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.

You are a Termite

I am still trying to get a grip on photography and equipment choices.

So I did a macro photo of a tiny weed blossom, and it was so beautiful, I wanted to blow it up, print it, and put it on the wall. I went to the true photography experts: Walgreen’s.

Okay, Ansel Adams wouldn’t have used them, but there is a Walgreen’s near me, and I can submit photos online for printing. And their candy aisle is outstanding.

I uploaded the photo, and the website told me it was too grainy to be printed at 16″x 20″. The photo is nearly square, but I figured I would print it in a rectangular size, cut off the blank parts, and put it in a frame made to hold it.

Now I have to decide whether to put up with the graininess or print a smaller photo. Sad, because every photo is unique. I can’t go out and redo it.

This problem showed me a couple of things.

First, I really do need a better camera. My camera has an 8-megapixel sensor, so you don’t get a lot of pixels. It’s fine if you’re not doing too much cropping, and you’re not printing big pictures, but otherwise, it’s a huge problem. Until yesterday, I was going along with the people who told me it’s the photographer, not the equipment, that matters. Turns out they’re totally wrong. You can take great pictures with a bad camera, but you can’t take EVERY great picture. A camera’s limitations can limit what you can do, very dramatically.

Second, when taking macro shots, you need to get as close as you can and fill up the viewfinder. That way, you get as many pixels as possible, and when you crop later, you get the best resolution possible.

A few days ago, I was wondering if I should blow $400 on a cheap DSLR body that would make better use of my old lenses. Now I’m thinking I should spend a few thousand dollars and get it over with. I have a wife. I may have a child sometime next year. I can’t keep letting bad equipment cost me opportunities to do good photography.

I also have to get out and shoot several times a week, because lack of skill and lack of familiarity with the equipment also ruin opportunities. I don’t want to be the old guy who finds himself cursing at his camera and millennials and electric vehicles and soy while his son takes his first steps.

I don’t know too much, but it’s starting to look like I need to put at least two grand into a camera, along with a big sum for a very good zoom. The zoom I have is 17-70mm, and it starts out at f2.8, so it’s unusual to have to take it off the camera for anything. I have a prime lens I never use.

I don’t want to find myself on a trip with two annoying cameras, plus lenses, to lug around, so whatever I get has to be very good for both video and stills. That means I need a flip screen so I can see myself and/or others when I’m in the picture. There are still a lot of cameras without flip screens, and they’re not going to work for me.

I don’t want a DSLR because they’re extinct already, and they are completely inferior to mirrorless cameras with far better electronics. They miss shots. They focus on the wrong things.

It sort of looks like the camera I want isn’t available yet. I looked at a bunch of products, and it seems like the Sony A7CII is the answer, given what I am willing to spend. It does great stills. It’s pretty good for video. It’s water-resistant, unlike most cameras under two grand. It has a flip screen. It’s intended to be a smaller version of an existing Sony people like, so it saves weight and space. It won’t be available until later this month.

Sony mirrorless cameras supposedly take an extremely vast array of lenses, unlike Canons, which are limited by a greedy refusal to license. What if I want to do telephoto stuff a year from now? Do I want to be confined to a few overpriced lenses that may or may not be what I want?

It turns out cameras are like rifles. I can buy a phenomenal rifle for under a grand, but glass to make it work right will likely cost more than the gun.

Today I’m doing continuing legal “education” again. Right now, I’m playing a video about attorneys who use artificial intelligence. It’s really depressing.

Most people are not overly bright or perceptive, so most of us don’t really understand what AI is going to do to us. We have ideas about computers creating big machines that go around exterminating us, and surely that could happen after enough technological progress, but the real threat, which would come to pass much sooner, is that we will become startlingly stupid people who do almost nothing except serve as receptionists and mechanics for computers who do our actual work.

Apparently, a huge number of people are using AI to do things they should do for themselves. Kids make it do their homework. Students have found ways to make it take exams for them. Lawyers are making it do research and writing.

The speaker in the video talked about using AI for things like doing writing tasks lawyers don’t feel like doing or are, frankly, too dumb to do. She talked about using AI to beat writer’s block.

I don’t get writer’s block. If you tell me you need me to write 500 words, I can sit down in front of you and get it done in 15 minutes. I once wrote a very good legal brief, 48 pages long, in a day. It’s not a problem for me. Some people can dunk a basketball. Some people can write symphonies at the age of 7. I can write legal documents quickly, well, and without help.

