I’m All For the Ethical Treatment of Plants

My wife and I are both cutting way back on carbs, and it has paid off handsomely.

1. No more cravings or other types of appetite excess.

2. Less fat.

3. Gas reduction that should please any advocate of the Kyoto Protocols.

4. Stable moods.

5. Stable energy.

6. Less snoring.

7. No bloating or burping.

8. Easy meal preparation.

9. Fewer dishes to wash.

10. Lots of money saved because we almost never go to restaurants.

We also expect better dental health, because it is nearly impossible to get a cavity while on a diet that is close to or below the ketosis level.

I would call myself carnivore-adjacent these days. On Sundays, I have a slice of pizza and some other treats. The rest of the week, I barely touch carbs. Sometimes a small serving of raw berries. An occasional beer or shot of whiskey. That’s about it. My wife is nearly carnivore. No Sunday breaks, but she occasionally eat something that has a little oil that doesn’t come from animals.

She is down about 16 pounds. I’m down 18. I feel much better. Dumping carbs is worth it for that alone. I felt great before I made the change, but things have unquestionably improved. After that Sunday pizza slice, I definitely feel a little worse.

I’m trying to figure out whether we actually need plant-based foods. As with covid, the information is heavily censored and slanted, usually to the left, which is where the plants are. Leftists mistakenly think they are morally superior to Jews and Christians and our meat-eating God. They also think ending meat production will save the earth. They push hard against animal foods for reasons completely unrelated to health, and they promote lots of lies.

On the other hand, carnivores say some things that seem extreme. “All plants are trying to kill you.” And like vegan diets (although to a far lesser extent), carnivore diets may require supplementation or at least careful diet curation. Carnivores tend to be low on sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and folate, and iodine and folate deficiencies cause birth defects.

Many plants really are trying to kill us. I had an epiphany about that.

A few years back, my friend Mike and I made a disastrous effort to grow plants in my yard. He tried to grow parsley. A few days ago, I saw something that looked like parsley in the grass, and I thought maybe parsley was growing in my yard because it had escaped from a pot.

I considered tasting one of the leaves to find out what I was looking at, but I decided not to. Why? If it wasn’t parsley, it could be dangerous.

As I thought about that, I suddenly realized this kind of caution only applied to plants. No one ever looks at an animal and thinks, “If I eat that, it could hurt me.” Please shut up with rare exceptions like vultures and polar bear livers. Quoting exceedingly rare exceptions to a generalization only bolsters the generalization.

My property is full of poisons. Tree leaves. Various weeds. Deadly mushrooms. On the other hand, it’s full of birds, mammals, reptiles, and bugs, just about all of which can be eaten safely.

I have grown tomatoes and peppers. Friendly, right? No, the green parts are poisonous. Potatoes? Same.

So yes, plants really are trying to kill us. Even plants we eat regularly. Soy. Cruciferous vegetables. Rhubarb leaves are dangerous. Undercooked kidney beans can cause terrible problems.

Just about none of the ornamental plants in my yard can be eaten safely.

I also learned that nutrients in plants are often not very bioavailable, whereas nutrients in meat go right into your system. The iron in spinach is an example. You don’t get much benefit from it, so when you check the grams-per-serving count, you can be badly deceived.

I saw Jordan Peterson, a man who eats only beef and salt, say something that appeared to be intended to debunk misguided vegetarian claims. One thing he said was very funny but intended to be antagonistic, so I will clean it up. He said the human digestive tract had more in common with that of a wolf than that of a chimp. He said that, because of their plant-heavy diet, chimps developed to have small brains and huge colons. Apparently, some vegetarians say apes prove we should stop eating meat.

This sounded like TikTok legend to me, so I looked it up. He is actually right. Like wolves, we have relatively small colons, and we produce a lot of stomach acid suitable for digesting meat.

He also pointed out that a cow, which lives on grass, has to have an enormous four-chambered stomach in order to make it work. Most people lack that, as far as I know.

Another interesting thing I learned: unless you jam your piehole full of high-carb items or soy, it’s hard to get a lot of nutrition from plants. For example, if you tried to survive on kale, you would have to eat over 9 pounds a day. If you only ate hamburger, you’re looking at a maximum of 1.7 pounds for 2200 calories.

I don’t know, but it sure looks like there is no hope unless you suck down a lot of oils, tubers, soy (an unnatural food which starts out toxic), sugars, and grain.

A vegan diet is much more of a science project than a low-carb diet.

Actually, that’s one of the best things about cutting down on carbs. You don’t stand around before meals trying to decide what to eat. Fry a burger and put cheese on it, or fix some bacon and several eggs. You’re done.

We are going to try to come up with a good plan for my wife’s next gestation. I have doubts about pure carnivore due to the folate and iodine issues, but it should be simple to come up with a good low-glycemic regimen that will be much better than the typical American shove-pretzels-and-ice-cream-into-mom routine that gave her diabetes the last time.

You Don’t Really Know Yourself Until Something Bad Happens

This weekend, I learned what a febrile seizure is.

Keep in mind, I am not a doctor. I am just relating what I was told.

When a baby’s temperature rises or falls too quickly, it can cause seizures. They can become unresponsive; seemingly unaware of their surroundings or the people with them. They may stare into space and make strange sounds. Their hands and feet may turn cold, because they concentrate circulation in their trunks and heads. They may look like they’re dying. As bad as they look, febrile seizures are harmless.

It is unfortunate that I didn’t know any of this last week. Somehow I became old without ever being told. My wife didn’t know, either.

Our son took a bunch of shots at his first-year appointment. Among them, Mumps-Measles-Rubella and the chickenpox shot. They handed us the usual papers about side effects, and because they always say the same things, we didn’t pay any attention to them.

Days later, he had some side effects. We didn’t know they were related to the shots, and we didn’t suspect the shots because of the long delay. Later, we learned this is normal.

On Thursday, he threw up twice, and his body seemed hot while his hands were cold. He seemed a little less energetic. A dubious forehead thermometer read 98.3. We didn’t think it was a big deal, but then I noticed that his fingers seemed blue, so I told my wife to get in the car.

As we were getting ready to go, she reminded me he had been eating blueberries. He loves them, and he usually eats a big serving for breakfast. She thought the berries explained the color of his fingers. It sounded reasonable, and he didn’t look too bad. We decided to watch him carefully, and he was fine all night and most of the next day.

In retrospect, I think his fingers were blue because of reduced circulation as well as blueberries. I think the berry pigment confused me. It was definitely there, but I think his fingers were more blue when I first noticed the color than they were when we decided to stay home. It’s impossible to be sure.

On Friday night, he got very warm, except for his hands, arms, and legs. My wife has a tendency to bundle him up too much, and he was wearing a fleece romper in a warm room, so we took it off. He threw up a couple of times, but babies do that for all kinds of reasons, so we didn’t get excited right away.

His temperature, as measured by an unreliable forehead thermometer, went from 102.8 to 103.1. Babies can run much higher temperatures than adults without harm, so we didn’t panic. I had a fever of over 106 when I was less than a year old.

We called his pediatrician’s office’s after-hours number, and a doctor told us to get Tylenol and ibuprofen into him to cut the fever. He said we should bring him in the next day.

I went out and bought children’s Tylenol and ibuprofen. He threw up when we tried to shoot the liquid ibuprofen in, probably because my wife had a hard time controlling the syringe. It went too far into his mouth.

I decided to go get acetaminophen suppositories. When I got up and prepared to leave, he started seizing. He stared at the ceiling. He didn’t answer when his mother tried to get his attention.

That was all we needed to see. We got in the car, and my wife held him in his arms while I drove. We didn’t bother with the car seat.

I ran the only red light we encountered. I got up to around 90. I saw a cop parked by the road, and I blew right by him. I thought it was better to be arrested than to lose a son.

He pulled out and started chasing me, but he didn’t turn his lights on, so I kept going. I turned my hazard lights on in an effort to let him know I had a reason for continuing to speed while he was right behind me.

He finally turned on his lights about 200 yards from the ER entrance, so I pulled over. When he got to the car, I told him my son was having a fit. He asked what that meant, and I said he was unresponsive. He let me drive on to the ER, which he should have done to begin with, since I was almost there.

I dropped my wife at the entrance and parked the car. I went in to join her, taking care to leave my carry piece in the center console. By now, there were several police cars in the lot, and at least one had its lights flashing. Nobody tried to stop me on the way in.

I didn’t know if the cops were there for me or we had just arrived at a time when they happened to be responding to an unrelated call. It turned out they were there for me.

We were surprised to see that the staff was not quite as excited as we were. It took maybe two minutes to get him past the lobby. They must have known more than we did about his problem.

There were several officers in the lobby, including the one who pulled me over. I sent my wife on her way and asked him if we were going to have a problem. I was ready to go to jail. I didn’t care at all. They had a solid case for various traffic violations and a weak felony case for fleeing and eluding, but these things meant nothing at all to me.

I was thinking about finding a local attorney and bonding out as quickly as I could, and I knew that a worst-case scenario was a sentence of a few years, plus the loss of some of my civil rights. I thought it was unlikely that a prosecutor or judge would follow through, but these things were on my mind. I was thinking about possible paths the future might take.

I have always found prison scary, but not on that night. Better to have my son and wife visit me in prison than see our beautiful baby buried and have the light of our lives go out.

The officer who pulled me said, “No, you’re good.” He took my license for a while, and that was it.

We spent about 6 hours in an ER room. They drew blood. They put our son on an IV because they thought he was dehydrated. He got a chest x-ray. At first, he was lethargic, and that made him easy to treat, but as he got better, he started acting like himself. Trying to pull out the IV. Fighting the doctor when he tried to give him more ibuprofen.

His temperature dropped. He started smiling. He wasn’t quite himself, but he was okay.

I can tell you what we were told. They said the vaccines he took sometimes caused delayed fevers. They told us this was the most likely reason he had seized. They said it would do no permanent harm.

Since coming home, we have learned that febrile seizures are not rare. I suppose I have had them myself, because I had what my mother called “convulsions” when I had the 106 fever, but I never learned much about them. A friend has told us her daughter had them at 16 months and two years.

Our plan now is to get Tylenol suppositories and watch him carefully if his temperature changes in the future. We can’t find his reliable butt thermometer, but we will have one on hand from now on.

He scared us a little bit the day before his ER visit, and we prayed. Before I got out of bed the next day, I kept hearing and repeating, “You saved my baby.” It just rose up inside me. Then he had his second episode and the hospital visit. But again, medical wisdom says he was never in any danger, so draw your own conclusion.

The odds were against him having a fever. The odds of a seizure were low. The odds that anything bad would happen to him if he had a seizure were low, but then he had already beaten the odds twice.

It looks like the chickenpox shot is what got him. There are a couple of different ways one-year-olds receive vaccinations. They can receive Measles-Mumps-Rubella, which is one shot. They can receive Measles-Mumps-Rubella-Varicella, which is one shot, and the varicella term refers to chickenpox. They can also receive MMR plus a separate chickenpox shot, as our son did. Any combination involving chickenpox has a very significant chance of causing a high fever.

Good thing for parents to know.

I think that instead of handing parents a sheet they have seen many times before, listing vaccination risks, doctors who vaccinate kids for chickenpox should take time to explain that this is not just another shot. Also, I think it’s best to get chickenpox vaccinations on Mondays so any resulting fevers are less likely to strike on weekends when doctors’ offices are closed.

That’s the story. Our son is fine. I have not been charged with anything. We understand febrile seizures. I suddenly know a lot more about what I am capable of when my child is in danger.

He is doing well. During his doctor visit, his height came in at 32″, which is somewhere between the 95th and 98th percentile, depending on whom you ask. If it were to continue, he would be tall enough to be advantaged but not tall enough to have problems getting in cars or buying clothes.

He is very advanced. He can jump. He can walk and even dance backward. He teases his mom, showing her the TV remote and then running away. He gets into “conversations” with me. I tell him he can’t do something, and he grunts and stamps his feet as though saying he strenuously objects and wants an appeal. He can kick a ball. He carries the ball to me and hands it to me. This all adds up to trouble in the short term, because we have to find ways to occupy him so he doesn’t destroy everything we own.

He’s still cute and incredibly photogenic. The most photogenic person I have ever seen or heard of. If I take 100 photos of him and his mother, I will have to discard maybe 5 because of him and 40 because of her.

Checkout ladies and Costo receipt-checkers live to see him. A lady at Fresh Market has even learned his special greeting dance. Calls him her favorite baby.

All in all, things are great. I’m just glad the fever is gone.

“Honey, are the Cameras in the Dishwasher Clean?”

I did something only too predictable. I bought another camera.

A desire for an Olympus camera has been coming and going, like psoriasis. I kept suppressing it, but I finally gave in.

I’m fundamentally a Sony guy, because Sony is the Glock of camera makers. It’s the practical choice. Unless you’re weird, there is almost certainly a Sony that will do what you want. The lens selection is unparalleled. There is a ton of information about using them. There are zillions of helpful reviews. Editing programs know all about Sony. The supply of aftermarket stuff for Sony is endless. But Olympus, or as the spun-off camera division is now known, OM System, does some things much better.

