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I have been asking myself whether I should write about the recent addition to my family. I don’t want to give cowardly, underdeveloped Internet nuts power over my wife and son. On the other hand, we have strong prayer lives, I can easily (both physically and mentally) kill anyone who endangers us, I’m in a jurisdiction where the police will pat me on the back for it and possibly take me out for ribs, and I feel I owe something to people who have read this blog for years.

Some people have been reading since the beginning, two decades ago. I have gotten to know a few people, even if at a distance. I have prayed for them. I have met a handful. I don’t know if I can call people I’ve never met friends, but if not, some are pretty close to it.

I think this is the first photo I took after we brought him home. It was not staged. It’s amusing, and it should also serve to send a message.

I thought it was really funny. We were extremely sleep-deprived and barely knew what we were doing. We tossed him in the bassinet and started squaring the house away for bed, and a couple of minutes later, I saw I had left him near a carry piece.

Not a problem, since he was not able to rack the slide at that point.

Second photo, equally funny:

He was due to wake up at any minute, and I wanted to shoot some video. I rushed around looking for something to weigh the tripod down. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and then I saw some bags of .45 ACP handloads. Perfect.

He is healthy. He is happy and peaceful except when it’s time to be changed, and I wear ear protection for that. He really is as cute as the picture suggests. Not all babies have curb appeal early on, and we have learned that it’s a blessing. The staff at the hospital didn’t want to let him go home. I know they give good treatment to every baby, but it was pretty obvious that being really cute bought him some extra favor. They loaded us up with stuff we weren’t supposed to get.

I thought it was a little unusual for a baby to be this cute, so I asked people if it was just my perception as a parent, and apparently he is objectively cute.

The delivery process was a horror. They told us to go in at 4:45 a.m. on a certain day. Then after we had gotten up in the middle of the night, they told us to wait another day. Then they called us in at about 6:30 the next morning. Then they ran the air conditioner all night, and it was 53 degrees outside.

It was so cold, we put 6 blankets on my wife, and her hands still shook. I got the staff to yell at whoever ran the air conditioning, and we got them to provide two electric heaters. I slept in a winter coat with insulated gloves and two pairs of socks. The room warmed up the next morning at about the time labor got into gear. Then it got too hot.

The labor itself was terrible, which means it was normal. For medical reasons, we had to finish without an epidural.

It seemed much worse than it was, because we were both exhausted from lack of sleep and lying in a freezing room. The whole experience should have been much better.

We both had the feeling that the labor process was a crushing ordeal, but later we agreed that the main problem was that we had been deprived of sleep and subjected extreme cold. If she had gone into labor rested and warm, it would have been painful but quick and bearable, and it wouldn’t have taken us several days to get over the stress.

We are getting an acceptable amount of sleep now, although sometimes I start to doze off in a chair, and I make mistakes I wouldn’t make if I were rested.

The baby was 80th-percentile big, but he was not fat. He is heavy. He is now wearing stuff for 3-month-olds. He seems very strong. I thought newborns were like rag dolls, but he wrestles with us pretty forcefully. Yesterday he insisted on rolling onto his side. When I corrected him and put him on his back, he rolled back onto his side instantly, in spite of being swaddled. He lifts himself off his mother’s chest with his arms.

His eyes were very dark when he was born, but today, suddenly, they’re blue. I don’t know what to expect later.

He was hairy from the get-go, and the hair on his head is nearly black and pretty straight.

He feeds like a horse, so no problems there yet. He was supposed to lose weight, but I think he’s going the other way.

He seems to smile and light up when I bother him, which is a father’s duty. Web sources suggest the smile may be from gas, however. He has that to spare. He seems to like us. He appears to have fun sometimes.

For a long time, I prayed for God to give me a house of love, and now I have it, so don’t give up on your important prayers. I don’t think my son will ever have to know what it’s like to live in a dysfunctional home.

That’s about it. Don’t expect a lot of updates. We give our thanks to everyone who prayed for us.

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

My buddy Mike sent me some interesting photos on December 31. His son works in Manhattan, and while his son was at work, a man showed up on a balcony below his office and set up a sniper rifle. Here it is.

At first, I thought the photo was more interesting than it later turned out to be. I thought Mike’s son’s building was locked down due to a terrorist situation. Then I realized the rifle belonged to a cop. Mike sent me a video, and it featured a burly guy in black clothing with big white letters on the back.

If you were dancing, getting drunk, and doing drugs in Times Square when the ball came down, you were surrounded by guys with precision rifles.

I thought this was interesting, so I went to a community of shooters and asked if they could identify the gun. I have a precision rifle, so it was natural for me to be interested. You could call my gun a sniper rifle if you wanted. Professional snipers use precision rifles, just like shooting hobbyists. Military snipers didn’t always use them. They used to use deer rifles that were nicely set up to maximize accuracy.

I don’t know if it’s correct to say our military still uses deer rifles. The Marines use a modified .308 rifle based on the Remington 700–a deer rifle–and you can buy a heavy-barreled 700 in .308 for $690. The Marine designation for its rifle is M40A5.

A company called Georgia Precision sells the M40A5 for about $6500 without a scope. Do Marine rifles come from Georgia Precision, or are there a bunch of companies selling different M40A5’s? Not sure. I saw an Internet forum post which suggests the Marines build their own rifles.

The McMillan stock they use runs about $1400, and the aftermarket barrel probably costs something similar, including customization.

Do you need to spend that kind of money to get a super-accurate .308? No. But not every custom part is intended to improve accuracy, and the military can afford frills.

How much of the money is, basically, wasted? No idea. I’ll bet a lot of it is.

The Marines use a barrel made by a company named Schneider. So Schneider must make unbelievably accurate rifles on one else can match? No.

I don’t know why the Marines use .308. It’s an obsolescent (not obsolete) cartridge that loses velocity quickly. It drops below supersonic speed at around 800 yards, and when that happens, the bullet jiggles in flight, and it degrades accuracy. A 6.5 Creedmoor round is supersonic to about 1400 yards. It’s a more modern cartridge, designed with better technology.

When I took my precision rifle course, an instructor said my .308 had a trajectory like a mortar. The bullet goes up, slows down, and comes down, creating a path that looks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

All rifle bullets do this, but a .308’s arch is a lot shorter and steeper than a 6.5 Creedmoor’s arch.

A bullet that slows down and drops fast is a pain to shoot accurately a long way out. When you do precision shooting, you have to know how much your bullet will drop over distance so you will know exactly how high it will be when it gets to your target. A short arch means the bullet’s path will be more nearly vertical far away. That means it will drop a lot more over a given distance out there. You have to have a good accurate range figure, because the round is less forgiving than a flat-shooting round.

The .308 delivers somewhat more energy to a person or deer at 200 yards than 6.5 Creedmoor, but farther out, the 6.5 delivers more energy because it’s moving faster. Because it wasn’t designed during the Truman administration.

I don’t know why any sniper would use a .308. Tradition, maybe? I don’t know any Marine armorers, so maybe I’ll never know. Maybe they have a great reason. It can’t be the increased energy at short ranges. A 6.5 Creedmoor will kill a moose just fine, so there is no reason to think a .308 is needed to kill a person. And there are a bunch of other cartridges that are better than 6.5 Creedmoor.

It’s not because a .308 rifle can use spare ammo from machine guns when things get bad. You can’t hit anything with machine gun ammo. I have tried.

If the .308 didn’t exist today, no one would invent it, because the technology is so backward. It would be like inventing a black and white TV with 13 channels.

The .308 was invented 73 years ago. Penicillin was about 11 years old. The transistor was just being made available to the public. The only intelligent life that had been to space was a few perverted beings that liked to abduct guys out of bass boats in Mississippi and probe their unmentionable parts. There were no satellites.

I guarantee you, you can get a Remington 700 that is just as accurate as the Marine version for way, way less than $6500. Maybe it will weigh more or not have wifi or something, but it will shoot fine, and given the short useful range of the .308, it will never need to shoot better than maybe 0.75 MOA. One MOA is 10.5″ at 1000 yards. How wide is a person?

Remington rifle: $650. Timney trigger: $250. New barrel: $500. Precision chassis (stock): $400. Bipod: $100-$250. Ballpark figures. Under $2000. Good scope (Vortex Viper): $1000. Rings: $150.

You don’t actually need the precision chassis, but it looks neat.

What are we at? $3050? Have my 3,000 university math credits paid off?

I think I have something like $2700 in my precision rifle, and I can promise you it will shoot 0.5 MOA with the right ammo and shooter, because I shoot close to that with crap off the shelf, and I am not a great shot.

You know what? Boys like their toys. It’s a blast, customizing, well, nearly anything and getting it just the way you want it. The Marines are boys, just like the rest of us.

As King Lear said when his daughter tried to tell him she couldn’t keep his drunken entourage in her palace, “O, reason not the need!”

To get back to the sniper photo, I asked some forum people if they knew what it was. It turns out the NYPD bought (or was given for publicity) Sako Trg M10 sniper rifles, which sell for about $12,000 without accessories. This is a 14.6-pound gun, and apparently, the NYPD went for .308.

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

I asked if anyone knew why the NYPD used this gun when Chris Kyle managed to get by with a TAC-338 which you can buy for $6500.

The TAC-338 uses a real sniper round which stays supersonic out to maybe 1500 yards and can be useful farther out.

The best answers I got involved politics. Basically, the NYPD does not care what it spends, and if it fails to spend whatever it gets in a given year, it gets less the next year, so it tries to spend up to its allotment.

I believe this is the correct explanation, because it comports with my understanding of human nature and blue states.

Anyway, I got a few unbelievably stupid answers. One guy called me a Fudd, which is a nasty name for a person who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to things like hunting shotguns. His answer contained zero useful information. He wanted to know how I had been on the forum for 4 years without knowing exactly why the NYPD needed a $12,000 rifle.

The answer was dumb for multiple reasons. First of all, they do not need the rifle. They could do the same job with an RPR from Bass Pro. Second, since they do not need the rifle, it is not possible for the justification for the rifle to appear anywhere on the forum. Third, who sits and memorizes every post on an Internet forum for 4 years? Fourth, his answer was rude, and he was a bully. I put him in his place and left him there.

Another guy said I had posted a dumbass thread. Another bully. I trimmed him down to size as well. A whole bunch of other users–knowledgeable people including former snipers–had responded with useful posts full of great information. A bunch of them agreed with me. I asked him if they were dumbasses.

I was called a whiner, by someone who has no idea what whining is. Whining means exaggerated, useless complaining. I didn’t complain. I pointed out problems with the arguments supporting the Sako purchase. That makes me a hater, not a whiner, right?

The Internet is a big playpen for jerks and bullies, and forums can be really trying. And certain interests draw unusually snotty people. Firearms. Bodybuilding. Christianity. Fishing. Electronics. Professional machinists are so rude they’re barely human. Hobby machinists are in the middle along with homebrewers. Welders are really nice. Foodies are Nazis. Not regular guys who like barbecue and pizza; they’re okay. I mean people who call themselves foodies and worship Food Network windbags who can’t really cook. Photography people are okay.