So now people like me are going to compete with numbskulls who struggled to get through law school, who pick up their phones, log into AI sites, and tell them to do what I do. When the product spews out a few seconds later, their only job will be to review it and correct it, and if what I’m hearing is true, a lot of the numbskulls aren’t even doing these things. They are getting caught submitting things AI messed up.

If I practice law again, I may spend 20 hours putting a brief together for you, but opposing counsel, with an IQ of 95, may bark some commands into his phone in a strip club toilet instead. Then I’ll bill you $10,000, and he’ll bill his client $10,000, but I’ll be doing about 20 times the work he does.

If this is how it works, aren’t we going to end up with generations of utter morons who are not able to practice law when they aren’t plugged in? Even many of the smart ones will stop learning the second they pass their bar exams.

Also, what will happen to fees? How long will $500 per hour seem reasonable when machines that cost little to use are puking the work out almost instantly?

It will only be a few years before reviewing AI work will not be necessary, because AI will be much better at the work than we are. The tables will turn, and if we actually write anything, AI will review it for US.

Remember I, Robot? Will Smith had a self-driving car. He got in it with Bridget Moynahan. She started shrieking about how unsafe it was to drive a car for yourself.

Won’t there come a time when doing your own legal work will be considered negligent? Computers will be so much better at it, it will be foolhardy to let humans do it. What happens to lawyers then?

It will happen, and it’s going to happen very soon. Within 5 years, probably.

Judges, quite frankly, are already stupid, without the help of AI, and they are also biased and dishonest. Not all of them have these faults to problematic degrees, but many, many do. Should we have AI judges? Maybe they’ll miss some things human judges would catch. At first. But what if the down side is grossly outweighed by the up side?

When I practiced patent law, the country’s only appellate patent court was reversing 54% of the cases it heard. Federal district judges were just too stupid to do the job. There are other areas of law that are also too hard for many federal judges, who tend to be stooges with political appointments. Should we continue letting these people ruin lives and mishandle cases when we have computers that will do a better job?

What if the reversal rate for human judges is 54%, and the reversal rate for AI judges is 35%? Could we ignore this?

Is there a way to team humans up with AI judges to balance the disadvantages out? I doubt it would work well. Human judges have a limitless capacity to screw things up.

What about medicine? Let’s be honest. There is no way a human being can consistently diagnose physical problems, or prescribe treatment, as well as a really good machine. A machine will know the symptoms of every problem known to medical science, no matter how obscure. It will know every cause. Every treatment. What the outcomes are. Most medicine boils down to following flow charts. Human beings can’t do that as well as machines. In the future, doctors will probably be limited to examination and data entry.

For a long time, we’ve had robots helping doctors rip out prostate glands. How long will it be before machines do many procedures from beginning to end, with doctors standing by mainly to collect fees?

I would rather have a machine than a doctor most of the time. Doctors have misdiagnosed me and given me the wrong treatments many times. I have stumped them many times, which should not happen. They have tried to con me into undertaking unnecessary courses of supervised treatment, so they could make more money. Give me a machine any day.

What about an AI president? Sometimes I wonder if the Antichrist will be a machine or a huge leftist mob wired together with a central machine.

The millennials who teach CLE courses think AI is wonderful. They can’t wait to see it do more. They may feel different when they’re collecting aluminum cans for a living.

Another disturbing CLE taught about social media and the law. Boy, are you in for a surprise if you’re a social media addict and you find yourself in court. They will go after your entire history. Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook…even Myspace. You name it.

You should probably delete every account once a year. If you really have to, you can start new ones with less dangerous data stored in them.

They’ll also go after every email address you have. Probably every forum you’ve ever joined. I have no idea how many I’ve joined. I’ve been on the web since about 1992.

If you lie about your whereabouts, or you just make a mistake, they’ll dig up things you’ve put up on the web, along with times and locations, to prove you’re wrong. Can you imagine anything more invasive?

On top of that, there will be forgeries, and lawyers will have to hire expensive experts to validate or invalidate things attorneys want to introduce into evidence. This is how it works right now, so expect it if you get dragged into court.

What a nightmare. You’ll be sitting in court looking at subpoenaed copies of your neighbors’ Ring videos.

