ruminasean

As someone who spends most of his time either shooting, teaching or hustling, this truly is phenomenal. It makes some of the more mind-bending aspects of photography perfectly clear. Great post!

I never said TV was essential. Entertainment in NY and LA feeds families as well, however. My Broadway friends who are losing their homes and apartments with no hope of work until at least June (but most likely September at least) might want a word about feeding families.

I never said we were essential. I personally don't watch tv, so I'd agree with you generally.

I work in TV, in an environment that's very strict. We're tested up to 4 times/week (I have friends who are tested daily), asked not to use mass transit, and many of us work so many hours that we have no time to do much socializing outside of the group of people working for the production who are all in the same boat. It's really the only place I go where I feel perfectly safe. Even when unmasked to eat, we don't sit together, we're always socially distant.

Contrast this with my friends outside the business...they're going out semi-regularly, have only been tested when they want to see their family or get out of quarantining for 2 weeks after travel, think nothing of eating in the outdoor huts that are slowly getting more and more enclosed as the NYC weather gets colder. I'm very sympathetic to this woman and all restaurant owners in general, but the situations are not the same.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

I am a (white) photographer for an organization where I am photographing a bunch of Black people, and nightly one or more of those photographs wind up on Twitter. This would explain some issues with terrible automatic thumbnail choices we've had in the past.

Professional photographer here who does portraits and product. I’d say not “dead,” just very different.

We’ve taken a hit, yes, but mostly amongst the problematic clients who say things like “you shot this in 2 hours, why do I need to pay a whole day rate?” They go and shoot their stuff with a phone, it looks like garbage but in some way they can’t quite articulate but it’s good enough, and we’re happy to not have to deal with them any longer.

There is another segment, that of the client who bought a consumer crop-sensor DSLR and a white box off of Amazon and told us “hey sorry but anyone can do this now.” Or they picked up a cheap strobe kit and a lens that the blogs said had “creamy bokeh” and they can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong. Generally we see them slink back in a month or so later and quietly hire us back. This is very common.

Is the future scary? Yes. Am I sure I’ll be able to work as studio photographer forever? Nope. But as with anything, doing one’s homework and having a commitment to quality while paying attention to what’s happening in the photo world can keep you successful for the time being. The points addressed in the article are good ones and I try to stay up on all of it, but there are plenty of companies who still pay good money for photography don’t have access to the level of digital rendering that he’s talking about. They have a small product and a couple grand and they need a well-done photo in two days.

And yes, you can bang out something with a phone and an app or two, but it’s not “there” yet. Is it a privilege to hire a professional photographer for your headshot rather than something someone did on a phone? Of course. I’ve also shot plenty of headshots pro bono for aspiring folks who have a dream and work their asses off and can’t seem to get there, whether or not I was already set up for a paid shoot. My friends mostly do this as well.

I suspect 9 months from the lockdown months will see a surge in births....

Gotcha. Thanks.

I was under the impression that the vast majority of investing was automated, algorithm-based, no?

30 year vegetarian here, not vegan, but I definitely look askance at all the massively processed fake meats. I'll happily eat seitan, but I make my own out of maybe 6 ingredients.

I don't know too many vegetarians who eat them with any regularity...to me, they're more to transition meat-eaters to vegetarianism than anything else. Or maybe something for me to bring to a BBQ so I can not stand out like a sore thumb AGAIN.

Background anxiety is a perfect way to describe it, in fact that's what I'm going to say from now on, thanks.

I always felt the same, until I was locked into it for 30 days straight....

I've found this to be the case too. Been on mostly keto for roughly 2-3 years, done several short and long fasts, and I test my blood daily. There were days after fasting and then eating something that really should've knocked me out of ketosis where it barely made a dent. The whole thing is really very interesting.

I've done strict calorie tracking for restriction, keto as well as IF.

The best I've ever felt was keto, the easiest for me to adhere to was calorie tracking. It's marginally harder if you eat out a lot, but if you cook for yourself and can throw everything on a food scale for a week or so until you get an idea of what's servings of your most commonly-eaten foods looks like, tracking calories made losing weight for me and reducing my daily eating almost comically easy. There's a switch in my brain somewhere that works really well when I have to enter the calories of everything that goes in my mouth into an app....suddenly that cookie or those chips that were so hard to resist aren't a thing for me at all....my brain manages to yell "200 calories for THAT?? Nope." I found myself eating more at the end of the day just to hit my total calories and macros.

