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.

Some Day I Will be the Richard Avedon of Beef Cattle

I have settled on the Sony A6700 as my main APS-C camera, and I am learning to use Photolab9 to edit photos.

I thought Photolab was a better choice than Lightroom and Photoshop, based on some confusing information I worked pretty hard to obtain. I thought I was being told Photoshop was not good for working with raw files, but in a comment, a reader said that was not correct, so I went back to my research and discovered that just about everyone agrees with him. Nonetheless, I have Photolab right now, and it’s a top-notch program, so I am learning to use it. Maybe I’ll eventually give up, join the Adobe subscription herd, own nothing, and be resentful.

Today, in order to learn, I decided to do a photo walk around the property. I can’t publish all the photos that came out reasonably well, because I want to keep some private, but I can show a few things that seem to have worked. The ones I won’t publish are considerably better, but even these mediocre-to-bad shots have some value. I had to shrink them quite a bit, so the original large files are a lot nicer.

It was a productive experience, and I really enjoyed the camera and lens. I found the A6700 much more pleasant to work with than the A6400 it is replacing.

I think I would have done a lot better had I gotten out earlier. I started after the light had started dying, so it was a short session, and that cost me opportunities.

My single biggest problem is inability to deal with lighting challenges, so I think shooting in bad light is good for me, but this lens may not be up to it without a tripod and low shutter speeds. I’m not sure yet. Maybe I should have risked lower speeds today to find out.

I bought a Sigma 18-50mm zoom to go with this camera, and that’s what I used today. I like fast primes, but I have to learn to use slower lenses and zooms.

First off, the worst of the lot. I came across the cattle working on a round bale in the shade, so I thought I would see how well I could handle the poor light. The cow in the sun is the star of the picture, and unfortunately, her face is pretty grainy, but this would be just barely good enough for social media, if I had social media. I wonder if I had the camera focused in the wrong plane.

Hmm. Maybe it wouldn’t be good enough.

I figured this shot told a sort of story. The cows are all staring at me, and they have stopped eating, which makes it seem as though something that would be important to a cow has happened. The cow in the sun looks as though some higher being has selected her for some special purpose, which is not likely but gives the picture some appeal.

I also shot a photo of a chain hanging on a gate. Not the most exciting subject, but the light was excellent, the gate had interesting color and texture, and it was an opportunity to work on composition. I don’t know if it’s possible to do much more with this subject, but it helped me get used to running the camera.

The focus is not great. I may have alternate shots that will look better. The bokeh seems fine.

I just checked the original large JPG, and the focus is considerably better.

The weirdest shot is an upward look into the branches of a live oak. I was trying to find a composition in it. I did not expect much from it. In fact, I assumed it would be trash, but once I started playing with the raw photo, surprising colors came out. I really enjoy looking at this picture, so it must be okay.

I’m not sure how to crop it. Sometimes I like one version best, and sometimes I like another one.

It’s a shame I can’t post the full version, because people will probably look at this small, crude one and wonder why I didn’t delete this picture. There is a world of difference. I would never have expected this photo to be so pleasing to look at, but there it is.

I’ve learned that you can’t tell whether a photo is good until you edit it. They will really surprise you.

I got a very good shot of my wife with my son sleeping by her side, and I also got a nice shot of some mailboxes in good light as well as a surprisingly pleasing shot of the workshop with a sun star over it.

I have seen people claiming that high ISO numbers are no problem, but that doesn’t seem to be true. I use Photolab’s denoising, which is supposedly better than Adobe’s, but it looks like there is still no substitute for good light and a fast lens. Or a slow shutter.

I took a lot of useless pictures today, including shots I knew would be useless. I took shots I didn’t expect to work out, just so I could get used to running the camera and lens.

I hope to get out earlier tomorrow. If I get out earlier, I won’t have to struggle so hard to find things to take pictures of.

Life Never Gives me a Straight Answer

My photography journey gets weirder and weirder.

A couple of years back, I got better photo gear and bought Photoshop Elements 2024 for editing raw photos. I did quite a bit of research and still ended up making some bad decisions.

On the gear end, I failed to realize that I really needed wide-aperture lenses if I wanted indoor photos and other low-light shots that truly looked good. I think middle-of-the-road optical quality is less harmful than a small aperture. Nearly all lenses shoot photos that are sharper than most people can appreciate, so it’s not a big deal if your lens isn’t optically excellent, but if your lens is too slow, you have to use high ISO settings that create a lot of noise, and software that cleans up noise is not as good a solution as not having noise in the first place.

I think this is right today, but I could be wrong.

On the software end, I bought Elements, a program that is good for editing JPG images but unbearable for raw files. I didn’t know the difference. I thought that if I bought a photo editing program, it would naturally be good for everything from snap to print. It looks like that is not true. I have spent many hours trying to edit raw files in Elements, and often, I spent so much time trying to make the program work, I ended up editing nothing or nearly nothing.

When you edit raw in Elements, you can’t go straight to the bit where you get to create a finished photo. You go to an incredibly nonintuitive middleman program where you do certain things to the raw file and then export it as a JPG. Then you use what everyone thinks of as Photoshop to edit the JPG.

Unbelievably (to me, at least), every edit you do to a raw file in Elements is instantly saved, permanently, so you’re stuck with it forever unless you can figure out how to undo it, and there is no simple “undo” function as far as I know. Maybe there is, and I have forgotten it. To me, this seems like common sense: don’t save a file until you’re satisfied with it. Is that crazy? That’s how most programs work. If you have a Word file open, and someone sits on your keyboard and ruins it, it’s not instantly saved, overwriting the original.

I have seen all sorts of photographers praise Photoshop, and I haven’t been able to understand why they like it. Today I learned a few things. As is so often the case these days, a chat with AI answered questions multiple human beings failed to answer in the past. Ominous.

1. Editing raw is generally a completely separate process from editing JPG’s and other images. Raw edits are generally (not always) global, like changing brightness or reducing noise. JPG editing can do things like that, but you can’t make adjustments as large as the ones you can make in raw, and JPG editors are better at things like removing and inserting objects.

2. Most pros are not all that concerned about creating beautiful, detailed images. They are pumping out prom pictures and family photos in JPG form at low resolution. They are largely interested in erasing zits and removing boogers from noses.

3. A lot of pros use Adobe Lightroom to get their raw files in shape, and then they take them to Photoshop to cut out the warts and pimples. Supposedly, Photoshop does things like that very well, without a painful learning curve.

I wish I had known all this two years ago.

