Category: Photography

ONLY SO MUCH TO GIVE

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

Maybe it’s because I just turned 48. Or I ran nearly four hours in the last two days. Or maybe I’m just fed up with everything. But man, I’m wiped out.

It’s never good to write when tired, like you should never go to the grocery store when you’re hungry. But eh, go buy the cookies and chips and ice cream. Life is short, have a snack.

I’m going to hit 80 miles running this month, which I haven’t done in a LONG TIME. I have a half-marathon coming up in two weeks. That’ll be fun.

Evenings not spent running are spent walking around town with my camera. I am so stoked to put together two of my favorite things – walking and taking pictures. It’s made even better with this new camera (a Nikon ZFC). It’s digital, but has full manual control dials, which means taking a photo means stopping, making adjustments, and being mindful of light, and movement, and angles. I love it so much.

Taking photos is like running for me – I might be slow, but that just means more time outside.

TAKE OUR PICTURE!

On a recent morning walk about town I took a photo outside of this barbershop, and Keith (on the right) shouted “hey, come take our picture!”

Mind you, I’ve been walking around town the last few months still trying to figure out this camera. It’s a Nikon ZFC with full manual controls, so I’m always dialing in the shutter speed, aperture, and all that fun stuff.

All that noodling around paid off I guess, as I was able to get this photo in two takes, with some minor editing in Adobe Lightroom.

Here’s some more recent shots:

STORMY NIGHT

We had a glimpse of spring a few weeks back, but then it dove right back into winter. Three days of rain, then today was just cold and drizzly. Got in a walk tonight and managed to avoid getting too wet.

IMPACT

Had a wonderful conversation with a dear friend today, about life and work. And the big thing that came up was about impact.

That while money and the bank account are usually the biggest factors in our work, sometimes it’s impact that counts for most. And to somehow be in a position to seek opportunities for impact, that’s the dream. The bills are paid, there’s food in the fridge, and that opens up space for impact, and I gotta say, it sure feels nice.

GETTING IPHONE PHOTOS ONTO MY COMPUTER

Since I no longer keep my photos in Apple Photos, I needed a way to transfer my photos from my iPhone to my new file system.

I knew I could plug in my iPhone via USB cable and then use Image Capture to get the photos, but transferring the photos wirelessly would be really nice.

I was looking at USB thumb drives that I could plug into the Lightning port (on the iPhone 14 Plus), export the photos, and then plug into my Mac via the USB C plug.

This seemed fine, except I’d be using SansDisk software. I watched a few YouTube videos, and it looked atrocious.

Not to mention, sure, that’s another $50 purchase.

I then remembered that Dropbox has cloud photo storage. I’ve got the space in my account, and it seems that a month’s worth of photos on my phone is around 5GB of space.

So now, at the end of every month, I can export the images from Dropbox on my Mac and drag them into my new file system.

There is no clunky SansDisk software, no extra purchase, and it all works seamlessly in the background. I did it today for the images, too, and it’s absolutely fine.

GOODBYE, APPLE PHOTOS

The photo you see on the right is from 2002, which is 22 years ago. Apple’s iPhoto launched the same year, but I didn’t get my first Mac until 2003, which is when I must’ve started pouring photos into my computer.

Here we are 20+ years later, and my Photos library is over 350GB in space, but too large to sit on my my new 512GB MacBook Pro.

So the file sits on a 2TB external HD. Everytime I click on a photo, or an album, or anything, I get a beachball.

And since I’m getting more into taking photos with an actual digital camera, that means I need to put more photos into iPhoto (or whatever the fuck it’s called now), which just means more of the same – beachballs, slow, partially downloaded images.

So I finally exported all my photos by year into their own folder.

Yep, everything is out of sort, nothing is tagged, I lose the whole AI functionality of finding the word “burger” in a sign from a decade ago, but that’s ok with me. I also can’t bring up any photo on my phone at any time, but oh well.

I have over 3,000 screen shots.

What the fuck do I need all those for?

And did you know if you have LIVE PHOTOS turned on, like every image has a corresponding video file of a 2-5 seconds?

So 1000 photos is really 2000 files. Of shit I’ll never need again in my life.

Somehow I have duplicate files – sometimes 3x, 4x, 5x copies. Zero idea why.

Not sure the designers of Apple Photos planned on people like me with 22 years of photos, but here we are.