I was surprised too. It's a variety of "I need X to speak at my charity event," "hey can you give X my contact info," "here's my nude selfie and my number, please tell X," to "X is impersonating himself on social media and swindled me out of thousands of dollars, I'm going to report you and everyone else."

Ironically, being relatively faceless has burned me as well. I have a fairly common name, so when someone else with the same name made a shitty comment on some board on Facebook, I had days of being attacked, getting DMd to kill myself, brutal comments on all my posts...it was hours and days of cleanup and banning people.

I am publicly in close proximity to someone famous for my job and with a modest (~15k) Instagram following because of that, I've experienced most of this behavior to one degree or another. I was completely unprepared for it and it really freaked me out.

I love the Bill Murray quote, and I've been living by this, also from the article: "You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face.” It really seems to affect people that I don't post selfies and pics of myself anywhere....second to requests to be put in contact with the famous person to whom I'm obviously connected, people really want to know what I look like. As someone who is fairly private as well as nothing special in the looks dept, I'm in no rush. I'm googleable because of the absurd name under which I started, but most people can't or won't put in the effort.

I've definitely concluded that in my particular case, some respectable form of following on IG is necessary (I'm a photographer) and I certainly won't get rich, but damn I was utterly not ready for nor was I expecting 5-screen-long tales of woe and death and disease and pleas for help and mercy along with the same kind of "I know what you did and I'll expose you" shit several times a week.

It's funny...I don't drink, never smoked, and don't eat meat or sugar, but I'm not really hoping to live until some crazy age.

Seriously. They don't learn why not doing it is the right thing to do, they just learn how to hide it better.

My experience with both my parents was "I retired and I don't want to use my brain anymore," and they have both definitely experienced decline since retirement. Some of my friends' parents, however, have adopted more of a "I'm retired and now I can dedicate all my brainpower to these special projects I've always wanted to focus my energy on." These people have mostly declined not at all or very little. I think the answer is not to retire and go rot in a chair while taking 5 naps a day.

This is definitely one example of my thinking.

I’m a professional photographer, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it’s relevant because I have a camera in my hands all day for most of the week. I’m not a gadget guy, I don’t need the latest and greatest, but when I pick up new gear I want it to do the thing and do it well and to not need to be replaced within a few years because it’s completely obsolete.

I picked up an iPhone 11 pro last week, upgrading from a 7. The camera really is great. What I keep thinking is that I’m finding it creepy. I’m not a luddite by any means, I’m all for innovation….I shoot with a Sony mirrorless camera as my main everyday, that felt to me like a massive change.

I think what gets to me is I don’t know exactly what the iPhone camera is doing. When I press the “shutter button,” what exactly is happening? How many shots is it taking? Is it shooting on all three lenses? Is it recording audio even when I have Live Photo turned off? If I think I’m intentionally leaving something I don’t want to record out of the frame, how can I be sure that one of the other lenses isn’t also recording and including it? I just don’t feel like I’m sure about any of it anymore, with all the processing I hear about it doing, layering multiple shots together, shooting outside the frame. The tech is cool and all and I’m not prone to paranoia, but I just keep wondering.

As a stagehand, I've spent an inordinate amount of time on fireproofing, worrying about fire, as well as working with fire officials to make sure the risks are minimized as much as possible. Oh and also cleaning up after one fire, which destroyed a major-market local news studio and pushed Regis and Kelly out of their studio. It's no joke.

Came here to say gaff tape, so seconding this. And I'm an actual gaffer, so you can believe me. I have it on every tiny spot of light in my room.

You can also water many of your houseplants with it. Not JUST whey, mind, but you can give them whey.

Glad I'm not the only one. I read the whole thing thinking "I mean I know Japanese seem to live very long lives but this feels a little off."

I've tried pretty much everything in the course of my lifelong insomnia, and still my nighttime mind racing is still consistent enough that it's literally my username across all my online apps ("rumination" plus my name). I've had some success with lavender drops right before bed, but I'll give this a shot too, because why not?

I had the best of both worlds, working as a photographer and in a lighting gig in TV with enough downtime to do all the work on what I shot when I wasn't working. Then, the photography thing took off, the lighting gig got crazy busy and my other other job got crazy too. Now I'm so tired I can't even think about working on photos and I never get time off. Be careful what you wish for....

1 picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel half the length of a single grain of salt. What a Joycean level of measurement.

I am vegetarian on a very low carb diet. No fruit, no high starch vegetables. It is possible to eat zero added sugar and almost zero natural sugar. As mentioned above your body can synthesize glucose from protein, to the extent that on a keto diet you must be sure not to consume too much protein, lest your body convert it to glucose.