Thank You, Oh Thank You, for Taking my Loathsome and Repulsive Money

Yesterday I wrote about the difficulties I had had with my new Canon Powershot V1 camera. The camera itself is nearly perfect for what I want it to do, and no one else makes anything comparable at any price, so I plan to keep it, but editing the photos is a real challenge, and it is impossible to connect the camera’s memory to a real grown-up PC.

I found that the camera produced black (not just dark) vignetting in raw files, and it was not possible to fix this with Affinity or Photoshop Elements. Why not? Because Canon will not provide support to Adobe or Canva, the parent of Affinity.

Canon has pulled this kind of thing before. They have been very hostile to companies that make lenses for their cameras, so Canon customers have had to buy expensive Canon lenses instead of enjoying the kind of incredible, affordable array of fair-to-outstanding lenses Sony customers are used to. It’s like what Apple did in the last century when it refused to license things and handed Microsoft the bulk of the computer market.

Canon pretty much forces people to use its proprietary Digital Photo Professional software to edit raw Canon Powershot V1 files. This is stupid and unreasonable. Canon makes no money from the software; it had to pay people to develop it. It’s not like Canon loses money when you use other programs.

Photographers like programs like Lightroom and Elements, which come from Adobe, and there are other companies that make good software. I had no idea DPP existed until I had my editing problem, because no one uses it. The majority of working photographers use Adobe. Because it’s better.

Canon is currently the most popular camera company on Earth, but that is changing. People used to love digital single-lens reflex cameras, but mirrorless has taken over, and Canon has failed to prosper in that area. Sony is the world leader, and it will continue to increase its dominance as Canon focuses on outdated technology.

Seems to be Canon ought to be doing everything possible to court customers. To the contrary, it seems to be trying to become the Blackberry of cameras. Instead of making sane efforts to maintain and increase its customer base, Canon seems determined to run off everyone but the mindless zealots.

I decided to try to get help from Canon, and like many inept companies, Canon provides a forum which is supposed to be useful to customers. I had to join if I wanted help. I joined and posted questions. I didn’t get any actual help, but I did get cranky, pointless, wrong responses from customers, and then I got an amazing lecture from a Canon employee. I’m going to paste it here.

We provide tools that enable users to work with our products. If users choose to use different tools, they are responsible for verifying compatibility. We cannot (and will not) troubleshoot or otherwise support any non-Canon or third-party software or tools unless they are specifically listed on the product’s support page.

If you need help using non-Canon software, you must contact the software developer – they are the experts on the software they created, not Canon. They may need to update their software to include the latest RAW codecs; this is their responsibility, not ours. We cannot force a third party to update its software.

This is incredible. This is from a guy who, one would think, is paid to improve customer relations and keep people coming back.

I didn’t ask this character to “support” Adobe or Affinity. I thought that Canon employees and other forum users might be aware of the problem I was having, and that they could conceivably have useful input. “We are sorry you are not able to remove vignetting in Elements. We will be working with Adobe to help customers edit Powershot V1 photos with its industry-standard software. Please be patient, as your camera is a new product.” Something like that. Or maybe, as a paid expert, an employee would have some tips on using the programs I was using.

No, I got a rude lecture. After I had moved on and come up with a jerry-rig solution on my own.

This is not how you compete for market share. It’s astonishingly inept. This guy seems to think I need Canon. It’s the other way around. He doesn’t understand how capitalism works. No consumer base has ever gone bankrupt, but companies do it all the time.

I’ve had 4 Canon cameras. I bought a Canon photo printer a long time ago. I’ve had to work in an office with a Canon laser that couldn’t feed typing paper correctly and had to be replaced by a Brother which worked perfectly. That about sums up my Canon experience. I will never buy another Canon product again if I can avoid it. If a more competent company releases a pocket camera that will do what the Powershot will do, I will buy it and quit using the Powershot.

The photo printer is pretty annoying. When I bought it, of course, Canon wanted everyone to use Canon ink, because that’s where the actual profit is. They installed some kind of ink-level monitoring technology in the printer, and if it decides the ink is running out, it will prevent the printer from running. If you don’t print photos for a while, the printer will decide it’s running low when it isn’t, and then you have to buy ink you don’t need.

Like other Canon customers, I had to learn how to fool the printer so it would run.

I think there is aftermarket ink now. I hope so.