It’s funny, but bodybuilding draws bullies, but bodybuilders can’t actually fight. Fighting is a skill. It also requires cardio fitness, which many bodybuilders don’t have because they’re on drugs and don’t do cardio. There are bodybuilders who get tired climbing stairs. A lot of guys pump up show muscles in order to push other guys around, but actual martial artists who could pummel them easily are less obnoxious.

Bodybuilders aren’t even that strong. The kind of lifting they do produces big muscles that don’t do as much as smaller powerlifter muscles.

There is a skinny guy on Youtube who goes to gyms and humiliates drugged-up bodybuilders, tossing their weights around and saying how light they are.

Nineteenth-century-pistol guru Massad Ayoob is a forum guy, and he’s pretty obnoxious. Goes into panic/attack mode when anyone shows him up, which is not hard to do, or, more accurately, hard not to do. He has set himself up so many times. He got me banned from The High Road for disagreeing with him in a thread he was not even part of. Must have sent a note to his pals the mods: “I HAVE BEEN BLASPHEMED!”

Christian forums are awful. The Catholic forums are full of Catholics telling each other all Protestants go to hell. Protestant forums are full of people telling each other they’ll pray God helps them with their errors, when they really mean they hope they go to hell.

You literally have to treat electronics people like mental patients who could have full-blown slobbering-and-head-banging crises if you say the wrong thing. You can’t think of them as human beings. You have to act like you’re trying to extract data from bombs without setting them off. Like you’re playing Operation, with no funny bone.

Reddit is swarming with moderators who have no interest in moderating. They live to delete useful posts and lecture people. “Stand in awe of my deletion powers, mortal! Nanna, get me more Hot Pockets! And shove more Funyuns in them!”

In any case, I think I know why New York City spent a king’s ransom on rifles that work no better than Bass Pro merchandise.

People should be nice to each other. We should be patient. It makes life so much better. If you’re going to be hostile to someone, you should have a very good reason.

When people are nice to you, it gives you a lift. Sometimes I remember nice things people said to me decades ago, and the memories still give me strength. I remember nasty things people said and did, and I realize they still drag me down. It’s funny that I attached so much weight to remarks made by inferior people who were little better than chimps and who failed at life.

When you’re nice, you form attachments to people, and you go on to be helpful to each other in life. Snotty people push others away and end up fending for themselves unless they can control others.

God put us here to help each other. It would be wonderful if more people realized that instead of seeing humanity as a muy thai bag to use to vent their baseless cruelty.

Guess it’s time to take my new rifle out and see what it will do.

Make Silent Movies With Your New $320 Microphones

Time for some practical information that will probably be interesting to about 30 people.

When I got married and we started traveling, I began investing in camera gear. Normal families take pictures and make videos and recordings, unlike my family. They like spending time together. I can’t even guess what that’s like.

Eventually, I realized the microphones that were built into cameras were not intended to be used routinely. They are for times of desperation. When your real microphones aren’t available.

Put a camera 5 feet from a speaker, in a room with normal noise, and you get bad audio. Put both outdoors in a light breeze, and all you hear is the wind. You can put a hairy mike cover (“dead cat”) on the mike to cut the wind sound, but you will still get bad audio because the mike is too far from the speaker.

You’re supposed to use external microphones. Some connect to cameras mechanically. Others send sound to cameras via radio.

You can get a “shotgun” mike, which is a little tube you mount on your camera’s hot shoe. It’s directional. You can point it at your subject, and it will emphasize sounds coming from his direction. You can also buy mikes with long cables.

What you really want is a wireless mike set with at least two remote microphones. And you want lavalier mikes. I mean mikes with wires that connect them to transmitters. Apparently some people think a mike with no wires at all can be a lavalier, but that goes against the definition of the word.

The remote microphones go with your subjects. If you’re a subject, you can attach a remote mike to your collar and capture your speech perfectly when you’re a long way from the camera.

A lavalier mike is a tiny mike with a long cable. You plug it into the remote mike or transmitter, which is larger and more conspicuous. You can put the remote mike in your pocket and clip the lavalier mike to your shirt. This way, you don’t have a big, heavy black thing pulling on your shirt, and the remote mike can’t fall off and land in a toilet or a river.

I got my first remote set in Hong Kong. I wanted DJI, but DJI was hot, and no one had them. I got a Saramonic set. It’s pretty neat. It has two remote mikes you attach to yourself using magnets. It works great.

Problem: it’s very easy to knock the mikes off the magnets. Then they roll down the street. It has happened to us more than once.

Problem: you can’t plug lavaliers into them.

Problem: if you need a part, forget it. Saramonic is an unreliable company. I lost a dead cat for a while, and I could not get a new one. They are still unavailable.

Problem: the magnet in the receiving unit, which sits on your camera, may interfere with your camera’s monitor screen. You have to install a ridiculous spacer on your hot shoe. Saramonic promised me one and never sent it. I had to go aftermarket.

I decided to eat the $250 loss and get a new set. I had to choose between Rode and DJI. Both seemed pretty good. I went with a Rode Wireless Pro set for some reason I don’t remember. Rode is a serious company that makes professional stuff. The set I got is on their low end.

We decided to make a Christmas video with the Rode set and a Sony A7IV camera. Couldn’t do it. There was a horrible buzzing noise that took over most of the audio signal. I could sort of hear words in the background, but that was it.

Rode knows this problem exists with at least one product. The set one step below the one I got. I don’t know how much they know about this issue and the Rode Wireless Pro.

Let’s cut to the chase. There was a short cable that connected the receiver to the camera’s audio jack. Rode claims it’s a shielded cable. Whatever. It passed all sorts of noise and very little audio. It was the problem. When I contacted Rode, they gave me bad advice, like suggesting I crank the gain way up. Yes, so then I’d hear the audio AND the buzz. If I had listened to them, my set would now be in the return pile at an Amazon facility.

I had a similar cable I bought in an electronics shop in Lucerne. I think it was Lucerne. Could have been Singapore, but I don’t think so. I put this cable where the Rode cable had been, and all the noise disappeared.

Either:

1. Rode’s cables are pathetic, or
2. I got a defective one.

Based on Rode’s reputation, I would guess my cable is defective. I certainly hope they’re not sending useless cables out on purpose.

I got a Rode rep to send me a new one so I could find out. In any case, the camera works now. The new cable is longer and more likely to get in the way. I am hoping the replacement cable from Rode will function.

They asked me for my phone number before shipping the replacement. I told them they didn’t need my number, but they insisted. I didn’t want junk calls, so I gave them the number for a local Burger King.

Our relationship needs work.

Other than this, the product seems great. The batteries drained faster than the ad copy suggested, but every company lies about battery life. The audio sounds beautiful

Should you buy a Rode system? No idea. I don’t know whether DJI’s competing products have this problem. I know you should avoid Saramonic. If they can’t supply parts, it almost certainly means they are going out of business slowly. If you have a Saramonic set, guard the dead cats with your life, because you will never get a new one.

A Rode set like mine runs about 40% more than a Saramonic set, but at least it’s from a real company that has real support, and you won’t drop your mikes in the toilet.

The Saramonic mikes are still nice for indoor work. When the subjects aren’t moving around or leaning over deep fryers or anything.

How do you replace the batteries in products like this? That’s a great question. I’m pretty sure the product is finished when the battery quits. They don’t make a point of putting this information in the ads. “DIES PERMANENTLY AFTER 200 SESSIONS! COULD HAPPEN DURING A WEDDING OR EXPENSIVE VACATION!” That wouldn’t help them move merchandise.

I just emailed the Rode rep to find out. Not going to bother with Saramonic. They already owe me a part, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it.

I see some people on the web replacing batteries for a different Rode set, so maybe there is hope.

If you bought a Rode Wireless Pro, and you can’t record anything, maybe this blog post will fix the problem. I recommend trying your set out before your return period expires.

Forget College and Fauxnouns

I just read an interesting article purporting to relay smart advice from old people to young people. The purpose was to help the young avoid the mistakes of the old.

The advice seemed inconsistent. One person said the young shouldn’t work hard to build up their wealth, but another said it was important to invest while young. Some advice was just stupid. One person said people should not rush to marry in their twenties.

I can think of some good advice I wish I had received.

1.Yeshua is mandatory, not optional. He is your God. He is everyone’s God. He is the God of every Jew, regardless of what rabbis say. He is the God of atheists and every sort of pagan. You have to give yourself to him and submit to him. If you reject him, your life will be pointless, and you will eventually be condemned to burn alone forever. There is no reincarnation. You can’t try again. You get one shot.

2. You have to know the Holy Spirit. It seems to be possible to escape damnation without knowing the Holy Spirit, but without him, you will never mature, you will believe all sorts of lies and errors, you will lack the power to help yourselves and others, and you are much less likely to be able to introduce your children to God successfully. You are supposed to pray in tongues every day and experience the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. You need at least three prayer sessions per day.

3. Bless God. I don’t mean thank him. I mean speak blessing to him, like Jacob blessing his sons. “In the name of Yeshua, I bless Yeshua, Yahweh, and the Spirit of Holiness. Their names are honored and made holy, their kingdom is come, their will is done, their children are multiplied, and their enemies are defeated, on Earth as in heaven.” Things like that. God will speak blessing to you, too. Yeshua commanded us to speak blessing to God. He had a reason. Bless yourself, your spouse, and your kids. If you’re a kid, bless your parents and siblings.

4. You should marry early, especially if you’re female. If you are raised to know the Holy Spirit, he will choose someone for you, so you don’t actually have to spend 20 years sorting through applicants in order to protect yourself. You’re not qualified to choose your mate. Only God can do it, and he is willing and eager.

If you’re a woman and you wait till you’re 30, you may have a lot of trouble conceiving, and you will be more likely to lose your baby during gestation. You are also more likely to have children with defects. You will regret not having a family much more than you will regret not having a career.

5. Have children. Paul suggested there were people God had created to remain single, but they are rare, and you’re probably not one of them. If you know the Holy Spirit, he will tell you if you are. We were created to please God and help him reproduce. Our children are really his children. And a big family can be very helpful. Family members look after each other.

6. Don’t live in a city. Satan’s children are concentrated in cities. You will always be at odds with the people around you, and when they rise up and become terrorists, you’ll be right there where they can get at you, and your city’s government will back them up.

7. Keep non-Christians at a distance. Not just unbelievers, but backward Christians who pull you down instead of pulling you forward. Don’t marry them. Don’t have them as close friends. Don’t partner with them in business. Avoid working for them if you can.

8. Give to people in need, as the Holy Spirit tells you. God will bless you and protect you from your enemies, and he will bring you wealth.

9. Cut off everyone who makes you miserable. They came from Satan. Being alone is better than being suppressed and abused by idiots. Before I got close to God, I had a pattern of making friends with overbearing, condescending people who let me down and treated me like a child. I haven’t had a friend like that in maybe 14 years. It’s wonderful that they are not part of my life now. I would never let them rekindle our friendships.