As far as I can tell at this stage, it looks like it works this way: subscribe to Lightroom and Photoshop. Use Photoshop on JPG’s. Maybe Elements can do the JPG work. I don’t know yet, because I NEVER GOT PAST THE HORRIBLE RAW INTERFACE.

When my son was born, a nice photographer who presumably had a contract with the hospital showed up in my wife’s room and offered to take photos, and we hired her. The photos are not good. They’re sort of okay, and they serve the purpose of documenting the existence of a new person. We were given JPG files she had already edited. We have never received raw files. She probably photographed 10 babies that day. She was not in the art business. She was in the documentation business. She was putting food on her table.

I think this is the sort of person you usually end up talking to on the web when you ask for help with photography. Lightroom is good at improving raw files, and it helps organize the thousands of mediocre photos a typical photographer will take in a year, so when someone wants reprints, they are easy to find. Photoshop makes people and things look a little better. The people you ask for advice will generally have these things in mind, and they won’t mind paying for expensive Adobe subscriptions because they get paid for their work, and Adobe makes for an efficient business.

I think that if I really wanted to make life simple, right now, I would get Lightroom and use it. Then I would try to edit everything in Elements 2024, which is a non-subscription product. Then if that didn’t work, I would subscribe to Photoshop and use it to finalize JPG’s. Then I would delete Elements, because it would serve no purpose.

Instead, I bought Photolab9, which is a competitor to Photoshop. It is not a wannabe clone, as far as I know. It is better than Adobe’s stuff for a lot of things. It has fantastic denoising. It keeps up with new lenses as they are released. It makes working with raw files easy. It produces glorious JPG’s.

Does it remove boogers well? I don’t know. I am not in the booger-free-portrait business. I haven’t tried it. I have Elements, though, and one would hope it would suffice for the retouching stuff.

Photolab lacks some important Photoshop features. It won’t put cat ears and noses on people, and it won’t surround you with stars and butterflies after you get dressed for the prom. I’m not sure Photoshop actually does those things, so perhaps I’m being unfair, but it has some icons that look like they are intended to create equally pleasing and classy effects. I think I can do without all that.

Ansel Adams managed.

Photolab has opened my eyes. I have used things like Befunky.com and free Canva Affinity to edit things. I generally made small changes. I changed exposures and cropped and so on. With Photolab, I have been able to do more. It has a ton of useful presets that will move my images into the general ballpark where they need to be before I work on them. It lets me change one part of a photo without changing the rest of it. It will bring out things that were barely visible before. I was actually able to change the composition of a photo by increasing the color saturation of the clouds and sky. It turned an acceptable photo into one I really love.

Now I’m looking more closely at raw files to see if I can turn dumpers into keepers.

I don’t like overworked pictures. They’re tasteless. A lot of people jack up colors and make other changes that make photos look the way you would expect them to look on picture placemats for tourists in Thailand or the Philippines. I’m not interested in that stuff. I believe Photoshop excels at it, partially explaining its popularity.

No one ever went broke investing in bad taste.

I have a feeling I will start seeing the above sentence on the web in people’s online profiles, not attributed to me. Story of my life.

I don’t like Adobe. I don’t like the forced-subscription model. I don’t like the way they turned “free” Acrobat into an annoying ad platform for things I don’t want. I am hoping Photolab will turn out to be a better choice. These days, Adobe is offering Lightroom plus real Photoshop for $10 per month, so if I change my mind, all is not lost.

Oops. I just found out Elements uses a very limited color palette for certain useful tools. Forget Elements, I guess. Funny how they didn’t mention that when they sold it to me. “Pay once and create inferior images for life.” I guess it’s just for people using Pinterest and Instagram.

I would post some shots to show people what I’m talking about, but my best pictures include the wife and son, and I am not going to make them Internet curiosities at this point.

Ripe Pomegranate Versus Sour Grape

God has started showing me things about favor, which is disparate treatment. For example, if your neighbors have their houses washed away in a flood, but the water goes around you, it’s favor. If there is an economic crisis, and somehow you make money instead of losing, it’s favor.

I prophesy. I saw a Derek Prince video a long time ago, and he made a good argument for at-will prophecy. You can’t say what you want to say, and you can’t tell people’s fortunes or pick winners at the racetrack, but you can open your mouth and let God say whatever he wants, in the language you normally speak. It appears to work, although I have had some glitches. I believe errors come from letting the flesh crowd in.

For a good long time, I’ve heard myself saying, “Be with me and receive favor.”

I believe that for my entire life, I have received favor. My life was a mess when I was young, and I failed at all sorts of things at which I should have excelled, but on the other hand, I was spared calamity over and over. Problems that should have hit me hit other people. It has been a lifelong pattern.

I believe that most of the problems I had were caused by Satanic persecution. The people of this world, including Christians, generally belong to Satan, and if evil spirits think God is likely to do good things with you, they and their puppets will do a lot to suppress you. They will blacklist you, steal from you, take jobs away, prevent you from getting jobs in the first place, drive potential spouses off, cause whatever wealth you have to be destroyed and wasted, cause people to libel and slander you, and, of course, cause you to be driven out of churches.

I had disfavor from Satan and his worldly people, and it destroyed my worldly success, but I had God’s favor to keep me from being wiped out while he waited for me to come around, know him, and receive sufficient favor from him to overcome Satan’s disfavor. Once I got close to him, things got better and better for me, and it has never stopped.

Some misguided Christians like to wear T-shirts with “Favor ain’t fair” printed on them. That’s ridiculous. It’s insulting to God, who is always more than fair. The intention is good, but the slogan comes from a ghetto mentality that says anyone who is not blessed is being treated unfairly. Blessed people don’t earn what they get, so the disfavored think favor, which comes by God’s righteous judgment, isn’t fair to everyone else. People who hate favor think they are better than God.

Favor certainly seems unfair to many people, and I can make a partial list. Feminists, leftists, antisemites, and vocal atheists hate favor. BLM and Antifa people hate favor. It’s impossible to be a real Democrat and not hate favor.

God isn’t the only one who shows favor. Satan does it, too, on a grand scale. Look how rich Oprah Winfrey and Megan Thee Stallion are, to name but two of his proteges.

“Protégé” is a French word meaning “protected.” You can’t be protected in this life unless there is a protector. Someone stronger than you who does the protecting.

What do favor-haters do? They try to steal the fruits of favor, and they like to kill the favored.