I haven’t printed a photo in maybe 15 years. I would like to use the Canon again, in order to avoid spending more money, but if it gives me trouble, I’m going to look for something else. Supposedly, Epson makes printers that are just as good and cheaper to run. I hope so, because the Epson monochrome inkjet I bought in about 1994 used 40 cents’ worth of ink to print one page of text.

I don’t want to get any deeper into Canon than I already am.

Of course, Epson could be worse.

I hope this blog post is helpful to anyone considering buying a Powershot V1 or any other Canon product. You should do your research carefully before investing. I did, but I still got bitten in the rear end.

This is How You Give Your Competition the Future

It has been but three days, and I have already discovered the annoying things about my new Canon Powershot V1 pocket camera.

I got it because my Sony ZV1M2 had a disgraceful problem: it was made for video, but when you actually shoot video, it overheats in a few minutes and shuts down without telling you. It fails, and miserably so, at the main task for which it was created. It’s like an air conditioner that only works on cold days, or an SUV you can only drive 50 miles at a time.

I can’t understand why Sony would do something this stupid. Are they unable to do better? They’ve made a lot of outstanding products. It’s hard to believe they let this one slip by.

It’s great if you like shooting three-minute videos, and you don’t shoot them less than 10 minutes apart.

Maybe I should have just bought a good selfie stick and external mikes.

The Canon is often described as a point-and-shoot camera, although that is not true. It has a pretty good optical zoom, and if you have to zoom, you’re doing more than pointing and shooting. It has a manual mode, so you can pick your shutter speed and ISO. It has all kinds of features. It has an APS-C sensor, which is pretty big for a compact camera. It’s not a 1970 Kodak Instamatic. Stay within its limitations, learn to edit, and you can produce very, very nice pictures with it.

It does not overheat. It has a fan. Video is not a problem.

I’ve already produced some photos so good, I am shocked. It’s not a pro-grade full-frame camera with a $15,000 lens, but what it can do, it can do very well.

So what’s my beef? I’ll tell you. Canon has rigged things up so it’s hard to edit raw photos that come from this camera.

Canon has a reputation for being a jerk. Sony will let just about anyone make a lens for its cameras, but Canon, perhaps hoping to equal Apple’s disastrous performance in the 1990’s, makes people use Canon lenses for its latest mount. That’s just idiotic. It also has a proprietary raw format. On top of that, it does not cooperate very well with outfits that make editing software.

Bottom line: I pretty much have to use Canon software to edit this camera’s raw CR3 files. I have Affinity. I have Elements. I have Topaz Photo AI. I had to download a fourth religion…I mean program…to fix this camera’s CR3’s without a ton of hassle.

I never saw this coming. I don’t know anything about photo software. I just figured any software would edit any photo. Not so.

Let’s talk Affinity. It’s a real program. It’s not a joke, even though it’s free. I can edit Sony raw photos all day with it. It’s nice. It’s intuitive. It is useless for my Canon’s files.

When CR3 and JPG files come out of this camera, they look just fine. When I try to edit a CR3 in Affinity or Elements, I get what is called “vignetting,” which really should be called “dark corners.” That way, no one would have to look up “vignetting.” The corners are black. Not dark. Black.

Everyone always says it’s easy to fix vignetting with software. Well…it’s not. The software has to like the format. If not, you can’t fix the corners.

Affinity relies on lens profiles to fix vignetting. Canon, being the unhelpful company it is, does not provide profiles. Helpful consumers create them, and they upload them to a site called Lensfun. That’s where Affinity gets its profiles. There is no profile for the V1. Maybe there will be some day; it’s a new model. If you look at the other Powershot profiles at Lensfun, what do you see? The site says they don’t fix vignetting. So even if someone creates a profile, you’re probably sunk.

Canon’s software is free, so why does Canon care if people use Affinity? It doesn’t cost Canon a dime in software profits, and it makes their products more pleasant to use.

Affinity has manual vignetting correction. It does not work. The V1’s vignetting is far too severe.

I worked on this for hours yesterday, and AI kept telling me I could correct the photos. It was wrong.

Elements would not even open the files. It kept telling me to download and install its Camera Raw plugin. When I did that, and I tried to open the files again, it told me to download and install its Camera Raw plugin.

I can convert the files to something called DGN, and then I can edit the DGN files. But they don’t contain all of the information in the CR3 files, so it’s a low-grade hack. And if you want to keep the information, you end up with a huge CR3, a huge DGN, and the huge JPG’s you create. Hard drives only go so big.