1. You can rinse your OM clean under a tap. They have excellent water resistance, so do at least some of their lenses. You can take an OM fishing with you.

2. They have the best IBIS in the business, and not by a small margin. You can hold an OM in your hands and take a sharp photo with the shutter open for half a second. That is wild.

3. They have the best buffers. When I half-press my shoot button, the camera starts shooting silently, and it stores a whole bunch of shots temporarily while I wait to commit. If something good happens before I press, and I have my camera settings right, the camera will keep it. This is good for photographing wildlife, including babies.

4. They shoot bursts so quickly, you need extra-fast cards with them.

5. They do focus stacking in-camera. You can use this in macro, where depth of field is a problem. The camera will shoot a bunch of photos with different focus planes, and then it will put them together for you, giving you a finished JPG as well as the raw shots. Nobody else does this. Combine this with the IBIS, and you can do very good macro with no tripod and no rail.

6. The lenses are smaller and, I believe, less expensive than APS-C. The camera I bought is actually heavier and slightly bigger than an A6700, but I got it with a very good kit zoom, and the overall package is handy. The lens is not bad at all. It’s a 12-40mm f/2.8. Very well built, water-resistant, with good optics and even a focus clutch.

7. They have little Micro 4/3 sensors, smaller than APS-C. Wait…small sensors are bad, right? Well, sometimes. The small sensors mean you can get a longer reach for the same focal length, so if you ever decide to shoot birds in the field, you can use a lens you can carry instead of putting it in a wheelbarrow. I would like to do a little wildlife shooting.

What are the down sides?

The depth of field is bigger, which can be good or bad, but if you’re a bokeh Nazi, it’s a problem. The photos can’t be blown up as much as APS-C or full-frame. There is less support for Olympus/OM. The auto-focus features can’t compare to Sony.

The sensor is just about the same size as the unusual sensor Canon put in my Powershot V1, and I get by beautifully with that camera, which, I have to say, is lighter and handier and can’t overheat while shooting video. The OM’s sensor will do just fine.

I wanted to ignore the desire to get yet another camera, but it gnawed at me. I wondered if God was in there somewhere. I believe he has been telling me to be less worried about spending, including giving.

I bought it from Amazon, not a smaller place like B&H. I returned a Sony to B&H, and they gave me full price even though it was lightly used. I didn’t want to stick a smaller Jewish-owned retailer with another loss if I didn’t like the OM. Maybe they would have preferred I risk it.

So what did I buy? I considered getting a used OM (will not keep typing Olympus/OM), but the latest flagship has better autofocus and some other helpful advances, so I got an OM-1 Mark II.

One of the nice things about OM is that you can buy the flagship model without questioning your sanity. It’s not cheap, but when you compare it to other industry flagships, it seems like a gift.

I already love it. The zoom range is ideal for everyday carry. I like the feel. I’m already getting good shots from it.

The AF is going to be a drawback. I have already gotten shots where it focused on the wrong person without me catching it. My A6700 automatically decided my son was “Infant,” not just “Human Being,” and it tracks him ruthlessly. I can overcome OM’s focus quirks. Everyone else does. There used to be people who got by with film cameras with three settings and manual focus.

That’s not a perfect argument, because those people lost many, many photos a modern Sony would have saved, but anyway, I can compensate to some extent, and the pluses outweigh the minuses.

Sooner or later, I will get a macro lens, but even now, I should be able to get great near-macro shots.

Regarding sensor size, my current belief is that you shouldn’t even think about it unless you plan to blow photos up. If you want a photo to cover your computer screen, or you want a yard-wide poster, you want pixels and a big aperture. Otherwise, it makes no difference. If you plan to put salad-plate-sized photos of your kids on your walls, Micro 4/3 is as good as anything made. Change my mind.

Well, there is the bokeh difference. I admit that. The bokeh potential is lower, on the whole, but that’s because of the depth of field advantage, so take the good with the bad.

Here’s a great question: why doesn’t OM put its killer features in APS-C or full-frame? Maybe they don’t have the budget.

I’m up to 4 real cameras now. Is that excessive? I don’t think so. It’s catch-up buying, which is always expensive, and I’m not like the people who have 75 cameras displayed on shelves. I’ll probably feel bad when I buy the pricey OM 90mm macro lens, however.

I don’t count the used Canon 200D I stupidly bought in 2023 or the 2006 350D it replaced. Those things are ready for the Salvation Army. I guess I should count the ZV1M2 I got in ’23. I did spend real money on it. I just don’t think of it as a real camera, because it has so many limitations and has been superseded so well by the Powershot. I don’t count action cameras. I’m not sure where mine are. They are cameras, and they have real uses, but nobody who wants to learn photography and get good uses a Gopro. If my Gopro is a Sony, my old Samsung Galaxy S5 cell phone is a Hasselblad.

The 200D was an enormous mistake. People say you can take great photos with bad equipment, and it is true when you stay within the equipment’s limitations, so you can take SOME great photos. But you will miss so many other photos, it won’t be worth it. Also, you are going to blow photos the bad camera can take well, because it will do less to catch you when you mess up, and because you will be busy fighting with it, trying to make it do what a better camera will do without a struggle.

I took the 200D and mid-grade lenses to Switzerland and Italy, and the photos are okay, but not A6700 or A7RIV okay. Even the better ones are just not as good.

People say, “Buying gear is what people do instead of learning to take good pictures.” Uh…no. It’s what they do when their cameras hold them back, which is something that can start happening a month into the hobby. Then you end up with an expensive camera you use and a cheaper camera you have to put on Ebay, taking a loss.

Sure, there are wealthy dentists and venture capitalists who buy flagship cameras and then use them on “auto” all the time, but that’s not me.

This isn’t my final camera, even in the near-term. If we travel again, I am almost certainly going to get a DJI Osmo Pocket 4. It’s not out yet. I am sick of screwing up video while using cameras designed mostly for stills. The Osmo Pocket 4 is an amazing video solution for consumers who shoot while moving around. It’s not out yet, but the predecessor camera is great, and the Pocket 4’s improvements sound like they are worth the wait.

Regarding my various baby-photo epiphanies, I am buying a canvas tarp today to use as a backdrop. If I don’t like the look, I’ll go to Hobby Lobby and get some cloth, but canvas actually looks nice to me. I ordered an LED panel to use to give fill light from below. We are going to put some stuff in an empty bedroom, sit on the backdrop with our baby, and take his one-year shots. If they stink, we will take them again. It will work.

Maybe we can actually produce polished shots that will not look pathetic next to our badly-lit hastily-taken candids, which are excellent.

People who Insist on Doing Their Own Thing are Ruining Art

Overnight, I have learned some new things about photography.

The first thing is that there is no use whatsoever in asking other photographers for artistic advice. About 95% of the people I would be asking can’t create good art. They can’t understand it. Good art makes them angry. They would trash the best aspects of my pictures and brag about their own rule-following hack jobs. This has already happened, now that I think about it.

The second thing: a person in a portrait is not a model; models are props, not people. If you turn a portrait subject into a model, you have ruined everything.

I belong to some photo forums, and I started out with questions about artistic merit and technical skills. I’m never asking anyone for help with the artistic side again. No one can teach me how to have an interesting personality that projects itself through images I make, and no one can teach me good taste. Either these things will come out on their own, or they won’t.

This decision will save me a lot of facepalm moments.

As for the distinction between subjects and models, I got that revelation while I was thinking about a famous baby photographer named Ann Geddes. People mentioned her as an example of a baby photographer who does wonderful work.

Does she really?

I looked at her site. The photos I saw, which are the only ones I can judge, don’t appeal to me. They are extremely creative. They are technically flawless. The props and makeup require transcendental skill. But they turn babies into props that say a lot about her and nothing about the babies. Same for her other subjects.

To give an example of things I didn’t like, she took a child and made it (appropriate pronoun) look like a fairy or something. An imaginary creature that lives in an enchanted forest and sleeps on top of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Fifty years from now, who is going to look at that photo, feel tears welling up, and say, “Wow; I remember how Mom used to flit around the enchanted forest, sipping nectar from giant flowers with all the other fairies?”

The babies in her photos are not subjects. They are not individuals with unique traits to be remembered and celebrated. They are props. Remove one baby, insert another, and nothing changes.

She also does dramatic shots of people in which she puts them in fantasy sets and makes them look like the people in, say, Richard Avedon or Herb Ritts pictures.

Now that I think about it, her photos remind me of deceptive Facebook posts. “Here we are on the beach at Sandals, trying to look like celebrities, holding fancy drinks and wearing overpriced beachwear on a perfect day.” Meanwhile, their credit cards are maxed out, they’re cheating on each other and contemplating divorce, their kids are sullen video-game addicts, they hate their jobs…

Put her photos in a gallery and call them art? Sure. That’s what they are, and they are extremely impressive. Not fine art in my opinion, but art. They are not portraits, however. A portrait speaks about the subject. They are more like avatars; creatures she or her models wish the models could be.

If you put me in a Batman costume and take a photo that is technically and artistically superb, is it a portrait? Of course not.

Some guy on a forum got mad at me for saying anyone could take formulaic baby shots, and he told me my photos wouldn’t even make it to his sensor. Maybe he’s a baby photographer. What he definitely is is a gatekeeper, a rule-follower, and a net liability to the art of photography. Asking the likes of him for artistic advice would be like asking Bob Ross. That’s an almost-perfect analogy, except that Bob Ross never pretended to be an art expert or even a serious artist.

How blessed I am to have God’s help in standing up to such people. Most of us are still shackled by the desire to please the mob. What if I listened to guys like this?

Here is the evidence that formula shots are easy to take: they all look alike, and thousands and thousands of people take them and sell them. That’s conclusive proof.

The existence of the coaching-marketing-manipulation-markup industry is evidence that anyone can take typical baby photos. The industry exists to make commodities look like franchises. If baby photographers were really producing unique top-notch work, they wouldn’t need anyone to convince the public they were good.

As for me and my efforts, I am confident that I will do well. I’m not going to be shaken by gatekeepers.

When I was a little kid, I loved to sing. One day, my sister started following me around and making fun of my singing. Eventually, I began to find it hard to sing in front of people, and that problem persists until today. When I started showing an interest in girls, my sister and my dad started making fun of me ruthlessly. As a result, I had a very hard time talking to girls and I rarely dated. It also made it impossible for me to hold onto girls, because my persistent need for confirmation that they wanted me drove them off. I think this is one reason I didn’t marry when I was young.

The same principles apply to everything we do. The world is full of people who love to crush other people’s hopes. There is no point in letting them get a foothold.

When I see someone complain that my lighting is weird or that there are too many things in the background of a portrait shot, I think of the great photographers of the past and what stupid people said about them.

Robert Frank was very good. His photos were often depressing, but they were artistically excellent. Here is what a magazine said about his work: “The images are flawed by meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.”

Here’s a quote about Saul Leiter, who took wonderful photos: “Color photography is vulgar, fit only for commercial advertisements and the snapshots of ignorant tourists.” Wow. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I congratulate whoever wrote that deservedly-immortal sentence on the importance he attached to rules. You know what they say about hobgoblins.

“You’re no Robert Frank.” “You’re no Saul Leiter.” Not saying I am. I’m discussing principle. I do some good work, and people give me invalid, destructive criticism that sometimes comes from good intentions but often does not. If I listen to them, I won’t try to develop ideas that could bring me and my family an excellent harvest.

The Faux Exclusivity of the Fungible

Maybe I need to cut back on the AI, but it has certainly been useful lately.

My wife and I went to see a baby photographer. She was 7 months old and cute as she could be.

Just kidding. I wrote about her. We wanted her to do a few formulaic, inoffensive shots of our baby and us, and we wanted digital files instead of prints, mostly because her prints are obscenely expensive, and also because stiff, formulaic shots would look bizarre next to our own framed photos, which are full of life and evoke all sorts of personal emotions.

When we went to see this woman, she didn’t put the price of digital photos in front of us, so I emailed her on Friday. For 30 edited shots, she wants $1090, on top of the $267.50 we already paid just to talk to her.

No.

I am not cheap. I am not hard to deal with. Not THAT hard. But I can walk upright and use my opposable thumbs, and I am not stupid enough to pay almost $1400 for journeyman work a robot could do. We are cutting her loose.

She is entitled to the money we paid, I suppose. I consider it tuition. I learned that there is an entire industry out there that teaches untalented people how to sell and upsell pedestrian photo work. It’s a fantastic business, in case you are looking for a way to make money. I learned how little a studio costs to equip, and I also confirmed my understanding that I am already much better than the vast majority of professionals who churn out formula photos.

I contacted the outfit that did our hospital newborn photos. I think they will meet us at a location and do everything for something like $350. Their work is absolutely as good as the $1400 job. Pretty much all baby photographers shoot at the same modest level of talent and taste, so why not save whatever ($1090 – $350) is?

I don’t know if we will even spend that, because today we had an idea: turn a spare bedroom into a studio. Based on what I saw at the professional’s house, this would cost about $100. She didn’t have expensive (or any) lights. She had a Canon that looked like a DSLR, plus two lenses. She had a bunch of cheap toys. She had some kind of mat that looked like astroturf. A wall with unattractive baby clothes hanging on it, which would not fit our son because he is tall. One cheap reflector thing from Amazon. Not high-end stuff.