I had a college buddy I thought was a friend. Eventually, God showed me what a liability he was. To be honest, he was a jerk. He lied all the time, mainly by embellishing stories to the point where they became ridiculous. He couldn’t admit fault. He was undependable. He had a bad temper; he couldn’t hold his liquor, and he liked to pick fights when he was drunk. He punched walls and windows. He was a racist. He used racial slurs like “Jew boy” when he was angry at people.

There were good things about him, but on the whole, he was a drag.

One day he contacted me and asked if he could come to Florida and go fishing with my dad and me, and I realized I just didn’t want to be around him any more. I turned him down and let him know I had grown apart from him, and that was that.

I’ve never missed him. We never did anything worthwhile together. We never helped anyone. We never prayed. We drank and amused ourselves with worthless pursuits. I was no asset to him, either. Our friendship didn’t add any value to either of our lives.

If I were still running around with him, it would be a chore, not a pleasure.

9. Never lift anything you don’t have to. Always ask for help with anything that takes serious effort to lift. In one second, you can put yourself in a back brace for life. It has happened to millions of people.

10. Never exert as much force as possible with your muscles. For example, never try to see how much weight you can lift. It’s at the extremes of effort, which are unnecessary, that we hurt ourselves.

11. Invest. You want passive income that multiplies. You will never get rich by working more hours at an hourly rate. You get rich by making people and things work for you.

12. Don’t go to college unless you’re certain you need to. It’s very expensive, and it will cut four productive years out of your life. You will be indoctrinated and surrounded by filthy people. If your college friendships last, it probably means you’re immature and a failure at life.

If you want to be rich, start a business and make investments. The richest people on Earth aren’t doing anything they were taught to do in college. They’re not professionals. They’re investors and businessmen.

Elon Musk doesn’t build rockets or cars. He runs the businesses that build them. He never picks up a tool. He doesn’t design anything.

On the low side, at a college that will not impress anyone, college will cost you over $100,000. On the high side, several times that. If you’re like most people, you will waste 3.5 years memorizing Cliff’s Notes and taking subjects you can learn just as well on the web and at libraries. It’s an unparallelled waste.

I called a guy about landscaping. A young man. He has a truck and a few employees. He told me his net worth was around a million dollars. What’s the average net worth of a 30-year-old English major?

A young guy charged me $7500 for a day of tree cutting. He had several trucks, multiple employees, an enormous crane, and a diesel grapple that probably cost six figures. He probably brought half a million dollars’ worth of equipment to my house, and he had other jobs.

He never had to learn anyone’s fauxnouns (my name for them) or attend orientation lectures about groveling for confused, bigoted, dangerous perverts. He has never had to pay Marxists to lecture him.

13. Keep your kids out of public education, and if you send them to a private Christian school, watch them like hawks. Hold everyone at the school accountable. Look at the textbooks. Go to every meeting. If you see effeminate men and masculine women on the faculty, pull your child out while there is time.

14. Never, ever, EVER trust a man who likes being around other people’s kids. Scoutmasters. Priests. Funny, witty male teachers who wear bowties. Camp counselors. Youth pastors. Your single uncle who keeps an immaculate house. It is not normal for a grown male to want to hang around with children.

15. Read a lot, but don’t waste too much time on fiction. The fiction establishment rewards the children of Satan with money, awards, and wide distribution. Fiction is full of rebellion, sexual sin, and misinformation, and very little of it includes God. You would be wise to avoid reading any fiction written after 1900. You don’t actually need it.

16. Don’t eat a lot of carbohydrates. Don’t listen to the nonsense about whole grains being good for you. They may be less bad, but that’s about it. Carbs cause obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, strokes, heart attacks, arthritis, high blood pressure, dementia, and a whole bunch of other things it is pretty much impossible to get from animal products and non-starchy plant foods.

17. Music, travel, and books are not luxuries. They are necessities for people who want to be fully developed, so don’t be afraid to spend on them. Learn an instrument, and make your kids learn instruments.

18. Buy cameras and learn to use them. Your descendants will be grateful.

I wish I could take advice as well as I give it, and I wish I had had this advice when I was younger. My children will receive all of it, and they will be better off than I have been.

Tech Wreck

One nice thing about having a blog is that when you have a problem you can’t solve, and you finally find the answer, you can put it on your blog for other people. Then you and they will be able to find the answer later.

I have been trying to set up a Zhiyun Crane M2 S camera gimbal so I can use it with my vlogging camera. It’s a very annoying process. You have to be able to set up the gimbal and the phone, and in the case of my Sony ZV1-M2 camera, which doesn’t fit the gimbal all that well, you have to know how to wire the camera and gimbal up.

I turned the gimbal on, and it told me “axis lock,” suggesting one of the axes on which a camera turns was stuck in the locked position.

Of course, this was totally wrong.

A gimbal rotates a camera, and in order to make this easier, the camera should be balanced, like a drawbridge. If your camera is not balanced, you will get an “axis lock” error, which should really be an “unbalanced” error.

To fix this, you balance the camera. One axis at a time, you turn the GREY levers and move the camera around until it’s NEARLY balanced. If it will fall one way as easily as the other, it’s balanced.

To connect a Sony ZV1-M2, you need to get the Sony Creator’s app, which will force you to consent to various violations of your privacy in order to use the camera you paid for.

You have to connect the camera to your phone (the app) first. The app will let you add more than one camera. You will probably be forced to download a huge firmware update before you can do anything. Using your camera’s screen, you go to your globe icon and then select something like “Connect to Smartphone.” Then you wait forever for your phone to download the update. Then you wait forever for your phone to shoot it into your camera using wifi. Then you wait forever for the camera to install the update.

When all this is done, you plug your USB-C cable into the side of the camera and the rear of the gimbal’s light. Far as I know, there is no way to connect the camera and gimbal wirelessly. The guy who sold me the gimbal in Hong Kong’s electronics district, where the prices are exactly what they are here, had to use a cable.

You set your camera up for something like “PC Remote” input even though you’re not using a PC or a remote.

When everything is working, you will not be able to use your gimbal to zoom the camera, but you can use a Sony or aftermarket remote to do it while you’re using the gimbal. Smallrig makes a better and cheaper remote than Sony. It comes as part of a small tripod. Magnetism makes it part of the handle, you can remove it and use it separately, and unlike a Sony remote, you can charge it instead of changing batteries. I don’t know what happens when the internal battery dies, however.

Guy on the web thinks it’s better to use the camera by itself, with image stabilization activated, and use something called Sony Catalyst Browse to fix any video issues caused by shaking.

This gimbal doesn’t fit the Sony very well as it came from the seller. I had to use a weird angle adaptor to make the camera fit against the gimbal while plugged in. I think they may make a new baseplate now.

That’s it.

Fire Them All

I guess everyone is talking about the same thing today. Trump was finally shot.

I’m amazed it didn’t happen sooner. He has more enemies than John Wick.

I found out a few minutes after it happened. I saw that there had been some kind of problem at a rally, and I watched the video. He reached up to his right ear and grimaced in pain, and then he ducked. It was obvious something had struck him.

The left-wing coverage was appalling from the start. An early CNN headline said Trump fell. They must have been high-fiving in the room where that deliberate libel was written. “Finally, we can say the other guy fell.” Trump burst onto the scene as a candidate nearly a decade ago, and he has not fallen once. When will they quit with the false equivalence?

They knew he didn’t fall. They didn’t care. They had a chance to tell a lie, so they took it, not thinking about the way it would age during the next century or even over the next hour. Other liars in the MSM took the same low road. They don’t even try these days.

We now know a bullet went through his right ear. It was fired by a nut named Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was a registered Republican who also donated money to Act Blue, a far-left organization. The MSM played up the “registered Republican” thing, exactly the same way they never play up the “black male” thing when street crimes are committed by black males.

Leftists often register as Republicans so they can cheat and queer (sorry) our primaries.

Let’s look at the evidence in totality, as we now know it. Republican. Donated to Act Blue. Tried to kill a Republican president at a Republican rally. Also killed a person attending the rally and wounded at least two others. Yeah, the two seconds he spent checking the “R” box when indicating his affiliation really outweigh the other stuff.

Photos show a man with a woman’s hairstyle and geeky feminine eyeglass frames no normal conservative would wear.

Another thing: he couldn’t shoot. He shot from a prone position at 150 yards, using a rifle resembling an AR-15. That would be a 4-MOA rifle at worst, unless it was a complete piece of junk, and prone shooting is the easiest way to get precision. At 150 yards, 1 MOA is about 1.6″, so 4 MOA is 6.4″. How wide is Trump? Maybe 18″ when facing you at an angle? Crooks missed the center of mass by about that much, the only time he hit Trump. The other shots hit other people, so they were even worse.

A conservative would be less likely to be a terrible shot. Let me shoot at another person from 150 yards from the prone position, with a good gun I practice with, and he has nearly no chance of being missed. And I’m not all that good.

Crooks shot from a roof, meaning he was higher than his victims. Shooting downward is easier than making level shots because it reduces the bullet drop.

Crooks was wearing a T-shirt from the popular Youtube gun channel Demolition Ranch. I’m familiar with it. A rich veterinarian runs it. He does silly things like deliberately putting the wrong ammunition in guns and then firing them. I’m sure his fans are mostly conservative, but I don’t think the shirt makes Crooks conservative. It seems more likely he wore it to embarrass us. More than Demolition Ranch does.

Maybe Crooks really was conservative, and he was just mentally ill. So far, it appears unlikely. If he really is conservative, we’ll just have to admit it.

My best guess is that he is either on the trans spectrum, sympathetic to Hamas, or both.

I haven’t gotten to the real story yet. The real story is this: the Secret Service and the police organizations that worked the event are incompetent.

Sixty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and John Connally from an elevated position. He used a mail-order military surplus rifle, and he still got impact with two out of three shots. Clearly, the Secret Service has learned absolutely nothing since then. They let a man climb onto a white roof in broad daylight, carrying a rifle, and shoot a former president a couple of Frisbee throws away.

If I wanted to shoot Joe Biden, I wouldn’t try. I have–well…had–an inflated sense of the competency of the Secret Service. Before the Trump shooting, I would have expected to have to deal with drones, facial recognition, and only God knows what other clever tools designed to protect presidents. It would never have occurred to me that they might let me climb onto a building a few yards away, unmolested, and fire at will.

A single drone flying around the event would have picked up the sniper. Agents on foot with binoculars would have spotted him. There must be a number of computerized surveillance systems that would have picked him up, had they been used. The Secret Service and the police didn’t think of these things, but I, an old untrained guy in a recliner, did.

The government loves to say, “See something? Say something.” There was no system in place to help people say things to the Secret Service. Witnesses saw the sniper as he took several minutes to climb onto the roof and get settled. They waved their arms at the Secret Service and yelled at the police. There was no hotline they could use. The Secret Service and police ignored them. They allowed Trump to walk into an ambush dozens of people already knew about.