It’s a stupid approach.

I had to download Canon’s free program: Digital Photo Professional. It works, but I can’t get the exact results I got (apart from the black corners, which wouldn’t go away) with Affinity.

I wasn’t planning to buy any more Canon products after this one, and I would have chosen another Sony compact if I could have found one. Now I am determined never to buy another Canon product as long as I live. I don’t need to be treated this way.

Why not buy another camera? Because the Powershot has absolutely no rival in its niche. Even if you had a billion dollars to spend, you could not do better. It shoots good stills and saves them to raw and JPG. It has a good optical zoom which provides an excellent low end. It does better than the ZV in low light. It has a headphone jack for video monitoring. It won’t overheat. Nothing else comes close. I looked.

If I want a pocket camera that will do what I want, it’s this Canon or nothing. So I have to use Canon’s ridiculous program until a better camera comes out.

Of course, you can’t connect it to a PC. It’s aimed at the saggy-pants Free Palestine crowd. You can upload images to your phone, which is not useful if you’re trying to produce quality work. A grown-up uses a PC, not a phone. You can’t connect the Canon wirelessly or even with a cable. You have to pull the micro SD card out and put it back, over and over and over.

Someone tell me why you need a camera this good to take pictures of you and your saggy pants and exposed underwear for Instagram. It makes no sense.

I want to get rid of it, but since there is no escape route, I will stick with it until someone makes something better.

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.

For Want of a Fob, the Explorer was Lost

It is remarkable how man loves to use technology to make life harder and more irritating.

I have a Ford. It has stupid electronic key fobs instead of brass keys. I wrote about it a few days back. One of my fobs was disintegrating, and I thought I had found a good solution to the problem. It turns out I was overly optimistic, so I am revisiting the issue.

What are the benefits of an electronic key fob?

1. You can operate your door locks with it. Brass keys do this as well, cars come with interior lock switches, and brass keys don’t fail due to battery problems.

2. You can start your car with it, if you have a fancy fob. Brass keys do this as well, and again, they do not fail. Yes, you can start your car remotely when it’s cold and get in when the heat has warmed it up, but then how sorry and useless do you have to be for that to matter to you? Is it really that hard to walk out to the car, start it, and go back inside?

3. You can make your horn honk when you’re in the parking lot at Walmart and you can’t find your car. Okay; score one for technology.

What are the problems with fobs?

1. They can cost up to $300 each. Each. And that’s not all. You may have to go sit in a dealer’s waiting room while they program your fobs.

2. They don’t last. Step on one or drop it just the right way, and you’re out a day’s pay. A brass key will work for a millennium.

3. As noted above, the batteries die.

4. Illiterate punks with gadgets from Ebay can clone your fob from across a parking lot, and then they can steal your car while you’re shopping. You, on the other hand, probably can’t program your own fob. Car makers work to make it impossible because, hey, $300 fob, which costs them $10.

5. When fobs that fit your car are no longer available anywhere, you will still be able to go to Lowe’s and get all the $1.50 keys you want for your 1975 Maverick.

My car is 10 years old. It has two of the fanciest 2016 Ford fobs. One of them slowly fell apart, and it finally refused to close. I decided to fix this. Being me, I thought there had to be a way to avoid the dealer.

I used AI. I watched videos. I did my homework. I was told I could buy a Chinese fob clone and program it myself, using some functions built into the car. I also read that I could buy a new shell for my busted fob so I could put the OEM guts in it.

I also read that in order to program a new fob, I needed two working fobs. Why? Because Ford is a jerk.

They don’t tell people this when they buy cars because they hope you’ll lose fobs and end up paying more.

I came up with a genius plan. Buy a Chinese fob. Clone my old broken fob to it. Make another clone for my wife. Put my old fob in a new shell. Put both OEM fobs in a safe place. Continue using Chinese fobs and replace as needed. Boom.

I ordered three items from Amazon for very low prices, and I felt pretty smug.

When the items arrived, reality hit me across the face like a cold, wet fish.

1. It was not possible to clone the fobs using my car. The year my car was made, they disabled the cloning feature for the particular type of fob I have. Other people with lesser fobs can still clone. Great.

2. The Chinese shell was impossible to assemble. The company that made it shipped it disassembled, and when I tried to put it together, I found out why. I think all the people who reviewed it positively were in China in review farms or they were the voices of the AI matrix.