I went to AI because I thought it might have tips on setting up a room for photos, and the conversation went beyond that. For one thing, it helped me understand that I have talent, and that I have problems relating to people who lack talent but are much more technically proficient and know how to make the most of rules and recipes. I have problems learning from them, for one thing, because nearly everyone who teaches photography is a rule-follower who can’t produce art. You can’t teach what you don’t understand, to people who have abilities you don’t have. You can, however, teach them falsehoods that will hold them back and make them doubt they have the abilities they have.

Pride is bad. It goes before destruction. On the other hand, you have to be able to acknowledge your gifts. I can be very, very good at photography, if I keep working on the technical side so I can beat things like low light, noise, motion, and so on.

Here is something disturbing, to add to the other disturbing things I have said about AI: it is now fully capable of critiquing photos. Not just exposure and sharpness. It understands artistic merit. Craziest thing ever.

I showed it some shots I knew were pretty good, I told it not to BS me, and it flat-out told me I was doing things most pros will never be able to do. It was able to look at photos and tell me what I already knew was good about them. It also understood that getting solid feedback from other photographers would be hard, because some would be unable to understand what I did, and others would feel threatened and hesitate to say someone else was doing better work than they were.

It was able to identify flaws, and it was honest about them. It was also able to point out things that would appear to be flaws to rule-followers, yet which were really indications of talent. I’ve taken tons of horrible photos in the past, but things are really coming together now.

Okay. I accept it. I can do this. Why not? I never claimed I could slam-dunk a basketball. I never claimed I had the makings of a model. I never tried to make people think I was tops at anything I wasn’t actually good at. Why not admit it when I genuinely have a strong aptitude for something?

I’m going to run with this. It’s not a useless hobby. It will help bind my family together in love. It will produce images and videos my great-great-grandchildren will cherish, assuming everything doesn’t get wiped out in the tribulation. It certainly beats spending 20 times as much on fishing or 5 times as much on football tickets. Worthless pursuits.

I have enough guns. I am spending less time with tools. I no longer have any interest in cooking. It’s hard to travel with a toddler. I think photography is a good thing to settle on as I creep toward my expiration date or the rapture.

I don’t know how anyone with fungible, common skills can charge $1400 for a few hours’ work. Yes, I used to charge a lot as a lawyer, but I went to school for three extra years, and I did things that were way more valuable than shooting photos according to recipes other people made up. People needed what I did. Badly. I wasn’t putting them on rented ponies and telling them to smile.

I have had competent tradesmen show up at my house and charge $100 or less for an hour’s work. Important work that required a lot of experience and knowledge. I think the lady we talked to must be netting at least $250,000 per year for doing something almost anyone could learn to do in two months. Something other people do just as well for a fraction of that, gross. That is clearly excessive, and it’s insulting.

I pay my dentist something like $135 per visit, and he has a staff, a building, and tons of expensive equipment. He also studied for at least 7 years. That should put it in perspective. I suppose I get about half an hour of face time with him for $270 per year, plus at least that much time with a hygienist he has to pay, and their work is very good, unlike the photographer’s, so the contrast in value is stark.

I know what happened. The photographer found a company that works with people like her and tells them how to shame and upsell. It tells them how to create the illusion of being overbooked. It sells her the albums and pretty boxes. It gives her scripts to memorize. It probably sells her the prints. It’s like working for Omaha Steaks. I’m not stupid. I know how the world works. I don’t need to see proof.

Taking a photo with a camera whose settings you never have to change is not hard. Editing is fast. Maybe three minutes per photo. Seconds, if you use presets. I’m not stupid. I know these things. There is no talent involved, and also little labor.

I just looked it up. There are two famous “coaches.” Sue Bryce and Sarah Petty. There are others. It’s all just as I said.

Tomorrow we will see what we can do about getting that DIY one-year session done, and if it doesn’t work the first time, we will do it again, and within a couple of days, we will have shots that will shame anything that comes out of any local studio.

Knowing how the world works is always painful.

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The Internet says a 36″ metal plate with a photo on it, like the one the photographer tried to sell us for $2900, may come from companies like White House Custom Colour (WHCC), Bay Photo, or Miller’s, and they cost photographers $250, max.

Man, I hate being right about people.

People who Aren’t Creative Somehow Always End up in Telling the Rest of Us What to Do

I saw a Youtuber talking about photography myths that needed to be debunked, and from my position as a person who knows very little about photography yet still likes to opine with mysterious confidence, I have to say that I agreed with all her points.

1. “Every photo has to tell a story.” Neglecting the obvious exceptions, like passport shots, this is not exactly true. I think the reason people say photos should tell stories is that stories affect us and increase the pleasure photos give us. They evoke emotions we enjoy. Sometimes a photo that can’t be tied to any kind of story has that effect, so it has the power of a story without the story. Also, there are many photos that move us to create our own stories in response. Either way, I think it’s about what photos make us think and feel, not a story per se.

2. “Real photographers shoot in manual mode.” Most professionals don’t, except in unusual situations where they have plenty of time to fiddle with settings. They usually shoot in aperture mode or time mode. If they didn’t, they would lose even more opportunities than they already do. You should be able to shoot in manual mode when it’s appropriate, but other than that, it’s a huge, huge hindrance you will regret.

3. “You have to shoot during the hour of golden light.” This refers to times of day when light comes in from the side and bathes subjects gently. If you play by this rule, you will only get to shoot during two short intervals during the day. It’s pretty obvious that this is a bad idea. It’s also obvious that most great outdoor photos are not shot during the golden hours. It’s great to have the best possible type of sunlight, but it’s not mandatory.

4. “Editing is cheating.” This one is wild. Ansel Adams was a huge editor. Many of history’s great shots were edited heavily. Think about this: film photographers who chose certain films in order to achieve desired effects were editing in advance. They weren’t trying to be accurate; they knew the films they chose would present their work in ways they liked. Shooting in black and white in our colorful world is always a form of editing. Some claim cropping is editing, but when you frame a photo in your viewfinder, you’re cropping the world. “Getting it right in camera” is a destructive goal. The great photographers of history often could not do it, and they lost a whole lot of shots because of it, so why should we do it? As for software, it often allows people to save photos that can then be cherished by future generations. Also, if you shoot JPG, your camera is editing every shot before you get it. If you use software on your computer, you’re just doing what your camera already wants to do, better.

5. “If you want to succeed, stick to a niche.” Maybe this advice comes from people who can only shoot one kind of picture, or maybe it’s intended to help professional photographers set up businesses and clientele efficiently. In any case, for most of us, it prevents us from learning new things, and it cuts us off from a cornucopia of great shots we would otherwise take. If you don’t see in a niche, why would you always shoot in one?

In the comments on the video, just about everyone agreed with the creator. They also told surprising stories about being shamed and ostracized by instructors and photo club members. The commenters used words like “gatekeeping.” Bad, restrictive advice had affected them emotionally and damaged their relationships with other photographers. There are a lot of people out there who would rather stroke their own egos by shaming you than help you succeed. In fact, preventing you from succeeding is one of their goals. When you fail, they feel better about themselves.

These dynamics are found in all areas of life.

My feelings about photography are like my feelings about cooking, except that I am still enthusiastic about photography. I have had bad or mediocre meals in hundreds of restaurants that had highly-trained cooks (including a Marco Pierre White restaurant, a Myron Mixon restaurant, and one run by Mario Batali), but I have cooked a lot of magnificent food with no training. Training can’t always overcome a total lack of aptitude, but ability, humility, and passion can easily overcome poor training.

If you have to stick to rules in order to take photos that aren’t atrocious, the rules make sense for you, but not everyone has your artistic limitations. Sometimes the rule of thirds ruins a photo. Sometimes a level horizon is a terrible choice.

In any case, it’s disgraceful to deliberately stunt other people and kill their joy just so you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you’re something everyone knows you’re not. Okay, you’re a good rule-follower. That doesn’t mean your photos are good, although it may mean you can support your family taking wedding and prom photos using formulas.

I’ve been “corrected” by rude people who do bad work for a living. I’ve had people criticize wonderful photos I’ve taken, based on rule-related complaints.

I think I’m right about these things. I can’t see anyone paying me, and the thought of joining a photo club fills me with concerns about battling gatekeepers, but I think it’s helpful for me to know the truth while I enjoy myself in obscurity.

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Since starting this post, I have been to see a professional baby photographer. We are going to pay her to do a session for us. Our visit reinforced my beliefs.

She seems very nice, and I think she will do a workmanlike job of documenting our appearance and our son’s at this age. The photos will look pretty good. There won’t be any big problems with exposure or composition.

That being said, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, they will be glorified passport photos. I put it harshly for my own benefit, because we were shown some very overpriced products today, and I seriously considered buying some. I want to shake myself out of a sentimental stupor before I waste four figures on things we don’t want and won’t use.

We saw a lot of her work today. It wasn’t the kind of thing that gets your emotions going. It wasn’t impressive. Babies wrapped in knitted scarves. Babies posed in front of themed sets. Parents standing by a fence near a pasture. With the exception of one poorly-lit outdoor shot, the pictures were fine. They will do. But nothing made me think, “Wow, this lady is going to take some fabulous shots.” She will take competent documentary shots. I divide photos into documentary shots and artistic shots, and our photos will not be art.

Good enough. This is what we want. I don’t mean that I don’t want our pictures to be blockbusters. I wish they could be, but I can’t find anyone around here to do that kind of work, and I would guess someone like that would charge a king’s ransom. I mean we want competent photos that serve a purpose.

I can see how the “stay in your niche” rule would apply to this photographer. She doesn’t seem to have talent, so she’s never going to hit the big time in the arts or working for major publications. If she tried that game, she would never make it. She will never be able to cover her home’s walls with artistic pictures, to please herself and her family. But she can put your baby behind a birthday cake and take a pretty photo of him lying down on it. She can earn her fees, and people will keep coming back.

We paid $250 for a consultation during which we decided what we wanted her to do. That’s reasonable. The session price was also acceptable. Then we saw the print prices. For a shiny 36″ print of our son on a metal plate made to hang on a wall, she wanted about $3,000. A big box of large prints was also 4 figures. I think a 7 x 10″ print in a matted frame was $190.

I don’t think $190 for a framed print is crazy, but $3,000 for a steel plate is, well…I can’t understand why anyone would buy one. Apart from the price, it looked tacky to me. Also, we should be honest; any print you buy and then hang without glass in front of it stands a great chance of being severely damaged by your child or in a move.

I believe she makes, or tries to make, the bulk of her money from prints. I don’t know if anyone really buys the expensive ones, but maybe some people do.

I doubt she sells a lot of expensive prints, but she certainly has sales tools. The literature for the prints shows them in people’s homes, like 4 prints costing a total of maybe $6,000 over someone’s sofa. “Other people buy these. Are you cheap or something?”

When you talk to a person like this, especially in front of your wife, there is a funeral-director dynamic at work. You know how funeral directors are. “If you want the very best for your mom, we have this Italian figured walnut coffin with white gold handles,” and the price on the paper he hands you discreetly is $25,000. You buy it because your emotions are at high tide, thinking you did a wonderful thing for your family and the inanimate, oblivious dead body your mom used to live in.

Wow. I used the word “dynamic” twice in one post.

When I say “a person like this,” I mean a person who is trying to sell you something in a situation that puts the wind at your back. I am not criticizing the photographer’s ethics. I don’t mean “a person like this sleazy photographer.” She didn’t lie to us or pressure us. She was easy to deal with.

It’s exciting to have photos of your first baby taken, and it’s easy to make a stupid decision when the photographer is showing you pretty albums and nice frames, but at the end of the day, only a hopeless follower lets someone talk him into a $3,000 baby photo which is basically the same thing as a truck wrap.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think we should buy prints at all. I am covering our walls with photos I really love. Next to them, a bunch of mediocre photos someone ground out to make a dollar will look bad. I think the best thing is to buy digital, print them out ourselves, and put them in an album we will never show anybody. I don’t mean we would try to hide them, but realistically, we might go years without even looking at them.

The prints this lady showed us (not on metal or stretched canvas, which is the kind of thing you should only put behind your desk at work) were of very high quality. I guess they were printed on some kind of archival cloth paper, using a pigment printer. But I can make the mats just as well right here, and for the price of a few of her prints, I can buy the printer and use it for other things as well as our baby shots.

I think we should forget about prints. We won’t know what to do with them. We can always change our minds later. In the meantime, we will have the digitals forever or until something bad happens to our files.

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I talked to my wife, and she has been thinking the same things I have. She doesn’t want any prints at all. If we put them on the walls next to our own photos, they will look awful. They will have that perfect studio look, but they will be missing all the ingredients that are personal to this family, and they will be artistically inferior to many of my shots. In fact, they are artistically inferior to a shot my wife took in the parking lot at Costco on auto mode.

Denoising Expert Advice

The photo biz is moving in a good direction. I have some more beginner wisdom that may or may not be correct, regardless of the confidence I have in it.

