Blog
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Joseph Irvin on blaming your photo gear
Joseph Irvin: Here’s a photo I took on a $3 roll of consumer film I picked up at my local grocery store, shot through a Pentax body that I paid $5 for at a garage sale, mounting a $25 lens from ebay. So never mind not having the top-of-the-line equipment, use what you have and […]
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Marcus Peddle on using film or digital
Marcus Peddle, remarking on making Jim Grey’s aforementioned list of film photography blogs: I’m honoured, but slightly embarrassed because most of my photography these days is digital. Still, a photo is a photo, right? I hope you won’t be disappointed by the paucity of film photographs if you came to this website by following the […]
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A list of film photography blogs by Jim Grey
Jim Grey: It’s time for my annual list of film photography blogs! A great joy of film photography is the community of people who enjoy everything about it: the gear, the films, getting out and shooting, and looking at the resulting photographs. Lots of us share our adventures on our blogs. I am so very […]
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Tim Bray on blogging
Tim Bray: But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. Also, this bit: Since most of us don’t even try to monetize ’em, they’re pretty ad-free and thus a snappy reading experience. I’ve successfully monetized niche blogs in the past that made enough for a few incomes. I’ve only tried to monetize my personal blog a […]
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What I saw somewhat recently #65 – July 28, 2020
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When I first read that Slack was taking Microsoft to court I thought it’d be too much of a distraction for Slack. Reading Stewart’s tweets makes me think they had no choice.
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I think we may look back at many of the brand identities that Pentagram has redesigned lately as misfires. If you’re going to remove all personality from a mark it needs to end up being iconic. They are hitting somewhere in the middle in my opinion.
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If someone could please make ear hair fashionable you’d be saving me some of my precious morning time.
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Decentralizing all of my data
A few days ago I came across Ton Zijlstra’s post about trying out Obsidian. I didn’t have the time to read it just then so I quickly stored it in Unmark (shameless plug alert) to read later. After reading his post I realized he is attracted to Obsidian for the same reasons that I was […]
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What I saw somewhat recently #65: July 16, 2020
Unfortunately I haven’t published one of these lists since April. I enjoy looking back at the archives so I need to post these regularly more-so for me than for you! This list should be three times as long. But I didn’t keep good records.
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Shattered window panes – July 2020
Shattered window panes – July 2020 I haven’t been shooting very many photos in the last few weeks. Partially because life is very busy and also due to the pandemic. This photo, taken on a nature walk, was shot on the iPhone of an abandoned railroad building from the early 1900s.
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I feel like most people, including those that rail against Facebook, don’t have the stones to quit Instagram.
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Quicktime on macOS bug: Hover to display controls. Roll off on left, right, or bottom of window, controls disappear. Roll off on the top of window and controls remain.
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Steve Benjamins on Spotify
Steve Benjamins, in a post showing how he makes some money via Spotify for streaming his music: Every Monday my music gets a spike in streams on Spotify. You could set a watch to it— it’s that consistent: What makes Monday so special? Well every Monday Spotify sends out a new Discover Weekly playlist. Discover […]
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A tweetstorm about Photos for Mac
I’m old, so I can still call them tweetstorms rather than threads. I just posted a tweetstorm regarding Photos for Mac on Catalina. I posted it there because I’m sort of hoping that a few Apple people are still lingering on the WWDC hashtag. Here are my tweets: Figure 1 Figure 2 Who knows. Maybe […]
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I’m looking for recommendations on personal homesteading blogs. Something like @dejus‘ @yellowcottage. If you know of any, please let me know about them.
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My wish list for this year’s WWDC was pretty well accommodated today. Once we are a few releases into the public betas we’ll know what we’ll really get come the fall.
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I’m still importing photos and this morning I will pass 100,000 photos added to the Photos for Mac Library (as referenced files). Still lots more to import. So far the performance of Photos seems to be holding up. I can’t tag any photos right now – the interface “jumps” – but I can bounce around […]
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Adobe’s Photography app updates
Big updates across all apps and services from Adobe coinciding with their 99u event. Notably, Creative Cloud went from 100GB to 1TB with no additional cost. I wish Apple would do something like that. Here is a list of the updates to their photography apps. I really like this Versions feature in Lightroom – I […]
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WWDC 2020 wish list
I see some wish lists for Monday’s WWDC being published so I thought I’d take a moment and jot down just a few from the top of my head. I decided to jut let my mind riff for a while to see what it would come up with. I could likely come up with more […]
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Stolen by Adrian Brandon
Adrian Brandon: This series is dedicated to the many black people that were robbed of their lives at the hands of the police. In addition to using markers and pencil, I use time as a medium to define how long each portrait is colored in. 1 year of life = 1 minute of color. Touching […]
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The 16-inch MacBook Pro
I was going to wait a little bit longer before writing my review of this new computer, but Michael Tsai recently published some of his thoughts on it and – after writing a post in response to his experiences I realized it was turning into a bit of a review – so now this post […]
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Why I used Migration Assistant to move to my new Mac
This isn’t a tutorial. If you’re in need of one and you’ve somehow stumbled onto my blog of jumbled thoughts on a variety of topics, sorry. You’ll need to go back to Google and try again (though, really, you should be using Duck.com). I recently upgraded to a 16-inch MacBook Pro (review forthcoming) and had […]
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PHP turns 25
PHP turns 25. I’ve said that I agree that PHP is pretty bad. However, I still use it regularly, it has allowed me to make some incredible things, and made me a ton of money over those 25 years. /via Michael Tsai.