I don’t want to live in the world that’s coming. Take me now. The Borg is real. It’s already here. Our lives are suddenly losing all purpose. We are losing our value as individuals. We are like ants in a farm. Bees in a hive. Gather the nectar, make the honey, and then die.

Oh, well. Back to CLE. When Jesus comes, I’ll be able to say I finished this cycle.

“If you Truly Love Nature, you Will find Beauty Everywhere.”

My subtitle is supposedly something Van Gogh put in a letter to his brother Theo, and the web says it appears on page 88 of National Geographic’s Sublime Nature: Photographs That Awe and Inspire.

I decided to wander around today and try to get used to using my camera in manual mode. It’s very easy. I used to complain about it, but I was just lazy. Too bad.

I took maybe 25 shots, and I only came up with two that I thought were good enough to spend time editing. Here they are.

The first one is another weed blossom. I posted a weed blossom picture a couple of days back. It’s surprising how beautiful flowers on weeds can be, if you just zoom in and get the weeds out of the pictures.

The flower is no more than 1/2″ wide.

I was telling the wife I would like to blow a few of these up and put them on our walls. She thought it was a great idea.

I was thinking yesterday that if I keep shooting weed blossoms, I’ll turn into a low-budget Georgia O’Keeffe. That would be sad. That lady had no talent. I don’t care what anyone says. Her paintings were clumsy, ugly, and creepy. I have read that she painted flowers to look like women’s genitalia. Maybe women who needed surgery. Not normal women. And what kind of nasty old pervert would do that anyway?

Cracked Magazine says she denied the accusations, so maybe she was slandered.

Do modern artists absolutely have to be degenerates to get attention? I guess they do.

The second picture obviously a bull. This guy is very friendly, which is not normal as far as I know. I took several shots of him, and this one was the best. Not Pulitzer material, but I felt like it was acceptable for my purposes. The second-best of a bad lot, but too good to delete.

This camera is fine for macro shots, and I once took a pretty good photo of a friend from a couple of feet away. I don’t know if it will ever be good for shots taken at longer distances. The subjects would have to be pretty compelling to overcome the dubious resolution, I think. I don’t think every shot should be razor-sharp, and the history of photography is full of astounding pictures that were not clear by today’s standards, but it’s a shame to be unable to get good detail in today’s world, where cameras are so capable.

The camera also provides somewhat bland colors in JPG mode. That can be fixed with software, but it would be pleasant to have striking photos right out of the card. I wonder if the camera has an adjustment!

I shot in very bright sunlight. Looks like that’s a mistake for most shots. The grass in the photos looks extremely washed out.

I want to get decent editing software. I use a free website called Befunky for blogging, because my needs have been simple up to this point. I would like to have something like my old Photoshop Elements program. I downloaded Photoshop Express from the Microsoft store, and it’s awful. I looked up the new Photoshop Elements, and people say it’s terrible. I think Adobe made it that way so people would upgrade and subscribe to their annoying cloud program. I don’t want that. After 4 years, I’d be into it for around $500. I am not completely stupid. I can do multiplication.

I tried GIMP, and it’s atrocious. The interface is for the kind of geeks who run around insisting Linux is for everyone.

It’s not. And GIMP is no fun.

I will keep at this for a while. It shouldn’t take long at all to figure out which camera and/or lens I need to replace the creaky 350D and Sigma zoom.

Biden and his Weimar Scrip

What is happening to the dollar? Is there some explanation I don’t know of, or are we just reaping the harvest Bush and Obama sowed when they started pumping currency out of the Federal Reserve like it was Monopoly money? Sooner or later, something had to happen.

I have a warehouse. If memory serves, in 2017, it rented for about $1770 per month, tax included. Florida collects sales tax on commercial rentals, which is probably one reason there is no income tax.

The warehouse needs a new tenant. The lady who helps me with tenants just sent me comparable rentals. They average out to about $3888/month. I don’t know whether that includes tax yet. She is getting back to me.

Assuming tax is included, the increase is about 120%, over 6 years. The INCREASE, not the total. I’m going to charge more than twice what I did 6 years ago.