If you examine the Bible, you will see lots of favor-haters and favor-stealers. Satan, Eve, Cain, Haman, Dathan, the religious Jews who had Yeshua murdered, Adonijah, Absalom, Jezebel, Joseph’s brothers, Balak, Balaam…read for yourself. The best way to become hated in this world is to become one of God’s favorites.

All sorts of favored people were murdered or tormented. Abel, Job, the prophets who were all killed by religious Jews, and the martyrs of the New Testament come to mind.

Being a favorite is like being the pampered youngest child the older siblings hate. The hatred is irrational and unfair, and it is solely based on a perceived difference between the treatment you get and the treatment your siblings got. You don’t have to harm them or actually receive more than them to be hated. Favor-haters are unjust.

I was the favorite in my family, and I can tell you a story that will illustrate my point. When I was very small, on Christmas, my sister got angry at my parents. She said, “Steve got two presents, and I only got three!” That’s how favor-haters think.

Favor-haters covet. If you have favor, they covet everything you have. At the bottom of their hearts, they want to replace you. They want you to die so they can take what you have. What they really wish is that you had never existed.

Favor-haters portray themselves as victims. They libel the favored. They make up stories about how you got your favor. You got it through racism and sexism, they say. You stole it from other nations. You ran the government and the banking system behind the scenes.

If you’re favored, they come up with excuses to steal from you, convict you of made-up crimes, and even kill you. Socialists have murdered millions of people using libels as excuses. Our modern domestic terrorists in BLM and Antifa will do the same if they ever get power.

In the Christian church, they go after people who are close to God. If they don’t get miracles, prosperity, healing, revelation, safety, and so on, and you do, they will claim you got what you have by earthly means.

I know a Christian who is very bitter, and she was telling me tongues aren’t for everyone. They clearly are; the Bible says so, and every time anyone in the New Testament got saved after the gospels, they spoke in tongues. It’s a universal gift.

She also told me God doesn’t make people wealthy, because it will destroy them. She did allow for some exceptions; those who are so mature, they can handle wealth.

I set her straight, and I am sure I offended her. I didn’t offend her by criticizing her. I offended her by saying good things about the way God treats people.

She is very angry. Whenever she has a conversation, she focuses on other people’s sins and how badly she has been wronged. My understanding is that unforgiveness blocks healing and tongues, so I would like to see her admit that she ruined her own life. If she did, she could be filled with the Spirit and be filled with blessings. This is why I told her the truth instead of sparing her feelings.

I told her God made me wealthy after I quit going to church and giving offerings, as I got closer to him and spent a tremendous amount of time speaking in tongues. She contradicted me. She told me I was well-off because I was “born into it.”

This is a lie Satan tells all the time. “You’re doing well because you’re white.” “You’re doing well because you’re male.” “You were born in a wealthy family.” “You got lucky in the job market.” “You got lucky in investing.”

My dad was born poor. His dad was born poor. My mother’s father was born poor. I couldn’t succeed at anything when I was young, no matter how I tried or how much ability I had. I was sabotaged and stabbed in the back over and over. I had nothing until I was in my thirties, and even then, I didn’t have much.

By the time the lady I was talking to was born, her father was wealthy. He bought her a brand-new car on her wedding day. He let his daughters run up bills at department stores. He paid for their schooling. When he died, with a net worth that was probably close to 15 million dollars, the person I was talking to got a fourth of it. Now it’s mostly gone. What happened to it? If being born into wealth makes one prosperous, where is her prosperity?

God gave her a husband who was a good provider, and she drove him away. Then he made her affluent. She was set up for life, twice.

She is in no position to speak as though God didn’t give her prosperity, and saying I was born with a golden safety net is wrong. I inherited, to be sure, but that was late in life. My sister was in the same position I was in, and now she has almost nothing. What she inherited, she spent. She blew it on things like cars, clothes, furniture, drugs, and Whole Foods cooked prime rib for her dog. Then she pretty much forced my dad to delete her from his will, twice without a break.

The lady I talked to is not filled with the Holy Spirit, so spirits of envy, anger, and bitterness don’t have much opposition. Such spirits drove her to deny what God, in his overwhelming love and kindness, had done for me. These spirits want everyone to think poverty is standard for Christians.

God kept telling me to be with him and receive favor, but I don’t think I fully understood it until very recently, when God started telling me 1) never to reject favor, 2) never to apologize for favor, 3) never to feel guilty about favor, 4) never to question whether favor was right, and 5) always to declare that the favor God gives me is righteous; how can I criticize what God does?

I am taking his advice. Now, I defend favor.

If you think about it, giving people good things they don’t deserve is the foundation of Christianity. None of us deserve to be saved or helped, but God is love, so to protect us, he allowed himself to be tortured to death and took the blame for our sins. That’s all of us. The pope. Your favorite evangelist. All the “saints.” Everyone. God can’t fix us if he doesn’t give bad people good things. The system wouldn’t function.

When I was in my thirties, I rejected favor, and it caused me a lot of misery. My mother was dying from cancer, and my sister, as usual, was abusing her. She didn’t take care of my mother. She was not helpful at all. She was her usual narcissistic self. My mother wrote a diary in which she criticized her, and after she died my sister stole it (along with the painkillers we had to keep in a locked box) and threw it out. She later bragged to me that she had thrown it out, with a delighted, spiteful, sadistic smile on her face.

One day my mother told me to help her, because she was going to disinherit my sister. This was favor. I should have kept my mouth shut.

Instead, I rejected favor, which means I questioned it. I didn’t realize God was behind it. I was making myself out to be more just than God. I talked my mother out of cutting off my sister, so the only bonus I got was in the form of a couple of small investment accounts that went straight to me.

If I had listened, my sister couldn’t have stolen from my grandparents’ estates. Her ability to make me miserable would have been greatly reduced. I would inherited twice as much. But I opened my mouth and ruined it because I didn’t understand what was happening.

God wanted the one-heir solution, and I pushed for, and got, the two-heir solution.

When my dad talked about disinheriting my sister, I kept quiet and didn’t try to influence him, so he cut her out. I can’t even guess at the pain this saved me.

I never tried to mediate between them. I never questioned his decision. I never went to her and tried to get her to try to restore her relationship with him, although I consistently prayed God would make it happen and that she would be put back in the will.

She knew she had been disinherited, and amazingly, although she was a dishonest, greedy, manipulative person who loved inherited wealth, and who stole from estates, she never tried to get herself put back in the will.

Learning to accept favor without questioning it has improved my faith. When I ask for things now, instead of being derailed by feelings of unworthiness, I say, “I receive favor. I will not reject it. I will not apologize for receiving it. You are right to do this for me.” I don’t look at other people’s problems and feel that it is somehow wrong for God to treat me better.