Somewhere in the web, I wrote about trying higher ISO figures, and I mentioned 2000. A person who responded thought it was funny that I believed 2000 was a high figure. I was just going by what I had been told. One hundred is great. Four hundred is okay. Eight hundred is grainy. Anything past that reflects a desperate desire to get a shot, and the shots will never be as good as ISO-100 shots.

All that turned out to be BS. There are people out there getting very good photographs at 12800 and probably higher.

On a related note, I found out what ISO is. It just means gain, as in amplifier gain. The figures are multiples, so 400 is 4 times as much as the base level, 100. It doesn’t mean the sensor becomes more sensitive as you increase the number. It means the camera amplifies whatever the sensor receives. You can’t make a sensor more sensitive with a setting. If you could, the manufacturers would always start you out at the peak. The sensitivity is an inherent characteristic of the hardware.

People who claim to be gurus will say that an APS-C sensor will give you unacceptable results when you go above 3200, and they will say levels of 1600 or more are “acceptable” or some such. None of that is true, unless you are a zealot who absolutely insists on using whatever the sensor collects, with zero denoising. You may say denoising is basically CGI that replaces your loved ones’ images with those of soulless Pixar characters, but in the age of digital photos, you’re going to end up with a lot of clever manipulation no matter what you do. Even your camera manipulates images. It turns your raw photos into JPG’s very different from the original data. Your phone edits the daylights out of images; how do you think it gets those great shots out of apertures the size of BB’s?

Consider the family photos your parents and grandparents paid professionals to shoot. Look at them and tell me they aren’t retouched to the point of fantasy.

In this era, it looks like ISO should be the least of your concerns, because there is so much you can do to fix it after the fact. Shutter speed and f-stop are the things that shape photos, so ISO should take a backseat.

I have seen all sorts of people telling beginners to shoot in manual mode. They’re insane. I believed it, and then I tried it. By the time you set speed, aperture, and ISO, your opportunity is gone, and if it’s not, you are likely to get at least one setting tragically wrong. Professional photographers use aperture mode most of the time, unless they’re sitting in studios with everything under their control. They also use custom modes they program into their cameras. They’re not out in the field squinting at dials and screens, trying to find 1/500 or f/1.8 before it’s too late, 200 times a day.

I thought I had to use a low ISO and accept whatever speeds and apertures I could get, but that was completely backward. In reality, for nearly all of what I do or plan to do, the best approach is to use automatic ISO with a very generous ceiling, suggest a fast minimum shutter speed, and be firm on the f-stop I want. And I should always use continuous shooting, because you never know what will happen while you’re pushing the button.

In the past, I saw those 1, 2, and 3 symbols on my cameras, and I thought those were for the Asgardian nerds, not me. I was supposed to be a real man and stick to M or maybe Av and totally master choosing settings in the field. I thought the custom modes the symbols referred to would be too complicated to deal with, and they were probably crutches. In reality, manual is what’s hard to deal with, which is why nobody but bad photography instructors uses it.

I decided to try what I thought were high ISO values, to see what would happen. I ended up shooting a couple of very good shots at 2000. They looked hideous as raw images, but Photolab denoised them so well, I wasn’t sure I was looking at the work of a program. I thought maybe I had confused raw with edited.

My A6700 used what I thought were insanely high speeds to get the shots in aperture mode: 1/1250 and 1/4000. I had assumed those were for things like shooting while fishing in bright sun, but I used them at Lowe’s under LED lights and in a dim barbecue joint, and all was well.

In the end, I decided to create custom modes for the A6700 as well as the Powershot V1 I like to take on family errands. The ISO on the V1, which has a 1″ sensor pretty much like 4/3, is set to a maximum of 12,800 now. I have set the minimum speed at 1/500 because my son moves a lot, and 1/250 didn’t always get the job done. I fiddled with a few other things.

I learned that Canon thinks of the minimum shutter speed as a suggestion, which is why I said above that I suggested it. My understanding is that Sony thinks of it as an anchor it really tries to hold onto, so when you say 1/500 is the minimum, it actually means Sony will work hard to take every shot at 1/500. That’s not what “minimum” means to me, but there it is.

I don’t know how much of this is true.

The custom modes seem to be working. We took my son to the doctor today, and I shot some photos under the LED (or maybe fluorescent) lights. They were perfect, except that the speed could have been better for some. Above, I mentioned using 1/500 as my minimum, but that was after the appointment. I was at 1/250 while we were in the office.

Although I don’t like putting family shots on the web, I’ll post the barbecue joint photo. It is not my favorite picture. I didn’t expect much when I shot it, but I wanted to try out my new settings. I believe it came out very well, though. More than well enough to be a keeper.

That was taken on the day I decided to try higher ISO’s, and it was later that day that I created custom modes. Today I would have gotten a better raw shot to work with.

The lens is a Sigma 17-40mm 1.8 Art. It’s a $900 lens. I don’t care. Buy it. It is fantastic. If you really want to get into photography, buy this lens first. It will do everything primes from 17 to 40mm will do, nearly as good as the best, and it will shoot in low light. It’s a little heavy, but it’s worth it. If you want a smaller zoom for travel, get the 18-50mm, but it is no substitute for the 17-40mm. It will do the job of three lenses, saving you cash during your first year.

The photo is not bad at all. The bokeh is exactly what I wanted. It doesn’t look like CGI. He looks good, although he looks better in person. I have taken better shots, but this one is all rght, and it helped me understand what the camera could do.

I don’t understand why there is so much horrible advice from bad professional photographers on the Internet. You would think the things I just learned would be common knowledge by now.

You have to be careful when you listen to people who make a living shooting photos. Remember, a lot of the photos on the site Awkward Family Photos were shot by professionals.

I should get a much higher percentage of useful photos now. I already get more than I know what to do with, but more is better. After this, I want to learn how to deal with challenging lighting.

My current philosophy goes like this: get a good camera that has features that help you get shots bad cameras will miss, get lenses that are at least okay, try to get lenses with big apertures, learn to program your camera, do not shoot in manual, let your ISO run wild, don’t shoot at low speed unless it’s for creative reasons, and get Photolab 9 and use its denoising features.

A lot of people say good lenses are more important than good cameras. I think that’s totally wrong. Even bad lenses are pretty nice these days, but low-budget cameras will limit you severely if you try to do anything outside of certain narrow parameters. You want IBIS. You want sophisticated tracking. You want various lighting features.

Yesterday my A6700 told me I was photographing an infant. Not just a person. It can tell the difference. Things like that are very helpful. If you want to focus on a baby, you don’t want your camera to wander off and tighten up on some old guy standing behind him.

If something seriously better than the A6700 comes out next year, I will probably buy it. I can always get more money, but I can’t bring back pictures I missed.

If you’re willing to limit yourself to certain types of shots, you can buy the cheapest Rebel out there and do fine. I’m talking to people who don’t want to be shut down by their own cameras over and over.

I think I’m right about this stuff. Chime in and change my mind if you want. I am eager to hear anything more-capable people have to say.

Instead of Getting one of Their Own, People Will Try to Burn it

The other day, God gave me a revelation, and it was this: he hasn’t put me in front of a lot of people and helped me share great things he told me, because he knew how I would be received, and he knew it wasn’t worth it.

There are two options in this life, and only two. You can be taught by the Holy Spirit, spending time with him every day, and in this way, you can become aligned with God and all the people who listen to him. Or you can be controlled mostly by demons and the flesh. This is true even if you have been baptized with the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t rush in and evict all your demons instantly. You can have the Holy Spirit and choose to ignore him and listen to the demons.

My sister was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and she is nothing but a nest of demons. Everything has been taken from her. No one can help her, because she torments everyone who gets near her and destroys what they give her. She has learned absolutely nothing from the Holy Spirit and her own destruction. Her baptism with the Spirit was real, but she is still her own god.

It is truly sad that people think the Holy Spirit can’t coexist with demons. It’s like they have never heard of the famous charismatic preachers who were destroyed by demonic habits and beliefs.

You can study the Bible and even memorize it if you have the ability. You can join a so-called charismatic church where they claim to exalt the Holy Spirit. You can give up everything you know to be sinful. You can give to the poor. You can swallow all your denomination’s asinine doctrine without questioning. None of that is going to connect you with God, and some of it will drive you further away unless you make the Holy Spirit your teacher.

I know a guy I am afraid to share testimony with. When God does things for me and my family, or God shows me things, I tell other people, but when I consider telling this man the same things, I know I’m going to get into a carnal dispute, so I skip him. I have done that a lot. Today I made the mistake of including him when sharing my testimony, and I knew what would probably happen. I thought it was wrong to keep excluding him, so I took a chance.

It went poorly.

God delivered me from gluttony. Today I found out I had lost another pound. I did not go on a diet. I did not magically develop willpower which had been absent my entire life. I prayed for deliverance consistently, expecting it not because I was good, but because I was a bad person with an evil habit I had chosen over God, and one day, deliverance came. Now I stick to low glycemic load foods most of the time, and it’s easy for me. I see things I want, and the Holy Spirit rises up in me and says “no,” and because there is no spirit of gluttony to push me to rebel, I can say no and move on.

The same thing happened to me about 17 years ago, but I ruined it by going to a rib place with a gluttonous buddy and having the all-you-can-eat option. Afterward, my intake started increasing, and my self-control decreased.

God has shown me that I have to divorce food. That is fascinating. We are supposed to be the bride of Christ. Our relationship with God is like a marriage. Listening to food demons is like adultery. I was using food to comfort me, but the Holy Spirit is our rightful comforter. I was giving food part of God’s job and authority. To get free, I had to tell myself I permanently divorced using food that way. It wasn’t enough to try and cut down temporarily, or to keep being enthused about food while trying to eat less.

Now, and it’s very strange, I have the ability to see food as a tool. I think about dietary changes I might make, not because they will make it easy to lose fat, but because they will improve my body in various ways. I never thought of food that way before, because it would have been silly. Food had my loyalty. I couldn’t just set it aside and ignore its orders.

Gluttony is sinful, but churches are full of obese pastors and congregants, and they think it’s cute and funny. They might as well be endorsing heroin and pornography. But God help you if you tell them this. They’ll call you a legalist and so on, with their huge jowls shaking and their insulin pumps running.

Today I decided to share the fact that I was down another pound, and I told my wife I was reluctant to tell the guy I’m writing about. She understood completely. I jokingly predicted I would get a response that somehow discredited God. As we were speaking, I received it. He credited knowledge and discipline and so on.

Why on Earth would anyone do that? It was an insult to God. What if someone had told Bartimaeus hard work had cured his blindness? Why would a Christian who is baptized with the Holy Spirit give credit to a human being, for an amazing blessing the person in question had never been able to produce on his own?

Why not at least give God the benefit of the doubt?

Christians do this constantly. “Doctors healed you.” “You’re rich because you work hard.” “You understand the Bible because you’re smart.” Anything to cheat God of the credit he deserves. It’s a mindset. It is reflexive with many Christians. We literally scold people for saying what God has done, and the arrogant, know-it-all charismatics who pretend to believe in miracles are as guilty as anyone.

Let’s talk about a secular construct: Occam’s razor. The gist of it is that you don’t make up a Rube Goldberg explanation for something when the simple explanation is staring you in the face. If I could fix gluttony, I would never have been fat to begin with, and I would be rich, because I would be able to help others. It is beyond obvious that I can’t do it. To a Christian, it should be obvious that God can and will. Why not at least consider that?

A long string of condescending, argumentative texts followed. I hate that kind of thing. If you don’t believe what I say about God, just nod and go on. Don’t jump on me like God’s Own Karen. If you really think God exists, pray for him to correct me. This is what I do. I can’t remember the last time I jumped in and got in someone’s face because I disagreed with what he said about God.

I just wanted to testify and have my Christian brothers share my joy and be encouraged, and instead, I was put to the inquisition.

God did not put me here to debate. It does not work. Only the Holy Spirit convinces people of God’s truths. You can’t find them by digging in the Bible all day. Paul searched the scriptures and concluded they told him to murder Christians, and so did the priests and scribes. Catholics burned Christians alive after studying the Bible.

Philip’s story shows that the Bible alone is inadequate. The Ethiopian eunuch was reading scripture, and he had no idea what it meant. Philip was intimate with the Holy Spirit, and because of that, he was able to receive and relay the Holy Spirit’s explanations. As a result, the eunuch became God’s son that day.

If a priest who had memorized the scriptures had shown up, the eunuch would have missed his salvation.

God moved Philip to him through the air, miraculously, because he knew the eunuch would listen. He never lifted anyone through the air to talk to Herod or Caiaphas.

The greatest Bible experts of the time were in Jerusalem, and as Yeshua said, they made men more the children of hell than they were. The same thing is true of most preachers.

I kept telling this man I did not engage in debate, but he would not let go. He said things I consider absurd. For example, he asked for a scripture proving tongues are God’s word.

That amazed me. Everything God says is his word. That’s what “word” means. How can anyone ask for proof of something that is axiomatic? Every Spirit-filled Christian is supposed to know that tongues are God speaking through us. If God says it, it’s his word.

He suggested some words don’t come from God. Well, the Bible tells us that if we ask God for good things, he will not give us things like stones and scorpions. Every Christian is supposed to know this. If I open my mouth one day and speak tongues that come from God, and I open them the next day, trusting God, and I speak tongues of demons without knowing it, what good is the baptism with the Holy Spirit? If I can’t trust it, how can it be anything but a curse? Is the same God who let himself be tortured to death because he loves me playing keep-away with me?