People are saying the Secret Service saved Trump. Never happened. Bad aim saved Trump. A round hit his ear, he heard it and felt pain, and he ducked behind the podium, which–please tell me this is true–must have been reinforced to resist gunfire. The Secret Service let him get shot, and then they reacted when he was already safe.

If Donald Trump gave a talk in my pasture, and I had to protect him myself on a thousand-dollar budget, you better believe I would find a way to reinforce his podium.

Anyone who says the Secret Service saved people is forgetting Corey Comperatore, the man whose brains were splattered by the assassin as he shielded his wife and daughter. They’re forgetting the two (at least) other people who were shot.

The Secret Service is a disgrace, not because it failed, but because it made an effort Barney Fife would have been ashamed of. It did not provide basic protection from a known threat. If you do a good job and fail, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Letting people with rifles climb onto roofs near a Trump rally is something completely different.

We and Trump’s family nearly got stuck with everlasting video of Trump’s brain and skull spraying all over about 30 rally attendees. We were spared not by an inch but by half an inch. That could have happened. Today, we could be watching one blurred video after another. We could be seeing photos of people with Trump’s blood and brains on their shirts and faces. Leftists would have made animated GIF’s to make each other laugh. Far worse than the Zapruder film. The Secret Service put us in this position.

I don’t know if it’s possible for the victims and their families to sue the Secret Service. I wish it were. The Secret Service deserves an embarrassing series of televised trials, and it deserves a bunch of firings.

People are saying the Secret Service is too busy with DEI to do a good job. I wouldn’t doubt it. A woman runs the show. A woman who has never been physically capable of doing everything an agent should be able to do. You have to wonder how many tee-ball hires they have.

Another person who deserves public shaming: Representative Bernie Thompson, an black Democrat who sponsored a deplorable bill that would strip convicted felons sentenced to prison of Secret Service protection. I’ll bet he’d want agents around his sorry butt if he had to mingle with the general population in a penitentiary. He wouldn’t want to depend on corrections officers. Ask Jeffrey Dahmer and Whitey Bulger.

As of this moment, the Secret Service is a loser agency and a laughingstock. Someone needs to go through it like Hercules went through the Augean stables before Biden gets his head blown off while trying to find his way off a stage. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing to add to America’s history?

As for Trump, I am very impressed. When you’re shot and wounded badly, you may not know it right away. Many people in Trump’s situation would have panicked and even cried. Many would have refused to stand back up. Trump got up, faced the cameras with blood on his cheek and the side of his head, insisted on getting his shoes, and then pumped his fist three times and yelled, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” That was great. He turned being shot into his greatest campaign triumph.

AP photographer Evan Vucci, who will be famous by mid-week, got a picture of Trump gesturing defiantly with our flag waving above his head in front of a deep blue sky. That picture will live forever. I promise you, it’s on T-shirts right now. I want one, even though I’m not as excited about Trump as many Republicans.

That photo is Trump’s Marines-on-Iwo-Jima shot. I feel like blowing it up and putting it on my living room wall.

I knew Trump was impervious to stress, but I had no idea how deep it ran. He is a marvel.

The Secret Service needs to be fixed, as does its reputation. Today, tens of thousands of nutjobs who used to be afraid of the Secret Service are suddenly wondering if they gave it too much credit. We need to make criminals afraid of the Secret Service again, fast.

I look forward to seeing a bunch of Secret Service and police officials roasted alive for this debacle. Their organizations need some tough love. If the Secret Service isn’t reformed, no one they allegedly protect will be safe. I hope a lot of useless people are humiliated and forced into retirement by September.

God Hates Displays of Wealth

It’s impossible to trust the government (shocking) when it comes to reports about the prosperity of the American people. For example, it’s possible to have a low official unemployment number when an unusually large number of people are unemployed.

A few years ago, I came up with the Baldor Bench Grinder Index. You go to Ebay and search for used Baldor bench grinders.

When times are hard, people sell their tools. Back during the Clinton forced-minority loan housing crisis, I got a barely-used 19″ Shop Fox band saw for way less than it ordinarily cost. I got a Powermatic 66 table saw with a big extension, Biesemeyer fence, and a punch of pricey blades for $500. Both tools came from cabinetry shops.

When things improve, you don’t see a lot of used Baldor bench grinders on Ebay.

Yesterday, I drove by an auction site. They sell trucks and heavy equipment. I visited a couple of years ago, and the lot was full of junk no intelligent person would buy. Yesterday, there was a lot more stuff. I saw two very nice-looking track loaders (similar to skid steers) right out front.

Today I checked the Baldor Bench Grinder Index. There are a lot of grinders on the market. Maybe 60% more than there were a couple of years ago.

Is the index reliable? I don’t know. The business of selling things online has changed. Craigslist punched Ebay in the gut, and Facebook Marketplace is stomping Craigslist. Seems to me that even if the grinder index had a somewhat low number, it would mean things were not going well. The other sites are taking sales away from Ebay.

Today I saw Charlie Kirk say that 4 years ago, a person needed an income of $59000 to buy a house, and now it’s $106000, meaning you might be excluded even if you have a high-paying profession, such as working at Burger King for $25 per hour.

He said big companies are swallowing up houses and renting them out, driving the purchase prices up. He said lowering interest rates makes things worse by making it easier for corporations to buy homes, decreasing the supply and jacking up prices. I don’t know if that makes any sense, because it also makes it easier for the rest of us to buy homes. Anyway, a lot of young people think they will never own homes.

The difficulty of buying homes and food under Biden, which is indisputable, is a phenomenon we used to call “poverty.” If you had a hard time buying things, we said you were “poor.” Affluence is becoming less common, and poverty is on the rise.

Americans are becoming poor. That’s the short version.

When I was a kid, I heard the term “rich Americans” all the time. When my family visited Europe, the people seemed poor and also short and spindly. Now Americans are descending the ladder of wealth, in terms of net worth. We passed Switzerland, which is number one, per capita. Our GDP per capita is far below Ireland’s, if you can believe it.

I think we are hiding the pain through denial and credit. I sometimes go to fast food joints, where I can expect to pay $13-$25 for a low-quality meal, and I often see a lot of cars in front of them. My county is not wealthy, and I know the people who keep spending on fast food generally can’t afford it. They must be pumping up their credit card balances because they can’t make themselves accept the lower standard of living their incomes now support.

I checked, and credit card debt is now at an all-time high. Adjusted for inflation, the only higher figure was reached in 2008, and we all remember what that was like. Deflation. Prime beef for $7 per pound, because no one could afford it. Shuttered businesses.

I am terrified of debt, so I stay away from it. If I die tomorrow, some credit card companies get a few grand, and that’s it. I don’t know how people can stand lying in bed at night thinking about debt mountains that will kill their estates and leave their heirs with nothing.

On rare occasions, my wife thinks I’m cheap because I won’t pay for something I think is ridiculous, like a Vuitton purse. She always comes to her senses later. She has visited 6 countries with me over 4 years. I don’t expect her to get a job. I try to supply her with more than she needs. She knows this. She has moments when she loses perspective, but she snaps out of it fast.

Lately, God has been teaching me about the evils of ostentation. I believe it’s sinful. I think it turns God against people.

Since purses have already been mentioned, I’ll use them to illustrate the point. A good, durable, classic purse that will last 20 years starts at maybe $300. A $500 purse can be a very good investment. A $2000 purse with little Vuitton symbols all over it is different. It won’t last any longer, and the only thing the extra $1500 gets you is the ability to impress shallow people and hurt the feelings of the poor, who are already humiliated enough.

When I buy boots, I don’t buy $65 Chinese disposables from Rural King. They will hurt my feet, let water in, and fail in less than a year. On the other hand, I don’t spend $1500 on custom-made boots from Oregon. I don’t need them, and I don’t get a good return on the investment. I’ll spend $140-$250 to get something that will last years and do a great job. Very often, $250 boots sell for over a hundred dollars less on Amazon. I have boots I bought over 20 years ago.

Often, buying good, expensive things ends up costing less than buying cheap things. I understand that. And trying to save money has caused me a huge amount of unnecessary pain. But you will never see me in a $500 Gucci baseball cap unless someone puts it on my corpse.

A friend of mine has a diesel Mercedes SUV. I thought he got it because he liked diesels, but now I think he drives it partly for status.

The car has been a nightmare to own. I hate it. It had a persistent limp mode problem for maybe two years. To replace the battery, you have to cut the carpeting or remove the passenger seat. It has cheaply-made engine parts that fail routinely, and they are very expensive to buy. Working on it is pure hell.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. I think they’re both fantastic. Reliable, comfortable, and common, so everyone knows how to fix them, and parts are everywhere. I never asked myself whether my wife would be impressed when she saw it. She was supposed to be impressed with me and the way I treated her, not a machine. But a big percentage of American women–this is incomprehensible to me–are put off by great men in ordinary cars. Incredibly, there are millions of women in American who will have sex with you just because you have a high-end car. That’s worse than being a whore. A whore gets paid.

My friend has an Iphone, which he hates. I asked him why he got it. He said he got it because women like them. I can’t figure out how it feels to think that way. If women started saying they were insanely excited by men in a certain $3 shirt from Tractor Supply, I wouldn’t buy one.

My wife likes Land Rovers. She will never have one if I have to pay for it. They’re unreliable. They cost a fortune. The insurance is high. They only exist to impress people who don’t matter.

My car is now 9 years old. It has fewer than 75,000 miles on it. It has no rust. The interior is good. I may drive it until I die. It has antilock brakes, a bunch of airbags, climate control, and comfortable seats. It was made before spy technology made it possible for the government to shut cars down and helped insurance companies find out how people drove.

What else do I need?

I’m building up her jewelry collection. A woman has to have jewelry. I get her tasteful pieces that look great, but I will never jeopardize our future by buying a ruby the size of a lima bean. Apart from the cost, over-the-top jewelry makes women look shallow. A lot of it makes them look ghetto.

God has given us extraordinary blessings. We have a nice house in a secluded area far from the Satanic lefist and Islamist mobs. Away from the constant parade of murderous, entitled sexual perverts. We have enough wealth. We have good food and clothing. We don’t have to go to work and bend the knee to a system designed to crush Christians.

He didn’t give us these things because we were good people who deserved it. He let himself be tortured to death so he could show his love by giving us all this in spite of the fact that we are failures. If we show off and make other people feel bad, and if we want them to admire us for receiving charity in return for our histories of vileness, then we are provoking God to take it all away and give us what we deserve.

There are tens of millions of Americans out there spending money they have not earned, along with crippling interest, in order to make other people (sincere Kardashian fans and influence-worshipers) think they’re bigger deals than they are. These are the same people who go on Facebook and post photos of their cars and dream vacations. They are the same people who post glowing remarks about their perfect families while they are having screaming fights in front of their kids or losing children to homosexuality and drugs.

I don’t understand the social media liars. Everyone who knows them knows about their failures, and they talk.

I used to go to church with a deacon named Manny. He called himself an architect, and he called his business and architecture and engineering firm. He has never been to college. He’s committing crimes by pretending to be a licensed professional. If he ever tries to design anything, he could get someone killed.

