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.

What I Think Works…as of This Evening

I keep working on my photo skills as well as my gear. I am strongly aware that my baby son’s first year will never happen again, so I am doing what I can to produce quality photos and edit them well.

I’ve learned a lot of things since 2023, when I finally bit the bullet and started buying new equipment and learning to use it.

When I found my wife in 2021, I had a 2006 Canon 350D, a Samsung Galaxy S8, a Yi action camera, and a Gopro Hero 8 Black. The 350D was a decent amateur DSLR for its day. It had an 8-megapixel APS-C sensor, meaning it was smaller than a full-frame sensor, which would be about the same size as a rectangle of 35 mm film. In 2006, putting 8 megapixels on an amateur-level camera was fairly impressive.

We started traveling in order to see each other in 2021. We made three overseas trips with phones and action cameras. The 350D stayed home, covered with the cockatoo dust it had accumulated after years of hanging near a bird cage. I don’t recall why I didn’t take it with me. Weight, maybe.

We got acceptable photos and a little video that year, although I screwed up more than once and ruined videos. I found the Yi to be difficult to work with. I have a video about 10 seconds long which I accidentally shot so it would be sped up upon viewing. I would guess it was supposed run more like 5 minutes. All that’s missing is the Benny Hill music.

In 2023, instead of taking the 350D on trips, I bought a used 200D. This is a more advanced camera from about 2017. I was under the delusion that my 2006 zoom lens needed to be saved, so I stuck with Canon. The lens fits the 200D. This was a bad idea, since I turned right around and bought a better zoom. I should have gone with Sony or maybe an Olympus.

I also bought a Sony A7IV and a Sony ZV1-M2. The A7IV was my no-holds-barred (few, anyway) quality-gear splurge. It’s a full-frame camera. I thought I should have the gear to do a truly top-notch job of capturing things. The ZV is a compact camera made to appeal to vloggers. It has a built-in zoom lens, and it’s very handy. Much better photos than a late model Samsung Galaxy, too.

I have never taken the A7IV anywhere. It’s heavy and expensive. I don’t want to carry it on trips, and I don’t want to have it stolen. It’s great when air travel is not in the plan, however.

When we went to the Far East for the second time, I took the ZV and the 200D. I was not ecstatic about the shots I got with the 200D. It was like I had forgotten everything I knew about composition, and I didn’t think they were sharp enough. The video was also extremely amateurish. I don’t know how I managed to perform so badly. The ZV gave me good video, but the stills were not always great. I relied mostly on my phone for stills.

I learned something interesting: the ZV1-M2 quits in hot weather. My wife and I were on a food tour in Singapore, and I noticed the camera’s monitor would go dark during video shooting. At first I thought it was saving energy, but in reality, it was turning itself off, without so much as a warning beep. It was overheating. Black camera that absorbed heat. Hot equatorial sun. I later learned that the ZV is just about useless for video in hot, sunny weather. Oddly, Sony does not trumpet this fact in ads. You find out after your videos of your priceless trip are ruined.

In retrospect, I find it amazing that anyone recommends this camera. It’s like buying a car you can only drive 10 miles at a time. Its primary purpose is video, and that is the only purpose at which it fails.

It is helpful if you remove the battery from your ZV and power it using a cable. The battery contributes a lot to the heat. But it’s still a very poor video camera for anyone who shoots videos in hot weather, unless they’re very short. If you have this camera, it’s fine for short indoor videos. Other than that, stay away. And it’s not cheap. I think they still cost about $900.

Since I began to buy better stuff, I have drawn a few conclusions, which may very well be wrong. And they overlap.

1. The most important thing is equipment that works, not equipment that works perfectly.
2. A handy camera you use is better than a heavy, complex camera you dread taking out of the bag.
3. Useful lenses are more important than buying the best camera.
4. Unless you want to spend a lot, don’t buy a few pricey lenses with top optical quality. Buy lenses that shoot well in low light.
5. For video, and maybe photos, you want some kind of stabilization.
6. A very good camera phone will do everything 95% of the population wants.
7. You absolutely must use wireless external mikes.
8. Good photography is almost completely about choices.

I guess I’ll start with 1.

Consider 2015. Ten years ago. They made pretty nice cameras. Twenty megapixels and more. Good connectivity. Good features. Excellent accessories. You can spend maybe $600 and get a very good, lightly-used camera from 2015, with a nice low-light prime lens that will be useful in lots of situations. On the other hand, if you buy a very, very good newer camera with a truly excellent low-light lens and a big sensor, think more like $4,000. Will the photos be 4,000/600 as good? No.

If you want to take photos that are optically very good, and you aren’t a perfectionist, buy a very good camera and lenses. If you want to take photos that are technically superior, spend 6 or 7 times as much for superior equipment. But consider the fact that many of the world’s great photographers used cameras and lenses that were, objectively, bad by today’s standards. Most of photography is about content and exposure, not corner-to-corner sharpness or minimal chromatic aberration.

2. I would guess my A7IV weighs over three pounds with the big zoom attached. There is no way to have a normal day with that hanging on you from breakfast to bedtime. You’re not going to drag it around with you unless you take pictures for a living. The a6400 weighs much less. It’s doable. The 200D also weighs less. All the other cameras weigh less. Then there is the phone, which is pretty good. Figure out what you are willing to lug around and use, and concentrate on whatever that is for day-to-day photography. If you insist on heavy cameras, you are going to end up using your phone nearly all the time.

3. Any 20-megapixel camera made can shoot excellent photos, but not without the right lenses. A $10,000 camera with one crummy zoom is less useful than a used $200 camera with several good lenses.

4. You can spend $15,000 on one amazing lens, but when people look at your photos, almost no one will be able to tell the difference between the photos it takes and the ones you can take with a $500 lens. You’re better off with several okay lenses than one lens that makes photo nerds cry when they see it on your camera. If you can afford it, get very good lenses, but if not, get lenses that will take okay photos with the exposures you want. It is EXTREMELY important to have lenses that shoot well in low light. You will find this out when you try to use your $1,500 f/3.5-5.6 lens to shoot a once-in-a-lifetime event in a dim restaurant. Go for 1.4 primes, at the highest.

5. Shaky video is annoying to watch. You can buy a thing called a gimbal, and it’s a big, cumbersome device that holds your camera and moves it up and down to cancel out your shaking, but it’s a royal pain to use. There are cameras that stabilize, and there are lenses that stabilize. Stabilized is better. My understanding is that a stabilized system will also let you shoot images in lower light (if it stabilizes images as well as video), because you will not move as much, and you can use a lower shutter speed without getting blurring.

6. If you don’t want the hassle and expense of getting camera gear, get a phone that does a very good job. Some phones are much better than others.

7. Buy external mikes, like Rode or DJI. My wife has the speech volume of a turbine-powered helicopter at home, but getting her to speak up on videos while traveling is nearly impossible. I have videos where you can see her lips move, but that’s about it. You, too, will find that ordinary situation noise kills speech, so buy external mikes. You can even use them with phones and selfie sticks. And use dead cats (wind noise suppressors) unless you like listening to wind instead of people.

8. Choice, not gear, is what makes photography an art.

I came up with my own system for categorizing photos. There are two kinds in the system: documentary, and artistic. A documentary photo’s main purpose it to show that something happened. “Wayne Newton kissed me at his show.” “This is really my driver’s license.” An artistic photo is, well, art. A documentary photo doesn’t have to have artistic merit, and it doesn’t have to be done well. An artistic photo has merit, and generally, although not always, it should be technically good.

A lot of people think photography is not an art, because you don’t have to draw or paint something in order to take a picture of it. They think it’s like having a sprained finger x-rayed or Xeroxing your behind at the office Christmas party. Of course, this is not true. An artistic photo evokes emotions. It usually seems to tell a story. It may tell a story that has nothing to do with what was actually happening in front of the camera. For example, a photo of two strangers at a bus stop, who don’t even know each other, may seem to be about dramatic events taking place between two people who have some kind of relationship. The mind and heart of the beholder fill out artistic photos with backstories that may be completely imaginary.