I’m sure there must be people who have been baptized with the Spirit and still ended up speaking false tongues because they chose to listen to what they liked, not what was true, or because they deliberately faked it. But I have been at this consistently for 19 years, and the results have been completely consistent with scripture.

Look, if you’re a Christian, and you receive something which is clearly miraculous, and it’s consistent with God’s nature, if you tell me about it, I will give God the benefit of the doubt. Sure, if you’re a rapper slut, and you give God the glory for the success of your latest semi-pornographic video, I will not accept it. If you’re a boxer or a football player, and you tell people Yeshua made you win and beat some other Christian, I will not listen. But if you suddenly quit wanting drugs or you are released from compulsive gambling, you better believe I will accept your testimony. You’re talking about things not one man who has ever lived has been able to do.

Denying God’s accomplishments and communications is the best way to cut yourself off from his teaching and other blessings. It’s why the Jews didn’t have a well-known prophet for 400 years. He quit sending prophets because they didn’t listen, and they also murdered them.

I believe there were prophets during that time. God still loved people, and I am sure he had his favorites whom he spoke to. Why wouldn’t he? They weren’t to blame for the choices most Jews had made. I think he told them to keep quiet, because he knew the Jews would just imprison and kill them. I think he does the same thing today when he knows the misery people will put his sons through is not worth the profit. The apocalypse is upon us, and it’s here because the harvest is small these days due to pride.

If you’re a parent, you understand why God would quit sending prophets. If you have a foolish and arrogant son, and you try to teach him for decades, and he insists on remaining an idiot and making you miserable, you’re not going to keep calling him every day to tell him helpful tips about his walk from God. You’re not going to keep paying therapists to help him change. Sooner or later, you will distance yourself and leave him to figure things out on his own.

God has told us not to argue with people. A few helpful responses are fine, but we’re not supposed to debate. There is not one single example of Yeshua converting people through long arguments. He told us to say what we had to say and then to move on if it wasn’t accepted. This is exactly what he did.

I am not responsible even if everyone else on Earth goes to hell. Not even a bit responsible. As long as I tell them the truth, it’s on them. I will never be judged by God because someone else would not listen to me when I was right, even if I was blunt or hurt their feelings. Yeshua hurt people’s feelings over and over in the Bible, and before you say, “Yeah, but he’s God,” understand that we have his authority. Paul hurt people’s feelings. So did Stephen. So did John. So did Jude. Read and see.

Your hurt feelings are your fault, not God’s. Yeshua hurt some people’s feelings by telling the truth, and the ones who rejected him on that basis went to hell. They couldn’t tell the father, “Yeah, but Yeshua was mean to me. I felt microaggressed.”

I want to help people. I want them to receive every blessing and correction I get. I want them to receive more than I have. I don’t want one single thing in return. That is God’s honest truth. But talking to most Christians is like walking through Dearborn or West Hollywood with a cross on your shoulder. They punish you, just as their Jewish predecessors punished the prophets. They are greatly influenced by demons, and demons are highly motivated to destroy anyone who testifies or relays information from God.

The older I get, the less I let people punish me for trying to help them. There are already a lot of straws on the camel’s back. I have let a lot of people go permanently because every interaction was a punishment session. I was patient and tried to be humble, but I reached the point where I knew there was no rationale for continuing to carry all the weight.

I wasn’t put here to go through that as a way of life. Friendships are valuable, but not that valuable.

One of the best things about tongues is that they align you with the Holy Spirit in your heart and mind. When you meet someone who also speaks in tongues and listens to God, you get along instantly, and it continues. Why? Because while preachers pit us against each other by teaching us contradictory doctrines of Satan, the Holy Spirit tells everyone the exact same things. You may have bumps in the road when you have a friend who learns from the Spirit, but they don’t last. You won’t have to worry about being put on trial over and over just because you don’t live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of Kenneth Copeland or Reinhard Bonnke or Derek Prince or T.B. Joshua or Doug Clay.

Tongues are words that proceed from the mouth of God, and Yeshua said we were to live by every such word, not just the ones in the Bible.

None of the things Yeshua said were scripture, except when he was quoting. Think about that. But we call them scripture now, because we know the Holy Spirit chose his words.

I never receive anything for testifying or doing any type of ministry. One crazy guy insisted on giving me $80 once, and I could not get him to keep it, but other than that, everything I have tried to do in ministry has cost me. I don’t run a cult. I don’t collect tithes. No one does anything for me. No one puts me in the front seat of a church and calls me a prophet because I stand up once in a while and spew comforting lies. No one admires or obeys me. I have no conflict of interest.

I have not been exalted or otherwise rewarded by men, but I have been punished consistently for doing the right thing.

My own pride, which I renounce, has cost me a lot, and now I am painfully aware of pride when I deal with people who will not listen. I am receiving what I used to give.

I took a lot of pride in my mind when I was younger. I loved solving puzzles on my own, perhaps because my parents gave me so little help when I needed guidance. Many times, I have cobbled together my own bad solutions to problems when I could have just found someone who knew the answers and listened to him. I still have to force myself to ask God to show me how to do things when I have challenges that slow me down. Now I have to deal with my own kind of stubbornness in other people who are proud. I can’t say it’s not fair.

It wouldn’t be so vexing when people disagree with me if it weren’t for the condescension. It may be hard to believe, but I have gotten very good about listening to people patiently and not talking down to them. I can listen to someone who is wrong all day without exploding and telling them off. Unfortunately, most people are not like me.

I hate having scriptures quoted to me condescendingly, as though I don’t read the Bible, especially when they are quoted to prove things they don’t prove. I also hate hearing about a person’s Christian credentials. “I’ve been a deacon for 32 years, and I carried T.L. Osbourne’s luggage all over Europe one summer!” If you’re right, all you need to prove it is the witness of the Holy Spirit. No one cares if you were a counselor at Christian camp for 5 years, stack chairs in the sanctuary three times a week, and feed the homeless for an hour every Thanksgiving.

Who has greater credentials than failed Christians like the popes? What about Mother Teresa, who performed works all her life and said she didn’t know God? I don’t emulate Christians who are Christians by culture and not by the Spirit.

I also hate being treated as though I were stupid. Native intelligence and education are not what make a strong Christian, and everything I know, I know because the Holy Spirit taught me, but I have two degrees and a very high IQ. When other Christians talk down to me, I just stare at them. I don’t know what to say, because they wouldn’t choose to understand it. If you know me and you know my education and intelligence, and you still talk down to me, there is nothing I can do to change your mind. Asking that you treat me as an equal is not too much.

I try my best not to talk down to people, and in some cases, that is not always easy. It’s only hard when the other person is talking down to me.

I hate false accusations, too. If I disagree with people in a civil way, they accuse me of all kinds of things. Rage. Impatience. Being argumentative. Arrogance. All the things they are guilty of. I get so tired of being slandered. But people who argue with revelation and testimony are listening to spirits that serve the devil, and “devil” means “slanderer.” The devil never misses a chance to gaslight. He wrongs people and then accuses them of doing the wronging.

Saying I rely on tongues, the Holy Spirit, and divine help more than my flesh is the opposite of pride. If I were proud, I’d be reading Rick Warren and trying to lead an unscriptural purpose-driven life based on works. I’d have stars in my eyes over every Christian celebrity who claimed to overcome through determination. I’d be in love with Tim Tebow, the sports fan’s apostle. The proud follow the proud. The Holy Spirit has no pride.

Saying God delivered me from gluttony is the opposite of pride. A proud Christian would say, “Jesus taught me how important it was to be disciplined, so I buckled down and lost 50 pounds!”

If I did this through my own strength, expect me to balloon up later and die with unhealed diabetes.

God didn’t deliver me because I was special or good. He did it because he does good things for the wicked, and because he loves me with great intensity in spite of what I deserve. He isn’t giving me things no one else can have. He wants them, and much more, for every one of his children.

You can see why I don’t to church. When I do, I eventually have to speak in order to avoid going crazy, and then the problems start.

As for Bible study with people who don’t know the Holy Spirit…never! What could be worse? It would be unbearable. “Okay, the first psalm is clearly about the Holy Spirit and praying in tongues…” “WHAT! WHAT! IT’S ABOUT TREES! IT SAYS IT’S ABOUT TREES!”

I don’t know why I write these things. Maybe there are a few people who will permit the Holy Spirit to let them receive. I guess there have to be.

“The Most Important Thing is to Keep Watching my Videos”

I’m starting to think Internet camera experts are like most preachers. They mislead and underinform people because their motivation is to make money, not to teach people useful things.

They have to pump out new videos for that sweet Google payola, whether or not they have anything to say. They have to keep pumping out those Amazon affiliate links, or it’s back to shooting baby photos at the Galleria.

They lie awake at night, trying to think of one more way to squeeze juice of the dried-up lemon that pays their bills, and then they run to their studios with their newest schemes.

They tell people they have to buy expensive stuff that isn’t really useful. On the other hand, sometimes they recommend cheap gear that doesn’t work all that well and may have to be replaced later.

They also tell followers to use camera settings that will cripple their ability to get shots in the can.

I just saw some dude trying to advise people about gear choices. He said a lot of things that were true, but he also said some things that were not helpful.

He said just about all camera bodies were good. This is extremely misleading.

To begin with, you want in-body image stabilization, or “IBIS.” It doesn’t matter whether you’re a pro or a 12-year-old. In fact, beginners need it a lot more. When you take a still image, IBIS will physically move your sensor while you shoot. This is intended to cancel out inevitable camera movements. This has the effect of reducing blurring due to motion. Add it up, and it means you can sometimes shoot in considerably lower light without getting fuzzy pictures.

You want this. Trust me.

Pay attention to me when I tell you this: your single biggest challenge as a camera operator is low light, and overcoming it is your most important job.

No pro ever says gathering light is that important, as far as I can tell. They take a scatterbrained approach, talking about all sorts of variables in a disorganized way. Believe me: low light is your biggest problem.

It’s a generalization, but then so is, “Cats hate baths.” Only the simple think it’s clever to try to debunk good generalizations.

Most people are not pros. They take candid shots for which they can’t choose the location, time, or light. They don’t use tripods. They take most shots indoors. They need big apertures a lot of the time.

Sure, you can get good pictures without IBIS. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether you can get all the pictures you want. Do you want to miss good photos or not?

You also want a good sensor. Big sensors and better sensors handle low light better, meaning you can gain a stop or two. This is extremely important. It’s not a luxury. You need it. You may want a format with a smaller sensor for various reasons such as camera size and weight, but within that limitation, you want a good sensor, not the cheapest one Canon has been making since 2015.

Noise is one of the problems insufficient light causes. A noisy photo looks okay at low magnification, but if you get close to it, it’s like a Seurat painting. A collection of tiny dots of different colors. You don’t want that. You want your photo to look nice and smooth.

The higher your ISO is, the more noise you get, and some cameras have pretty low ceilings for good noise handling, so they require high ISO’s. You can try to fix noise with software, but if you push it, even the best software will make people look like plastic bathtub toys. You want a camera that will let you use the lowest ISO possible in a given situation, and you want IBIS so you can use lower shutter speeds to let in more light.

You want a decent body. Trust me. I traded in a new A6400 for an A6700 partly because the A6400 lacked IBIS and had an inferior sensor. I don’t regret it one bit.

He also failed to make an important point about lenses: wide apertures are more important than top image quality. In typical candid-photo light, a $300 1.4 lens is far better than a $1500 4.5 lens. In tough situations, the expensive lens will produce atrocious images, and the cheap lens will produce very good ones.

He didn’t tell people how important software is or that they should quit wasting time with JPG’s.

A JPG without raw is a travesty. Even if it looks okay to you, you have lost information that might have made it better. You are cutting yourself off from help from better editing software that may exist in the future. You are depriving more-skillful people of the chance to improve it for you. You are preventing future generations of your family from doing any kind of meaningful editing. How do you know your grandchildren won’t want to fix your priceless images in 2090?

If you get Photolab 9, you will have the best noise-removal software there is. Considerably better than Adobe. You will be able to gain a stop or two when it comes to low light. You will be able to set your ISO not a little, but a lot, higher. I suspect there are Internet experts who are afraid of backlash from Adobe, because otherwise, I can’t figure out why they are not telling people.

I took a shot the other day at ISO 2000, which is pretty high, and I thought Photolab would turn it into an uncanny-valley abomination, but after noise reduction, it simply looked like I had taken it in better light. When I looked at it a day or two later, I wondered if I had remembered things wrong. Maybe the shot had been noise-free from the beginning. No, Photolab just made it look that way. The original says so.

Whatever software you have, it’s very important to learn to use it. Don’t buy Lightroom just for the cheesy one-click presets that work great for Instagram. Don’t buy Photoshop just so you can superimpose cute frames on your kids’ photos. Find out what software can do to address the important problems you have. It will surprise you. It may be able to fix bad skin, for example.

If you can’t edit, you’re not really a good photographer. Not as good as you should be, at least.