3. Two of the fobs I ordered could not be made to work because they were not actually fobs. They were empty shells. Okay, technically I guess you could say that was my fault for ordering the wrong thing without paying attention.

I kept researching, and I learned some stuff.

It is (allegedly) possible to clone fobs like mine at home. You have to buy a cheap device that connects your ODB to a PC or phone via Bluetooth. You also have to buy an $11 program called Forscan. You hook up your car to your PC, crank up the program, and clone away. You can also change certain other functions of your car.

I bought the program. I ordered the gadget from Amazon. I’m sending the shells back and getting Chinese fobs complete with guts. I don’t know if I can do anything to fix the structural issues with my old fob, but I did put a thick rubber band around it to keep it together.

In a couple of days, unless I have been brutally deceived again, I will have two OEM fobs and two working Chinese fobs. Total cost about $105. Sounds expensive, and it is, but compare it to using a dealer or locksmith. And the ODB thing could come in handy later.

I would absolutely love to have a new car with brass keys and zero fobs. Keys are objectively superior, and I can say with equal certainty that the fob movement was a very bad idea that should be abolished. It’s like motorized mirrors and hatches. You just don’t need it, and the problems it causes when things go wrong, which they usually do, are horrifyingly expensive and bothersome.

Ford is an astonishing company. It is hard to understand how a company this stupid could continue to turn a profit. My car has design issues a monkey would have fixed prior to production, and cars with similar problems keep coming off the line, year after year, uncorrected. Ford is right up there with Nissan and the city of Los Angeles when it comes to incompetent management.

Somebody out there needs to start converting cars back to brass keys. He would make a fortune.

Would Yeshua Dance to Her Music?

So supposedly, Nicki Minaj is Christianity’s new ambassador to the world, and the Christian Broadcasting Network is her new ride or die b____.

Sorry for the choice of implied words, but it serves to illustrate how insane this story is.

Nicki Minaj is a very whorish woman. She performs sexually explicit “songs” about fornication.

Let’s take a look at some of her lyrics.

Yeah, high heels on my tippies
Dolce and Gabbana, that’s on my t__ties
Cop me Vetements when I ride the d__kie
I still got the juice, b__ch, buy a sippie

More:

I got a call, told him, “Meet me in the backstreets”
Got out the Jeep just to f___ him in the backseat
I’m not impressed, I said, “Yo, the D mad weak”
Hit my niggas up, I got him robbed and that ass beat

More:

This dude named Michael used to ride motorcycles
It’s bigger than a tower, I ain’t talking about Eiffel’s
Real country Anaconda, let me play with his rifle
P-P-Put his butt to sleep, now he calling me NyQuil

“Yo, the D mad weak” means her companion’s work with his member is unsatisfactory.

Is fornication still wrong? A lot of Christians seem to think not. In the Bible, God equated it with abomination, and he hasn’t published a retraction, so who is right?

“But now she’s a Christian! She has changed, and you shouldn’t judge her!”

Oh, really? Find me a story that says she has repented of producing whorish entertainment. Show me where she has told girls and women to stop listening to her music and to quit fornicating and acting like whores. It must be out there, right?

No, it mustn’t. She still performs her filth, and she has not told anyone else to quit supporting her act.

What makes you a Christian? Calling yourself a Christian? People who called themselves Christians murdered American Indians and claimed the Pope had said they had to convert or face war, slavery, and the confiscation of their land.

Jim Jones was a preacher.

Try again.

Does raising your hand in church and answering an altar call make you a Christian? Does it bring you eternal salvation? Megan Fox went past these things, received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and prayed in tongues. Now she is emasculating her three sons, who wear dresses and claim they’re girls. Is she a Christian? Do you think she will be saved if she dies before she repents?

Miley Cyrus used to be a church girl.

In 2 Peter 2, God makes it clear that you can lose your salvation and be worse off than if you had never had it.

Why are ignorant Christians suddenly praising a notorious slut?

Christians are persecuted, as we all know. Here in the US, Christians who don’t know the Holy Spirit persecute those who do, stifling their voices and driving them away from churches. In Muslim countries, even nominal Christians who don’t actually know God are persecuted. Churches are burned. People are murdered.

Nicki Minaj, though unchanged, has started calling herself “God’s anointed,” and she has been speaking up for persecuted Christians in Nigeria. She just spoke at the UN.

