I mentioned in my last post that I had made the decision to purchase the new iPhone 18, with its advanced camera settings and editing options and its variable aperture lens. I took delivery of that new toy a couple weeks ago and have been playing with it since. I decided to take it out as my sole photographic tool for a quick photo shoot at a local garden. I wanted to know if it could fully replace a standard camera. Yes, we are at the end of our growing season, but there are still beautiful colours out there, only getting more beautiful as Fall sets in.
Here’s a look at what I packed to take to the shoot and how things turned out. (Note: some corrections are now included, as I discover new things).
You probably have just come back from long summer days at the cottage, on a trip or just spent lounging away from all of your many commitments. Some part of you looks forward to coming back, re-establishing that routine and settling back into it. Part of my routine is usually paging my way through fall announcements of new computer and photography technology and software. Although I no longer routinely purchase the latest and greatest of anything, I still enjoy (or used to) seeing what the brilliant engineers have come up with. Not this season.
Draco Smart Telescope
There are some new developments in my astronomy hobby with more and more releases of smart telescopes, and of course the new Apple products have been announced as they always are each September, but all other domains seem ridiculously quiet. Even the rumor sites are quiet. And even the annoucements we do have include staggered or delayed release schedules. I haven’t seen anything like it since the height of the Covid pandemic. So I set out to find out why.
My last post was about printing your favourite photographs to put them on display in your home. In order to decide what are your favourite photographs though, you need to review your collection. That opens up a whole other topic and it’s one that has gotten some airtime lately – should you keep all the photographs you ever shoot or spend some time initially culling and sorting good from bad and deleting the bad?
The topic has surfaced because of the proliferation of online resources that now enable or even insist that you keep all of your “assets” in the cloud. The convenience of working on your collection anytime, anyplace, on any device seems to be what has prompted this discussion. Or perhaps it was the fact that even professional photographers now use many different devices to capture their work. And of course, the larger your collection, the more challenging is this idea of managing everything in the cloud. Cost aside, the larger the collection, the more organized you have to be in managing it and the more time you need to devote to it.
There are so many elements that factor into a decision on retention. This post explores some of the most relevant considerations for hobbyists primarily. Professionals have to be guided by contractual conditions and by their own marketing and branding interests. This is not that. This is for those of us who have full creative control over what we keep and what we don’t without the pressure of legal obligations or earning an income from it.
If you are a hobbyist photographer like me, you have a big collection of digital images, all taking up space on your computer, separate hard drive or even memory cards tossed in a glass jar (yes, I have friends who do this!).
We are creating an amazing legacy of our lives and, sadly, much of it is hidden away. It’s estimated that 5 billion photographs are taken every day around the world. The reality is that our digital lives make this easy – click, click, click – and it also means that only a fraction of these ever see the light of day. It’s also true that only a fraction of these are really worth keeping. From my own experience, I know that my keeper rate is about 10% once I take the time to actually review what I shoot.
But what do you do with that 10%? It shouldn’t sit hidden away. Here’s what I’m doing.
Hobbies are a great way to spend money. They are also a great way to spend TOO MUCH money. Just when you’ve bought the kit you need, you discover the one more thing that will make it perfect. That is certainly true in astrophotography, which is my latest creative focus.
I decided fairly early on that I would invest in only tried and true solutions, including techniques and gear that would fully support my enjoyment of the hobby without a lot of testing or tweaking. That strategy has paid off for the three plus years of effort. But just once, last fall, I decided that I would try another approach instead. I was looking for a way to control some equipment using a tablet or my phone, and there were several options, including one that had only recently been released a few months before. The appeal of that option was versatility: a claim that the device could handle so much more than any other available option for about the same price. I decided to give that a try. Find out how it went.
Whenever Adobe releases a new version of its photography software package components (i.e. Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop), there are typically a multitude of videos that explain the new releases and, again typically, comment on how great the new features are.
Not this time.
The bulk of videos I have watched, mostly from long running pro photographers, have described and demonstrated the features, but also offered some very puzzling or at least unexpected commentary. Find out what.
Note the word “trying”. Turns out, this type of printing is not quite as simple as queuing up a file, loading a substrate and hitting print. The hardware and the “substrate”, which in this case are spools of filament, are not cheap and require a well designed project file to start, with an assembly or “slicing” plan to complete, and a printer whose temperature and mechanical settings are perfect.
I wanted to explore this because my astronomy hobby relies on being able to connect devices and hardware items to the top or sides of your telescope, in order to ensure the telescope can move freely without tangling cables or slamming into stationary detached components. I’ve ordered 3D printed items for this purpose from talented folks who designed and printed them for sale. How hard could it be to print my own? Turns out it was a lot harder than I thought.
Happy New Year all! Hope the holiday season was everything you wanted and that you received and gave everything that made your season perfect. I was actually quite ill over the holidays, struck with a seasonal flu (and maybe other bad bugs) that kept me at home for quite some time. Eventually, this becomes boring, so I turned my diminished brainpower to exploring a topic I had not explored lately: how best to balance budget and hobbies in retirement?
I actually have had a budget every year since retirement. And at the end of every year, I check it to see just how much difference it has not made to my end of year finances. I’ve decided to give it a more meaningful try for this coming year, especially since travel will be big on the agenda this year.
Budgeting has long been the mantra of financial planners who work with young investors, particularly the part about saving for retirement. But few seem to have good advice on how to manage that money after retirement. Why of course the floodgates open, no? This post is not financial advice. This post is about a few things I’ve learned about having fun responsibly in your golden years.
It happened unexpectedly, unannounced. One day I was minding my own business, reading email, and one popped into my feed. Oh, no, another ad. But this one was different. It was from that venerable king of creative editing software – Adobe. It was a reminder that my subscription for my Photography Plan would renew in a month. Ok, great. Then I saw it, at the bottom.
Back in 2020, I did my first blog post on AI, commenting that while many saw its emergence as a threat, I didn’t. With the choices available to them, people like me could elect how much if any machine-learned automation might become part of our lives.
It’s five years later and I thought I would revisit that idea again, again from the perspective of a senior retiree. I do recognize that other lifestyles and financial circumstances might result in a different viewpoint, but this is mine.
Here’s how AI has impacted me in the last five years and how it might impact me in the future.