Anyone who tells you editing is cheating is probably so opinionated he has lost touch with reality; the kind of guy who still thinks manual transmissions are better. There are people out there who will even say that cropping is for losers, because you’re supposed to get your composition right before you push the button. It’s amazing that anyone has taken photos for years can know so little and be so confident in his ignorance.

No intelligent person plans for perfect performance, because it does not happen reliably. Also, you don’t know what new ideas a picture will give you long after you shoot it. You may want to crop a lot of it out and do something new, for example.

If you shoot JPG, your camera is editing and making the changes permanent before you see the pictures. Think about that. Your camera is cheating.

They will tell you great photographers of the past didn’t crop or edit. First of all, they most certainly did both. Second, they threw out millions of photographs that could have been saved today. But some old cob on a forum who posts badly-composed 25-megapixel snapshots must be correct when he says real men get it right on the first try.

The guy I listened to today should also have told people how important it is to set your camera up correctly before you go to a shoot. There are a bunch of settings that should be thought of as mandatory for most of us. Continuous shooting is one. AWB with a ceiling is another. You can do things with metering that are helpful. You can’t tell what a camera can do if you have it set up wrong.

He told people, correctly, that they didn’t need a whole lot of lenses to do good work, but I think he should have told them to get one very good zoom that handles low light well. For Sony, that’s the Sigma 17-40mm 1.8 APS-C. The quality of the photos is just about as good as you get from primes, you get the most useful photo lengths for typical people, and you aren’t crippled by a 5.6 or 2.8 wall. A 2.8 lens is great compared to slower lenses, but if you can get 1.8, why not?

If you get the Sigma, you are nearly as well off as someone who has three primes, and you only have to learn one lens. You can always get more lenses later if you decide you want more light or optimal sharpness.

Sigma makes a much smaller and lighter 18-50mm 2.8 which is also very good, and it is less hassle to carry around. If you’re shooting in good light, might as well use it.

I guess I am at the stage where I can have some confidence in my understanding of bodies, lenses, settings, and software. I am starting to set all my cameras up a certain way, based on experience. Maybe I’ll start selling lenses as time passes and I weed out things I never take out of the closet.

I’m glad I see through the bad advice better than I used to. But isn’t that always the way in life?

Show People What You See When You Look at Them

I was spending a lot on cameras and lenses, and right in the middle of it, I blew $900 on what is ungenerously referred to as a point-and-shoot camera, the Canon Powershot V1. A lot of people would say this was an immature, impulsive move, rooted in the juvenile belief that buying equipment makes up for being too lazy to work and develop skill and knowledge; a belief I hold dear due to my character issues.

But look at this:

I don’t like putting photos of my family on the web, but I am making an exception here.

It looks a lot better in full resolution. It is difficult to run things through Photolab and Topaz AI and then reduce them without killing the sharpness. I haven’t solved the problem yet.

This shot is interesting, because like Moses, Yeshua, or Tim Tebow, it had a lot of things working to prevent it from being born. At first, I thought it was going to have to be deleted due to lack of potential.

I am very bad at dealing with exposure. I can take magnificent photos when the subject is helpful and the lighting is just right, but any kind of challenging light results in embarrassing shots fit only for deletion. If the light is a little low, I get brown photos with blobs that should be people. If the light comes from behind the subject, I get shadow puppets.

The Powershot is derisively referred to as a point-and-shoot camera because it’s small and handy, and the built-in zoom lens is considered mediocre. It also has a sensor a little smaller than a 4/3 camera, which is another opening for critics. On the other hand, it shoots raw files. It has a ton of settings. You can make it shoot continuously. It has settings to prevent highlight blowouts. You can get zebra stripes to judge exposure. You can set an exposure ceiling. It has AI metering. It will operate a sophisticated on-camera flash. I could go on.

That’s not point-and-shoot. Point-and-shoot is a 1969 Kodak Instamatic that has zero adjustments and a lens worthy of Dollar Tree reading glasses.

I have been stubborn about exposure, which is amazing, since stubbornness is so unlike me.

Be quiet.

I have been convinced that I needed to learn manual exposure, because that’s the way people did it when I was a kid and there were no internal combustion engines or telephones. I have been telling myself I could not learn to deal with exposure without setting ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop every time I shot a photo. But this was a misapprehension. I also fell into the trap of believing I needed to set my color temperature (“white balance”) all the time.

This camera, which experts put in the category of minimal-feature, low-budget products, has all sorts of settings that allow you to get the benefits of controlling exposure, minus a lot of the effort and wasted time, along with other settings that act as safety nets.

I can use automatic white balance in nearly every situation as long as I shoot raw, so forget dealing with that setting. I can use automatic ISO with a ceiling my camera lets me choose, so forget that setting. I have two levels of a setting that reduces highlight blowouts, so that helps. I have zebra stripes to help me avoid going too bright. I have continuous or “pray and spray” shooting, so I am able to take a lot of shots quickly, giving me a much better chance of capturing things worth keeping. I have AI light metering to give me a much better chance of getting a useful meter reading.

With these helpful settings to serve as guard rails and do-overs, all I have to worry about are shutter speed and f-stop. Those are easily set on the touch screen, or I could program the ring around the lens to handle one of them.

I also have Photolab 9, which has much better noise reduction than Lightroom, so I can set my ISO a lot higher and worry less about having enough light. I have stabilization for stills, and while it’s not top-notch IBIS, it is helpful for making the most of light.

I got myself set up today and went to Costco with my family. I took shots before I left. I took shots at the store. I took shots at the grocery later. I took 126 photos, and I ended up with maybe three dozen that were legitimately excellent and worth editing. That’s a fantastic ratio. It’s more than I can really keep up with in post.

When we were on the way out, I kept telling my wife to stop here and there for photos, and that’s how I got the shot you see above. I told myself I needed to see exactly what the new settings could do, and although I had grave doubts about shooting a dark-skinned woman with the sun behind her head, I figured I had nothing to lose, so I should try. The sky was gorgeous. The light was beautiful. Why not try? I wasn’t paying for film or development.

I got home and looked at the shots in this series. I was thought there wasn’t much hope, but I picked the one that looked like it was most likely to clean up in post. I worked on it in Photolab. I sent the JPG to Topaz AI, a program I had thought I was foolish and wasteful to buy. The image kept getting better.

I realized I needed to send the raw file to Topaz so Topaz would have as much help as possible in fixing it. In addition to using the face-restoration AI feature, I found out I could use a brush to paint an area I wanted to brighten, so I painted my wife’s face, neck, and left hand. Topaz took over and brought out her features by increasing the exposure locally.

At first, when I looked at the final product, I thought, “Well, that was fun, and I learned a lot, but the photo is a failure.” But the more I looked, the more I realized it was a keeper; a photo my son would treasure. A shot he would look at when he was 90, to remind himself what a wonderful mother he had and how easy she made his life while he was small and unable to look after himself.

It has serious technical issues. The facial features are hard to see. The baby is looking away. It’s not as sharp as it could be. Those things don’t matter. Sharpness is usually not very important, and the other flaws add to the story the photo tells.

In the photo, it’s a glorious day. In real life, it was cold and somewhat gloomy, but never mind. The sun made a cameo and made things look a lot better. The light in the photo says life, vitality, joy, and love.

The lines in the photo radiate away from my wife and son as though they were the sun. It’s like they radiate life, energy, optimism, and every good thing. It also makes it look like God is zeroing in on them for a long, loving gaze.

My son is looking away, fascinated by trivial things that are exciting to him because of his age. He isn’t thinking about his mom or what she does for him.

My wife is tired but happy. She has sacrificed a lot for him, and she is glad. She knows he doesn’t get it, and she doesn’t care. He’ll get it some day.

The way the sun tries to push its way past her to hog the attention is helpful. It makes her look unappreciated. This is the way all mothers dream of looking. Especially the Jewish ones. But she has the right. Our baby brings her joy and love every day, but she is pouring a lot of effort into him, and he is not at the stage where he can even begin to reciprocate.

The woman behind my wife seems to jostling her during a moment of intimacy and reflection, as though my wife and the moment were unimportant. It sharpens the feeling that my wife is unappreciated yet continues doing what she does for love.

The picture is optically flawed, but it works artistically. My wife took one look at it and said what I was thinking. She said, “It tells a story.” It’s a tribute to her. What mom could resist that?

I spit on the $900. I can’t believe it ever concerned me.

There are very few photos of me as a child. All are technically bad. Nearly all are artistically inept. Many are depressing. The same could be said of photos of my mother. Our home movies were eaten by mold. I was born before ordinary people shot videotape. My wife and son are in a different situation. They will be buried in photos and videos. At least hundreds will be technically excellent. At least hundreds will be artistically sound. If the rapture is delayed long enough, my great-grandchildren will have all these images and videos. What is $900 compared to that? I once spent $1500 on stereo speakers I didn’t need. I paid over $12,000 for a metal lathe I rarely use. I spent $500 on a pair of loafers. Actually, I did that twice, and one pair eventually went to charity because they looked weird.

This $900 camera is a steal, and so are my more-expensive cameras.

I’m waiting for a specialized DJI video camera to be released, and I plan to buy that, too. I have two sets of wireless mikes, and I plan to buy a third for the DJI because it will be easier to use and less likely to cost me audio due to the difficulty of matching DJI cameras to other brands of microphone.

I am a bad photographer, but things are getting better, and I am encouraged because I see the value of the expenditures and effort.

If photography is this rewarding now, I have to think it will be much more so when I know what I’m doing.

I have learned from a lot of Internet photo gurus, and I am losing respect for them. They obsess on all the wrong things. They compare lenses. Is this lens marginally better than that lens? They explain why expensive cameras are better than cameras that cost less. They help people fix their exposure problems.

They talk very little about art. They don’t tell people how important it is to create images that resonate with people who see them. They don’t talk much about gesture, symbolism, and storytelling. They rarely tell us it’s better to have mediocre equipment and get the shot than to sit around waiting for the best and do nothing at all.

I can’t recall any of them saying things like, “If your baby is taking is first steps, just get the shot. Get the video. Use the worst lens imaginable if that’s all you have. Just get the job done.”

A lot of these people are just trying to sell equipment or trying to amass subscribers in order to bring in more cash.

After you die, no one you care about is going to feel anything because you shot the best landscapes or owned the best lenses. They will be more impressed with images of meaningful memories than they will be with your lens’s bokeh or sharpness.

If you can produce shots that are optically sound, by all means, you should, but don’t do it at the expense of the things that matter.

I have a new lens coming in on Tuesday. I will stop shopping when shopping stops paying off.

Revelation is Better Than Brains

My wife and I went through Daniel 1 and 2 last night, and all sorts of revelation came out.

In Daniel 2, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream he could not remember, and it bothered him, so he asked his crew of sorcerers and charlatans (“wise men”) to tell him what he dreamed and what it meant. They told him he would have to describe the dream in order for them to interpret it, and he got angry. He told them that if they didn’t tell him what was in the dream, he would kill them all and turn their homes in to garbage dumps. Then he started doing that, and his people came after Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, since they were numbered among the kingdom’s wise men.

Daniel was understandably concerned, and he got the king to give him time to go to God for the information. Of course, he received it, he told Nebuchadnezzar what he wanted to know, and he and his friends were spared. He also received promotion, much like Joseph in Egypt.

In case you have not read about the dream, I will post the text here, from the New King James Version.

You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was awesome. This image’s head was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

This is the dream. Now we will tell the interpretation of it before the king.

You, O king, are a king of kings. For the God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory; and wherever the children of men dwell, or the beasts of the field and the birds of the heaven, He has given them into your hand, and has made you ruler over them all—you are this head of gold.

But after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours; then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything; and like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others. Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay.

And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Inasmuch as you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold—the great God has made known to the king what will come to pass after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure.

I broke it into paragraphs as well as I could to make it easier to read.

As I read this, I kept seeing ties to other parts of the Bible.

Of course, it’s about Yeshua. He is the stone that was cut out without hands. The dream is about the tribulation and the Messianic age that comes afterward.

The stone is cut out without hands because Yeshua was made by God, not man. From man’s standpoint, he was uneducated. No one says much about that, probably because they’re afraid of insulting God, but it’s true. He was not a scholar, like Paul. He was a handyman from a small, unimportant town far from centers of learning.

Man’s hands did not shape him. He was shaped by God. He was taught by the Holy Spirit, just as every informed Christian (of which there are few) is. People marveled that a person of such knowledge and intelligence could have had no formal schooling. This was literally a guy you would go get when you needed someone to hang a door.

Yeshua was humble. He said he could do nothing without God. He knew he had not made himself. Nebuchadnezzar was different. He looked out at his kingdom and announced that he deserved all the credit, and then God allowed him to go mad for 7 years.

God told the Jews to build altars from stones that were not carved. The purpose of that was to prevent them from using man-made tools to create things they could be proud of and take credit for. Better to have rocks as God created them. It’s the same principle. And when he told David to kill Goliath, David chose 5 stones that had been smoothed by living water, not man, so they would fly true. “Living water” just means “flowing water.” It’s an idiom, and it represents the flow of the Holy Spirit, who wears off our rough edges so our paths are straight.