A millennial hipster with the obligatory beard and a hyphenated last name just put up a video for CBN, expressing approval. No mention of the horrible damage Minaj has done to women, millions of whom have surely gone to hell under her continuing influence.

In the comments, people who think they are Christians are saying things like, “I support Nicki Minaj!” They’re saying they’re fans now. FANS.

It’s the “don’t judge” cult, once again. The adherents of the two-word Bible. Never criticize anyone. Never name names. Hang out with sinners no matter what they do, because Yeshua hung out with sinners.

It’s idiocy. It comes from trying to make Yeshua popular by denying his essence and undoing his work.

Yeshua will never be popular during this age. He has never been popular. People need to get this through their heads. He said the world would hate people who belonged to him.

I’m so sicky of sleazy rappers claiming to be God’s chosen. It makes me want to throw up. Kids who don’t know Moses from Herod swallow it hook, line, and sinker, because it allows them to keep sinning up a storm while virtue-signaling and impressing each other.

People think Minaj should be supported because she is helping Christians. Is she really?

A whorish woman made a speech at the UN. Is that going to fix the problem? Really? You believe that?

It gained her public approval and built up her already-immense arrogance. It helped her make more money. It had no legal force, however, and it’s not going to fix anything in Nigeria.

If we want to help Nigerian Christians, we should be praying for them and exposing the filthy prosperity preachers who enslave them and keep them damned, poor, and weak. We should be praying for the destruction of Islam. What is more powerful and righteous? The prayers of tens of millions who actually know God, or the self-serving capering and prancing of a famous trollop?

There are millions of people who think everything they see on CBN is right. Now CBN is telling them to go ahead and be whores as long as they say they support Christians, and they are lapping it up.

She spoke as God’s representative at the UN, and now she’s back at work, selling songs about penises. Do you really think that works? Are you completely deranged?

If you think this woman is acceptable as a Christian leader, you are falling for a very old trick. Satan has a long history of promoting whorish women by tying them to good causes.

Consider Josephine Baker. A straight-out whore. Danced naked for Parisians. She was a spy for the Resistance, too. She risked her life to fight the Nazis.

Then there is Marlene Dietrich. She was a complete slut. One of the worst. Broke up marriages. Had sex with both men and women. Kept John Wayne busy while he was married and may have been the reason he was a draft-dodger. She was also famous for a long list of charitable works.

There are others you probably know of.

We’re supposed to look at people like this and say, “Well, Yeshua will ignore their sins because of all the good they did.” But salvation is conditioned on repentance, not good deeds. No body of good deeds can save someone who won’t repent.

When he wants to, Satan appears as an angel of light. He teaches his children the same trick.

Yes, Yeshua spent time with sinners. To get them to CHANGE. He didn’t dance for their approval and abandon all virtue and dignity. He didn’t go into bars so he could play beer pong and nail pelts. He went to pull people out, and when they wouldn’t listen, he left.

Try and picture him sitting in the front row of a Minaj concert, with a big smile on my face. I dare you to claim you think that is possible.

Yeshua criticized self-righteousness. We criticize actual righteousness and promote evil. People can’t tell the difference between self-righteousness and righteousness because they don’t speak in tongues and listen to the Holy Spirit. You could literally tell them to worship a chicken, and eventually, they would do it, and if you kept at it, you could get them to murder people who denied the chicken’s divinity.

Look at Revelation 2. Yeshua criticized the church at Ephesus, which was, like all the Revelation churches, a small group that met in houses and rented rooms. Not popular.

He told them they had forgotten the basics of Christianity, and he said that if they didn’t repent he would remove their lampstand from its place.

The lampstand is the Holy Spirit, who gives illumination; revelation. Nearly all churches have had their lampstands removed, and that’s why we grope in the dark and think Nicki Minaj is a virtuous Christian woman.

The church in Ephesus lost its lampstand. How do I know? The church became corrupt and vanished. Modern Ephesians are Muslims, and their country, the ancient epicenter of Christianity, is against Israel and the Jews. The sincere, unpopular church was replaced by a sick, enormous, state-sponsored church, and eventually, the Muslims took over.

If the ancient churches hadn’t lost their lampstands, Christianity would not have failed globally, which it indisputably has.

The church is a failure in America, and as a result, we see CBN promoting a tramp. The lampstand is gone. If you want your own lampstand, you can have it. You can get close to the Holy Spirit in your own right, but don’t expect to find a really sound church of any size.