Where is the money supposed to come from? I know I’ll get it, because people have no choice, but where are tenants finding money to pay their rent now? Is their income 220% of what it was in 2017? I’m pretty sure only burger-flippers are doing that well. They can write their own ticket in Biden’s America, although they are rapidly being replaced by apps and electronic kiosks. I’ve probably been to McDonald’s 15 times in the last year, and I only ordered from a human being once, to add something I forgot to tell the app about.

Last year, a tenant called me about a rent increase. He was almost in years. He literally begged me to help him out. He’s a great tenant. Never a hint of trouble. Pays his rent. I didn’t want to raise his rent at all. But I’m not running a charity. I pay taxes, which go up. I support myself and my wife using tiny, shrinking Biden dollars.

What am I supposed to tell him at the end of his current lease? I’ll probably have to tack over a thousand dollars onto his monthly rent.

I have to do it. I assume he’ll leave. I have no reason to think his business will generate an additional $12000 next year. Who will replace him? I know someone will, but where are these willing tenants coming from? Dubai? Palm Beach? Beverly Hills?

I’ve had people try to sell me on long-term leases. “I’ll pay what you ask, but you have to let me stay x years.” I never go for it. Why would I? I have zero incentive. If you don’t accept my terms, someone else will jump in later the same week, and I won’t have to worry about being underpaid after a year or two of inflation.

No one has ever refused to rent from me because I wouldn’t accept a long-term lease. Not once.

They tell us inflation is at something like 8%. How can that be true when so many things have doubled in price? Are they cooking the numbers or what?

I watch a Youtuber named Louis Rossmann. He’s a New Yorker. Well…he USED to be. Not long ago, he took off from Manhattan and put his computer repair shop in San Antonio. He’s a big right-to-repair activist. He also criticizes the government, which is an easy thing to do in a giant pile of reeking excrement like New York City.

He criticizes landlords, too. He goes around filming vacant businesses in Manhattan. They’re everywhere. When coronavirus hit, a lot of people just went home, and instead of helping them, the government made things worse. They’re not going to return, but somehow, landlords are charging more than ever. He showed tiny spaces smaller than a Miami warehouse, going for numbers like $75000 per month. Per MONTH. Not for jewelry stores or Apple shops. For ordinary businesses.

Granted, some of the increases are necessary because of inflation, but in view of the fact that the vacancy rate is huge, one would expect things to balance out at a lower average price per square foot.

By the way, he mentioned something interesting. He said people who lease real estate in New York are allowed to lie about the square footage. Say you have a unit with about 1500 square feet of space. You can tell renters it’s 2500, and you can’t be sued. You can say you adjusted it to include the benefit of common spaces like the lobby or whatever. They call the additional pretend square footage “loss factor,” so they have an established, accepted term for lying to people. If you tried that in Florida, I think they would put you in prison.

If people don’t want to rent, how can landlords charge so much? Aren’t they destroying their own businesses? I could ask for a million dollars per month, but no one would bite, and if other people around me asked too much, eventually, the whole area would decline and turn into a slum. It could end up like Detroit, where you can buy a two-story house for a thousand dollars. Aren’t New York landlords concerned about this?

In a pre-move video, Rossmann said he was trying to think of things to tell his employees in order to get them to move to Texas. He said they would earn the same pay and spend way less for everything. He said he might help them move. Why wouldn’t they? I know there are psychotics out there who think Manhattan is paradise, and they wouldn’t move if the alternative was death, but why would any reasonable person choose Manhattan and living in a shoebox over San Antonio and having a house?

I still don’t understand how Americans are surviving. I’ve wondered about it for a couple of years. Where are they getting the money to pay their bills, with so many closed businesses? I know Trump and Biden gave us a few bucks off our income taxes, but it wasn’t much. I know we spent a few trillion on relief. Was it so much it kept America going? I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the figures.

Doesn’t the house of cards have to fall sooner or later? Have the basic laws of economics suddenly changed for no reason?

I bought big cans of pizza sauce a year or two back. About $7 per can, which was a big increase over $4 per can, which I had paid a couple of years earlier. This week, they cost $9.70 per can. This isn’t frou-frou stuff at Whole Foods. It’s grocery supply food, for business that think about profit and loss. The vendors can’t just mark it up because it’s chic. They have to try to keep prices down. What happened?

We all saw what happened to cereal boxes. General Mills and Kellogg’s made the boxes really thin while keeping the height and width the same. The boxes are so thin, they look like plaques.