You choose your subject. You choose your camera. You choose a focal length, f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed. You choose the angle. You may be able to choose the lighting. You may shoot a number of shots and then choose the only one that says what want to say.

This is what makes photography a legitimate art.

If you want to take artistic photos, which is what I want to do (even when shooting my family), if you master the art of making choices, you will not be blocked by your equipment’s limits. You may not perform as well as you want to, but it’s better to have the right choices and the wrong equipment than the wrong choices and the right equipment. Bottom line: you should use whatever equipment you can get, today, instead of moaning about being unable to take pictures because you don’t have the gear you want.

I say all this stuff, but I keep buying gear. I got myself a couple of f/1.4 lenses for my a6400, and they have made a huge difference in my life. I can take shots now in light that used to produce noisy photos that looked awful. I also replaced the Sony ZV1M2 with a Canon Powershot V1. It’s bigger and heavier, but it will do everything the Sony will do and more, and it has a built-in fan.

I like the small size of the Sony, and it’s a little annoying to put the Canon in my pocket, AND I just wrote that handy is better than not-handy, but I’m willing to put up with a little more bulk in this case, given the enormous advantages the Canon offers. It shoots better in low light, it’s not going to overheat as fast, and it has image stabilization for still shots.

It’s too bad I don’t put photos of my son on the web, because he is extremely cute and possibly the most photogenic person in history. I’m not just saying that as his dad. He is really something. And I don’t consider “photogenic” to be a compliment anyway. Many ugly people are photogenic.

If I could post some of the shots I’ve taken lately, I think people would see how helpful the 1.4 lenses have been, not to mention how much better the ZV1M2 and the Powershot are than my phone.

I’m continuing to work on my editing. I just got a new PC. I bought a gaming computer because it happened to have a lot of parts that were excellent for editing photos and video. I am learning Affinity 2 and Topaz AI. I have Photoshop Elements, but I find it annoying and not noticeably better.

Editing photos is shockingly relaxing and satisfying. I don’t know why. I honestly think it’s one of those things that will improve your health if you do it regularly, like spending time outdoors.

I am going to put two very large hard drives in the new PC to store photos and video. One will back up the other, and my hope is that no catastrophe will wipe both out at once. I am hoping 10 TB will keep me going for a few years. It would be nice to have two huge, fast SDD’s, but that would run around $1600, and I don’t think I really need them.

I don’t like the idea of cloud storage. I don’t trust it, and I have an irrational (I hope) fear of having hostile people root through my files in order to harm me or my family. I also think it would take a decade to upload a single terabyte.

Now you know my current stance, valuable as it may or may not be, on the subject of photography.

From Creampuff to Marginally Able

My sparing efforts at building my strength are paying off.

I decided to try adding one resistance exercise to my life. This was several weeks ago. I knew I would never go to a gym again or do long workouts or do multiple sets of anything. I wanted something sustainable. It was okay with me if I never maxed out my potential. I am old. I just want to be pretty strong as well as resistant to injury, and lifting also improves cardiovascular health and strengthens the skeleton.

I did a bit of research, and I learned something I should have realized long ago: there is no fitness industry. There is a vanity industry for men who want to look good to other men.

I exaggerate, but I won’t retract what I said. I learned that nearly everyone who gives “fitness” advice involving weights is really giving muscle-bulking advice for guys who want other men to admire them. It’s kind of gay, really. The gurus constantly use the word “gains,” but it rarely refers to strength gains. It’s about having big, puffy show muscles that aren’t as strong as they should be.

I found out what I really needed was to lift very heavy weights no more than 5 times per set. When I was young and even more stupid, I was taught to lift 8-12 times, and that builds man-love muscles but doesn’t maximize strength.

If you look at competitive powerlifters, including the ones who use drugs, you will see that they don’t look like bodybuilders. They outperform bodybuilders without gaining useless mass or prancing around in locker rooms in their underwear taking creepy selfies.

Even powerlifters do things wrong. They lift to win at events involving very specific muscles. This isn’t the way to build the most functional strength. If you want to be able to lift furniture and carry luggage and so on, you should do exercises that involve more than one muscle group, because that’s what life involves. Otherwise, you end up with weird gaps in your strength.

I decided to do one exercise, which I made up. I put two dumbbells by my feet. I lift them to my waist using my legs and back. I curl them to my shoulders. I press them overhead. Then I do things in reverse.

This works pretty much every leg muscle. It builds up my back, arms, and deltoids. It’s supposedly good for my core, which is what you use to do things in real life when not wearing tiny, shiny thong panties and competing for trophies while smeared with oil.

I started out with horrible form, swinging the weights and whatever else is bad, but I did not care. I figured the weaker muscles would catch up with the stronger ones, and from then on, I would be okay. This has turned out to be true for the most part. I will never be able to give my back and legs a real challenge with dumbbells I can press over my head, but my arms are catching up to my deltoids and pectorals and whatever else I use to press dumbbells.

I am not Charles Atlas. I started out with two 42.5-pound dumbbells, which is not impressive, and I am still using the same weight. I went from three terrible reps to 4 pretty good ones.

It doesn’t sound like much of a routine, but I am not the same person I was. I don’t make old man noises when I bend over to pick things up. Things feel lighter. Squatting is no longer something I think of as dangerous or a major challenge.

I have continued researching, and I was told I should use my legs and back to toss the dumbbells up to shoulder level, reducing the awkward strain on my back. This is safer, supposedly, and it produces something called explosive strength, which doesn’t sound good but allegedly is. So now I’m exploding, as instructed.

I use dumbbells because they give a better workout. A barbell does a lot of the work for you, just as a machine does. If you can press 200 pounds over your head on a bar, don’t even begin to think you can do it with dumbbells.

Also, dumbbells are cheap and easily stowed, and they don’t require a bench.

I considered getting something called a trap or hex bar, which has a big back-and-knee-sparing loop you stand inside, but they’re not as effective as dumbbells, and they take up room.

Now that I’ve found one quick, productive exercise I like, I am considering adding two more: deadlifts and squats. Sort of.

My understanding is that unless you use a straight barbell, you’re not doing real deadlifts and squats. There are other names for what you’re doing. Anyway, I am considering doing similar exercises with the biggest dumbbells possible. Weights I will never be able to lift over my head. This should make my back and legs strong and help me make it through old age without spine issues, broken hips, and knee problems.

Oddly, dumbbells like the ones I have are cheap, but big ones are very expensive, whereas fairly heavy barbells and weights are less expensive than huge dumbbells.

Based on what other people are doing, I think there is no way I will ever need more than 200 pounds per dumbbell. I doubt I’ll even get that far. I figure if I get dumbbells that hold 200 each, I will never have to replace them.

I would be amazed I ever needed 400 pounds of weight. If I manage to deadlift 200 pounds, total, I’ll be thrilled beyond description. I may be able to get up to 85 per side with the dumbbells I have, so I should be in no hurry to look for bigger ones.

Learning the truth about strength training has lowered my esteem for the human race to new levels. It should astonish us that men all over the world, overwhelmingly, are more concerned about looking good (to a limited population segment that likes that kind of thing) than being strong. Ordinarily, you would expect that kind of thing from women.

I love doing one set and quitting. This has been my MO for years, during the brief periods during which I have exercised. It works. I don’t like exercise. I hate the smell of a gym. It’s like smelling a big pile of underwear mixed with soured bologna. I don’t like that “two more sets to go” feeling. My goal is to keep my one-set philosophy and refrain from adding any more exercises than I have to.

Another great thing about strength training: you can do it twice a week and get results. I have been doing my little exercise three times most weeks, but the pros say it’s not necessary. They say two will work.

If they are right, I should be able to get 75% of the benefits of three-set exercises, working out about 30 minutes per week. That may sound bad to fanatics, but I prefer to compare the results to the results of doing nothing. By that standard, they look amazing.

Very few people exercise consistently all their lives. Arnold Schwarzenegger let himself go to the point where he had moobs and looked like he had never touched a weight, and he was only in his fifties. Sustainability is better than maximal results you can only maintain for two years.