Satan and his children don’t sit around questioning their unfair decisions to abuse me and treat me worse than other people. They never have. His children never question his decisions to fill them with money and power and make them famous and admired. Why should I question God’s decisions to help me? Do I know more than God? Would I rather he didn’t help me?

I don’t question his righteousness when bad things happen to me. Should I think he’s wrong when God does me good? What’s the difference?

When God began telling me to receive his favor, I started trying to obey him. I would tell him I received it. After he told me not to reject it and so on, I augmented my responses, as I have written above. As for “be with me,” I now believe that means I’m to spend time in the Spirit, praying in tongues, entertaining his presence, worshiping him, humbling myself, and so on. If I’m in the Spirit, who is God, I am with God. According to his commandment, the time for proactively receiving his favor is when I’m in the Spirit.

All favor is inheritance. Satan’s children inherit from their father. The Jews and God’s children inherit from God. There are no self-made people, although there are a lot of proud and deluded people who think they did everything on their own. They commit the sin of Nebuchadnezzar, who took credit for his kingdom and then went mad for several years.

Inheritance is right. It is good. You will never make leftists believe that. They pass laws to take inherited wealth away. They murder people who inherit wealth, and they give it to fools who destroy it. They say this is “equity,” meaning inheritance is inequitable. Meanwhile, God calls his children heirs, not employees or earners. He tells us we receive good things we don’t deserve.

We are supposed to give our kids what we have, starting with the knowledge of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to set them up in life and give them fortunes when we die, as Proverbs says. We are not supposed to throw them out of the boat with nothing so they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and reinvent the wheel with every generation. That’s idiotic. It’s as if the wealth of a parent were a big, elaborate sand castle, to be kicked over so the kids can suffer for no reason.

Will unearned wealth destroy immature people? Sure. But so will earned wealth. And if you give your children an inheritance of holiness and revelation, they will probably be blessed by every bit of earthly wealth they receive. Saying wealth destroys people only makes sense when the wealth is not coupled with the knowledge of God, which every Christian is supposed to have. If you say wealth destroys Christians, you’re really saying it exposes people who haven’t been transformed by the Holy Spirit. The wealth doesn’t destroy them. Spirits and their flesh do. Wealth can’t hurt anyone. It is completely good.

Nearly all Americans look down on heirs, but nearly all Americans want to leave their children fortunes. The only thing more amazing than the hypocrisy is that no one ever talks about it. I have never heard a single person other than myself mention it.

If you sneer at heirs and call them things like “nepo-baby,” “trust fund baby,” and “trustafarian,” you shouldn’t give a penny to your kids. You should add up all the things your grandparents and parents did for you, and give away whatever the monetary value is. You won’t.

As for the obligations of heirs, people who are given things are supposed to be humble and grateful and fear God. They should never be proud. They should never make fun of the poor, which I have done, since I have made fun of just about every type of person. To make fun of the poor is to reproach God, as the Bible says. I was very disturbed to find out I had reproached God.

Heirs should be generous. We are objects of generosity. The Bible says God rewards us in this life, not just in heaven, for generosity.

The story of creation, good, and evil is a story of class warfare. There are two classes: the class composed of God and the spirits and people who will always receive his help, and the class of Satan and the spirits and people who have no chance because of their evil decisions. The evil class is the ghetto class of the universe. The protestor class. The social justice warrior class. The left wing of the universe. They can’t be blessed by God, so they devote their lives to trying to harm him and his favorites and working to steal what God gave them.

In our political system, conservatives more or less represent the first class, and leftists more or less represent the second. Politics isn’t religion, and there are plenty of godless, useless conservatives who are mistaken about the class they are in, but the distinction between the classes is valid. It’s not really possible to be a serious leftist and belong to the first class. No one who actually knows God can remain a leftist.

The word says that during the millennium, people who are raptured because of their closeness to God and his righteous nepotism will return to Earth and rule with Yeshua. They will be kings and queens. Proper royal persons rule by inheritance. They are not elected by mobs run by Satan. They are not people who worked their way up from the mailroom. The monarchs will all be heirs. Who has the right to question that?

This revelation is life-changing for me. It will make things go much better in my walk with God. It will annoy many blind Christians, but they are always annoyed with me anyway, so it won’t be a significant change.

Kirkland Scotch is a Winner

Every weekend, I take the family to Costco for pizza, a sundae for my son, and whatever unneeded items clever false-bargain marketing can persuade us to buy. Today before our trip, I decided to look into Costco booze. They sell an XO brandy for $48, and I prefer it to Remy Martin and Hennessy, which would cost about 4 times as much. I figured I should look for other things.

My favorite Scotch is Lagavulin 16, an Islay whisky which is very smooth and tastes and smells of iodine. I know that sounds bad, but it’s not. It’s wonderful. I read that Costco’s Kirkland Signature Speyside single malt was very good, and it sells for under $60, so I wanted to try it. They sell it at various ages. The 18-year is supposed to be great.

I have only had Scotch that old once, and I didn’t think much of it. I used to drink Macallan 15 before the price went through the roof, I tried the 18, assuming it would be better. After trying it, I thought it was a waste of money. Somehow harsher than the 15, which was just plain perfect. Maybe I should have added water to it. I don’t know. Today I read that a lot of people prefer the 15.

In any case, I wanted to try any Speyside Scotch Kirkland had to offer, as long as it was old, but they didn’t have any today. They had about 15 tons of ghetto Mexican booze of every conceivable kind, so I am guessing someone at Costco thinks everyone in Florida is Cuban and all Hispanics love tequila.

I don’t think I will ever be convinced there is such a thing as really good tequila or rum. I think these spirits are sort of like Irish whiskey, except that Irish whiskey isn’t ghetto. I have had Irish whiskey I really liked, but it had zero complexity and was in no way comparable to Scotch at the same price. I have enjoyed 5-star Barbancourt rum, but you could never get me to trade Knob Creek or even Korbel brandy for it. I don’t think good tequila exists, although some people claim it does.

In order to simulate quality, tequila producers are allowed to add things like sugar and glycerin to their rotgut. That tells you a lot. Also, the upscale tequilas and mezcals we see today were nowhere to be seen 50 years ago, suggesting they are recent creations born in marketing meetings.

I was disappointed today when I looked for Speyside Scotch, but I did bring home Kirkland 16-year old Highland single malt, which ought to be something like Macallan. They are both Highland Scotches.