Just to inform people: no, it is not okay to pal around with people who are not Christians and who sin constantly, and that includes people who claim to be Christians. It is not okay to continue in your Satanic lifestyle after you ask for salvation. It is not okay to hold onto the Satanic culture of this world. These things are harmful to you, and they can cost you salvation in addition to bringing many curses on you here in this world.

You are not acting as a missionary by continuing to stick with people who won’t listen. They are the missionaries, and they are missionaries for Satan. You are the potential proselyte. You are making excuses because you want to keep sinning, and you don’t want to be unpopular, and you’re claiming to serve God by doing wrong.

Nicki Minaj is not helping Christians. She is not a Christian herself. Christians need to wake up and renounce the insanity of embracing her.

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.

Inching Upward Toward Mediocrity

Some new gadgetry arrived today, so I made some effort to shoot some more macro shots.

I was interested in focus stacking and focus bracketing. I should cover these things first.

Macro teachers on the web bamboozled me into thinking all I needed were a camera, a diffuser, and some patience. Not really true. You can get plenty of good pictures without a ton of equipment, but there are things you just will not be able to do, and the smaller you go, the more obvious this is.

With the lens I’m using on my APS-C Sony, the depth of field is something like 1 mm. That is small. It means that if I’m shooting a flower that measures an inch in my sagittal plane, I’m only getting about 1/25 of it, in terms of depth, in focus. That is no good.

A lot of people take shots that focus on one part of a small subject and give up on the rest, or they settle for low magnification. That’s okay, but sometimes you want to see more.

The way to get more depth of field, assuming you can’t back up enough to get it naturally, is to combine images using a computer. This is focus stacking. You take multiple images, changing the in-focus plane in steps. Then the computer discards the fuzzy stuff and puts the rest together in one sharp image.

How do you get all those images?

First of all, you have to use a tripod. Forget doing it the old-fashioned way. You will move around and get shots that are not the same.

Second, you can forget changing the focus between shots manually. It’s just too hard.

I thought in-camera focus bracketing might be the way to go. It looked that way when I read about it. It doesn’t work.

When you make your camera do focus bracketing, you push the button, and your camera shoots more than one shot, changing the focus between shots. The problem with this is that if you’re doing macro, not just “taking pictures of small things,” the camera will not change focus in small enough increments.

It turns out you need to move the camera, using a device that has a micrometer screw. That device is called a focusing rail. You mount it on your tripod, you line up your shot, and then you take numerous shots, leaving the focus alone. This moves the focused plane along your subject, giving you the desired material for focus stacking.

I got a pretty good tripod, and it arrived today. I got a geared head for it because geared heads hold stuff more reliably and allow for easy tilt adjustments around several axes. I found out how to make my A7IV do focus bracketing, and then I took pictures. I merged them in software, and the results are about what you would expect if I just held the camera and hoped for the best. Bad.

It isn’t going to work. I’m not going to fool with it. I’m getting a rail.

The tripod is excellent. I’m not saying it’s a great tripod, because it seems like any piece of equipment that qualifies to be called “great” by real photographers had to be made of spun platinum and cost over $50,000. I believe it’s excellent for my plans, given what I am willing to spend.

It’s a Vanguard Pro 2+, or something like that. Carbon fiber for weight reduction.

It holds a lot of weight, and you can move the legs and the central column in ways that will put your camera just about anywhere, solidly.

Using the tripod for the shot above was heaven on Earth. So much less aggravation than an Amazon Basics.

If you want to photograph a mushroom on the ground from 8 inches away, this tripod will hold your camera right where it needs to be. That’s pretty neat.

I got a geared head for it, and that’s also fun, but I think I could have lived with a regular ball head, which has a ball-and-socket joint you tighten with a screw.

I think I blew around $350. It’s not a childish splurge. It’s me, being a grown-up about photography. You can’t nickel-and-dime everything. You can’t buy a nice camera and nice lenses and then cheap out on everything else.

My $20-$25 tripods are amazing for what they cost, but you can’t put a real camera and a real lens on one and expect things to go smoothly. The weight is just too much. They’re wonderful for things like smartphones and Gopros.

I am getting a mid-range focusing rail, and with that done, I should be in good shape to do some photography. I am eager to see the results. The rail goes on top of the geared head, under the camera.

