did I adapt to life without Markdown? I don't miss it too much. After just a few weeks it even seems a little odd to me that I thought Markdown was a required feature.  I would like semantic headings at some point, but it's all fine as it is for what I'm trying to do here. What else do I like about it?  I like being able to make a quick edit without doing a commit. It's super...

May 16th, 2024 Tools

The content producer ouroboros (or: Lou Plummer is right)

Lou Plummer on The Phones of Normal People and the recent, I dunno, caterwauling over the fact that Apple keeps making tech bloggers buy the newest iPad on launch day then cruelly betrays them by not making it a touchscreen Mac by WWDC the next month:  “Even further from the norm are what the professional nerds do. Those folks who make their living from monetized blogs, podcast ads, subscriptions and other forms of content are so far removed from what your Mom does with her phone that they could be living on another planet. ” What a population. I used to be...

May 16th, 2024 Tools

Dental work

I had to do an emergency dental appointment today. It boiled down to "chunk of a filling went missing, and another tooth decided to light up in sympathy with its fucked up comrade." I've had situations where a nerve lights up and the pain is so bad that the tooth becomes your entire universe. This wasn't quite that, but it had that feeling of "you're just one hot sip of tea hitting that thing the wrong way," so I got the first appointment I could. It's always a mystery, too. What are they going to find? How fucked are you? I...

May 16th, 2024 Life

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