I will be more than strong enough. I already am, for that matter. You don’t really need to be able to bench 350 pounds in order to get through life. A person who has no trouble with 150 is prepared for just about anything life will put in his way.

Not that I think benching is a good idea. I agree with the people who say it’s silly. How many situations require you to push things away from yourself with great force? Nearly none. On the other hand, my exercise simulates the exact type of task most men have to do over and over. Lift from ground to waist or chest.

Groceries. Luggage. Furniture. Fat babies. Packages. Appliances. You know I’m right.

Benching requires equipment that takes up half a living room, and it doesn’t do you much good. Besides, if I benched regularly, I would have a 50-inch chest in a year. I hit 48 in law school with limited machines. My chest blows up and leaves the rest of me behind. I would like to be able to fit in a jacket.

I will never take drugs. It’s amazing how many boys and men are on them now. The boys are stunting their height, making their hair fall out, and covering themselves with acne scars. The men are encouraging cancer, strokes, heart attacks, and joint and muscle destruction.

I guess I see at least one drug user every time I run errands. Yesterday I saw an obese bald guy who looked miserable and appeared to be on drugs. His arms looked swollen. They stuck out sideways over his gut. He swayed from side to side as he walked; I guess his thighs rubbed together. He had a pained expression as he walked. His mouth was open. What is the point of doing that to yourself?

I think the guy two houses down is on roids. He looked normal the first time I saw him. A couple of years back, he came out of his house, and he was grotesque. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy. He was bald, of course, with one of those creepy convict beards. Tattooed. Way too tan. Scary-looking. Pumped to the max. He must be pushing 60. I don’t know what possessed him.

Testosterone replacement is normalizing drug abuse among American men. Everybody wants to be big and intimidating, not that bodybuilding is in any way a martial art or helpful against people who can really fight. I’ll bet we see a wave of strokes, heart attacks, and cancers starting 5 years from now.

I would guess the guys on testosterone claim they don’t take drugs. Yeah, okay. Doctors call testosterone a drug, and so should you. Having enormous testosterone levels is not okay. Check out photos of the faces of men who take it.

Men claim they take it because they have medical issues. Yeah, they say that about weed, too. Kids in their twenties are taking testosterone, from doctors, and posting muscle photos. Guys who looked perfectly normal before they started.

Men always want people to think they’re naturally big and strong. Somehow they think it’s more impressive if it doesn’t come from a vial. I think they want people to think they’re genetically superior to everyone else. Has kind of a Nazi smell to it.

It reminds me of the story of the Chinese guy who sued his wife for not telling him about her plastic surgery. He married her, and they had kids who took after their pre-surgery mom. He was not pleased.

When I was in college, I lived on a crew floor, and some of the guys took steroids. How do I know? Well, there was a guy we called Mongo. He was loaded with muscle. Saw him a couple of years later, and he was smaller than I was. He was actually kind of a little guy. Explain that without drugs.

Another guy had legs like Earl Campbell. You could stick your hand in the ruts of his thigh muscles, not that anyone ever did, I hope. Our floor counselor was skinny in high school, and other kids beat him up and broke all his ribs. As a rower, he had biceps like honeydew melons. Not from rowing.

He ended up rowing for Puerto Rico in the Olympics. Yeah, that was legit.

I think a lot of testosterone users are letting quacks kill them slowly. “My doctor said it was okay, so TIME TO GET PUMPED!”

Go look at Alan Ritchson’s photos from his The Hunger Games days, and then look at his post-drug Reacher face. He admits he’s on testosterone. Somehow he has managed to lose body fat and end up with a puffy face. He looks constipated and crusty. His eyes look dead. He looks like he’s straining in the bathroom, to be graphic.

Still photos can be doctored, but I saw the show, and he looked very bad. Aged. Like his heart could stop at any minute. And he walked like his legs were glued together.

How is he going to come back from that? He can’t take that stuff forever. Sooner or later, he’ll have to get off the needle and go back to being a skinny guy with a 15″ neck, just like the new Dwayne Johnson, except even smaller. That’s not easy for everyone. Drug muscles are addictive.

When he was young, he was a slender guy who looked like the picture of health. His skin was very smooth. Now it looks like a gravel road.

Harvard Medical School says that when you take testosterone, your body stops making it. When you come off it, I guess you turn into Richard Simmons until you recover. And then you have whatever to-you unsatisfactory levels you had before you started.

I’m sure there is a legitimate use for testosterone therapy, like when you’ve had parts torn off in an industrial accident or you’ve been married to a feminist for 25 years, but as for elective users, I think any therapy that requires constant bloodwork and vigilant monitoring of one’s circulatory health is suspect.

I don’t think my level is a problem. I have tons of energy. I sleep well when my baby son allows it. I’m far from depressed. I am still fertile, or at least I was in early 2024. I respond to strength training. I don’t feel tempted to vote for liberals.

I want to be able to cope with life’s minor challenges. I want to get through this life without new joints or a back brace. I do not have to be super-strong to be satisfied, and I do not expect to look much better than I do right now. I think this is the best attitude.

Let the Light In

I take a lot of photos of my son using my phone. I also shoot video. It’s very convenient. It’s quick. My phone is always in a handy pocket on the side of my leg. It’s not heavy. It’s not in the way. It takes around 4 seconds to get it out and get the camera function working.

The photo quality is amazing I don’t mean it’s good. I just mean it’s amazing. The phone is around 1/4″ thick, the lenses are smaller than Cheerios, optical zoom is a mechanical impossibility, and yet somehow, I get photos that are more than good enough to blow up to three feet wide and hang on my walls.

Does that mean they’re “good”? Well, no. Not if you judge them by camera standards.

The other day, I shot some photos of my son, using a Sony ZV1-M2. This is a camera that cost me around $900. If you’re not a photo buff, you may not know it, but $900 is not anything close to what new professional-grade cameras cost, so I’m saying it’s not the best camera there is.

It has a built-in mechanical zoom lens. It has an APS-C sensor, meaning it’s smaller than a full-frame sensor. It has an articulated touch screen on the back. It has two microphones. You can also plug external mikes into it. It has a hot shoe.

It’s aimed at the video-blog market. It will give you better videos than a phone. It’s not intended to be the world’s best still camera, but of course, you can use it for stills.

I bought it for travel. I found it to be good for video, albeit cumbersome with all the audio stuff and the mini-tripod or gimbal attached. It overheats quickly in the sun, however, and the Rube Goldberg nature of adding mikes led to me making a number of videos without sound. Unintentional silent movies. The stills were okay, but I also took a DSLR to see if I could do better.

When I put the shots of my son up on the 65″ TV I use as a monitor, I saw that I had been missing out. Even though I was using a compact vlogging camera with numerous limitations, the photos were clearly superior to anything my phone could produce. Better subject separation. Better sharpness. He just plain looked better.

Last night, I wanted shots of my son at Thanksgiving dinner. I grabbed a Sony a6400, figuring it would be better than the ZV1-M2. Problem: I didn’t have any lenses that combined a suitable focal length with acceptable light-gathering. In other words, I wanted a wide-angle lens that would give noise-free shots in my kitchen at night, and my only option was 9mm, which is over the top. I gave up and grabbed the ZV1-M2, which can shoot as wide as f1.8. The shots are probably pretty good. I have not seen them.

This experience made me realize, once again, that I had been looking for, and buying, the wrong lenses.

Photo gurus really push handy zoom lenses for travel, as well as sharp primes that don’t do well indoors. I listened to them, so now I can’t use my expensive cameras to shoot family photos without additional lighting.

Seriously, am I going to run and get a complicated lighting contraption and set it up every time I want to take a candid shot of my wife and son? Am I going to fiddle with my complex on-camera flash and hope I don’t end up with what looks like a bad amateur wedding reception photo? No. I’m going to grab the phone or the compact.

As fate would have it, things aren’t all that bad. Help was on the way before I realized I had the wrong lenses. Before Thanksgiving, I ordered a 23 mm Sigma f1.4 prime lens for the a6400. This would have been perfect for last night. It’s very sharp, it’s not terribly expensive, and the focal length is just right for most indoor people shots.