Pushing the button to take a shot is nerve-wracking, because it takes a lot of force and moves the camera. I’m going to be using remotes instead. I would stay away from Canon and Sony remotes. For one thing, they are back in the Stone Age when it comes to batteries. They use coin batteries that are a pain to replace, and my OEM Canon remote actually has a tiny Phillips screw you have to remove. Insane. I got rechargeable remotes from a company called Aodelan. I also have a tiny Smallrig tripod that has a rechargeable Sony-compatible remote in the handle.

I’m not using a phone app to pop the shutter because NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE SHOULD BE DONE THROUGH A SMARTPHONE. Man, I wish millennials would understand this. I’ll bet I have over 100 apps, and in a sane world, maybe 35 of them would not exist. The 21st-century obsession with forcing people to do everything on phones is incredibly stupid. A 50-year-old who can use a desktop is almost godlike compared to a millennial who can’t.

I’ll bet there are kids out there writing term papers with their thumbs.

Well. That’s not true. They tell ChatGPT to do it, and they go on their illiterate, merry ways. Oh well; 6-7, right?

I guess I’ll want a real diffuser eventually. The fabric job I have is not very good. The diffusing part is white fabric, and the flash shines through it. This would be fine if there was any distance between the flash and the fabric, but it’s very close to it, so I think I’m probably getting a very localized light source. I think it’s a lot like wrapping your underwear around the flash. The light isn’t direct, but I don’t think it is spread out effectively. Could be wrong.

Diffusers are cheap, so no worries there.

Looking back, it’s a wonder I ever got any nice shots of small things.

My conclusions are always subject to change, because I am learning as I do, and I knew almost nothing to start with. I think I’m right about focus bracketing, but who knows what knowledge tomorrow may bring?

Suddenly Semi-competent

I am getting better at macro photography.

I should say that I have learned that the term “macro” is used very loosely. In the most rigid sense, a macro photograph is one in which the subject’s projection on the sensor is at least actual size, but people use the word “macro” to describe photographing just about any small object up close, so I will use it that way, too.

I was not happy with my focus or depth of field with the new camera and lens. I have a real tripod on the way, and that will help. My TEMU-grade tripods are not up to the challenge.

Another thing that helps: backing up. The farther you get from your subject, the greater the depth of field is. Unfortunately, it’s an exponential change, so I don’t expect to be able to predict it while moving the camera. Today I tried to double my distance from the subjects, and I guessed at the distance by looking at the size of the subjects on the monitor.

I also changed the focus peaking settings. Focus peaking is the camera feature that makes things light up on a monitor screen when they are in focus. I have been using the high setting, because, hey, high has to be better than low. But it doesn’t. Google AI told me accuracy increases as you turn it down. I couldn’t really see the focus peaking on the low setting, so I tried the middle setting, and my focus improved.

A lot of people say not to use high f-stops because of diffraction, which will make things look fuzzy. On the other hand, it increases depth of field, or “DOF,” as we pro photogs call it. A French lady who teaches macro says to go high and not worry about it, so I did that today, shooting at f16. The results were not exactly crisp, but they were better than previous efforts. Maybe going down one or two stops is the answer.

Anyway, I’ll post a photo.

It is not going to win any sharpness contests, but on the other hand, photography isn’t all about sharpness. This isn’t science. I’m not a satellite shooting tiny features on the surface of Pluto so the human race can get the most information possible. It’s just supposed to be pleasant to look at.

To me, this is good enough to be considered a successful photo. The bigger version is sharper. I can’t post giant images here. I’ll post a piece of this photo for comparison.

That ought to be good enough for government work. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have that hanging on my wall.

I have learned that some cameras do something called “focus bracketing.” You focus and shoot, and your camera takes several shots while changing the focus slightly. This is very useful for macro photography with a low depth of field. It gives you a number of images suitable for combining with software so more of the subject is in focus.

Guess which Sony camera doesn’t have this feature? The one I just bought. DOH!

My bigger Sony does have it, however.

I don’t think it’s that important. I’m using a manual-focus lens, so I couldn’t do it with this lens anyway. A lot of people get great results with this lens.

Things keep improving. I’m learning more about real photography where the dial is not set to “AUTO” all the time. I’m really enjoying the editing. I don’t know why it’s so relaxing.

I think I should be able to produce some pretty good stuff before the month is out.

A Lot of Money, That Is

The macro photography journey continues.