I don’t have any Macallan to compare it to. I have been seeing it priced at over $160, and it’s just not worth it. I have some Lagavulin, so I’m comparing Kirkland to that. I can’t compare the flavors apples-to-oranges, but I can compare quality.

Aroma: Kirkland doesn’t have any. Almost. You can tell there is Scotch in the glass, but that’s about it. I think if you put Jameson’s in there, it would smell about the same. As for Lagavulin, it punches you in the face with that beautiful iodine smell before it gets close to your nose.

How about taste?

Kirkland is sweet, and of course, like just about all bourbon and Scotch, it tastes a bit like sherry. Dried fruit and so on. Those sherry barrels are everywhere. I’m not even sure I would like whiskey if it weren’t for the sherry barrels. This whisky is extremely, and I mean extremely, smooth. It feels like sweet oil in your mouth, but then strangely, it burns a little going down. Usually, I don’t like that, but Kirkland has made it very pleasant.

There is complexity, but it’s subtle. You have to think about what you’re drinking in order to taste it. There is a little smoke, but you don’t really notice it until after you swallow. It’s very good.

Lagavulin smacks you with iodine and smoke. Not the dirty-ashtray flavor I got from Ardbeg Corryvreckan, which I ended up pouring out to save cabinet space. It’s perfect. A little sweet. Almost as smooth as Kirkland. The sherry flavor is there. It combines with the smoke and the iodine to create a perfect drinking experience. Not as much burn on the way down.

So what is my conclusion?

For sixty bucks or whatever I paid for the Kirkland, it is fantastic. It’s not that there are a ton of positives; there just aren’t any negatives. Nothing jumps out at me and says, “If only this were fixed.” I think a little more aroma would be nice, and maybe the flavors could be less subtle, but when I drink Scotch, I am disturbed more by what’s wrong with it than I am by what could be more right.

Is it as good as Macallan 15? Can’t say. It has been too long. I think Macallan may be more complex. For twice the price, it should be.

This reminds me of a very good blended Scotch, but with that single-malt edge.

I would buy this again. No question. But I would still like to have a bottle of Macallan 15 again some day. Kirkland won’t make me forget it. Not unless it beats it head-to-head.

More

I published this entry too soon.

It turns out Kirkland Scotch tastes better after you drink it than while you’re drinking it. A couple of minutes after you put it down, all sorts of pleasant flavors, including a little iodine and smoke, rise up inside you.

In view of this, I would say it’s just about perfect. You just have to know what to look for when you drink it.

If I had to make a choice, I think I would say Lagavulin is a little better because of the superior aroma and the up-front flavor punch, but I’m not sure. Maybe if I drank a shot of each of these every day for a month, I’d end up preferring Kirkland.

Crazy, or Just Plain Mean?

The Rob Reiner story is very disturbing.

As everyone knows, Reiner has a drug addict son named Nick, and a few days ago, the son cut Reiner’s throat as well as his wife’s throat. They died, and a daughter found their bodies after rigor mortis had set in.

I can understand a lot of crimes of violence, which doesn’t mean I approve. I can understand having a sadistic, parasitic spouse killed. I can understand domestic violence. I can see why a person who has had a few beers might flip out during an argument and hit someone over the head with a beer bottle. I understand a person who successfully defends himself with a gun and then keeps shooting after the assailant is incapacitated. People get angry sometimes.

Slitting your mother’s throat? I can’t comprehend that. How can anyone get that angry? Slitting your parents’ throats when you know they would otherwise leave you set for life is also incomprehensible. You would think selfishness would kick in.

Nick Reiner has a defense attorney, and his name is Alan Jackson. Presumably, he is extremely expensive. He handles high-profile cases in Los Angeles, and he appears to have a big staff. Who is paying this man? Reiner appears to be indigent, and you would think his siblings would be reluctant to help. Maybe Jackson is doing it pro bono, which really means pro publicity.

To someone like Jackson, this case is worth 7 figures. That’s a lot of charity. I believe charity is extremely important, but don’t come to my house and ask for 7 figures.

I hope no one thinks I’m criticizing this man for representing a murderer. Murderers are supposed to have representation. I’m just marveling that Reiner could get representation this expensive, as an indigent drug addict whose wealthy family is presumably far past estranged.

As a sibling, do you really want to help your vicious, murdering brother to stay free while you live on millions you inherited and he did not? I wouldn’t. I have a second cousin who was disinherited and then emptied a deer rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol into his brother.

I suppose it would be best to refer to the murderer as Nick in order to avoid the confusion that would arise from typing “Reiner” over and over, as well as the awkwardness of calling him “Nick Reiner” 50 times.

People are saying Nick is mentally ill. Some seem sympathetic. They seem to think his addiction or his mental illness caused the murders. I can pretty much guarantee you Jackson will push this angle, because there is no way he can convince a jury Nick didn’t do the crimes.

As for me, I suspect Nick is just a rotten human being.

Let’s talk addiction. I know a little bit about dealing with addicted relatives, and not the nice kind. Not the kind of addict who says, “Hey, I broke my leg a month ago, and I’m still on Percocet. I better do something.” I mean the kind of addict who has to be forced into rehab and always quits. The kind that abuses and bleeds people until they die and then looks for new victims. The kind of addict that turns 65 with no signs of repentance and every sign of becoming more evil.

People say drugs drive evil behavior. I’m sure that’s true in many cases, but I believe that a person who starts doing evil things, is confronted with it repeatedly, is offered help repeatedly, and consistently demonstrates that he greatly prefers to continue doing evil things…was probably evil to begin with.

The Reiners were leftists, and leftists promote the delusion that people are good. They get upset when you tell them some people are just plain evil. They don’t like it when you say many people simply prefer being evil and cannot be changed. It’s true, though, and the Bible says it’s true.

Rob Reiner said his son was resentful because his parents wanted him to stay in rehab, which is different from detox in that it takes many months. This should tell you a lot abut Nick. It suggests he preferred doing drugs and doing as he pleased to receiving help and living a successful life.

As for mental illness, I don’t know if it’s a valid excuse here. Some nice people with good intentions have delusions that seem to come from nowhere. On the other hand, I believe you can make yourself mentally ill by choosing to be a jerk all your life. I think that if you love lies, you will lie until you can’t tell the truth from lies. I think that if you love rage and sadism, and you indulge in them long enough, you become a rotten, sadistic, angry human being, and while your therapist may claim it’s a mental illness, it’s really a habit you formed deliberately, reinforced by demons you don’t want to get rid of.