Before I bought it, I took my 18-135 mm zoom and took shots inside the house. I simulated 23 mm and 35 mm shots. The 35 mm shots were claustrophobic. They left things out. This is how I landed on 23 mm.

By the way, I put a space between numerals and “mm” for a reason. The convention of putting them next to each other is stupid and anomalous, and it causes all sorts of problems for search engines. It needs to stop.

Sigma makes a family of low-priced, good-quality f1.4 lenses, and that’s why I had to take the test shots. I could have gone wider or narrower.

The lens arrives today, and I expect it to revolutionize my a6400 game. I should be able to keep the camera sitting out where I can grab it, and I should be able to get a lot of very nice shots with it.

I also found a useful video about low-light shooting. Finally.

Why didn’t I know what I needed sooner? Well, I did study up. Quite a bit. But there is a lot of bad advice out there, from people who claim to know what they’re doing.

There are a bunch of camera courses on Youtube, and they must be pretty good, because people say nice things about them, and some of them used to cost a lot of money. I picked one, and I started watching it.

I have not seen the whole thing, so maybe the host will eventually get around to really useful information, but so far, he has not done all that well. He has spent considerable time talking about the Rule of Thirds, a maxim (not a hard rule) which seems useful when you first hear about it and then turns out to be disappointing.

It works like this. You divide your frame into 9 boxes. When you frame subjects, you try to arrange things so each third (bottom to top) contains something different. For example, ocean at the bottom, blue sky in the middle, clouds at the top. If you have an important object in the frame, put it near a corner of the middle box; the Paul Lynde box.

This is considered aesthetically pleasing, and it definitely works in many circumstances, or nobody would teach it. On the other hand, the vast majority of photos I enjoy violate it pretty vigorously.

I like watching Youtubes featuring the works of great photographers, and when I watched a few after learning about the Rule of Thirds, it seemed more like the artists were obeying the Rule of Avoiding Thirds. Makes you wonder if they ever heard of the rule. Go look at some great photos, and you will see I’m right.

I’ve watched other advice and instruction videos as well.

My impression is that most instruction videos are useful but not terribly so, and they can push you into formulaic approaches that obscure whatever talent you may possess. Photography is an art, so talent is the main thing.

I listened to Youtubers when I chose lenses, and they talked a great deal about things that aren’t nearly as important as getting the shot in the first place. Vignetting. Barrel distortion. Sharpness. Focus breathing, which, I believe, only applies to video.

The sharpness obsession got me excited, so I bought sharp lenses. I think they’re just swell, but I also realize I got too caught up in sharpness. Even as I was shopping, I thought I was probably focusing, if you will, too much on the wrong thing.

If you want to see how right I was about being wrong, go look at photos from Vivian Maier.

Maier was a nobody when she lived. She was a professional nanny. She owned an expensive Rolleiflex twin-lens camera that shot square photos. Guess how many photo lenses she had. “Two,” you’re thinking, because I just called it a twin-lens camera. Wrong. It had one. The other lens was just for feeding the viewfinder to set up pictures. The images it passed never touched film.

Guess how sharp the shooting lens was. I’ll tell you. Not very.

Maier had a one-lens, one-focal-length, unsharp camera that shot square photos, and her work was magnificent.

She used to shoot photos on her days off. The families that hired her traveled, so she shot in exotic locations as well as around New York and Chicago, where she lived. She left 150,000 negatives behind, that I know about. Maybe there are more. She was discovered posthumously in 2007, when a guy looking for useful old photos of Chicago bought a box of her negatives for $380. It had been left in an abandoned storage unit.

I will take the liberty of posting a photo or two. I don’t think I can be accused of infringement, since this is pretty clearly fair use, and it’s not like anyone can blow up a grainy resized photo from a blog and sell prints to the public or charge money to see them. There are a bunch of photos on the site named for her, and they advertise books you can buy on Amazon. My understanding is that the site is legitimate, and the profits go to people who are entitled to them.

It seems obvious that most photographers default to cameras that shoot 3:2 frames these days, and maybe Maier would have done so if she had had access to the variety of quality cameras we have today. In fact, she moved to 3:2 later in life. But she did just fine with square photos. It didn’t matter what shape the photos were as long as she was behind the camera.

Also, she didn’t seem to care about the Rule of Thirds. Maybe she didn’t know what it was.

The low-light video I found was made by a guy named Jason Vong, and he provided some simple rules I had never heard of before. He said there was one set of rules for handheld photos and another set for tripod use.

He says using the “auto” function on a camera will give you poor-quality low-light shots. You’ll preserve your precious memories, but they won’t look very good. I think it’s a waste of money and potential to use a good camera in “auto” when you don’t have to. It’s like driving a Ferrari with the valet key.

Handheld: set your aperture, your speed, and your ISO, in that order. “A-S-I.” Use the lowest f-stop you can. Use a shutter speed that matches your focal length for full-frame, and double the focal length for APS-C (example: 60 mm and 1/120 second). Use an ISO no higher than 3200 (APS-C) or 6400 (full-frame), and try to stay below 800 APS-C or 1600 full-frame. If you have to go higher than 800 or 1600, but you stay below the upper limits, software should give you an acceptably clean photo.

Tripod: S-I-A. You can set your shutter speed to be very low because the camera won’t shake.

Is Vong right? Probably. I haven’t tried his suggestions yet, but he is talking about basic theory, and he does photography for a living. I will find out.

Most instructors give vague advice. “This is what aperture does.” “This is what shutter speed does.” They don’t present information about exposure in a systematic way, as Vong has.

Maybe the longer video I haven’t finished watching will eventually cover the same points.

So what do I take away from all this?

Learn the Rule of Thirds, but remember that it’s just a suggestion. Learn what composition is, and get good at it. Then you can forget the Rule of Thirds. Don’t let a rule ruin your photos.

If you want to take candid photos instead of having people line up unnaturally and give creepy smiles in unison to produce bad flash photos where everyone has red pupils, you should get a couple of low-light lenses. I think this is probably a good conclusion.

I think you are better off with a bad camera and a good low-light lens than you are with a fantastic camera and a lens that quits at f3.5. When I started upgrading in 2023, I had a 2005 or 2006 Canon 350D with an 8-megapixel sensor. I thought moving to a 200D with way more resolution was the best move, and for $200 or so, it was a good buy, but now I believe faster lenses would have had more impact for indoor work.

I took some surprisingly excellent photos with the 350D back when it was young, and in the 80’s, I took some great shots with a Yashica FX-2 that only had one lens.

If you have to choose between optical perfection and low-light performance (or whatever other kind of performance you need), go with performance. People will care more about the quality of your photos than they will about “softness in the corners” or whatever other flaws they may have, and you will miss far fewer shots.

I think these are sound conclusions, but I am still fairly uninformed as photographers go, so anyone who knows more is welcome to chime in.

Here’s a great suggestion: don’t take advice from bad photographers unless you’re sure their badness is unrelated to the advice. I keep seeing videos and articles from successful photographers, accompanied by images I would delete instantly. It looks like there is, quite literally, no substitute for talent. No amount of experience, training, or equipment can help someone who is just not wired to take a good photo.

I am planning to work with the 23 mm lens to see what it can do, and after that, I will consider other low-light primes.

By the way, that little ZV1-M2 is not bad at all for travel stills. If you can’t stand the weight and size of a more serious camera, you can put it in your pocket or purse, and it will definitely outdo your phone.

God has Definitely Tabernacled With Us

I hope everyone who reads this is having a pleasant Thanksgiving of prayer and shared love. I didn’t get our turkey into the oven until about 30 minutes ago. Lots of setbacks. The packer left maybe 300 pinfeathers in it, so I had to pull them out, and when they prepared the bird, they ripped the skin up so there was a lot of sewing to be done when the bones had been removed and it was time for the stuffing.

This will be my son’s first Thanksgiving. Outside of his mom, I mean.