His wife used to post family photos and say how wonderful their lives were. Meanwhile, she texted a friend of mine and said her life was a living hell and she had to get away from Manny.

My wife knows a model from Zambia. She lives in the USA. She posts photos of her expensive things, like $30,000 purses. This is a common thing in Africa, as it is among ghetto people here. Bragging is considered acceptable, and people who do it also make fun of the poor people who comment.

My wife says she just found out this woman is a whore. Are the purses real? Well, she lied about herself, so she’ll lie about a purse. What about the cars? Anyone can stand next to someone else’s car in a picture. Ghetto people do it all the time. Same people who get a hundred singles and one hundred-dollar bill, put the big bill on the top, and fan the whole stack out in pictures so it looks like they have $10,000.

I don’t think it’s evil to drive a nice mid-priced car through a slum. It’s not evil to have a big house as long as it’s not a nouveau-riche status symbol tarted up with things like a helipad. I think it’s fine to go on vacation and use a good camera to take pictures in a poor country. But God surely hates showing off, which is gratuitous. You have to watch it.

I hope that if we really are looking at a permanently lowered American standard of living, God spares his children and helps us to be generous and quiet. With all the other spirits, nations, and people out there trying to destroy our prosperity, the last thing we need is to join them.

I’m going to make a special effort to toe the line and get my wife to do the same.

Yard and Household Junk Fills in for Professional Models

As part of my preparation for a foreign trip which has been either delayed or canceled due to the difficulty of getting a visa for my wife, I improved my camera equipment. I got a better strap for my Canon 200D, and I got two zooms. A 10-18mm and an 18-135mm. I have been fooling with them. Might as well learn how to shoot, even if I have to do it in my yard for the time being.

The theory behind buying lenses for a 2017 camera which is not as good as my 2023 camera is that the 200D is lighter and would be less painful to lose than the new one. It will take excellent photos, even if the new camera might do somewhat better. Sometimes excellent is good enough.

I thought the wide lens would be good for indoor pictures in certain circumstances. You don’t always have the ability to back up far enough to take a scene in with a long lens, so you can lose shots. Someone questioned my choice, wondering why anyone would travel with a wide lens. I don’t know much about the subject, but it seems to me anyone who spends a lot on important trips would want versatility instead of falling back on a cell phone to take shots his camera’s only lens couldn’t handle.

I figured the longer zoom would be very, very versatile, so even if it didn’t give me the absolute best image quality, it would be a good choice for travel. Again, excellent can be okay.

As for what “best,” means, I don’t know. A lot of people are obsessed with super-sharp photos, and the zoom I turned down when I got the 18-135mm is sharp. It looks like a lot of lenses that aren’t considered very sharp these days are actually sharper than overly-picky people let on. Also, there is a program called Topaz that can improve the apparent sharpness of photos. I guess it’s a cheat, but then every digital camera is a big box of cheat.

There is a lot more to good photography than brutal sharpness, and sometimes you want a photo to be a little less forward-looking.

A lot of history’s best-loved photos aren’t extremely sharp.

I took a few shots with each lens. I’ll be trying to do more.

I really like photography, and I should have gotten more deeply into it 18 years ago, when I got my first real DSLR. Had I done that, I would have a huge collection of great photos now, and I would know more about creating great photos.

Here’s something weird: editing and looking at my own photos is extremely relaxing. I don’t know why. I can sit and stare at a photo I shot for a long time, feeling my blood pressure drop, even if the photo isn’t really good. This isn’t true of every photo I take, but it’s true of the ones that have some not-always-definable qualities I like.

I was desperate for things to shoot today. The light was fading when I started, and there wasn’t much out there. Or maybe I didn’t have the imagination to see what was out there. I took some shots of a few objects to see what the lens could do.

When I came in, I fiddled with editing software. I have started shooting raw files, which means my camera saves files just as it sees them. Ordinarily, cameras save in formats like jpg, which are actually pre-edited by the cameras to make them look better. A jpg may look nice, but when a jpg is created, you lose a lot of data, and that limits what you can do when you edit.

I wanted editing software so I could shoot raw, so I looked for advice, and I ended up getting Adobe Photoshop Elements. I don’t like it. The interface makes no sense at all, so I am constantly having to figure out how to do what I want to do.

Another problem: for some reason, Adobe’s program damages raw files as you edit. When you edit a text document, there is no permanent change until you save it. When you edit a photo with Photoshop, the file is changed, so you lose things. That’s annoying. There has to be some reason for it, but it sounds stupid to me.

Right now, I’m trying Affinity Photo 2, a competitor’s program. Unlike Photoshop, it can be bought. You can only rent Photoshop, and it costs $10 per month. Next year, it will probaby cost more. You can get Affinity Photo 2 a lot cheaper, paying only once.

My understanding is that Photoshop is better, but I’m not a pro, and I’m not doing extreme things. I crop and fiddle with color and sharpness and so on. I’m not trying to simulate psilocybin trips. I may end up buying Photo 2.

I think Adobe’s Lightroom would have been better than Photoshop. I made a good effort to find out what I needed, and Photoshop came out on top, but now I think I was wrong. Lightroom is supposed to be less powerful but easier to use, and it helps you organize photos. Lightroom is another rent-only program, so I am averse to trying it.

You know what they say. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Yeah, and arbacht macht frei. Saying something stupid to people you want to control doesn’t make it true.

I like owning stuff.

I’ll put up a few photos I really like looking at. First, the 10-18mm zoom, and then the 18-135mm.

Here is a hat I bought in Cancun, along with a 2006 DSLR lens I haven’t been able to cleanse of cockatoo dust.

Don’t ask me why. I enjoy looking at it. The composition could be better, and the only story the photo tells is, “I needed to take a picture to test a lens,” but I still like it.

I took a shot of a tire inflator in my workshop. It’s sort of a macro shot, which is not what you should do with a wide lens, but it was there, so I took the picture. The detail is not too bad, considering. The shot you see is not as clear as the original, because I reduced the size a great deal so I could post it.

These shots were edited, painfully, with Photoshop.

While I was shooting with the 18-135mm, I found a few objects I could use. Once again, I acted like I had a macro lens. I shot a couple of magnolia blossoms. I edited the shots in Photo 2.

I didn’t think much of these photos when I took them. I was just trying to see what the lens would do. After I edited them, though, I found them oddly engrossing.

I boosted the color a little, and I increased “clarity,” which may be the same thing as sharpness for all I know. Jacking up clarity brought out the weird veiny features in the petals. If you bring them out too much, the blossoms start to look like something from a Frankenstein movie.

They don’t really look like they do in these photos, and I guess that’s what makes photography an art.

The lens I used is not supposed to create bokeh, the creamy blurriness you see in the background of the second shot, but I tried to create it, and I got it. Not sure how that happened.

I thought these shots would be terrible, because I wasn’t thinking much about composition and so on, but they’re much more pleasing than expected.

I’m going to try to get out there and shoot more stuff. I have a habit of shooting small things, because the big things I have around here aren’t that interesting. I need to try to make them interesting.

I think this is a great hobby for people who want to decorate their houses but don’t want to spend a lot on art. A good original photo, blown up to painting size, runs about $17, and it’s a lot more interesting than a cheesy Van Gogh print or a lithograph by some artist who never sold anything for more than $500 except maybe a lawnmower on Craigslist.

If you photograph people you care about, so much the better.

I don’t plan to put photos of the wife up here, but we have 4 huge photos of us on our walls, and there will be more. I also have shots of friends and their kids, as well as my pets.

This is not a hard hobby. It may be hard for me to create pictures other people like or respect, but I can take photos I like all day long.

Fungal Bungles

Today I had an interesting experience involving photography and the lawnmower.

I was riding along beside the fence that separates the pasture from the yard, in a long, grassy strip that resembles a road. I looked ahead and saw a couple of clusters of mushrooms. They were pretty new. Ordinarily, I would have splattered them with the mower, but I realized I was seeing something I could photograph, so I mowed around them.

When I went back later, I realized I only liked one of the clusters, so I tried to take a few shots with a Sigma 105mm macro lens. I was carrying it because I hoped to find some small things to shoot. Smaller than mushrooms.

Fortunately, not every shot I take with this lens has to be a real macro shot. I was able to shoot from far enough away to get the whole mushroom cluster in the photo.

I shot some more stuff I will probably delete, and then I edited two raw photos. You see them below.

I’m reasonably happy. The focus is bad, because I keep overestimating the depth of field, but the pictures showed potential. I picked a fairly good subject, the composition is okay, and but for the depth of field issue, these pictures would have been pretty good.

I like editing raw photos. Seems like I can stretch my work a lot closer to adequate. I am using the trial version of Photoshop Elements, and I plan to buy it.

The second photo is a little disturbing to me, because Photoshop cropped it. I did a crop first, and then I saw that the program was recommending its own crops. A couple were hideous, but then I saw the third, which was just like mine, only better. So am I still a photographer if a program crops my photos?

I learned I should not be afraid to clean up the area around things I shoot. I thought the blades of grass in the foreground would add context, but they are just distracting.

I tried to get a shot of another mushroom I spared with the mower, but the depth of field problem was so bad, it’s not even worth posting. I need to make a strong effort to preview depth of field in the future. It’s not all that easy when you’re on the ground looking down at your camera, especially if the sun is bright.

I tried to shoot some little weed blossoms, but this lens is not great for really small subjects. Disappointing. There is a very good Chinese manual focus lens that could be better. It has 2x magnification.

I’m not afraid to give up autofocus. I don’t really like it. It seems like it’s not as trustworthy as manual, and it doesn’t always want to focus on the right thing. I can spend the rest of my life mastering the camera’s focus programming, and I guess I’ll get sharper shots than I get now, but I already know how to focus manually.

Great photographers took very good photos for decades with manual focus, so I feel like I should be able to pull it off.

I would like to shoot more bugs, but they don’t like to pose. I had an idea: pour sugar water on things and wait for the bugs to arrive. A weak solution should dry and become invisible, but the bugs should still smell it. I’m trying it now. Tomorrow I’ll go out and see if anyone has shown up.

I have to be more serious about recognizing subjects, I saw some interesting mushrooms at the base of a tree, and I kicked them to see if they were mushrooms or edible fungus. It wasn’t until later that I thought about taking a picture.

I also have to learn not to go out and shoot things on the ground right after dinner. It’s not the best time to be squatting and bending over.

These mushrooms should keep popping up until the cold weather comes, so I should be able to get some really neat photos once I figure the depth of field out. As it is, I am a disgrace to the body of people who own this lens, which is supposed to be excellent.

I could have done better with the DSLR, but I’m not going there. I have to master this camera.

It’s Good if You Think it’s Good

It’s a milestone day. Last night, ghetto kids, and probably many people who were not kids, sacked an area of downtown Philadelphia like Nazis raiding Jewish stores. They fought the police, of course. At about the same time, Target announced it was closing a whole bunch of stores, including locations in Harlem, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Hmm. What do those locations have in common? The amazing thing is that Target came out and admitted crime was the reason. Not just crippling theft, but violence which exposed the company to lawsuits from employees, customers, and their families.

