It’s Good if You Think it’s Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every big city in America is becoming Detroit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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