I don’t know how much love he is feeling from me today. I had to get my wife to confine him to the bedroom. Sharp knives. Hot cookware. A waste can full of raw turkey parts and the associated bacteria. A Thanksgiving kitchen is not a good place for a baby who opens every drawer and door he sees, turns over garbage receptacles, and will put anything into his mouth as long as it’s not edible.

He managed to get into the waste can and put turkey bits on the floor. I was busy, so I didn’t know what was going on. We are hoping he didn’t put anything in his mouth. I had to make double sure my wife understood that she could not be on the phone or watching Youtube while I was cooking.

He is a wonderful boy. Most parents will say similar things about their sons, but he really is. He is still extremely cute. We go to Costco once a week, and the ladies who check receipts at the door know him and say they want to take him home. We went on Sunday, and the receipt lady who was working that day expressed her joy because we had brought “the cutie” with us. I said we had also brought my son, but she failed to see the humor.

He makes weird noises all the time. He growls like a monster in a horror movie. He makes a sound that resembles the wind whistling around buildings in the winter. He giggles. He sings, sort of. He can whistle, but he doesn’t do it much. He has joy sounds that are hard to describe.

He hasn’t said anything we can be sure was a word. He vocalizes constantly. He says things that may be words as far as he is concerned.

Today he gave one of his toys what seemed to be a stern lecture, but it was not in English or Nyanja, his mother’s first language. He may think he’s talking already.

When he smiles, he smiles with his whole face.

He is crazy about his mom. He spends a lot of his time lying on her. She sings to him and tosses him around. She talks to him all day.

Although he enjoys using his mother as furniture, he is very independent now, for the most part. He speed-crawls around the house. It sounds like two people running. He leaves the bedroom and goes where he pleases, so we have to make sure everything dangerous or expensive is out of reach.

He is scared of airplanes, so when he hears one, he forgets all about his independence and crawls back to Mom so she can hold him in her arms.

He sometimes cries when people sneeze. We haven’t figured that out yet. On the other hand, he loves watching people drink. He stares with a big grin on his face.

He wakes me up most of the time. A couple of months back, he used his voice. Now he climbs on top of me or comes up behind me and starts pawing and hitting my back with his big, meaty mitts. He’s so strong, sometimes I think it’s my wife.

He likes it when I pound on my back with his fist. When I do it, he opens his mouth and makes long noises so he can hear the effect. “Wuh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh…”

He loves being thrown in the air. He likes being swung around. When he was smaller, my wife thought I would kill him by picking up by one leg and one arm, but he loves it. He hangs there smiling, making incomprehensible happy noises.

He took three steps the other day, and he can push a walker, but he doesn’t seem very interested in walking. Why should he be, when his mother carries him all over the place? He spends a lot of his day standing, but when it comes to locomotion, he flops down on all fours and sticks with the old reliable.

He can reach things now. He pulls things off of other things. Every week, he reaches a little farther. He can’t grab things that are in the middle of my nightstand, but he can pull things off the sides.

My bed has a drawer I use for socks and underwear, and he opens it and throws my stuff out on the floor, one item at a time. He also removes drawer knobs and leaves them in interesting places.

We got him a little plastic activity table with lights and sounds and things to move around. He loves it. He used to sit on the ground and use it, so at first, I didn’t attach the legs that came with it. Then he started standing, so I put them on. He stands over it and works at it very seriously. Today, he picked it up and threw it, and then he was mad because it was upside down.

His curiosity is exhausting. Hold him in your arms, and he stares at the ceiling fans. Put anything down, and he wants to pick it up. He never stops. He zooms around the house like a pinball. I am constantly taking things away from him. I think I say, “Give me that,” more than anything else.

When we open the refrigerator, he makes a shriek of joy and starts speed-crawling for it. We have to close the door before he puts his whole body inside and refuses to move while he gropes things.

He stands up and hugs my thigh when I’m trying to do things, so I have to pick him up. I make the usual dad noises on his skin. I tickle his feet. I show him numbers with my fingers. I whistle at him. We play airplane baby. Sometimes he finds me overwhelming and has to hide his face.

I make sure I play with his toys. He loves that. I put his walker in front of him so he can push it across the room, and when he hits something, I turn it around so he can keep going. I tell him how amazing he is. We use the activity table together. I show him how to put the rings back on the ring toy, but so far, he mainly likes pulling the top of it off. The top is a stuffed rabbit head, and he can’t stand it when it’s on the toy.

He beats his parents. He likes banging on us with his palms, like a guy trying to get a bartender’s attention.

He cut his mother’s lip the other day. Banged it with his head while she was trying to sleep. He has Mongolian blue spots, which are birthmarks that look like bruises, so I hope the police never spot us when his mother has a busted lip and then ask me why he’s bruised up. Mongolian blue spots usually go away with age.

His mother is 100% African, but he looks like he’s mostly Caucasian. His skin isn’t very dark, his hair is curly but not kinky, and his features aren’t strongly African. My genes really bleached him. So much for dominant African DNA.

He may be getting a little spoiled, but we are working on it. Or at least I am. He has a playpen (for our sake as well as his), and he throws a fit when I put him in it. He will stand outside of it and push the sections back and forth, but if I lift him to put him in it, he starts screaming long before his feet touch the ground. My policy is to put him in it once a day and let him yell. He has to learn.

It has been very hard to get him to eat food that isn’t mushy. He is perfectly capable of holding it between his thumb and index finger and putting it in his mouth, but he still prefers mush. On Sunday, he put a little piece of Costco pizza in his mouth and sucked the sauce off, and we were thrilled.

He has no problem drinking. He can drink from a water bottle (not the baby kind) and a cup. The other day, he crawled across our bed, grabbed his sippy cup from my wife’s nightstand, rolled over on his back, and started drinking. He also drinks from a straw.

His eating habits are more my wife’s concern than mine. I know he’s not going to be eating baby food in 2055.

He is advanced for his age. He is bigger than a typical 15-month-old, and he is doing nearly everything ahead of time. We get excited as we see him change. Suddenly, those little bow legs are not so little and not so bowed.

He gets kissed and squeezed all day. He must think this is what life will always be like. If only Earth were like that.

He is a very happy baby. Why shouldn’t he be? His family isn’t dysfunctional. How many kids can say that? I couldn’t when I was young. Most of my friends couldn’t.

Truthfully, I consider our family bizarre in its lack of dysfunction. It’s an extraordinary thing. When I was a kid, every family on our block except one was dysfunctional. My dad’s partners’ families were all dysfunctional. I had 10 aunts and uncles, and only one pair raised a somewhat healthy family.

We pray in front of my son. We do all our Christian stuff in front of him. I put my hand on his head and bless him. I do the same for my wife. He will know supernatural Christianity is normal.

Things are working out well.

Even as a teenager, I wanted marriage, fidelity, and a family. I was not interested in taking down as many women as possible and staying free. Something always went wrong. I went after the wrong women. There were relationships I could not start, and there were relationships that were taken away from my suddenly. I know now that I was cursed. Supernatural enemies did their best to ruin my life and get rid of me. My own efforts didn’t matter. The spirits that hated me were stronger than I was. They always won.

I didn’t understand anything when I was young. I didn’t know how to align with God and defeat the failed spirits that destroy human lives.

I wish I had been raised correctly. I would have grandchildren by now. Life would have been much better. But God is restoring the years the locust ate, and my wife and son are wonderful. Would I trade this beautiful boy for the kids I might have had in my twenties? An unpleasant thought.

We are trying to have a real Thanksgiving today, praying, thanking God, and enjoying each other’s company. It’s not easy, with all the added work of cooking. At least we’re not going to malls so we can save a few dollars on junk for Christmas. I can’t believe people do that on Thanksgiving. I don’t think saving money is a good excuse, except for people in serious financial trouble. Even then, a day of prayer would do them more good than a day at a mall.

I have been so busy, I haven’t even showered. It is time to get up and do that. I hope I’ll be able to do it alone this time. My son loves visiting us in the shower and getting water all over his romper.

I wonder how long it will be till I have to start locking the bathroom door.

