MEDITATIONS ON LIFE , TECHNOLOGY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY
So one of my favorite writing apps, Ulysses, is up for the annual subscription renewal. At $50 a year, it is one of the pricier apps and I am not keen to renew as a result. Yes, it organizes my novel writing workflow better than anything else. But is this enough?
Compare that to IA Writer- similar features and a one-time purchase. It does lack the organization tools but can I find a work around or a new workflow?
I’ll test this for a week, in fact, I am writing in IA Writer and publishing from the app to this website now.
A web of linked notes all in one location and designed to connect my thoughts — this is my personal database and second brain.
This pandemic is really taking a toll on my desire to walk downtown and capture people in street photography. So, I’ll just write and share images and remind myself of some basics when I finally do get back out there and face the public.
See these images and more on my photography website:
Now included in my website is the ability to read the EXIF meta data written on to every image. Just in case you were a photo geek like me. I find it useful to see other’s EXIF data to see what works and then maybe even duplicate it.
“How does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? … I think that the answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read. I mean, that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week.”
- Jason Reynolds
After re-acquiring Nadia, the Nikon D90 this weekend, I was getting nostalgic of the images made in the past and reminding myself of ideas, tips, tricks and techniques that helped guide me through the years. These reminders are things that I wished I knew back then and can be applied at any time.
Finally: 
Organize and archive your images now. Don’t wait until you have thirty years worth of images that have been stored on multiple drives, duplicated four times on each drive, uploaded to various cloud accounts, shared on social media. Save yourself the frustration and get it all together now. Organize on one massive hard drive and then back it up to a second hard drive too.
Photographers are an isolated lot and we desire to do things our own way, for our own edification. Naysayers will tell you that everything that can be captured in a photograph has already been done so why bother? Well I don’t subscribe to that. Going my own way has always been the goal and there will always be new, creative perspectives to be discovered.
We’ve allowed ourselves to forgo curiosity and exploring in favor of a skewed view of what it means to be self-taught. Let’s be honest, watching tutorial videos on YouTube, or imitating other’s work from social media platforms does not make you self-taught.
We’ve been programmed to squash our creativity by algorithms, “Likes”, and followers and have lost our ability to think for ourselves. Take the risk and explore or lose the chance. It’s time to disconnect ourselves from the algorithms, delete Instagram and innovate. We photographers are independent so why do we rely on superficial kudos from strangers?
Isolating myself from all of that has been helpful to me. The time it takes for me to develop an image I am proud of is better spent than time spent throwing something up on someone else’s platform. The best remedy for improving ourselves is investing more time creating for ourselves than consuming from others.
A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.
I say try a different route. Go your own way, start a blog and add your personal thoughts along with your art. During down days, revisit your older work and revise, recycle into something new.
Think less of other’s thoughts and think more of our own.
“This is one corner… of one country, in one continent, on one planet that’s a corner of a galaxy that’s a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond. And there is so much, so much to see.”
Doctor Who
So there I was, in a meeting while working from home and this rooster decided to jump up on the window sill with a loud cluck. This isn’t something I see everyday even though the rooster and chickens live in a community garden across the street.
I first acquired the Nikon D90 DSLR camera when it was released back in 2009 as a replacement for my beloved Nikon D200. The 90 was the first DSLR to feature HD video with amazing results. Nikon got it right from the start. However, that camera was short lived because after shooting a concert that night, I failed to zip up the camera bag completely. Metal and glass disagree with gravity and concrete.
Flash forward twelve years later and after a brief dive into Canon, I have acquired another D90 and it seems like I have never left it. I picked it right up and immediately fell in love. I added an all-in-one Nikkor 18-105mm lens that can capture macro, portraits as well as landscapes. I cannot wait to take her out to see what she can do.
Say hello to Greta, the German Volkswagen Jetta.
To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out — I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea — or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That’s the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own thinking. I write something and think, How do I know that that’s true? If I wrote what I thought I knew from the outset, then I wouldn’t be learning anything new.”
Marilynne Robinson
When asked why she writes: “To change my own mind” is an excellent way to analyze and then describe something.
Time to back up the devices and archive.