I don’t think you can choose to be a bona fide psychotic who sees imaginary people, but I think you can choose to be consumed with hatred and lies. Medical science says we can rewire our brains to some extent, habits are real, and so are demons.

Some people who don’t have the facts yet are reflexively claiming Nick is schizophrenic, which could mean he was so psychotic he didn’t understand what he was doing. Maybe he thought his parents were vampires or something. Could be the case, and it would be grounds for acquittal, but on the other hand, it could be a label a therapist gave him in order to be nice and help his parents avoid concluding they had raised an evil man. Therapists are not very reliable. They get things wrong all the time. They can be biased. They can be dishonest. If they couldn’t be dishonest, lawyers wouldn’t hire them to examine their clients.

Sorry if that last sentence is disturbing.

Lawyers are pretty truthful, believe it or not. Laymen often say otherwise, but it’s true. Lawyers don’t always present all of the truth, because that isn’t their job. They present truth and speculation that may help their clients. To a layman, that may seem like lying, but it isn’t.

On the other hand, they hire experts they know are crooked. There are pro-plaintiff experts and pro-defense experts. Defense lawyers know who they’re hiring when they choose their experts. They know their experts may not be all that truthful. Is that dishonest? I suppose it is to some degree, but I think many lawyers would say they aren’t competent to say for sure whether pro-defense experts are more honest than pro-plaintiff experts.

I can assure you, there are lawyers who hire experts they know are crooked, but anyway, lawyers themselves generally tell the truth, because if they get caught lying, it can get them in serious trouble.

It’s generally not necessary for a lawyer to lie. Parties and witnesses tell so many lies, there are plenty to go around without any help from lawyers.

I don’t think Nick saw vampires. He clearly had a history of scary behavior. His own sister turned him in, and she must know him very well. She found her parents with their throats cut and their bodies going stiff, and she immediately told the police her brother was the best suspect. She knew what he was capable of. Also, he went to a party with his parents the night before they died, and he got into loud arguments with them and another actor. No one has said he was angry because he thought they were aliens who had come to destroy the planet or because he thought God had told him they were going to kill him and harvest his organs.

So what about the Reiners? Were they bad parents? Did they bring this on themselves?

They were definitely bad parents. Any parent who doesn’t raise his children to know Yeshua and the Holy Spirit is a failure. It seems they loved their son a great deal and tried their best to fix him, but love and loyalty aren’t enough to make you a successful parent. You have to co-parent with God.

In all likelihood, this man never had an encounter with the Holy Spirit or Yeshua. There is no way his liberal Jewish parents would have introduced him. They were hostile to God’s ways. They promoted evil and called it good. For example, they were known for their strong support of pushing society to accept sexual perversion, which destroys lives.

Would it have mattered if they had accepted Yeshua, been baptized with the Spirit, prayed in tongues every day, been transformed, and done their best to guide Nick in the same path? Maybe not. Like I always say, God raised Satan. He also raised the rest of the angels, and a third of them are evil.

I’ll say this: the odds of Nick’s salvation would have been a whole lot better.

I don’t say they were failures as parents because their son is what he is, and I don’t say he would definitely have been different had they done better. I say they were failures as parents for the same reason I would say any parent, liberal or conservative, who didn’t introduce his children to God was a failure.

God is real. His love is real. He truly does help people. There is no other solution.

As for me, I was not all that satisfied with my own response to the killings. When I read about the discovery of their bodies, I briefly wondered if it was God’s judgment, and I also hoped they hadn’t been killed by a conservative or nominal-Christian nut. My first response should have been grief combined with empathy. These things followed immediately, but they should have been first.

I never said I was good. Just that I am being improved.

Donald Trump has embarrassed conservatives with his response. In part, he said this:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

I think it is objectively true that Rob Reiner was somewhat deranged. His self-reporting on his mental state with regard to Trump is well known, and he said a lot of things that were legitimately indicative of an unbalanced mind. But you can’t relate that to the evil that lived in Nick or the resulting murders. Obviously, Nick did not cut up his parents because his dad had severely irrational beliefs about conservatives.

I have no idea what “reportedly due to” is supposed to mean here. I don’t think anyone–not even Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones–claimed Nick went crazy because of his father’s political delusions.

As a new father with concerns about his family, I now have some ability to comprehend how far off base Trump was. Trump has a big family, so he should have more insight than he does.

There is a religion which could be called Trumpism. A religion which says Trump is infallible and that conservatism will solve all the world’s problems. It’s spreading these days, and it is dangerous. God is conservative, but conservatism can, and does, exist among people who serve Satan. Conservatism is a fruit of submission to God. It is not a good substitute. Without knowledge of the Holy Spirit, you can turn into Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes. Such people are as dangerous as any far-left agitators.

The president needs to wake up and apologize, which is not very likely. Sometimes I think he is getting a bit deranged, himself. During the last half of the year, he has said and done some kooky things.

President Trump is a friend of the church and Israel, but that doesn’t mean he’s with us all the way. He is definitely not our Messiah. He is not even our Josiah.

Today my wife and I prayed for the Reiner family, with special emphasis on Nick. I have no doubt that he is a vile person, but that has never been a barrier to salvation. If you are willing to listen, you can be renewed, no matter what you’ve done or what you have been. I am concerned that people are not likely to pray for him, so we jumped in. Will it pay off? That’s completely up to Nick. It’s possible, if he will listen.

There is Nothing Like an Equal Yoking

Last week, a church buddy from way back remarried. I don’t know who is happier; him or his friends.

He was married to his first wife for something like two decades, and they had 4 children together. The kids are wonderful. He is an extremely dedicated husband and father, he pursues God through the Holy Spirit, and the results show it. The ex is another story.

She blamed him for a lifestyle she found unsatisfactory. She hounded him constantly, persuading him to move several times and change careers. She used to threaten to divorce him and take the children away. He suffered so much, he wanted to die.

I talked to her once about his suffering, and she didn’t understand. She didn’t see the problem. She said, “I was just trying to motivate him.” That was how she felt about driving someone to consider suicide. There was no remorse. No repentance. Just an explanation of behavior she thought was reasonable.

One day he sent me a picture of a list she had made. She went to the Internet and researched poisons, and she created a long handwritten list, complete with details about how much he would suffer and how long it would take him to die.

She alienated his friends. He raised her illegitimate daughter along with his own kids, and the wife turned her against him.

She believes her emotions are correct. If she goes into a rage and hits someone or verbally abuses them, she has no regrets. If she’s angry, she must be right. The person she abuses is to blame.