Tech Turns Faultless Two-Dollar Item into $250 Nightmare

I have good news for people who are justly upset with Ford for making keys ridiculously expensive, fragile, easy for hackers to copy, and hard for owners to copy.

Electronic keys are stupid. The electronic key boom is just one more example of engineers doing things they can, but should not, do. It demonstrates a total lack of common sense.

I have two fobs covered with buttons I don’t really need. They lock and unlock the doors. Don’t need. They open and shut the hatch. Don’t need. I think one of them will start the engine, but I don’t know, because…don’t need. There is also a button to set off the alarm, and that’s nice when I forget where I parked at Walmart, but truthfully…don’t need.

These keys are easy to duplicate. Easy for you and me? No. Easy for punk car thieves. They see you walking to your car. They watch you raise your fob. Then they use a machine to capture the signal. Later, they use it to get into your car. A 15-year-old moron who can’t read and write can do this, but you aren’t allowed to go to a hardware store and have your key copied electronically, like you could copy, oh, EVERY key made before engineers lost their minds.

Each fob has a real key inside it. Great. Problem solved. Throw out the fobs and use the metal key.

Oops…wait! Can’t do it. The metal key will not start or stop the engine. It just gets you into the car when your fob fails, so you can sit in the shade while you wait for a locksmith to come and charge you hundreds of dollars.

If the problem is a dead fob battery, you should be able to use the secret slot in your center console to start the car. You put the dead fob in there and start normally. If the fob got smashed or something, you may be stuck.

Here’s more great news. The fobs are made cheaply, so they fall apart. Eventually, long before your car gives out, your fob will start to come to pieces. Then Ford expects you to buy a new one.

If you buy a new Ford fob, you have to go to a dealership or a locksmith, prove ownership, and pay three digits to get it programmed. And you get to wait around while they get ready to call your name.

It’s a money-making scam for Ford, pure and simple. It’s also an insult. It doesn’t make the car harder to steal; it makes it easier. It doesn’t save the consumer money; it costs him money. It gives preferential treatment to thieves and dealers. Perhaps I repeat myself.

So what do you do?

If your fob breaks, it will almost always be the cheap plastic shell that fails. You can buy new Chinese shells on Amazon for as little as $10. You take the guts out of your old fob and put them in the new one. You’re welcome.

The new fob may or may not last, but for what you’re paying, you shouldn’t care.

What if you lose an OEM fob?

It turns out that all the problems that result from this are your own fault, assuming you know what I’m about to tell you.

You never use the OEM fobs. They are to be put away in a safe place. Both of them.

You can buy programmable Chinese fobs on Amazon for $27. If you have an Explorer, which is the only car I’ve checked out, you can program them yourself, easily. You have to do this before you lose one, because the car will do the programming, and it requires you to show it you still have both OEM fobs. Stupid. This is why you never take the OEM fobs out of your house.

I’m not going to show you the programming procedure. You can Google it, and I would probably get something wrong.

Before you lose or destroy a fob, buy at least two Chinese jobs and program them. Then put the OEM’s away. If you want, you can copy your metal key and put copies in the new fobs, but be sure you keep at least one key with your OEM fobs, because once you lose it, you are out of luck. You can program more fobs, but you will have to pay a locksmith to make the keys.

Are the keys useful? Well, I have driven this car since 2017, and I have never needed the real key.

You can also get electronic doodads to put on your keychain so you can find your keys with your phone. Samsung makes the Smarttag2, and Amazon makes Airtags. Ford sold you $250 fobs and did not include this cheap feature. Ford likes it when you lose your fobs. Ford wanted you to buy more fobs, because Ford is a jerk.

The rest of us will never stop paying for all the cafeteria wedgies the STEM kids got in junior high.

I guess I should not make unsupported allegations, but I lost my personal fob for a day and a half, and then I found it, broken, under a nightstand near which a certain small diaper-wearing person had been playing. Let’s say I have my suspicions. This is why I am learning all these new things.

Yeshua Never Said he Was the Way, the Opinion, and the Life

I was awake for hours last night. God showed me various things. For one, I have not been leading my family as I should.

I am not making my wife sit down in the living room every day, in the middle of the day instead of just before bed, to pray, study, and praise God. Sometimes we go all the way to bedtime before we pray together. We have a routine of praying after we get up, but I have not been enforcing it well.

I haven’t been speaking blessings over my wife and son every day. I should be doing that. Look how it worked out for Isaac.

I’m not decisive enough. I need to be in touch with God to get help with decisions. I shouldn’t consult my wife so much, when she is looking for leadership, not discussions.

God reminded me of some things.

Eve was the first rebel in the Bible. She was the first idolater and witch. She was the first drug pusher. She was the first feminist.

Adam failed to lead his wife. Perhaps she would have rebelled anyway, but we will never know, because he let her down.

It’s unfortunate, but most modern people have no idea drugs have historically been associated with witchcraft. By “witchcraft,” I mean all idolatrous practices that involve serving evil spirits and using them to satisfy our corrupt desires. Wicca. Voodoo. All the pagan religions that openly involve spirits.

Tobacco is a drug, and it was used by Indians in their religions, all of which were witchcraft. Marijuana came to us via Old World witches. Witches have used mushrooms in spirit worship.

The forbidden fruit was a drug. Like the worst popular drugs we have today, it came from a plant. It altered minds. A plant that alters minds is a drug. The forbidden fruit is one of many. Opiates, pot, coke, psilocybin, mescaline, and even LSD come from plants.

I am going to write in generalizations now. Generalizations are valid and useful. Citing counterexamples to debunk valid generalizations is sophistry. God himself speaks in generalizations. Read the Bible and see.

God also reminded me that women are the leaders in Satan’s army now. They have fought for feminism, homosexuality, fornication, drug abuse, idolatry, and socialism much harder than men. Go to a botanica, and what do you see? Men lining up to buy black candles? No. Women. Join a cult, and who do you see standing around you? Mostly women.

Men have abandoned their role as leaders because fornication is accepted and expected now. We are supposed to lead and accept the fact that we will not always be popular. Instead, we flatter and manipulate women to get them into bed. Naturally, they end up behaving like the fatherless. What were we to expect from them?

We can’t complain if we don’t accept the blame for our part in the catastrophe.

Women love homosexuals and homosexuality. Many women say they wish normal men could be like them. They wish we would be emotional and prone to crying. They wish we loved dancing the way they do. They wish we were excited about shoes and clothes. They wish we hated shooting, hunting, military service, and normal diets including meat.

Many women think it’s important to feminize men. To bring out a “feminine side” that doesn’t really exist. As though masculinity were an act, but prancing around like Liberace or Peter Allen reveals our true selves.

I have a baby son. He is as masculine as can be. He beats on things with his fists. He is fascinated by objects. He is rough and full of energy. I didn’t teach him any of that. It came with the package God designed. It’s going to continue.

It’s common for an American woman to have a husband and a homosexual friend to gossip with, and for her to wish the husband was more like him.

I had a girlfriend who teamed up with another woman and tried to get me and the woman’s boyfriend to go to a gay bar. I said they just wanted us to sit at a table and buy them drinks while they danced with homosexuals who loved dancing and wouldn’t try anything sexual. They admitted I was right. It was pretty insulting. It was extremely selfish and manipulative. It was contemptuous. Of course, I didn’t go. This is an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about.

My friend, who wasn’t really a friend, ended up marrying the other girl. I pity him.

Women vote for everything God hates. They vote for Democrats. They put Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden in office. They voted for the far-leftists in Congress. They vote for those who persecute the church and the Jews. They love socialism, because it makes the government the reliable husband they can’t find.

God told me this: if you and your husband don’t vote the same, how are you not a house divided?

BOOM.

What did Yeshua say about a house divided? It can’t stand. It’s built on sand, so it has no foundation.

If you vote to counter your husband, you make him and your entire house powerless. Is that supposed to be a good thing? A house that produces no net votes has no power.

Recently, Democrats put out an ad telling women to vote against their husband’s candidates. They were pitting women against their God-given leaders, with whom they were supposed to be one flesh. They were attacking their marriages.