It’s hard to pour cereal now because the boxes are so thin, the cereal can’t get out. You get a couple of bowls from a box, and you’re done. I’ve seen cereal for over $7 per box. This is sugary, low-production-cost garbage food people used to buy for $2.50. It’s not luxury food. It’s like Twinkies.

When things don’t make sense, there is a supernatural reason. That’s how the universe works. Economics no longer make sense because the apocalypse is here, and we are playing by the apocalypse’s rules. Prices go up and down. Shortages begin and end. None of it can be predicted, because spirits are pulling the strings.

I think we may see deflation soon. I know that sounds insane. It happens, though. It happened in 2007. I remember buying prime beef for $7.00 per pound. It seems to happen when reality sets in and people realize they can’t buy anything. Stuff sits on shelves, and prices drop. Maybe that will happen soon. People have loaded their credit cards to the breaking point because Americans have no common sense. Sooner or later, surely, they will have to stop.

Or will they? Maybe Biden will open the currency tap up like a fire hydrant in August, the value of money will go to nothing, and we’ll all be paper billionaires. It’s back door socialism. I save my money and pay my bills, and you sit around sucking up welfare and playing Grand Theft Auto. The government prints money and gives it to you so you will vote for candidates who give things away. My money is now worth less, the value went to you, and the government didn’t have to confiscate or tax anything.

I don’t know what to think. I am going to maintain my prayer life and not worry about myself or my wife. Other people, however, are a concern. What percentage of the world’s population is close enough to God to be safe? Perhaps one percent?

I keep asking God to end the world NOW. Just remove us. I don’t want to see any more fat, ugly old men dancing in thong panties for children. I don’t want to be here when President Harris giggles her way through the oath of office. I don’t want to see the next pandemic, which is 100% certain to come. We’ll get things that make coronavirus look like chickenpox.

I can understand why God is going to be so brutal during the tribulation. The truth is that there are a lot of people who really need to be killed. They are beyond redemption because of pride. They would stand in front of Jesus himself, with the gates of hell open behind them, and spit in his face instead of admitting fault and receiving his love. As Jesus said about Jews who rejected him, if people won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t listen to one who has returned from the dead. The Old Testament is all about Jesus, often very clearly.

Jesus isn’t the only person who has returned from the dead. It has happened to many people, and most people who hear their stories sneer and wave them off. What Jesus said is proven true every day.

I don’t want any part of the punishment of the proud. I want to be gone, along with everyone I love.

In other news, while I wait for the bus to heaven, I have been fiddling with cameras.

Years ago, in maybe 2006, I decided I wanted to learn to take better pictures, so I got me a Canon Rebel XT 350D and a couple of Sigma lenses. I took photos for a year or two and then tapered off. I don’t remember exactly what happened. Eventually, smartphones got to the point where I could take relatively nice photos, and when I used mine, I tried to do a good job.

Since I found my wife, I’ve had to think more about photography. On our first four trips, we got by with phones and cheesy action cameras, but we had some problems, and before our latest trip, I got a Sony mirrorless vlogging camera. This thing will shoot still photos or video, and it has a built-in zoom lens. It has some shortcomings, but it was worth the money because I got some priceless footage.

Right before the trip, I dug out the Rebel to see if I should take it with us. I thought it might be better for still shots than phones or the Sony. I didn’t have much time to make a decision, so I left the Rebel behind. Today I shot some photos with both cameras, and it seems pretty obvious that a dedicated still camera with lenses I can change is a worthwhile investment.

The Sony is nearly useless for really close up shots, and it’s very easy to make mistakes with it because it’s tiny, with tiny, complex controls. And I’m stuck with one lens which is intended for people who are very concerned with convenience and less concerned with image quality.

Why not use the Rebel? It still works. I certainly can. It produces beautiful pictures. The colors are not as nice as the ones that come out of the Sony, but that can be adjusted quickly with Photoshop Express.

Newer models, however, are better. More resolution for cropping, for example. Lighter. Better integration with new tech. And a new camera would shoot video, which the Rebel will not do.

I’m wondering whether I should get a newer Rebel body. I can keep my lenses.

If we start lugging a big DSLR around on our trips, we will pretty much have to start dividing the cargo business. As it is, I generally carry a backpack, and Rhodah flits around unburdened. This is one reason I lose weight on trips while she…doesn’t exactly do that. Creme brulee is another reason.