Target snitched on its urban customer base. The gloves are off.

What were the stores most prominently mentioned in the Philadelphia story? Apple (phones treasured by ghetto kids), Foot Locker (expensive athletic shoes), and Lululemon (major vendor of trashy twerking pants). Is it a dog whistle if a news organization mentions the companies?

WGN, a big Chicago news station, just ran a story about a Democrat mayor (El Paso) busing illegal aliens to a “sanctuary” city (Chicago) with a black mayor. Two things to take away once you’ve seen the video: Democrat mayor doing what DeSantis and Abbott did, which was supposedly cruel when they did it, and the WGN team sympathizing with him and making it clear the invasion is a problem.

When a major news organization in Chicago starts repeating conservative talking points about illegal aliens, it’s a day of note.

The world really is ending. It’s amazing, watching videos about our sudden plunge into chaos. I feel like I’ve been sucked into the TV screen during a disaster movie. You know how they create fake news shows. “Godzilla just used San Francisco’s South of Market area as a litterbox, and he’s headed for Palo Alto!” “The asteroid has hit, and here’s a live feed of a tsunami swallowing Leonardo Dicaprio’s house!” It’s all happening now, but it’s real.

I predicted this years ago, and even though I believed what I was saying, it’s still hard to fully accept as reality. Vote for whomever you want. Buy a solar roof. Learn to grow potatoes. It won’t help.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. I don’t know what else to say. Sooner or later, the wave will make it to your area.

Every big city in America is becoming Detroit.

Businesses are boarded up all over America. Crime and covid ended them. Covid drove people to remote work, which they really like, because it’s easier to get away with doing very little at home. Now they don’t want to go to cities and support stores, restaurants, and landlords. BLM and Antifa taught people crime was a human right, so even if people wanted to return, many are afraid to. Commercial property values are tanking. Maybe next year you’ll be able to buy the Chrysler Building for a thousand dollars.

A long time ago, I saw Detroit described as a doughnut. The suburbs were the ring, and the center, which was destroyed by the people of Detroit, was the hole. I guess we’re going to see a lot of doughnuts in the near future. A lot of worthless toilets that used to be centers of commerce where decent people could live decent lives.

In other news, I saw a great video about photography. It was about photographer Vivian Maier, sort of. Really, it was about the importance of taking pictures primarily to please yourself.

Maier worked in Chicago, and she left hundreds of thousands of negatives behind. She did not exhibit her work. Somehow, she was discovered after she died. Her photos are excellent. Truly exceptional.

Was she a great photographer, or will anyone who takes half a million pictures produce extraordinary work inadvertently? Is it a million-monkeys thing? I think the explanation has to be talent. There are millions of monkeys out there taking hundreds of thousands of pictures each, and most of them don’t produce much of value.

The gist of the video seems to be that you shouldn’t feel you have to post everything you shoot on the web in order to justify what you do. If it’s satisfying to you, that’s enough, and it’s more validating than likes from people who think Kim Kardashian and Joe Biden are saving the world.

I have been caught up in the mechanics of taking photos. F stops. Lenses. Figuring out endless camera menus. I should be thinking more about whether I like the pictures, and I should not be eager to discard pictures I think are flawed. Sometimes a picture that is over- or underexposed or blurry can be very satisfying.

I should know this better than anyone, because I write and cook primarily to suit my own tastes. I can’t say I would write as much if I knew no one would read it, but know NEARLY no one reads, and I still sit down and type.

As noted in my last post, I decided to get a used Canon SL2 to replace my 350D. I couldn’t make myself sell my lenses, which are nearly worthless, and the camera is worth so little, I would have to either throw it out or let it sit in a closet until my heirs threw it out. I felt like dropping $300 on a new body would make me happier. It arrives today.

I think it was a smart move. I’ll be more willing to risk damaging or losing it than the big new Sony, and the photos should be just as good, albeit a little smaller.

I got a flash for the Sony. I am getting nowhere with it. It works in either TTL (through the lens) or manual mode. My understanding is that TTL is for idiots. The flash receives data from the camera, as though looking through your lens, and it decides what kind of light to give you. The lens tells the camera your F stop and focal length, and your camera relays the information to the flash.

I tried idiot mode yesterday, and I got idiot photos. I turned the light in my dining room down to restaurant levels, and I tried to shoot as though I were taking travel photos in a restaurant. I got very grainy, poorly focused pictures. Because I was using a 15mm lens (I surmise), I also got something resembling vignetting. There were shadows around the photo’s center. I think the flash was not prepared for the wide field of view. The lens I used doesn’t tell the flash anything. It’s a manual lens.

I also tried a longer lens that was not manual, and things were little better, although turning the flash upward and back for indirect light killed the vignetting.

I kept getting really slow shutter speeds, and when I used automatic ISO, it went way up. This increases noise.

As a photo ignoramus, I just assumed a good flash would let you take decent pictures in a restaurant. I didn’t think the shutter would slow down to nothing. I didn’t expect the ISO to skyrocket. I thought the whole purpose of a flash was to fix those problems.

I have not tried using the flash’s manual mode yet. It seems to me that if idiot mode is too hard, manual, which requires knowledge, is still a ways off.

Of course, now that I have a good APS-C camera on the way, to save money, sort of, I am starting to want a new APS-C lens. As was said of King Lear, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” I should have seen this coming.

APS-C is good for travel because the camera and lenses are smaller and cheaper, and travel is upcoming.

My wife’s arrival here appears to be very close. The other day I was cleaning up the kitchen, and I considered giving away the T-Fal deep fryer. I find it useless and unpleasant to handle and clean, and it takes up room. She said I should keep it until she gets here, and they we can decide. Her expected arrival is so close, it actually made sense to say that.

If she gets the go-ahead, and we also get a European visa we applied for, we will visit Prague and Rome, so plenty to photograph and film.

My macro efforts are going badly. Part of it is getting use to the new lens and camera, but I’m also having a hard time finding critters to shoot. I had an idea: spray some plants with sugar water. It won’t show on film, and it will draw bees and flies. I may try it.

The guy who did the video I posted did another video about exercises to help photographers make the most of their surroundings. They are intended to help you see potential in things you would usually walk by. I may try them.

Having seen the videos, I feel like I need to amend my photography philosophy. I have been dividing photos into two types: documentary (Louanne and I were at the world’s largest ball of string) and artistic (Check out the amazing bokeh on this tiny orchid). Now I think I have to create subcategories: photos that obey the rules, and those that don’t. People keep telling photographers to make everything sharp and look for textbook composition and lighting, but sometimes a photo is better because it breaks those rules. I think I have to start throwing photos out because they’re bad, not because they would get me bad grades in a community college course. I should hold onto strange photos that are still pleasing.

I like photos that tell a story, but today I realized I also like photos that suggest there is a story no one is telling you. Sometimes a photo is telling you a story, just like a Normal Rockwell painting. “These boys got caught skinny-dipping.” Other pictures suggest something is going on, but you can’t figure out what it is. “This man is grinning, and the woman is furious, but why?”

Lots of things to think about when you take a photo. There are lots of things that can give a photo merit in one way when it appears worthless in other ways.

None of this philosophizing will do me any good until I learn how to work the equipment. I’ll get back to it today.

Bugs are Demanding Models

It has been a while since I got my Sigma 105mm macro lens for my new Sony camera, and I still haven’t been able to accomplish much. It’s hard to get used to the controls, and the lens and camera, together, just seem hard to operate.

I went outside and looked around for macro opportunities, and as luck would have it, a big, fat carpenter bee started feeding on the blossoms on the weeds by my house. I ran over and started trying to capture him doing something interesting. It was pretty much impossible to focus in time to get a decent shot. I got one depressing picture of him flying out of the scene.

Later on, I saw some kind of wasp or bee on a blossom, and he was taking his time, so I didn’t have to chase him. I got all excited and tried to shoot him. Afterward, I realized I had forgotten to check the shutter speed and ISO. Here is the best picture I got, and this is AFTER a lot of doctoring. Of course, it’s slightly better at full size.

The exposure is horrendous, and it can’t be fixed.

Yesterday, I decided to try shooting in RAW format, and today I tried editing. I tried to photograph some lantana blossoms. I could not get a good sharp picture, and the photo seemed dark in spite of checking the exposure. I used Photoshop and Camera Raw to try to fix the picture up, but it’s still a mess. I only took one shot because I had to shoot from a very uncomfortable position.

I’ve been thinking maybe I got the wrong lens. The Sigma is heavy, and the best magnification you can get is 1x. A Youtube macro guy says the Laowa 58mm macro is the way to go. It’s small and light, and you can photograph things between one and three inches away, which makes life easier. It does 2x magnification, so you can get shots the Sigma won’t get.

I have a perfectly good APS-C Sigma macro lens for my old Rebel 350D, but I don’t want to spend the rest of the year taking 8MP pictures. When I first started thinking about getting better equipment, I assumed I would use my old lenses, and people said I should get a newer body that would fit them. They recommended the T7, also called the 2000D. It looked great compared to my 350D, but while I was researching it, I learned that DSLR’s are now obsolescent, so I didn’t go for it. I bought a mirrorless.

Today I started considering the T7 again. I found out the resale value on my old lenses is about enough to buy three pizzas, so selling them will not be very rewarding, and they are capable of very good work. I looked around, and I decided to pick up a used Canon SL2 body.

This body is considerably better than a T7. It’s lighter than my full frame. It does video. It has 24 megapixels. It will give me an excuse to keep my old camera bag. I can use it when I’m afraid to take the Sony out or when I travel to places where good cameras tend to get stolen.

Now I should be able to get some decent macro shots, one way or the other. Eventually, I should get somewhere with the Sigma on the Sony camera. Until then, I can produce some useful work with the Canon.

I have an external flash coming, along with a cheap flash diffuser. I learned that you need a fast shutter to do macro on anything that moves. Bugs flap fast. To get good lighting, you use a flash, and the diffuser prevents it from looking like, well, flash.

Working with raw files sounded intimidating, but it doesn’t seem too hard. It seems pretty much like fixing JPG’s in Photoshop Elements, but you have a wider range of adjustments, and you are a lot more likely to be able to save iffy shots.

Tomorrow my used Laowa 15mm zero-distortion lens gets here. That should be a lot of fun while traveling. We are hoping to go to Rome, and it sounds like the perfect lens for shooting inside old buildings. I don’t know what I’ll do with it here, though.

My wife should be here for good in as little as 5 weeks. It is possible I will meet her in another country and fly home with her. That would give us a lot of photo opportunities. She is very supportive of the whole thing, because like me, she has very, very few childhood pictures of herself. We want to do better.

Sorry for the lame pictures, but I am plugging away, and I expect better results before long.

I Think I See Waldo Behind a Tree

My efforts to become an award-winning photographer are going poorly at the moment.