If you can’t agree on the best candidates for political office, you are out of agreement, generally. You are outside God’s plan, and you are bringing curses on your family.

My wife and I visited Singapore. We were in a mall. An Israeli guy had a cosmetic business, selling ridiculous potions and fake medicines that were supposed to make women beautiful. He had a local girl working for him to hook customers, and she descended on my wife.

They convinced her she should try this expensive stuff, which I had to pay for. I was standing right there beside her, and they ignored me. They must have read Genesis 3.

Fortunately, the Holy Spirit spoke to me. I said they were trying to pit my wife against me, so why should I support them? I got very angry. God had given me a wonderful wife who was full of the Holy Spirit, and this mall huckster was trying to drive a wedge between us that would threaten my marriage. He was pushing us in the direction of divorce.

I explained this to my wife later, and she understood. Now I am very sensitive about anyone who tries to persuade my wife to do anything while excluding me. After all, who did the same thing in Eden?

Satan didn’t come up to Adam and Eve and say, “I’m glad I caught you guys together, because I have a great limited-time offer I know you’ll be interested in. And there’s a coupon.”

Satan is a real bastard. There is no other way to put it. He is pure malice. His time in hell and his time in the flames will be the best times for humanity. He wants to destroy the best things in your life. He wants you in agony. The people who tempt your wife in his place are not looking out for you. The girlfriends who collect your secrets tell you your wife is too good for you. The gay hairdresser who tells you how to manipulate him. The salesmen who tell you your husband is cheap and selfish. The astrologers. The people who sell crystals. The palm readers. The lesbian preachers.

What I’m writing will not make me friends, and it will offend people. I don’t care. If you’re offended, it means you’re against God and against marriage. You’re trying to harm my wife and me. You’re trying to harm my baby son.

You should be offended. I hope you’re offended. I want you out of my life if you can’t listen. Get lost. I hope you never come back. I don’t need you. I’m sick of people like you. I need God and my wife, and my family needs me.

Your opinions are not valid or important. They are excrement. They’re like excrement from people who have fatal contagious diseases. Go and die from your disease far away from us, if you can’t listen.

God never worried about hurting people’s feelings. He never said, “I’d like to destroy Sodom for the good of mankind, but people will say I’m judgmental and homophobic. They won’t give me likes. I’ll be shadowbanned.” He poured out the fire and brimstone, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and the world was better for it.

I have repented, and I plan to do better, starting today. We will take over this house for God. We will get down on our faces in front of our son, and he will grow up to know this is normal. We are not going to live like nominal Christians who die and wake up in hell, surprised. We will show God love and appreciation instead of treating him like a washing machine and a VD clinic that gives free shots.

Spending More Money is Always the Answer

I plan to try to take more macro photos today. I am determined to figure it out. I have learned that if you want extremely beautiful, compelling, or interesting subjects, macro wins hands down. There are more small things than big things. You should be able to find excellent subjects in your own house, if you are satisfied with very small objects.

I have decided to upgrade my backup camera, and I don’t mean the camera on the rear of my car. I think I was stupid to try to make do with an old DSLR instead of getting a decent mirrorless during my last upgrade. Now I am correcting that mistake.

I don’t have to ask my wife if she thinks it’s a good idea. She always tells me not to worry about what I spend. I say I don’t want her to end up working at IHOP. She says God will take care of her.

Two years ago, when I decided to get a real camera for family photo purposes, I already had an ancient Canon 350D with 8 megapixels. It was not a bad camera, but I couldn’t get really sharp photos with it, and it was generally not as good as 2023 or even 2015 cameras. The screen was bad. It needed a lot more light. It was a 2005 camera.

I got a Sony A7IV, which, to me, is a Bentley of a camera. To a pro, it’s more like a Jetta, but I considered it a splurge. It’s full-frame. It has zillions of features. The lens selection is crazy. It’s easy to get great photos and videos with it.

My wife and I were still traveling a lot, and when I packed for trips, I learned that you have to be a very serious guy to take an A7IV with you on vacation. It is heavy. They lenses are big. If it’s stolen, it’s a big hit.

I had a Sony vlogging camera, but it’s not great. I don’t get fantastic stills with it. The lens can’t be changed. It overheats and turns off without warning while shooting video (that cost us dearly). I’m not sure I should ever use it again. It’s very convenient, but it doesn’t do much a phone will not do just as well.

My Canon had a lens I liked. I thought it would be smart to buy a newer but still old Canon that would take the lens. I bought a 200D, which was made in around 2017. It had lots of helpful features. It had zillions of megapixels.

Then I did something that blew my whole “bargain” theory out of the water. I got two new lenses for the 200D. One replaced the old Sigma lens that had made me think buying the 200D was smart. DOH!

We took the 200D on trips, and it was okay. It was lighter than the big Sony; so much lighter I actually used it. I got nice photos and videos. On the other hand, I now had two ecosystems, so I had to speak both Sony and Canon. I had to remember which camera could or could not do certain things, because the 200D was DSLR, not mirrorless. The 200D could not be zoomed during video shooting with a remote. Learning that was a real bummer.

I have been immersed in baby-related activities for over a year, and I have spent very little time with the A7IV and 200D. We are stabilizing now, so I got my gear out, arranged and sorted it, and started shooting macro. I found I had to use new features on both cameras. I had to use two flashes. There were useful features the 200D lacked.

I decided to do what Porsche should have done in the early Sixties instead of doubling down on stupid and continuing to make troublesome rear-heavy cars: I admitted fault. I gave up on the 200D and also on Canon. I’m getting a Sony a6400, which is a mirrorless camera which is lighter than the A7IV. Of course, I have to get a few lenses, and that adds to the pain. I can try to work with adaptors, but life is short, and I have already cheaped myself out of enough good photographic experiences.

I thought the a6400 was a good compromise between frugality and getting features that would be satisfactory for the next decade or so.

I looked at used cameras, but the discounts weren’t great, and the a6400 comes bundled with a lens I want, plus some other good stuff, at a nice price. I bought new.

While I was working on picking out a camera and two lenses, I read other people’s reviews. In particular, I looked at reviews of Laowa Venus lenses. Laowa is one of those Chinese optical companies that have been giving companies like Sigma and Tamron fits by making pretty darned good lenses for bad-lens prices. Not always the best, but often too good to turn down.

While I was checking out macro lenses, I had a realization: there a lot of very experienced, highly trained, bad photographers out there. It made me feel I had been selling myself short.

I have seen all sorts of shots on the web recently, and most were posted by people who thought they had gotten great results. Maybe 80% of the time, they were shots I would either delete or keep to myself. Bad composition was the biggest sin. After that, I noticed photos that were too bland and uniform; not enough color or brightness variation. I also noticed that most people were happy with photos that weren’t very sharp at all. Also, people took shots that either had boring subjects or seemed to have no subjects at all. Are we supposed to look at the island way off in the middle of the lake or the little crooked tree on the island?

Some people were posting sublime, eye-popping shots that made me feel I was destined to lead a life of utter inferiority, and I was glad to see those, because they showed me I should improve. The others were the kind of shots that make you try to think of polite things to say. “Everything in the shot is kind of orange, isn’t it? That’s certainly…interesting.”

So how much can you tell about a piece of equipment if people who use it post bad shots? A bad lens can make bad photos, but it’s not easy to create really good shots with an objectively bad lens. If a person’s photos are good, you know the lens must be okay, but if they’re awful, you don’t learn much about it at all.

Here is how I feel about photos: if a shot is good, you know it almost instantly. It grabs you. To me, this quality is more important than focus or obeying rules.

When I’m editing shots, I move selector buttons back and forth, and when a photo is right, I suddenly feel it and stop moving them. I don’t have any rules. When the photo looks right, it sort of yells at me and tells me to stop.

So…the people who take very bad photos with very good equipment and think they’re wonderful…are they just too proud to look for instruction, or is it an incurable lack of innate talent? I guess sometimes it’s both, and sometimes it’s just a talent void.

I know I can take very good photos. Can I create great photos? When I ask that, I mean great photos that aren’t lucky shots. Anyone can get lucky.