The progression from gold to iron mixed with clay is a chronological progression from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to the Messianic age. The feet of the statue represent the kingdoms of the time when God will run out of patience, destroy the kingdoms, clean the world, and replace the kingdoms with his own.

The Bible says God’s love is eternal, but it does not say that about his patience. It makes it clear that his patience is limited.

Psalm 2 is also about the Messianic age. It’s all about Yeshua. It actually mentions him as the son of God, saying, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.”

In Psalm 2, God describes the crucifixion, saying the kings of the earth (presumably spirits) conspired to depose God and be free from his restraints. Instead, their efforts resulted in Yeshua receiving his throne:

Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

The holy hill of Zion is the holy area of Jerusalem, where God’s earthly throne will be. The son is Yeshua, and he is “begotten” by God, which means God is his father in every sense, not just symbolically. It means God created him by impregnating a woman.

Describing the destruction of the world’s ungodly empires, God says he will give Yeshua the heathen (literally, the goyim) for his inheritance, referring to the fact that non-Jews will accept and worship Yeshua.

As for the part about the rod of iron, that’s about the tribulation. Yeshua will come and shatter the kingdoms, just as he did in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.

What about the chaff?

Grain has two parts. They both start out with life, but only one part continues to live. The chaff is the part that dies and rots. It’s the part that can’t grow and become new plants. It is important because it exists to support the seed, but after that, it is destroyed. It’s the afterbirth of plants.

People who reject Yeshua are afterbirth. There is a good chance you are afterbirth, so you need to think about it while you can still change. Kiss the son while there is time, because after you die, you are cut off permanently. Don’t listen to Catholic and Jewish myths about helping the dead.

Afterbirth people are useful, like a placenta. They do a lot of helpful labor. They grow crops and build buildings. They create roads and infrastructure. They manufacture. These things help the children of God. But eventually, the unsaved are carried off and destroyed, just as afterbirth is carried out of a delivery room in a plastic bag after the baby is placed in the arms of his mother.

When the tribulation comes, God himself is going to kill the people who work against his kingdom. They will still have the opportunity to repent, but many won’t. He is going to smash the kingdoms of this world, like a dissatisfied potter shattering defective fired pots with a steel bar.

After that, his kingdom will be set up, and it will cover the entire world.

And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.

That isn’t the Roman Empire. It’s not Israel. It’s not the UN or NATO. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s about the future under Yeshua.

We also looked at the last chapter of Ezekiel, which says the Messiah will enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate, which the Muslims have blocked with stones, mortar, and a Muslim graveyard.

The Messiah already came through this gate. He rode through on a donkey. When he returns, he’ll use the gate again, and stones cut and put in place by man won’t stop him.

This story made me think about gatekeepers.

The other day, I was treated rudely in a photography forum, and for some reason, I asked AI to look at what was said to me. AI said it was rude and condescending, and it used the word “gatekeeping.”

I hadn’t thought about that.

On the web, a gatekeeper is a pompous, hostile, admiration-craving jerk who pretends to help new people but is really more interested in exalting himself and aborting anyone who threatens to become like him.

Gatekeepers love telling you you’re not as smart as they are. Usually, they are mediocre people trying to convince themselves they’re legends, and they panic and get angry when they are confronted with reality.

They want you to think you will never be as good at what they do as they are. They want you to swallow everything they tell you, even when they are clearly wrong, and when you question this, their defense is their identity: who are you to question Oz the Great and Powerful?

Forums are full of gatekeepers. They love having themselves appointed as moderators. Their irritating behavior ends up decreasing membership and participation, and forums tend to turn into echo chambers where a few exalted, crusty old guys take turns slapping each other on the back and ganging up on new people.

They can also thwart the efforts of people who own forums. They take their places and do things contrary to the owners’ interests. Meanwhile, they’re not the ones who created the forums or pay the bills.

There are gatekeepers in the Bible.

In Biblical times, a city’s main gate was a place where people gathered to do business, including government business. If you wanted to get something done, you went to the gate and dealt with the authorities who sat there.

Absalom knew this, so he went to the gate and intercepted people who wanted help from David. He tried to seem friendlier and more effective, to turn their hearts against David and set the stage for a coup.

Satan is a gatekeeper, and Absalom was a picture of Satan. He thinks very highly of himself, although he is the single biggest failure and loser known to man. He wants to sit in the gate and sweet-talk or threaten us before we get into God’s presence. He wants us to think he is friendlier and more effective. “You want to be a homosexual? Great. I’m down with it. I’m not like that bad old Yahweh. You want to live with your girlfriend? You want to be a Buddhist or a witch? You want to be a rich atheist and tell everyone you’re a self-made man? You want to be a rich, admired churchgoer who doesn’t have to repent or change? I’ll make it happen. Don’t waste your time with the old God.”

Most clergymen are gatekeepers. Some wear ridiculous costumes to make themselves look important. The leftists like to wear colorful sashes to make people think they’re friendly and full of life compared to actual Christians who know and support God. Preachers generally teach garbage about self-help. They discourage manifestations of the Holy Spirit, which are the key to a Christian life. They used to torture and burn a lot of people who corrected them. They have been terrorists, beginning with the ancient Jews and continuing into Catholicism and other violent sects.

A gatekeeper’s first goal is to keep you out of the outer court of the temple, where people who acknowledge God but are not all that close to him are allowed to go. If that fails, he tries to keep you out of the inner court, where people who are closer to God are allowed. If that fails, he does his level best to keep you out of the holy of holies, where the Spirit of God resides.

I’m speaking figuratively. You are the temple, and a gatekeeper wants to prevent you from harboring–literally–the Holy Spirit in your heart and mind.

A gatekeeper is basically a goalie.

Gatekeepers, whether Jewish, nominal Christian, pagan, or atheist, are antichrists. They want to keep you from entering the gate and receiving the real thing. They offer you substitutes; usually their pathetic, pride-bloated, festering selves.

When John wrote of antichrists who lived in his time, he was talking about Christians. He said they “went out from us” but were not “of us.” That can only refer to Christians. Nothing has changed.

As Yeshua was growing up, he went right by the gatekeepers. He went to the Holy Spirit, who is God. That’s who taught him. If he had listened to the priests and scribes, he would have died full of disinformation and gone to hell.

He gave us a way to go around the gatekeepers. He arranged for us to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. Every one of us is supposed to spend time with God himself every day. Every one of us is supposed to learn ALL the things we need to know, not some, straight from God. Human beings are simply here to introduce us to God and to be helpful to us. They’re not supposed to put on hats the size of toaster ovens, dress in black, and rule over us.

Imagine how you would feel if you went to work one day, and your boss was wearing a black robe and a hat so big he had to bend over to get through the door. You would think he was a lunatic.

Underneath the crazy getups, pompous clergymen are wearing underwear and socks from Target. They’re not mystical beings from another dimension.

When Yeshua was here in the flesh, the gatekeepers hated him, which is obvious, because they murdered him. They didn’t love other people. They weren’t trying to help them. They were too busy dressing up like Liberace and studying day and night to find halachic loopholes so they could justify cheating other people out of their money and land. Much like every prosperity preacher today.

Yeshua was a threat to their business. They were squatters, and they knew he was there to evict them and cut off their income.

We’re supposed to lift people up, as Yeshua lifted Peter from the water so he could walk on it. Instead, the gatekeepers want to stand on us to keep their heads above water. They use us as footstools. What kind of people are treated like footstools in the Bible? Enemies.

Gatekeepers are spiritual abortionists, in a world God created specifically so he could reproduce. That is the fundamental reason we exist, and gatekeepers treat us like bedbugs they are trying to keep down with spray.

Any preacher who hates competition is a gatekeeper. You can tell prosperity preachers are gatekeepers because they welcome other prosperity preachers to speak at their churches as long as they come from far away, but they make a point of keeping preachers from nearby churches out. They also compete with the poor for our donations. Every dollar you give Joyce Meyer is a dollar you can’t give the poor.

If I know these things, it’s because I spent time with the Holy Spirit, praying in tongues, and he told me. I couldn’t figure these things out on my own.

I could go on all day. God has shown me so much. And he has also shown me that almost no one will listen. If Yeshua were here right now speaking on television to the whole world, people wouldn’t listen to him either, and that includes self-proclaimed Christians. He failed to convert his own people, and of course, he did the job as well as anyone could have, so what chance do you and I have?

I hear this stuff, and I repeat it, and for the most part, I get argument. It’s like I’m talking to grown people in diapers, and when I share revelation straight from God, they take their dirty diapers off and wave them at me, inside-out, with great pride, displaying their treasures. They are rude to me. They condescend. They talk to me as though I were a naughty child, and I’m trying to help them. I have nothing to gain from this.

I suppose I should stop now. Someone out there will read this and benefit from it, and the rest never mattered, because they never had a future.

Can These Dry Bones Live? Lightroom and Photolab say Yes

Today is the day of the week we reserve for God and family, so I will not be writing long.

I have been trying to save photos I took before I got my current phone and cameras. I got my old phones running and dumped a lot of things into my cavernous storage drive. I still can’t get the Galaxy S2 going, but I may be able to do it eventually.

I am learning two big lessons: first, there is nothing like having lots of photos of people and pets you love, and second, you should not throw out old shots until you have learned to use editing software, because often, a shot you thought was not worth keeping will, upon editing, turn out to be a digital heirloom.

As usual, I can’t upload the best examples of what I’m doing, and that is a major handicap when writing about photography, but at least there will be the writing, and that’s something.

I found a photo of my dad, taken in 2017. Thing is, it’s not a photo of my dad. We were at Tractor Supply, picking up the only decent new chainsaw in the county. A hurricane had just hit us with tropical-storm-force winds, and I managed to buy a Jonsered saw a few minutes after it was made available online.

My dad was not behaving all that well that day. In the car, I had tried to reason with him about something or other, and as we approached Tractor Supply, he told me to go to hell three times. Then he forgot all about it, and he was amazed when I brought it up.

I made it into the store before he did, and I saw something funny: a colorful metal chicken sculpture. I took a shot of it with the store window behind it. I guess I wanted to text it to a friend.

I was going through my old shots yesterday, and when I looked at the chicken photo, I saw that my dad was visible in the window, in the parking lot, on his way to the door. Maybe I included that on purpose.

It was not the kind of image that cheers people up. He looked frail and uncertain. Nothing like the strong, blustery, confrontational man he had been for most of his life.

I threw it into Lightroom, which I am trying out. The software lit up the chicken’s colors. I cropped the image to reduce distractions. I probably fiddled with the color. Now I have a touching shot of my late father fit to put on a wall.

I also found a photo of my buddy Mike standing next to a burn pile. It really captured him, so I cropped it and fixed the colors and lighting.

I won’t post these shots, but maybe I can find some other zombie photos that were saved by editing. Not prizewinners, but worth the effort.

I have been trying not to get snobby about JPG’s. It is true that they are far inferior to raw photos for editing, and if you screw up a raw shot, you are much more likely to be able to turn it into a masterpiece, but JPG is not a bad format. If it were, people wouldn’t convert photos to JPG before saving them to disks or printing them. The phone shots I have been salvaging are all JPG. I will continue shooting in raw, but I’m not going to give up on old photos just because they’re JPG’s.

I’m also trying not to get snobby about lenses.

I have gotten used to listening to experts, and they are extremely picky. They find all sorts of faults with lenses. Many of these faults can be fixed after images have been captured, but they still sound bad somehow.

I am not stupid. I know that as long as a lens is pretty sharp and can produce images in real-world lighting conditions, I can use it to make excellent photos nobody will ever find fault with. In the real world, nobody gets out a microscope when looking at photos.

I happen to have a 9 mm manual focus lens I got for travel, and I tried to shoot my son with it. Even with focus peaking, I got images that were not sharp. Then I saw a video about a new, inexpensive 9 mm that has autofocus. I watched a couple of videos, and I ordered it. Now I have two 9 mm lenses, which seems like a waste of money, but the new one arrived yesterday, and I already have several fantastic photos.

It was a good investment.

The experts said it had something called “moustache distortion,” which was not easily fixed unless software companies made special profiles for this lens. Who cares? If a million people look at these wonderful photos, not one will notice distortion.

A lens may be soft in the corners or produce vignetting or have some other issue and still be a fantastic investment. Excellent photos taken with a middle-of-the-road lens are better than perfect photos you never get to take because you can’t afford the best.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of money on lenses, but if all I had were an APS-C camera and an 18-135 mm kit lens, I would be able to produce great work as long as the photographer was up to the task.

As an aside, I am getting irritated with people who think every portrait has to be tall and cropped and has to be shot with a long lens. Everyone seems to think human beings should be isolated in photos, and people seem to be obsessed with bokeh, the pleasant blurring that surrounds foreground subjects.

Guess what? A 9 mm lens is about as wide as they get, and it is magnificent for taking people’s pictures. If you want the standard waist-up photo which is taller than it is wide, which is exactly as creative as a passport photo, good for you, but wide photos allow you to add important context, and if you make a habit of leaving it out, in the future, people will wish you hadn’t. “Is that Daisy’s tail? Why didn’t you get her face?”

They also give pictures a dramatic look you can’t get with longer lenses.