I talked to her about it today, and she thinks carrying a backpack would be a good move for her.

I didn’t make a strong effort to take good pictures today, since the purpose of my experiment was to test camera capabilities. Nonetheless, I took a couple of shots I really, really like. I edited them to make them more striking. You can see them below, 700 pixels wide. They look somewhat better with more pixels.

The second one is a lot better than the first, but it’s pretty good for something I shot in a few seconds to test a camera.

These are just quick photos I took in the yard, so I should be able to do very nice things with more effort, or with family photos.

That second flower is a terrible weed. The Spanish needle. Guess what its Linnaean classification is. “Bidens alba.” Funny. It products sharp, hard, needle-like sees that stick to your clothes like parasites. Interesting parallel.

It’s weird how a camera can make ugly things beautiful. I would not be ashamed to blow that second picture up and put it on the wall.

I may go for it. Life is short, and pictures are important. There are probably fewer than 25 pictures of me from my childhood, and there is zero video. My dad bought a Brownie movie camera and shot some film, but he didn’t take care of any of it, and it vanished. Can you believe that? Could we be any more dysfunctional? I don’t want my wife and kids to end up in the same situation. Actually, she already has. She was kind of a Cinderella as a child, so not many pictures.

Thinking it over. I may order a new body. In the meantime, I think I’ll take some more shots around the farm. Maybe I can eventually do some wildlife and non-wildlife (cow) photos.

No Riots, no Burning Buildings, no Pink Hair, no Problem

Rhodah and I are still waiting for our embassy interview so she can be brought to the US. We made the mistake of obeying the law instead of shoving her in amongst a group of military-age Somali males crashing the border in Texas, so we are still not finished.

Looks like we’re going to Hong Kong and Singapore so we can be together. I just bought a new camera so we can finally have a trip where we come back with decent video. It hasn’t arrived yet.

I don’t understand my feelings about Singapore at all. It’s a big city. Not a lot of green space. People generally live in apartments instead of houses. Hot weather all year. Lots of things I would ordinarily hate. Nonetheless, I really like Singapore, and so does my wife. I feel at home there. I wouldn’t mind living in Singapore if I had to.

Things to like about Singapore: minimal sexual perversion and coercion, extremely low crime, high standard of living, all types of goods in great abundance, stability, good food, and nice people. While the weather is hot, it’s not as unpleasant as Florida or Georgia. Mass transit is cheap and safe, and unlike New York’s trains and stations, Singapore’s don’t reek of urine.

There are nearly no bums in Singapore. We saw one lady begging, but she was an outlier.

What can you get in the US that you can’t get in Singapore? Guns are a lot easier to get here, assuming you live in a free state, and you can own them for self-defense and even carry them. In Singapore, you can get a license to keep a gun in your home, but they are rarely granted. Sounds bad, but on the other hand, you’re safer in Singapore without a gun than I am here with one.

Singapore is often called repressive, but whether a repressive government significantly impacts your enjoyment of life kind of depends on what it represses. If government restrictions don’t affect the kinds of activities in which you participate, you’re not likely to be bothered by them.

I think most people who call Singapore repressive are sexual perverts and perversion promoters. If you go online and look up Singapore repression, you’ll see that perversion is the main topic. Singapore only decriminalized sodomy last year. They shouldn’t have done that, and they’ll regret it, but it shows why perverts find Singapore unappealing.

We found the cost of living in Singapore to be reasonable. We stayed in a nice hotel for something like $230 per day. It was somewhat nicer than Hyatts and Sheratons here. We were able to get a lot of great food for between $5 and $10 per meal, and that’s Singapore dollars, which are somewhat smaller than ours. The trains were cheap. Not much to complain about.

Singapore is like a little bomb shelter for conservatives, if you want the truth. It’s not too close to China or Russia. It’s too far away for American perverts and socialists to invade profitably after they take over the US and our military. It’s too far away for social invaders from Central and South America to barge into. It’s not filling up with Islamists. It doesn’t need aid, so it won’t end up like Christian Africa, where we twist arms by connecting charity to filthy sexual aberrations God hates.

Is conservativism really about liberty? I wonder. Maybe it has more to do with safety and wealth. Do I really want a bunch of guns if crime is extremely low and the government stays off my back? I like shooting as a hobby, but I could give it up if the return were worth it.