I know nearly nothing about photography, even after all these years. I haven’t worked at it. I make almost no use of filters because I don’t know how. I don’t know how to work with white balance. Someone told me about stacking software. Don’t know anything. I don’t know how to use fill flash. The list is almost endless. I can’t do a whole lot of the things a real photographer can do, but I can do good work within that limitation, and I should be able to improve somewhat.

I wish I understood editing software. Seems like every program has 5,000 functions, and I understand 4.

I wonder if I could find a useful course. Maybe there are online courses for people who are beyond being told what an f-stop is but not capable of anything advanced.

Now, of course, I’ll sell the Canon stuff and try to mitigate the pounding I took when buying the new Sony.

Yeah, right. I know me. I’ll find a reason to keep it.

I’ll post another macro from yesterday. The depth of field could be better, the subject matter is okay but not great, and I felt there was a limit to what I could do to improve the composition.

MORE

I got a few shots today.

I tried to keep the f-stop at 18, and I kept the speed at 1/160.

I believe my biggest issue today was focus. I used the A7IV’s focus peaking, and it really failed me.

First, a peach blossom I shot. I believe I need to jack up the ISO, because things come out a bit dark, and the color is bleached out. Nonetheless, I like this better than the results I got yesterday.

It looks a little better at full size, but it is not perfect.

Second, a fly on a magnolia leaf. These guys were all over the leaves. I am considering smearing the leaves with a piece of tuna or something to leave a smell that will draw more bugs.

This is a very small bug, like 3/16″ long.

As you can see, the focus is poor. This is true even though the focus peaking lit up all over this guy. I got a bunch of shots like this, and they’re all useless. I don’t know if I need to use the feature that blows things up for focusing, or what. The person I watched in order to learn macro says not to do that.

A tripod won’t work unless the bugs sit still, and that won’t happen.

I got a lot of bad shots of some blossoms, so I deleted them.

It’s difficult to press the camera’s button without ruining composition and moving the lens off to the side or up or down.

Anyway, I made some progress.

The World is Full of Tiny Models Who Never Need Rehab

I got all excited about photography yesterday, so today I went outside and tried to do some macro shots. Macro photography is photography involving little-bitty subjects like bugs and drops of water.

Back when I got my first DSLR, I gave macro a shot, and I got some photos I liked, but they were not amazing, and I did not keep up with it. I had an all-purpose 17-70mm Sigma zoom lens that happened to work okay for macro, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I don’t recall working hard to educate myself.

When I got married and had to think about family photos, I bought a nice full-frame Sony camera, and I kept my Sigma lens and replaced the camera instead. Probably a bad idea, since I was going to replace the lens anyway, and I suppose a new mirrorless Sony would have been smarter.

I liked the idea of having a lighter, smaller, much cheaper backup camera.

I upgraded to a 2017 Canon 200D, which, oddly, was much more advanced than the 350D I bought 20 years ago. Shouldn’t the numbers get higher, not lower? I also picked up a wide-angle lens for the Canon as well as a better macro lens.

I have a very good macro lens for the Sony, but I like the Canon because it’s way lighter.

I also got on-camera flashes, which you need for macro shots, and I also got a diffuser, which is a big fabric pancake thing that, aptly, diffuses flash light.

I did a little macro work, and if memory serves, it was all bad. I did some studying so I could improve, but I did not follow up.

Today I tried to refresh my meager macro education, and I got out there and took some photos. It went poorly.

The guy I looked to to get me up to speed is a Youtuber whose bag is macro. He said to shoot at ISO 200, use a shutter speed of 1/200, and use f8 for an aperture. He also gave some other tips.

I tried doing what he said. I put my diffuser on. I set my flash up the way he said to. I adjusted my camera to his liking, to the degree that its firmware would let me, and I looked for little things to shoot.

The first thing I went after was a peach blossom. It is probably under an inch from one end to the other. I will show you one of the better shots.

The focus is heinous. Some bits are almost sharp. The rest looks the way everything has looked to Keith Richards since 1962.

I didn’t do anything to that shot except cropping, resizing, and exporting to JPG.

I kept trying. There were some things I could not photograph at all. I’ll post the best shots I got. I cropped them and edited them with Affinity, which is a great program you don’t need a Ph.D. to operate. Forget Photoshop. Maybe it’s great for pros. I don’t know. Affinity is working better for me than Photoshop ever thought of working, and it’s free.

If you know anything at all about cameras, you can see that my depth of field was inadequate. There was no way to make it work. Focus on the bug’s head, and you lose the tail. Focus on the flower, and you miss the bug.

I kept fiddling with the lens, and then I came inside to see if I had anything I could save. You are looking at the best of it.

Here’s something interesting: the first guy has posted his work on the web. I just looked at it. The focus is awful. Half a bug in focus. The other end hazy. Apparently, he is not a very good photographer.

I found another Youtuber, and she made a video about people’s macro mistakes. High on the list: using a low f-stop.

Wow.

She says to go to f22 or f28 or whatever it takes to get the shot. She’s right. Her photos are very, very good.

So why does the other guy keep giving bad advice? I wonder if he needs to be fitted for glasses.

The lens I was using is a Sigma 70mm 1:2.8 DG Macro DG EX, and it’s supposed to be very good for macro, and not just because it has “Macro” in the name. The camera has 24 megapixels. It’s not the problem. The instruction is the problem.

I was going to take the Sony out next to see if I could do better, but I don’t think I will. I plan to use the Canon again and start out at F22, the highest setting. I think I’ll do much better.

I like macro for a lot of reasons.

1. There are probably millions of times as many macro subjects around us as ordinary subjects.

2. Macro subjects don’t cost anything. You don’t have to create backdrops or whatever. You definitely won’t have to pay bugs.

3. Macro subjects aren’t whiny and uncooperative, and they won’t call the police on you or beat you up, which could happen if you do street photos of other people.

4. Macro is perfect for introverts. You never have to accost anyone or ask permission. Or have any of that nasty old human interaction.

5. You can do a lot more macro shots in the time it takes to do ordinary shots. You can walk around your yard and take dozens in an hour.

I expect things to go well once I start doing what actually works.

Let Your Walls be Your Testimony to God’s Goodness

I thought I would post some good advice for anyone who wants to decorate the walls of a house.

You can spend big money for good art. You can spend less but too much on bad art your kids will throw out. You can make your own art, which is great if you have the ability. Another possibility: have your own photos blown up, and put them in nice frames.

Today I received a frame from Amazon, and now this photo is on our wall, 20″ wide.

We have other big photos on our wall. I have 4 photo posters that are 24″ high. Travel shots of the wife and me.

Ordinarily, I would not put a shot of my son on the web, but you can’t really make out his features from this photo of a photo.

I didn’t spend a ton on the frame. I got it from Amazon for $50. I could have spent maybe $150 at a frame place. This frame looks very good. The front is plastic, not glass, but I can always go buy a pane of glass if I want to. You would have to touch it to tell the difference.

I took the shot with my phone, and it’s a very good photo. It shows you can’t use limited equipment as an excuse not to try.

In 2023, before upgrading my cameras, I took a shot of a weed in my yard. I used my ancient (!) Canon 350D Rebel, which is about 20 years old. It would be easy for a photographer to convince himself it wasn’t possible to do anything worthwhile with that old 8-megapixel camera, but it’s not true. There are some things you can do with a given setup, and there are some things you can’t do, and many of the things you can do are well worth doing.

Below, you will see the photo I took. It’s an elephantopus carolinianus blossom (Carolina elephant’s foot). It’s a useless weed, and it’s ugly from a distance, but the flowers are really something. The flower is around 3/8″ across.

I blew the shot up so it’s 24″ high, and I ordered a frame to fit. I think it will look neat on an upstairs wall; a guest (or child’s) bedroom. Not the greatest photo on Earth, but very pleasant to look at, and it’s mine. I took it on my own land. If I croak, my family will feel bad about throwing it in a dumpster.

I need to spend more time using my better cameras. The baby interrupted just about every process in my life.