I took some okay photos with my old Canon 350D and my new Sony ZV1M2, and I got all excited and bought a Sony A7IV, which is sort of a low-end pro camera. I got myself a 24-70mm lens and started shooting.

First problem: macro is not really an option.

I had been doing macro photos with the Canon, and I was extremely pleased with them. My farm is a good place for macro photos. I guess any place is good for macro photos, because you’re shooting things the size of a quarter. Shrinking the size of your subjects increases the number of potential subjects per unit of area. You can spend all day shooting macro in your house.

The new lens does not like macro. You can’t get close enough to little things to really fill the screen, so you end up with longer shots you have to crop, and even with this camera’s huge sensor, you can only crop so much. Also, I’m not very good at using the camera.

In addition to these problems, I have a lot of mosquitoes right now, and I need to get on the tractor and bush hog a lot of the farm. Thorny, unproductive blackberry bushes are taking over, and there is also some kind of stinging weed that sets your ankles on fire. The farm is not the most pleasant studio at the moment.

Giving up on macro puts me in a position where I have to find bigger things to shoot, so now I have many fewer subjects to choose from. I am struggling to find subjects, and it is not going all that well.

I ordered a real macro lens, and while I wait, I’m shooting bigger stuff, including landscapes.

I think my farm is beautiful. I treasure it. God used it to save me from Miami. But let’s get real. The land is flat by landscape photo standards, there are no creeks or rivers, there is no lake, there aren’t many big flowers…it’s not like the same size parcel in Switzerland or Norway.

Yesterday I walked all over, trying to find things to shoot. My understanding was that it was best to shoot when the sun was low, so I went out in the afternoon. The sun was still blazing like a thermonuclear blast, which, I guess, it was. The grass looked bleached. I didn’t know how to cope with the light.

I shot a bunch of garbage anyway, because I knew it would help me learn. Trying to find subjects is good practice even when you fail, and I was also getting familiar with the camera.

The landscape shots, apart from being shot in kind of a boring area, seem like subjectless photos. Photoshop people into them, and they would be fine. As it is, they’re like big empty frames.

I’m starting to wonder: are there places where you just can’t take a lot of wide shots, even if you’re good? I’m not saying I’m good, but I have taken some decent pictures.

I think a lot of people would say a good photographer can take great photos anywhere. I’m guessing, because that sounds like the kind of thing people would say, because they say things like that. But I have to point out that when Ansel Adams wanted to take great photos, he went to Yosemite. He didn’t hole up in his house, shooting dust bunnies and refrigerator magnets.

I Googled his photos, and I don’t see any shots of his toaster or recliner.

The macro lens will arrive tomorrow, and I expect it to save my life. You can never run out of macro subjects.

So, getting back to things like landscapes and street photos, I’m wondering if I’m going to have to start getting in the car and wandering around in public. Also, am I going to live for traveling with my wife? When you travel, you run into good stuff all the time.

I think I should get a wide angle lens for the future. I mean like 12mm or so. Not a fisheye, either. One that leaves straight lines straight. A really wide lens will give me stuff which is very different from my current minimum focal length of 24mm. It will also let me shoot in very small places without losing everything except someone’s elbow or a napkin dispenser.

I have looked at photos from different wide angle lenses, and I feel like a person’s first wide lens should be very, very wide. When you spend a lot on a lens, you want it to do something very different from what your old lenses do. If all you have is a 24-70mm, you don’t want to buy a 20mm lens.

I like the dramatic feel of wide angle photos, and it’s neat, the way they can make the observer seem isolated from the subject matter. When a lens pushes people away, it lets you know you’re not part of the action. You’re like John Cusack, in the portal, watching a lesbian live his intended life with his ex-girlfriend.

In Singapore’s airport, I used my phone to take a wide shot I really liked. It helped motivate me to think about wide lenses. I tried to find out what sort of lens the phone had. I figured that if I could find this out, I could get a lens just like it.

It turned out the center lens on my phone was (allegedly) a 24mm. I have that already, in my zoom.

If I lived in Singapore, I could go to the airport and take the same shot with my zoom, to see if the 24mm measurement is really correct. Can’t do it from here, though.

The web says my phone’s sensor has 50 megapixels. Can that be true? That’s insane. I think the Hubble only has 40. You get 50 with the center lens, 10 with the long lens, and 12 with the telephoto. On one $750 camera. Which is supposed to be a telephone.

The world has gone nuts.

The wide lens on this phone is said to be 13mm. If I had started thinking about still photography before the trip, I could have done more wide shots.

Is 13mm on the phone the same as 13mm on a full-frame camera? You tell me.

Really good wide lenses, like nearly all really good lenses, are really expensive. I found one that could be a bargain, though. A company named Laowa makes a 9mm job which features zero distortion. It’s affordable, it’s very small, and it’s light. It gets good reviews. The only problem is that it does not do autofocus.

Do you really have to have autofocus all the time, especially when you’re doing crazy-wide shots? I don’t really see myself suddenly developing an urge to shoot moving subjects at 9mm. Also, the depth of field is always large with this thing.

It’s difficult to make equipment decisions when you know as little about photography as I do. I am seeking advice on the web. Maybe trial and error are inevitable.

When the macro lens gets here tomorrow, I should be able to produce some acceptable shots. It should keep me supplied with subjects for, well, ever. Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for ways to get good material out of the zoom. I might pick up the Laowa.

At ISO 2000, I Don’t Mind the Grey Skies

My new camera arrived today. I decided I can now call myself a photographer. I have decent equipment that will allow me to create really excellent photos. Can you call yourself a photographer when you’re not highly trained? Yes, if you are capable of doing acceptable work. This is my ruling, based on the fact that there are innumerable experienced professionals out there, making a living, who couldn’t take a decent passport photo on the best days of their lives.

Maybe someone else out there is trying to decide which mid-range mirrorless camera to get for travel, so I will issue a couple of conclusions.

I was torn between two models: the Sony A7IV, which is full-size, and the AC7II, which is nearly the same camera in a compact package. I fretted a lot about this. I am a pretty experienced world traveler, and I know what it’s like to lug heavy stuff around while walking several miles per day.

Get the bigger camera. The difference between the compact and full-size jobs is nearly nothing, and once you put a huge lens on your camera, you will realize how stupid you were to worry about it.

I bought a 24-70mm zoom, and it’s as big as a can of corn. It’s bigger than the 17-17mm EF lens I had on the old Canon 350D. Attaching it to a camera that weighs 4 ounces less and is about 1/4″ shorter across the front is going to make no difference at all, and bigger stuff works better because there are fewer internal compromises. Big stuff overheats less. It has more features. It’s what you want.

This camera has a much better viewfinder than the small one, and it’s in the center, the correct place. It’s also shaded, unlike the one on the AC7II. You don’t want to fight with the sun when you look through a camera with old creaky eyeballs.

If all I had was a pancake (stubby non-zoom) lens, maybe I could bring myself to care about the difference in camera body size, but with this mechanical whale hanging off the front, the body doesn’t make much difference.

One disappointment: no charger tray. There is a charger, but you can’t attach it to the battery. You have to plug it into the camera itself, so if you have multiple batteries, you can’t charge one while using another. Amazon has a fantastic charger tray for $19. It takes two batteries, and it accepts USB-C and that other connector which is shaped like a “D.” It will charge two batteries at once, and it will give you a use for your old USB cables.

The bag B&H included with the camera at no charge is great. It’s a high-quality bag, just like the Lowepros I’ve had. The free memory card is a $120 Sony. The free second battery is a somewhat questionable brand, but they are all somewhat questionable, and this brand, Watson, is the least questionable. It costs something like $60 by itself, so no complaints here. A new Sony battery runs $80, so if this one is any good at all, I will be very pleased.

Sony sent its own battery empty. Bummer. I stuck the Watson in the camera, and it said it was at 58%. I’m charging it while I type this, and I’ll have to survive the weekend using the camera as a tray. Then the new one will arrive. This camera will supposedly take nearly 600 shots on one Sony-battery charge, so I should be okay. It will do two hours of 4K video, which I never plan to shoot. I’m a 1080p guy until someone changes my mind.

The Sony strap is not great. It’s thin, so it will cut into my neck. I’ll have to find a replacement.

I’m going to take the camera outside and see what I can shoot. I hope it’s less annoying than the 350D. The 350D is a fine camera, but it does some irritating things, like shutting off the internal display right before you take a picture.

I might conceivably read the new camera’s manual, but I doubt it. That would be cheating.

The lens looks perfectly fine to me. I’m not much of a photographer, and I try not to be a cork-sniffer. I know serious pros can criticize any lens. I’m going to shoot some regular shots and some extreme closeups and then render a premature, poorly-informed verdict. My bet is that if this lens has any real issues, it will be at least 6 months before I realize it.

I don’t look forward to lugging this thing around, and I hate looking like a Japanese tourist, but I should be rewarded abundantly for the effort.

I’m really happy about this. I did the right thing. I didn’t worry too much about saving my pennies, the way I did when I got the Canon and the small mirrorless Sony. I got something that will get the job done for a good long while. There will be fewer times when I can’t do something well because the camera won’t let me, and years from now, if the rapture is that far off, my family will have a lot of wonderful imagery to help us relive shared history.

I’ll tell you something weird about doing little bits of nature photography. It relaxes me to look at my own work. I don’t know why. When I take a shot I like, and I put it on the TV and stare at it, my blood pressure plummets. All my worries vanish. It makes me wonder if putting a few framed photos up in the house will improve my health and mental state.

I did not see this coming.

I generally don’t feel this way when I look at other people’s photos.

I supposed it makes sense that looking at God’s work is a little bit like being with God, who radiates peace in all directions.

Guess I should order a strap and then put the camera to the test. It will be a big relief, taking the ISO above 200.

MORE

I fired the new camera up and wandered around looking for things to shoot.

First thing I realized: this is not an ideal macro lens. You can get some good shots with it, but it’s not all that easy, and when you shoot things that are really small, you have to crop a lot.

Here are a couple of things I shot. I don’t think the first shot is great, but it’s acceptable for today’s purpose, which is to get the camera to work. It’s a bunch of leaves on a tree in the side yard.

Here is another weed blossom. The depth of field is too shallow, but I love the dark green background. It’s less grainy at the original resolution. Still too grainy to blow up.

Here’s one more weed blossom, cropped two different ways.

Finally, a shot of the goat shed. Here, I was learning how to avoid lying in the manure by using the flip screen. I extended the screen and looked at it while I lowered the camera.

I am able to take shots that were out of reach for the Canon 350D, and I have a lot more room to crop, so all is well.

Your Kids Can be Just as Crazy as You

I can’t believe the world I live in.

In California, it is now possible for the state to punish parents who refuse to pay for the castration of their children.

Where did I wake up today? Is this Mars? Am I on life support, receiving a feed of AI-generated fiction while they get ready to pull the plug?

Pull it! Pull it!

The number of the relevant bill is AB-957, and the legislature just passed it. All it lacks is the signature of Gavin Newsom, which it will, of course, get.