In America, I have some guns for fun, but I keep others in order to defend myself, my wife, guests, and my property. My government is increasingly hostile to affluent Caucasians who mind their own business, and so are leftists, especially minorities. We also have a problem with crime that is not politically or racially motivated. In other countries, my situation would be different, and so would my attitude toward arming myself.

Here in the USA, we have a big population of blacks and Hispanics, and they commit a gigantic amount of violent crime and property crime. Most crimes of both types are committed by these groups. They have backward cultures that glorify the abuse of innocent people. This is reality, not the woke explanation. Statistics compiled by nonpartisan entities prove these things. White people do bad things, too, but at a much, much lower rate.

Other countries are different. Singapore is around 75% Chinese (non-red), and the rest of the people are mostly Indians, Malays, and Indonesians. Singaporeans like to work and make money. It’s a hard place to start a street gang or do a drive-by. It’s a hard place to riot and destroy homes and businesses. It’s not likely one or two ethnic groups will team up against another, as American blacks and Hispanics have teamed up on whites, and try to take what they have and turn them into milk cows.

We also have a sick government which is becoming more dangerous every month. Professional victims are taking it over. They’re getting rid of cash bail and decriminalizing theft. They are trying to destroy rural areas and suburbs, pushing people into cities where they are easier to control and prey on. It’s not merely likely that sane, decent Americans will eventually have to fight the government. It’s certain. We will see secession and/or guerrilla warfare when things get too hot, and unarmed “haves” will be slaughtered publicly, with their executions posted on social media. We’ve seen the same basic thing in revolutionary France, Cambodia, China, Russia, Cuba, and other places where smelly, ignorant, hateful mobs took over.

In the USA, unless you are willing to trust God and accept martyrdom, it makes no sense to be unarmed, but there are places where arms are a much lower priority.

If you have retirement money, life in Singapore is easy. You just live. You don’t have to endure endless daily bombardments with terrifying news about your once-great nation. “Will the Democrats force my county to put housing projects on formerly-private estates?” “Will the Democrats impose wealth taxes and impoverish me in my old age?” “Will my children be unemployable because they refuse to call male perverts women?” “Will my daughter have to be naked in front of males every day at school?” “Will Antifa/BLM nuts climb my fence and kill and rape my family?” These are things people in Singapore don’t worry about, but they are very real possibilities in the US.

As I’ve gotten older and learned more from God, I’ve become less impressed with the US and democracy. This is not the best country to live in. Not any more. And democracy is overrated. A good king, or “dictator,” as kings are called now, is better than democracy, any day. I’d rather have Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis as a king with a lifetime term than the situation we have now. I’d even take Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

Democracy is a degenerate system of government, one step above rioting. It puts power in the hands of ignorant, malicious, bigoted imbeciles who have tremendous incentive to loot. Looters have more power than builders, because everyone gets one vote, and looters are more numerous. It also gives too much power to women, who, as a group, invariably vote stupidly.

In the US, we have the idea that it’s sort of illegal or shameful to contemn representative democracy. It’s neither. It’s perfectly acceptable to push for a monarchy or theocracy if you like. You just have to do it without committing offenses like treason and sedition.

I can say these things because I’m not a politician or any other type of person who depends on the love of the mob.

Anyway, America-worship is based in delusion. America is still very high up on the list of desirable places to live, but it’s not the best, and it will eventually become intolerable. Probably before Singapore and even places like Kenya and Uganda.

We are told to be grateful to America for what it has done for us, as though it were person with feelings; a rich mommy that sent us big checks every month. In reality, America never did anything for me. God did. He can bless me anywhere. Look how well Joseph, Esther, and Daniel did under tyrants. Look what he did to Laban because of Jacob. America is just an instrument God used to bless me.

America doesn’t actually care about me. If I died right now, no flags would be lowered. God and certain people care about me.

I’ve done a lot for America. I paid taxes and stayed out of trouble. I submitted to institutionalized racism in the form of affirmative action. I contributed to charities. I registered for the draft, which is a very big deal, at least if you intend to back up your word when called. No entity but America ever asked me to offer it my life and risk being maimed and forgotten.

If I should be grateful to anyone here, it should be the servicemen who fought so I didn’t have to.