Naturally, she’s a leftist. Leftists are known for believing their irrational rages are correct and give them license to abuse and even kill. Back before the 2016 election, she decorated her purse with conspicuous anti-Trump material so the whole world had to see how eccentric she was. She was ignorant, and it didn’t bother her. She once told me she was against Republicans because they took prayer out of school.

One day, she beat herself up. Literally. She attacked herself to make it look as though he had been beating her. She did it in front of the children, which is beyond stupid. She called the police, and of course, the kids told them what she had done. She was eventually convicted of various crimes, and a court forced her to avoid contact with the family.

After all this, she and her Christian-rapper new boyfriend broke into my friends’ home, stole the kids’ official papers, took his passport, and even stole his grandmother’s ashes.

We prayed for her for years, and you can see the good it did. You can pray for anyone and have the faith of Yeshua himself, and if they aren’t interested in repentance, nothing will happen. You can pray for Satan if you want, and you can say “in the name of Jesus,” and you can believe as hard as you like. Don’t expect results.

He found himself a nice lady who works at the hospital where he works. They hit it off. Now they’re married. They went to Orlando for the weekend, and on their way down and the way up, we spent time with them.

She is humble. She is gentle. She loves him passionately. She is properly submissive. I won’t say he is happy for the first time in his adult life. It goes beyond that. For the first time in his life, he is not completely miserable.

Last night, we had some of my Christmas ale, and we talked in my kitchen. They played with the baby. We talked about the changes in my friend’s life.

Eventually, we got around to sharing testimony and revelation. We took communion. We repented. We talked about what God was doing for us. Everyone was receptive.

I really enjoyed this. Every day, we pray God will bring us together with people who receive revelation from the Holy Spirit and who appreciate it when other people receive and share revelation. We are both tired of being persecuted by Christians who won’t listen and who try to correct us with nonsense they’ve heard from preachers who have never known God. You have to spend a certain amount of time with such people if you want to be around Christians at all, but you need to recharge with an inner circle that supports and understands you.

The other day, I was on the web complaining about the way Internet forum members treat people. I mentioned certain types of forums that are much worse than average. I mentioned Christian forums.

I will not belong to a Christian forum. They’re horrible. They’re full of self-righteous, ignorant, untransformed people who believe gossip from preachers and denominations instead of revelation they have received (should have received) from the Holy Spirit. They don’t examine themselves, because they think they’ve made it. They join forums so they can “correct” people in order to look holy to strangers. No matter what you say on a Christian forum, someone is likely to find imaginary fault and start condescending and belittling.

It’s persecution. People don’t realize this, because they have no idea what persecution is. Anyone who speaks against Holy Spirit revelation is a persecutor. For that matter, anyone who is against Yahweh or Yeshua is a persecutor. When Yeshua blinded Paul and knocked him off his donkey, he accused Paul of persecuting him. Paul was fighting proper beliefs in Yeshua and the Holy Spirit.

Churches have done a big percentage of the persecution Christians have experienced. They have a long history of torturing, imprisoning, and burning people who heard from the Holy Spirit. This is because Satan runs nearly all churches. He sets up denominations so they allow you to get a little closer to God, but not close enough.

Speaking against the fruit and gifts of the Holy Spirit is persecution. It is also standard procedure in churches all over the world.

Preachers repeat garbage long-dead men who didn’t have revelation made up. Adherents absorb it, and then, with their flesh under the influence of demons, they persecute people who speak the truth. This is the main reason I don’t go to church. God made me understand it was a poor use of my time.

Some people quit going to church because Christians have hurt their feelings. I suppose there are people who think that happened to me. Not true. Other Christians have been nasty to me, but I left because God told me to and because I was wasting my time in church. I was tired. When I spoke revelation, which has turned out to be right and which I live by to this day, people who didn’t pray in tongues tried to correct me. Some were downright snotty. This was especially true of the prosperity people and sycophants who were close to pastors.

Weirdly, people who were not nearly as blessed as I was tried to correct me. I mean people who had serious problems that were very clearly not in God’s will and which were caused by problems with their walk with him.

You can’t always say a person is closer to God than someone else because his life is easier, but when a person’s life is a mess and he never has any revelation or testimony, the problem is unmistakable.

I have called these people boneheads, which I supposed is insulting, but the point was to describe their condition. Their heads are like blocks of solid bone. There is no way for revelation to penetrate. Revelation comes by the Holy Spirit, and he can’t get into a bonehead. It took him quite a while to get anywhere with my own thick skull.

If you can’t receive revelation, you can’t recognize it when others relate it. Talking to stubborn boneheads who live in the flesh is like talking to a dog or a rock.

As God himself told us, it is not possible to please him in the flesh, but nearly all Christians are determined to do it. He told us we should worship him in Spirit and in truth, but almost no one spends real time with the Holy Spirit, and that includes most people who claim to be Spirit-filled.

I quit going to church and hanging around with incorrigible boneheads. Suddenly, there were fewer vexatious people in my life. I quit tithing, which, I was told, would bring me prosperity. Then God made me wealthy without work. God got me out of the hellhole known as Miami. He gave me a wonderful home. He brought me a wife who loves revelation and responds to it by nodding and quoting confirming scriptures. He brought me the cutest, most charismatic baby son imaginable.

I received miracle healings when I was a churchgoer (never through preachers). I received all sorts of wonderful correction straight from God; revelation kept pouring in. And I couldn’t share it with much of anyone. My buddy who just got married was one of the few, and even he had some rough spells.

Fred Stone, the father of tarnished evangelist Perry Stone, was a real man of God, and he told an interesting story.

When Fred Stone was young, he ran around with an older man named Rufus Dunford. Mr. Dunford was apparently an apostle. He worked miracles and so on.

One day Fred Stone was driving him around, and Mr. Dunford asked him to pull over so he could go into a cobbler’s shop that belonged to a German. They went in, and Mr. Dunford started speaking to the cobbler in German. Mr. Dunford did not know German, but God poured it through him.

Mr. Dunford told him he needed to be saved. The cobbler asked him if he was a Catholic priest. When Mr. Dunford said he was not, the cobbler said something like, “You must be one of those [expletive] holy-rollers,” and he picked up a hammer. He was very angry. Mr. Dunford left without further effort.

When he got back in the car, he told Fred Stone the cobbler was “a spiritual swine.” He was referring to a principle Yeshua taught when he said, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

Mr. Dunford said the cobbler was going to die soon, and God had sent him into the shop to give him a final warning. He never went back to try again.