Conservatives are oversimplifying the law, making it sound as though parents who refuse to support child mutilation or perversion will automatically lose custody. Leftist nuts are doing a poor job of defending the law, saying it only requires judges hearing custody cases to consider failure to support mutilation or perversion.

No matter how much lipstick you put on it, it allows judges to take custody away from parents who are terrified of seeing their children cut up and sterilized.

So what do you do now, if you’re a California father (it’s always the father), and you are terrified that a savage with a scalpel is going to slice your son’s penis open, scrape out the insides, and turn it inside out? What do you do to prevent your daughter’s breasts from being sliced off and discarded, her arm or leg skinned, and the skin being turned into a grotesque false penis?

This is what “bottom surgery” really means. Go Google pictures.

Talk about feeling powerless. Imagine having to stand in your house, looking out the window, as cops and social workers take your confused son off to have his testicles removed and incinerated.

This is enough. This age has lasted long enough. It’s time for Jesus to put an end to it. That’s my take, anyway. I don’t tell Jesus what to do, and maybe God has reasons for extending this ordeal, but if it were up to me, I’d remove Christians from the world today. I think we’re accomplishing nearly nothing here.

My wife should become a permanent resident in a few weeks. Then we will try to have kids. What planet are we supposed to raise them on? Assume one is born a year from today, which is about the best possible scenario. If things are this insane now, what will they be like when our child turns 18? I can’t even imagine it.

Are we supposed to live in a cave? Will we have to move to Africa and live in a country where sodomy is a crime and Christianity is in the constitution?

Right now, I have a great governor who shelters us, and there is a huge influx of sane, decent people, pumping up the conservative voter base. That won’t last forever. Sooner or later, Florida will go full-throttle pervert.

It’s bad even with DeSantis in charge. I listened to a legal “education” video the other day, and the participants were people who dealt with runaways and so on. These were people who are part of the system. Powerful people in low places. When you have a problem with your kids, you don’t get to deal with Ron DeSantis. You deal with these lunatics.

They insist–INSIST–that lawyers call runaways “absent from care.” The term “runaway” is somehow harmful, though completely accurate. If the cops rescue a child prostitute from captivity, you can’t use the word “rescue,” because–not kidding here–it implies all of the problems are solved. Of course, it implies nothing of the sort, but this is leftist insanity for you.

You can’t use the terms “prostitute” and “prostitution.” You can’t tell older kids who take drugs and turn tricks they are in any way accountable for what they do, even though they are. You have to tell them they’re victims, so they never take accountability and take control of their lives.

The whole thing made me want to puke.

These wackjobs come from the same milieu as the ones who come to take your kids when they think you’re misbehaving. I’m sure they would be forcing parents to support child mutilation if they could.

The Deep State isn’t just a federal thing. Every state has a deep state, and they are overwhelmingly leftist, i.e. psychotic and tyrannical. Government worshipers. People who gave their lives to the Beast without even believing he existed.

If you want to understand the level of religious freedom, and freedom to use common sense, that I now have, ask yourself what would have happened if I had objected to what the people in the video were saying. “I want to practice family law, but I insist on using terms like ‘prostitution’ and ‘runaway.'” Would I be allowed to practice? Would I receive a public reprimand?

Reproduction is important to God. It’s the reason he made the universe. We are supposed to generate his children through our bodies. I used to think I wasn’t obligated, but now I believe I am, so I plan to go through with it. I feel like I’m going to be holding drills on a destroyer while torpedoes close in on it.

There is no natural answer. You can’t fix it by voting. You can’t fix it with resistance or violence. It’s a supernatural thing, and repentance, prayer, and submission are the only way out, but Americans aren’t going to do those things in sufficient numbers to fix this country. We’re too busy thinking about red baseball caps and 3wning the libs on social media.

Man, I can’t wait to get out of this place. I don’t want to spend my few remaining years moving from refuge to refuge, ceding more and more of myself and my family to the deranged mob.

People I think of as Christians will turn. Same thing will happen in your life. Suddenly, they’ll be infected with wonderful rationalizations to justify siding with Satan’s herd, and they will come to your house and shame you for not seeing the truth. They’ll say, “If we don’t go along, what are we supposed to do?”, like it’s your responsibility to take God’s role and make things easy for them. I’ve seen this a zillion times. “If I do wrong, and you don’t give me another option, I’m innocent, and you’re guilty.”

The remnant of people who haven’t been corrupted will get smaller and smaller, like Gideon’s army. You’ll have to watch while people fall away and destroy themselves.

My children will want explanations. You know how kids are. If they’re not caught up in the derangement, they’ll want to know what I was thinking when I decided to bring them into this world. The answer is obvious: it was God’s will, so I had to do it. But I won’t be able to tell them things will get anything but worse, or that they have any hope of living in a decent world.

If there was a rocket to heaven standing in my yard right now, I would walk out and get in. Well…I’d do it if my wife had a rocket, too. I couldn’t abandon her here.

In brighter news, I ordered a camera. I was going to get a compact full-frame mirrorless camera, but I decided it would be better to deal with the added bulk and weight and get a real camera. Compact cameras have weird viewfinders and fewer features.

I ordered a lens somewhat like the one I use now. I ordered a Sigma 24-70mm zoom lens. It’s better than the equivalent Sony, and the better Sony that replaced the Sony costs over twice as much. I would have felt bad buying it, given my unending beginner status.

The 24-70mm will be great for almost all my shots, but I think I should still get a prime lens for things like street scenes and shooting in small spaces with dubious lighting. My plan is to use the 24-70mm until I have a clue and then pick out a prime.

A lot of people like the Sony 28mm f/2.8 lens. Seems like the zoom will duplicate its function, though. My understanding is that the zoom’s clarity and sharpness are not as good. Maybe I should go for a shorter lens. I should know in a few days.

I used B&H Photo. Amazon offers my camera at the same price, but you don’t get anything with it. B&H gives you a $100+ memory card, an expensive bag, and an extra battery. You can’t get the camera itself at a lower price by giving up the extras.

I think I know how this works. Sony tells B&H, “We’ll cut you off if you discount our cameras,” but it doesn’t tell them they can’t give things away with them, so B&H undercuts Amazon by giving you a lot of stuff.

I wanted the card and the battery. The bag is just a bonus. I’m sure I’ll find it useful, though.

So why buy a camera to preserve memories for the future, when I think there is no future? That’s a great question. I think the rapture is coming very soon, but God hasn’t sent out a printed bulletin with a date. What if it’s 20 years off? Besides, even if we only get a year of enjoying videos and photos, it will be worth it. I enjoy them now.

What do I do with my old Canon 350D? It’s not worth selling. It would bring about $20. I might be able to get a couple of hundred dollars for my lenses. I would rather just keep everything. A spare camera never hurt anyone. Maybe my wife could learn a few things with it. I would like her to develop basic competence with a camera. We may be in Rome this year.

I went pretty crazy ordering the camera body. I got a Sony A7IV. This is a very good camera when viewed in juxtaposition with my status as a total photo hack. It’s not a pro camera, but pros use it. It will do video and stills very well. It should have a useful life as a primary camera for a decade. It’s not as small or light as some models. I’ll just have to deal with it.

I didn’t choose Canon even though I’ve had two. This business with refusing to license their lens mount is not acceptable. It makes them sound like Apple. There are a zillion lenses for the Sony, and I mean lenses that are made for the Sony mount. No clumsy adaptors.

I should be up and shooting tomorrow. I will try the camera in places where the light was too low for my 350D. I hope it will get me shots I could not get before.

PIX

I’m starting to think I may have enough ability to take decent photos.

Today I was collecting all my Singapore and Hong Kong photos and videos, and I came across this picture of the Jewel building at Singapore’s Changi Airport.

This was just a phone snapshot, and I did not expect a lot from it, but it grabbed my eye. It looks considerably better when not shrunken down to blog size, but even here, you can see that there is a surprising amount of drama going on. If I had paid more attention and also made sure I took it at exactly the right time, it would be a very good picture.

There is implied motion, even though nothing except the water and the people is moving. On the upper right, the glass seems to be flinging itself up and to the right, like a pitcher’s arm, and the wall of plants seems to be swinging up to meet it. On the left, the little wall and the pavement seem to be shooting off down and left. The people look like they’re in a hurry, going somewhere important, even though they’re not. I think that’s because the image is slightly blurred.

There are little stories in the picture. Look at the lady staring at her cell phone. What’s going on with her? And whose kid is that way off in front of her, all by itself?

Never let a woman touch your phone. They put grease on their hands, and after they handle your phone, all the pictures will be blurry.

I also got this picture of a snake out on the patio. This thing was swimming all over the pool trying to get out, and it was going to drown. I saved it with a red plastic dustpan, and it was so wiped out, it just sat on it.

The curves of the snake and the texture of the skin are beautiful. There is something dramatic about the way the rear of the dustpan shoots off to the upper right while the handle breaks off to the lower corner.

The colors are vivid. The water drops add texture and context. It looks like I saved the snake in the rain.

I didn’t put a lot of effort into these pictures, but I did think before I pushed the buttons. They didn’t just happen. I thought about what I was seeing. I didn’t just think, “Now I have a picture of this snake, so I’m done.” That’s the attitude we have about photos before we learn anything. “I proved me and Sue were at Six Flags!” “Everybody stand in a row and smile!”

I have been looking at photography forums and photographers’ sites and videos, and I have noticed that most of the photos don’t look good to me. Guys with $10,000 cameras, who make a living with them, are putting up stuff I would delete right away.

On a forum, I asked what made this picture grab the eye, and some guy gave me a terse answer even I knew was wrong. He was a little rude. He said it was all down to a wide angle lens and doing something called “PC” with software. I don’t know what that is, but since this photo hasn’t been altered, I know he’s wrong. His analysis is shallow and unhelpful.

I asked my question in a beginner’s forum, so what’s with the attitude? A beginner’s forum is for stupid question, and mine wasn’t even stupid.

I decided to look up his photos, and they’re really amateurish. One level above high school yearbook shots. I take better photos right now. I can’t tell him his work is bad. The other forum members would be all over me.

Now whenever I ask anything on this forum, this guy is going to be my self-appointed Yoda, giving me bad advice and getting in the way.

A photograph is not just a visual record of a set of objects. It’s a painting with limited options. You start with whatever it is you’re photographing, and it is what it is, but once you accept it, you can do whatever you want with it within that constraint. Different lenses and lighting. Color and black and white. Software adjustments. Ansel Adams didn’t just shoot pictures and print them. He processed the daylights out of them. He never saw Half Dome the way it looked in his work.

Photography is really impressionism. You don’t just present what’s in front of you. You make it better. Van Gogh painted very ordinary things, but he changed them so much, they became completely new. He exaggerated colors and perspectives. He put in stuff that wasn’t there but should have been.

I think this is going to be easier than I expected. I may never be an expert at every camera feature or photo effect, and I may never be able to teach a class on lenses, but I am sure I can take photos that are worth displaying.