I got me a Laowa lens that was supposed to be fantastic for macro, and I also got real and bought a Sony a6400. I need to quit dividing my time between the Sonyverse and the Canonverse, and it seems pretty clear the Sonyverse is better. I don’t want to have to speak the languages of two manufacturers, because I don’t shoot often enough to keep my memory refreshed. I also got an a6400 because it was time to admit I needed a Sony APS-C camera for travel. I am probably never going to lug the A7IV around the world with its heavy lenses.

Yesterday, I tried shooting a tiny fly on a leaf, and it was frustrating. A Youtube guy said to use focus peaking, which is a weird feature through which cameras guess which parts of an image are in focus and paint them with bright colors in your display. The bug and the leaf lit up, and I thought everything was in focus, but in truth, very little was.

I have been told to use a tripod and try focus stacking. A tripod makes focusing easier. Focus stacking means taking several photos focused at different distances and using computer trickery to merge them into one image that has more stuff in focus than any single source image.

My best tripods cost about $20 and $25, and I got them in about 2004 and 2020
It is not ready for this kind of work. The camera, lens, and flash are light, but the tripod can’t handle the weight. It allows the camera to droop gradually toward the ground. I managed to get some shots, but this tripod has to go.

The tripod was inadequate, but it made focusing a lot easier. I got all sorts of color from the focus peaking. Then I looked at the images, and the depth of field was still no good. I got some gorgeous shots, but the focus was subpar.

I have to get a real tripod. K&F Concepts makes a cheap one that seems to work for some reviewers, and Vanguard makes a more expensive one that appears to be a more solid choice.

I have free Affinity editing software, and I checked to see if it does focus stacking. It does. So now I have to take some appropriate photos and try it out. It is conceivable I could do it with the $25 tripod, but I don’t know yet.

I don’t know if Affinity is good at focus stacking, but if it isn’t, finding something else won’t be hard.

The tripod I used today sometimes held steady long enough for me to fool with camera and flash settings, so I was able to get some okay exposures. That was a big step forward. I have watched tutorials about the flash, but I forget things, so I will have to watch again. It seems to have a mind of its own.

I am getting truly beautiful photos, even if they are seriously flawed, and I’m very gung-ho about macro. I think I’m less than a week away from a few photos that will make me very, very happy.

I’m also going to shoot other stuff. I am used to using a phone or shooting in aperture mode, so my understanding of what really works when I go manual is not what it should be. I have been trying to get good shots of my son before he is so old he gets mad at me and drives home.

Doing all this makes me appreciate phones more. I don’t know who designed my phone so it does such a good job making me look like a great photographer, but he must be a genius.

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.

I Never Did Mind About the Little Things

I am fooling with macro photography today.

I am starting to think the Canon 200D is not all that great for macro. It lacks focus peaking, and you can’t set the temperature manually without a lot of grief. Even then, you’re guessing. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Today I decided to use the Sony A7IV I rarely take out of the closet. Maybe I was stupid to spend so much. I really thought I would be using it all the time for baby photos, but the phone has turned out to be more than adequate, and it’s always handy. I don’t have to take it out of a bag and re-read a manual.

I used a Sigma 105mm F2.8 DG DN Macro Art lens. This is a pretty decent lens, so I had high hopes.

Setting up the camera turned out to be a royal pain. At first, the monitor was dark all the time. I found out there was a setting that forced the monitor to show me what it thought the photos would be like, and because I was using flash, it showed me darkness. The camera didn’t know I had a flash attached, which is weird, considering all the other things it knows.

It also has a maddening feature that magnifies things drastically when you try to focus manually. One second, you’re looking at a flower you want to shoot, and the next, the flower is IN YOUR FACE SO FAR YOU CAN SEE THE INSIDE OF THE ROOTS. You lose the shot every time. I had to fix that.

The exposure was too low. The ISO was too low. I finally got the camera to work well enough to produce images, however. They are not spectacular. I think they are underexposed. But the focus is much better than yesterday, with greater depth of field. I kept the f-stop pretty high.

I’ll post a couple of shots. The flower is under an inch across, and the bolt head is around 5/8″ in diameter.

The detail is not great. I don’t know if that’s because the ambient light was low. I would have assumed using a flash from a few inches away would make ambient light irrelevant, but maybe it doesn’t. The sun was fading when I shot these photos.

I left the flower photo somewhat dark. I don’t think every photo has to be bright. Given the exposure, I don’t think it would have been possible to brighten it up much without making it look weird.

I think I’ll get on top of this soon. It should be a very rewarding experience.