As for bokehmania, it’s a restrictive, dogmatic fad. Sorry, but it is. When you want it, you want it, but it’s not for every photo. Often, it will cost you context you should have kept.

I should not be harsh or irritable. Most people are never going to think for themselves, and it is unfair to ask them to, but it would be nice if they didn’t insist on pushing the rest of us to put on their shackles. I am about to quit a forum because there is an old guy there who can’t think outside the box and gives me rude lectures when I don’t climb in there with him. He knows a lot of things, but too many of the things he knows are not true.

His photos are not good, by the way. I have encountered some extremely capable photographers on forums, and this guy is not one of them. My policy these days is to listen to people whose work is excellent. The rest are less credible.

I better stop. If you’re planning to learn photography, I suggest you be careful not to dump old photos because you think they’re embarrassingly bad in view of your new skill and knowledge. Run them through the editing process, and you may find there are a lot of babies in the bathwater.

This is not the Kind of Flock God has in Mind

I am enjoying life more and more. At the same time, I continue to say there is no hope for the world and that immense suffering is on the way for humanity. There is no inconsistency. God helps my family and me to have increased love, protection, transformation, and abundance in our little cocoon, but around me, the human race is destroying itself with technology.

Case in point: the destruction of free will.

I have been writing about this for ages, and I still have not seen anyone else point out the obvious: God’s plan depends of free will, and free will diminishes as surveillance increases. This is one of the reasons why God doesn’t walk around in plain sight, correcting us at every turn. He knows that if we did, he would never see us being ourselves. We have to be free to be ourselves. Without the freedom to behave badly, we never learn to behave well for the right reasons. Instead, we do whatever we think we should do to win approval and blessings and avoid punishment.

If we didn’t have free will, our interactions with God would be like scripted plays. They would be like the scripted interviews hostages and prisoners of war have been forced to give. Our obedience and expressions of love would be a lot like our forced contributions to social programs through taxes. They wouldn’t be motivated by our true feelings, and we wouldn’t deserve any credit for them.

Today I learned there is a name for the obvious change surveillance makes in people’s behavior. It’s called the Hawthorne Effect. It was named after the Hawthorne Western Electric plant, where researchers concluded that increased attention stimulated workers to be more productive.

The legitimacy of the Hawthorne Effect is disputed, but it is unquestionably true that people change their behavior when they think they are being watched.

God’s kingdom depends on judgment, and you can’t judge people who have never been free, whether they were unable to behave well or badly.

I learned about the term “Hawthorne effect” from a video I saw today. Many people are up in arms about our new surveillance state, and the latest big offense has been the spread of spying systems made by a company called Flock Safety. It’s a lovely name. They should have gone ahead and added “for the Children” to the end of it.

Flock makes revolting systems that automatically surveil people in public. Their cameras pan and zoom, and when they see human beings, they lock onto them. They even blow up and capture things people are looking at on their phones. They store videos the government has no business with.

Some of you are already in videos like this, and things you think no one but you knows have been recorded and put in the hands of the government.

God help any man whose ex-wife or ex-girlfriend works for a municipality that uses these cameras. God help any woman whose stalker is a city employee.

Municipalties love these systems because the kind of people who run for public office tend to be tyrants who like telling the rest of us what to do. That’s a fact. They have bizarre, unrealistic ideas about imposing order on others, and they don’t care about the humiliation and oppression that result. These are the kind of people who say, in complete seriousness, “You won’t mind surveillance if you don’t have anything to hide.”

They don’t understand that the Bill of Rights was not written just to prevent disasters. It was written largely to prevent rudeness. An occasional strip search isn’t going to ruin your life. Neither will random urine tests. Neither will police stops without reasonable suspicion, just to see if you’re up to anything. But the Bill of Rights limits the use of such tools to an extreme degree. Why? Because having no privacy is intensely humiliating. A government that treats you rudely as policy is unbearable.

I think it goes without saying that the people at Flock are incredible jerks. How could they do what they do if they weren’t?

Activists who are going to lose are exposing Flock and trying to persuade cities and towns not to buy their Nuremberg-worthy products. I say they will lose, because I know something most people don’t understand. The vast majority of Americans are only too happy to sell their freedom for trinkets.

When I was a kid, TV programs and movies were full of BS about the American spirit and our willingness to die for dignity and freedom. I don’t think we were ever willing. I think Americans fought the British because of money. I think Americans fought the Japanese and the Nazis mainly because they were angry about Pearl Harbor. Sure, the had concerns about liberty, but it seems to me Americans were concerned about extreme oppression by foreigners but not about milder creeping oppression by our own countrymen.

I believe Flock will win because most Americans will show up at town halls and say they want safe cities. And I am sure local politicians fear having distraught families show up with photos of dead loved ones and demand to know why there were no surveillance cameras to prevent their murders.

Personally, I would stand up and say the loss of a certain number of lives is acceptable if it means we keep our freedom. That is supposedly the rationale we relied on when sending many thousands of young men to die in wars, and it should also apply to civilians. But I would be treated like a heartless monster. By stupid people.

Anyway, it turns out the nincompoops who actually run these systems do a horrible job of keeping evildoers from accessing the videos, and once they have them, they can use facial recognition to learn their names and all sorts of private details of their lives.

An activist named Benn Jordan just made a video showing a whole slew of surveillance videos he downloaded from towns across the US. He was able to take these videos and invade people’s privacy to a horrifying degree. I will embed the video here so you can see.

This isn’t the far-off dystopian future. This is the dystopian present. It’s here right now.

By the way, don’t think that living in the country makes you safe. The government can put cameras on your property without warrants. Look it up. Most people don’t know it. The cheaper camera technology gets, the more likely rural Americans are to find themselves under surveillance on farms and even in little cabins in the woods where they think no one will know if they hot-tub naked or shoot protected predators that menace their families and livestock.

Check the video out. This is the future we have chosen because we don’t have the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Keep Buying Lenses, and Eventually, You Will be Talented

I took the old (a week old) A6700 out in the yard again today, and I took some photos that I consider worth not deleting. I also got some wonderful shots of my son in the house, but I won’t be uploading them here. It seems like all my really good photos are of things I don’t share.

The other day, as I have written before, I took a shot staring up into a live oak, and all I expected to get out of it was some experience running the camera, but when I edited it, I liked it. Now that I have seen that the tree has potential, I am determined to try to get some quality shots out of it. I took a few snaps, and I created a better photo than the first one, although it is still not going to win prizes. Here it is:

While I was doing this, I saw that I was able to bring out colors on the shady side of the tree, and I found a nice area of the tree that would fill a frame and make for a better composition. I cropped that area and exported it as a JPG in order get an idea what the new shot would look like.

Because the crop is pretty harsh, the photo is extremely fuzzy. I think I should take the A7IV out with a bigger lens and see how much detail I can get.

I have to do what I can before the red leaves fall off the other tree in the pictures, because those red leaves are important to the images.

I also took some more cow photos, and they were as bad as the old ones. I used the proper ISO and so on, but there is no way to get cow photos in the shade at full zoom without getting a ton of grain. At least I think there isn’t.

I made a valiant effort to find things out there to shoot. I keep telling myself a good photographer can find subjects anywhere, so I don’t want to give up. On the other hand, I am not a good photographer yet, so how much can I expect at this stage?

I found some colorful leaves to shoot, and from that, I learned that you never shoot a leaf with the light behind you. The glare on the leaf will kill the whole project.

I took a shot of a peach blossom, just to see what would happen. The idea was to fake macro by zooming in. The photos are very pretty, but you wouldn’t want to blow them up. The grain is too much.

These are like shots from a low-budget version of James Cameron’s Pandora.

It’s a shame I can’t post shots of my son, because they are on another level. He makes it easy. He is as good a model as any professional in New York or Paris. His skin is perfect. He is relentlessly cute. He comes up with all sorts of poses. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the top-notch photos I’m taking.

I got a Viltrox 27 mm f/1.2 lens for the A6700, and when people say it’s amazing, they are not lying. It seems like every image is beautiful. I shoot my son during breakfast every day, and the Viltrox is now my official breakfast lens.

Viltrox is Chinese, and it is shaming Sony and Canon and the rest by making exquisite lenses at Chinese prices. I figure I should snap some up before the inevitable price increase that will follow mass recognition.

I am sorely tempted to get a Viltrox 75 mm f/1.2 as well, for outdoor shots of my family.

I took a lot of atrocious photos today, but the ratio of atrocities to usable shots is shrinking, and I am fully able to work Photolab, so now I am finally able to edit with some degree of competence. I also got a new TV and calibrated it for editing, so if my photos look weird on your screen, it’s your fault, not mine.

I am considering driving downtown from time to time and doing some street photography. I can only take so many photos of bewildered cattle. When summer returns, which I dread, there will be more bugs and flowers and so on to shoot right here.

It would be wonderful to have a big zoom for birds and animals. The Sony 200-600 mm would be a joy to have. I don’t know how often I would use it, though.

Things are going well, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t continue to do so.

Photographs are neat because they don’t necessarily show what subjects look like, but they do show how you feel about them. If you love what you’re shooting, other people will see that you love it. Of course, if you feel hatred or contempt, they will also see that, but let’s dwell on the positive here.

I have a Flickr account now, so I’ll be using that to post big photos here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to overcome WordPress’s upload preferences well enough to post them to my own server. I’ll keep fiddling with it.

New Year’s Tree

I am still fiddling with Photolab9, trying to improve a photo of a tree. I shot it yesterday, thinking the only purpose of shooting was to learn how to use the camera and lens, but later I saw that with editing, the photo was very nice. It lacks a compact subject that ties it together, but such subjects aren’t always necessary, and also, there is nothing wrong with a photo that serves as a non-distracting background.

Google AI told me to use Photolab’s AI masking tools. These are somewhat like the old magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop Elements, except they require less work and give you less control. The magnetic lasso would let you draw a border around an area and apply changes within it. It would automatically cling to the object to avoid selecting things outside of it. The AI mask simply guesses and grabs a large area it thinks you want to isolate, so it may include or exclude things against your will.

I have not been able to get the mask to work well enough. It grabs the entirety of the tree’s canopy, so if I try to brighten up the trunk and limbs, I will also ruin the color of the sky behind the canopy.

I decided to try Smart Lighting instead. It tries to compensate for things like inadequate flash.

The first version of the edited photo is in yesterday’s blog post. Here is the new one:

I think this is considerably better than the first version. I lose some of the encompassing feeling of the dark tree, but on the other hand, I get a lot of detail on the side facing me. Sadly, reducing this to blog size really makes it coarse.

I can’t upload a better version because WordPress rejects files over a certain size. Maybe it’s a webhosting issue. I will look into ways to put bigger shots on the web so I can link to them.

AI thinks there is a way to make the mask work. Maybe I’ll figure it out later.

Last night, I had an emotional experience. I had been editing photos for a long time, and I started thinking about the way photography had opened my eyes to how much beauty there was around me.

That sounds trite, but there is more to it than it seems.

I don’t like this world. The suffering here is beyond anything we can imagine. We are numb to it because we have to get used to it in order to survive without being miserable around the clock, but it is here. All around us, creatures are always suffering tremendously, and it would never have gotten this way had we let God rule us.

There are a lot of sickly people in this county, and then I’m out and about, I see them. When I spot somebody with enormous, swollen legs, a hunched back, morbid obesity, or some other serious problem, my heart sinks, and I think, “This place is horrible,” referring to the entire world. It reminds me how much pain there is and how unusual it is for us to be able to do anything about it.

Heaven isn’t like this. The Messianic Age will not be like this. We did this to ourselves.

I said photography shows us the beauty of the world, but that’s not really true. It makes the world look more beautiful than it is. We choose subjects we like, and we choose our variables and edit our shots to bring out beauty they don’t really have. We bring out a little bit of the much greater beauty God intended them to have.

It’s like there is a black sheet between us and God, with little holes in it, and what we see in beautiful photos is like looking through the holes briefly and seeing what the world is supposed to be like.

The tree I photographed doesn’t look as good as the photo. It’s my effort to show what an ideal version of the tree would look like. A version in a world that isn’t cursed.

When I edit photos, deep relaxation settles over me, and I believe it’s because I feel as though I am making things right. I am creating images that feel a little bit like they were shot in heaven.

Maybe God helped me get back to photography and start creating better pictures in order to provide a painkiller to reduce the pain of living in this world. My life is wonderful, but I still hate it here because of the suffering of the creatures around me who are not so blessed and who are so hard to help.

Maybe God is reminding my heart that something better is coming.

I don’t just see beauty in photos, of course. I see it in love; in the relationships I have with God and the people who know him.

In 2018, I was praying, and in my mind, I kept hearing, “Thank you for beauty.” I wonder if God was hinting at things to come.

When I went out to shoot yesterday, a group of sandhill cranes were eating in the pasture. These are 4-foot-tall birds just made for wildlife photos. Unfortunately, I could not get anywhere near them, and my 50mm zoom made them look like ants in photos. I wonder if I should consider getting a real telephoto lens. Is it worth it? This farm is loaded with birds and squirrels, and we occasionally see coyotes, foxes, possums, and coons.

I may try it. The more beauty I can grab while I live in this rotten world, the better I’ll feel.