I’m extremely grateful for every good thing I have, including the diminished rights I still possess, but I’m grateful to God, not nations. I want to continue to be an asset to America, but if I move to another country, I’ll try to be an asset there, and that country will have whatever loyalty I’m required to extend. I wouldn’t want to be like the disgraceful, parasitic people who become US citizens and then fly flags from their old countries. Dance with the one that brought you, right?

I am censored, libeled, and ostracized from the marketplace every single day, and America’s government–my country’s government–is behind it. That’s really something. I never had these problems during the last century, apart from the time I got desperate and applied for a government job. White people were not the target hiring pool. Other than that, I was nearly a full US citizen.

How grateful should I be for the good things when I’m already fairly well down the Nuremberg rabbit hole, with increased persecution soon to come? Should Jews who were once treated well in Germany have been grateful to their government in 1930? Am I wrong for weighing the very bad along with the good?

These things matter. Losing free speech is not a small thing. Being excluded from economic participation is not trivial.

To get back to travel, we’re only looking at Hong Kong because Rhodah wants to see it. If it were up to me, I would skip it.

I haven’t been to Hong Kong, but I’ve been researching. I’ve been told the people are rude, largely because so many have moved there from the workers’ paradise on the mainland. Funny thing about workers’ paradises; everyone in them always wants to move back to capitalist oppression.

Communism has made or kept the mainland Chinese coarse and selfish, and tourists in Hong Kong have to deal with them because they wait tables and drive cabs. Also, it looks like hotels and other facilities are more run-down in Hong Kong. People are less likely to speak English, even though it’s an official language. Everyone in Singapore speaks English, and they place a high priority on education. They’re not coarse, either. We didn’t see people spitting or littering. Everyone was courteous.

Look, Singapore is better than American cities. Better, not different. Let’s just say it. On average, American city dwellers are inferior to Singaporeans. Inferior. That is the right word. Some people are better than others.

Regarding Hong Kong, I have to say that the food looks very good.

Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Hong Kong Chinese are supposedly more cultured than mainlanders, which is not a high bar to clear. On the mainland, people urinate on the streets and let their kids poop there. Sometimes they pull these stunts in Hong Kong, and it doesn’t fly. Mainland Chinese tourists have terrible reputations in every single country they visit, as do Chinese businessmen.

Capitalism makes people better.

Having lived in Northern Florida, far from abusive, dangerous wokiees, for 6 beautiful, precious years that are like enormous pearls to me, I am disturbed whenever I think about visiting places where people are rude and selfish. I get Miami flashbacks. It’s too bad God won’t evacuate that place and put a fence around it to prevent it from coming back.

Hong Kong still uses the Hong Kong dollar, and I have read that people expect cash, so that’s a drag. As much as I hate the war on cash, electronic money is great for tourism.

I should have bought a better camera sooner. In fact, I did. I tried, I mean. I started Youtubing unsuccessfully in around 2016, and I have bought two unsatisfying action cameras. The latest, in 2019, was a Gopro. The cameras haven’t worked out. You really have to control them from phones in order to get them to function, and they’re very hinky. They turn on and off without warning. They refuse to connect to my phone and tablet. They change video modes unexpectedly. My Gopro ruined a video I made in Turkey. It’s just voices and a still photo. Unacceptable, when so much is at stake.

Phones are fine for photos, but I want something dependable for video, and it has to work without a phone.

My phone cost $750, and it does a ton of things. Oddly, the camera I bought costs about $150 more, and all it does is shoot photos and video.

I had a hard time choosing. I finally went with a Sony ZV-1 II. This is considered a point-and-shoot camera, although you can mess with a lot of settings, including the f-stop. I also considered the ZV-E10, which is similar but allows you to change lenses.

The ZV-E10 is more of a grown-up camera. No doubt. You can travel with a standard lens for vlogging and a zoom lens for versatility. Also, the sensor on the ZV-E10 is better. Thing is, it costs a lot with an extra lens. A good zoom lens will run around $650. Maybe I should have sprung for it, but the trip itself is not cheap, and I’m in the middle of Florida’s homeowner insurance explosion crisis, so I’m not feeling like this is the time to throw cash around. Although it probably is.

Our lives are great, but the rapture can’t come soon enough. I can’t wait for the day when I find myself looking back at Earth the way I now look back at the open latrine known as Miami.