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Over the weekend, Emulsive published my guest post in their 5 frames series. Subscribers to my blog will recognize the photos.
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Make RSS more visible
Marcus Herrmann: Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a /feeds page? You can put your blog feed there, but also RSS generated from your Twitter account (via RSS Box), Mastodon updates, or even the starred items of […]
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The last few mornings I’ve been toying with making a web UI for my photo script (and extending it into a full photo library management tool). I’ve hit a roadblock working with files using a web app. Not sure I want to write a Mac app this summer. I’m disappointed. Perhaps I’ll pick the best […]
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This Obsidian app is really very good. It may replace Simplenote for me.
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The 16-inch MacBook Pro is very fast.
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I too miss the old days of blogging but they are never coming back
TTTThis: When you search for blogs now on you see things like ‘Top 100 Blogs.’ ‘How to Make a Successful Blog.’ ‘Most Powerful 50 Blogs.’ But what you really want is 10,000 unsuccessful blogs. Much of the linked piece is likely to be taken as hyperbole but it is mostly true-ish. It is true that […]
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Chris Coleman has a blog
Chris Coleman: Eventually I ran out of steam, life changed a bit, and the vacuum that this site filled in my day was filled by other things. I was 23 when I started this site. I’m 41 now. A lot has happened in 18 years, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a long time has […]
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Unmark version 2020.1 has officially rolled into master today. This is a huge milestone with tons of new features and improvements. It has been running on Unmark.it for months and purrs like a kitten. Unmark is still my favorite app I use every single day.
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I’d like to shoot a photo for an album cover.
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Jeremy asks what our favorite photo is. Very hard question. But I’d have to choose Disfarmer #41383.
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Nick Carver is giving away 2 seats to his online light metering for film photography course for those that may not be able to afford it.
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Exposed root – April 2020
Exposed root – April 2020 If you walk through the same forest for months and months – you begin to notice the details you’d normally miss. Also on Flickr, Instagram.
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I hope my comprehensive crash reports that I’m sending to Twitter a few times per day are helpful for their team. See example.
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Micro.blog for Teams
Manton Reece: Today we’re launching a new feature on Micro.blog: support for multi-user blogs, so your whole team can write posts on a shared blog. We think it’s going to be great for small companies, families, and schools, with everything from shared photo blogs to podcasts. This is a big update. You may remember that […]
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Flowers – May 2020
Flowers – May 2020 The above image is a digital positive created from a paper negative. It was handcut from Ilford photo paper, shot, developed by me last night. I also used it as the subject for my first contact print. You can read the behind-the-scenes story here on my blog. Also More also on […]
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My first contact print
Above is my first ever contact print. A contact print is when you lay a negative (film, paper, tin, glass) onto photo-sensitive paper and shine light onto it to expose the paper. You then develop that paper into a positive print (or what you’d think of as a normal photo). This is a milestone in […]
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I also backed up my site locally – including media and database – something I do not do often enough.
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Me, laying down, waiting in line for tickets to Star Wars in May 1999. Image Credit: Times Tribune Archives
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Birds on wires – January 2020
Birds on wires – January 2020 Somehow these images got clogged into my drafts and never published. These pigeons roost above and below a nearby highway bridge. They were enjoying the sunset when I captured these images.
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What I saw somewhat recently #64: April 30, 2020
Are you enjoying these links? I know I am. Light week. Mostly because I’ve been very busy both professionally and on my photography.
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Jeremy’s post on Star Wars has me thinking; now that the Skywalker story is “finished”, I wish they never made the prequels or films 7, 8, 9. I’d like the original trilogy to stand on its own, keep Rogue One and Solo, and have a new trilogy based on Rey without any ties back to […]
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An interview with artist Marc Taro Holmes
Late last week I published an interview with Marco Taro Holmes, one of the original members of Urban Sketchers, on my now 10-year old web site The Watercolor Gallery. It was a pleasure to interview Marc and a lot of his answers epitomize the reason I built The Watercolor Gallery in 2010 – to inspire […]
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Photographing the same location over and over
I’ll likely touch on this topic in an upcoming pandemic powered Podcast episode. Albert Dros, 2017: Sometimes the area where you live would not be motivating to photograph because you see these things everyday. However, when I started photography I began to see the world (and my home area) in a different way. I started […]
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A few houseplants – April 2020
A few houseplants – April 2020 On Sunday morning I decided to quickly set up a photo shoot for my current houseplants. Here are just a few that I liked. The others didn’t come out the way I wanted due to a few limitations. So I’m hoping to do another photo shoot in the near […]
Writing helps me think more clearly and to form or transform my opinions. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.
Series archives: Diversions, WIS, typicalday