We are God’s pearls. People don’t understand that. Yeshua told us what pearls are in the story of the pearl of great price. He said the pearl of great price was the kingdom of God. He told us the kingdom of God was in his followers.

Yeshua was telling us we shouldn’t chase swine, which is a much harsher term than “bonehead.” We have to live in this world, and we have to warn people, but we aren’t supposed to waste our lives relentlessly pursuing people who will never listen and who will persecute us and even gladly do us harm.

The swine principle applies to evangelism and teaching, meaning we shouldn’t try to force them on swine, but it also applies to subjecting ourselves to their presence.

I believe this explains why so few people who get revelation are allowed to appear before churches. Yeshua is protecting his pearls by refusing to cast them before swine. What would be the point, apart from creating evidence to be used to judge the swine later?

God wants to save sinners, but on the other hand, he loves his children, and he doesn’t want to submit them to unlimited persecution and temptation. When you hang around with people who will not listen, they will try to turn you away from the truth, and they may mistreat you.

They can also be extremely condescending and pompous. “I drove the church bus for 25 years, little lost sheep. I did 15 mission trips to Africa. I have every single Joyce Meyer DVD. You are clearly listening to demons instead of the Holy Spirit, and you are lucky a man as holy as I am is here to rebuke you and clear all this up.”

I always try to avoid condescension when I talk to people. I try to be humble. Unfortunately, to proud people (including those who don’t know they’re proud), humility is an invitation to condescension and misguided rebuke. It’s like blood to a shark. They jump at the bait, and then you wish you had kept your mouth shut. When they’ve done it a certain number of times, you stop talking to them. They condition you to give up on them, just as God gives up on people.

I avoid debate. Yeshua didn’t tell us to debate people. It doesn’t work. He didn’t do it. He said his peace and moved on.

I should add that I’m really good at debating. I have an extremely high IQ, I’m familiar with the Bible, and of course, I’m a lawyer. The reason I avoid debating isn’t that I can’t beat you at it. I avoid it because I don’t want to fall into the trap you’re in. When I refuse to engage, it’s not because you scored a stunning point or delivered a sweet burn. I can respond just fine. I choose not to, for the same reason I wouldn’t put a nickel in a rigged slot machine.

In the Bible, you can see a pattern that shows that people who were close to God were not very gregarious. True prophets didn’t hang out at the temple or kings’ palaces. John the Baptist was a priest by birth, but he lived in the wilderness. Yeshua spent a lot of time away from people. Moses spent a lot of time alone with God. Immersing yourself excessively in the company of hard-headed people will not make you more productive.

Paul’s story is interesting. He knew all about organized religion and doctrine. He was a student of the great rabbi Gamaliel. He read out his earthly resume in his letters. After Yeshua gave him his own personal tribulation, he repented of flesh-based persecution and became a believer. He knew about the church, but he avoided it. Why?

He said he went into Arabia for three years and then he spent another 14 years away from Israel and the new church. He spent time with God, learning from the Holy Spirit. Go read it yourself. Then he returned and became the most effective apostle. He even corrected Peter.

No man taught him, but he had so much revelation, he wrote around a quarter of the New Testament.

I tell people they need to learn from the Holy Spirit, not preachers, and they argue with me. Why don’t they argue with Paul? He didn’t volunteer to wash a preacher’s car and carry his briefcase. He didn’t become a deacon or an usher. He spent time alone with God, and he came back filled with the truth.

I tell people they need to spend a lot of time praying in tongues, because it will fill them with revelation. They argue with me. Richie Wilkerson, the guy who married Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, went to the trouble of preaching against my revelation in front of a full church. Most Christians struggle with a basic and axiomatic truth.

The word says that if you pray in tongues you edify yourself. If that is true, it is not possible for praying in tongues a lot not to be helpful. This should be obvious, but people fight it.

I tell people they need to learn from the Holy Spirit instead of corrupt denominations that teach useless error. They argue with that. Yeshua said it. John said it. Paul confirmed it. Somehow when I say it, I’m wrong?

Why am I wrong? Because no one points TV cameras at me? Because I don’t have a jet? If TV cameras, fame, and wealth were signs of God’s authority, wouldn’t Whoopi Goldberg be an apostle? Jim Bakker had TV cameras. So did Jimmy Swaggart.

John and Yeshua said the Holy Spirit would teach us all things. ALL. Were they confused? If I’m wrong to say the same thing, prove them wrong.

A preacher’s role is to be a matchmaker and a sort of daycare worker. You tell people about Christianity. You get them baptized with water and the Holy Spirit. You show them how to spend time with God. You share your testimony. You try to provide guidance until they get their legs under them. You do NOT tell them you are their “covering” or their “father” or that they have to continue in your church and your teaching. You do NOT tell them to obey you. But these are things most clergymen do.

They say God is our father, and then they expect us to live lives in which we don’t ever meet with him. Is that how fatherhood works? Maybe in the ghetto.

If you don’t know your father, expect to think, feel, and behave like the fatherless.

Talking with someone is dialogue. Talking about what someone said is often just gossip. You’re supposed to talk with the Holy Spirit instead of relying on what some dodgy dead person may or may not have heard from him tens or hundreds of years ago. The vast majority of preachers are just gossips. They repeat slanders and speculation. We are supposed to be witnesses. A witness knows what he says is true. I talk about things I have personally experienced, and I relate revelation I personally received after time with God.

My last pastor, the pedophile rapist, made us give him–not the church, but him–cash offerings on his birthdays. You’re not supposed to give an offering to a person, but okay. He scolded us when we didn’t give him enough. He told us we were supposed to give his smirking, obnoxious, drug-dealing, atheist son money and honor him because he was the son of the pastor.

At Miami’s Trinity Church, Rich Wilkerson and his wife Robin told us, “Grow where you’re planted,” meaning, “Don’t go to the church across the street and give them your money. Stay here on the plantation and pick that cotton.” He told us God would make us wealthy if we gave him money. More money, I should say, since he already had a mansion in Golden Beach with a yacht moored behind it.

These guys made doctrine up, and they related doctrine other fools had made up. The pope does the same things. Most preachers do. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit always tells the truth.

I hope I get to spend more time with my friend, because a lot of people I know are draining. That includes people I love and want to keep in my life if possible.

Christians are the new Jews. We are just as hard to talk to and persuade.

I know it’s hard to give up on ideas you have held close to your heart for years. On the other hand, the truth is the truth, you need it, you won’t succeed without it, and all the wishing in the world will not make your cherished gossip the truth.