Pro Tip: Don’t Drop Your Camera

6FPS V1#7

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS. I'd hoped to get this out before the new year, but work and life and holidays intersected and I decided to hold off rather than rush out something below par. I think I may just plan for things to slow down during holiday time in the future and not try to push out as many issues next winter.

However, I did use that time to work on some projects and get my 2019 planning going, and so it was a productive time in many ways. One big shift: after our house televisions being attached to DirecTV for -- god, over 15 years -- we've started a migration to streaming. We are cord cutters (although in reality, our cord is in Geostationary orbit up there somewhere).

Cutting the Cord

The first phase of this was to take one of the TVs that is on a wireless Genie remote unit and shift it to a streaming device. We ended up going with a TCL Roku TV. After an initital trial of DirecTV Now, we ended up setting up Playstation Vue as our primary service.

That went so well that Laurie looked at it and noted how old the TV in her office was, and so we upgraded that as well. I've also set up my Apple TV in my office with all of the apps as well, so what was a basically a proof of concept quickly turned into three of the four viewing places in the house (yes, four TVs for two people and a cockatoo) are all now streamed.

The one that's left is the big TV in the main media room. Right now, we're marinating the setup to see if issues crop up, but it's been solid. I'm in process of setting up a Roku stick so we can travel with the setup, and we've both set up our iPads with the apps as well.

If things go well, in a month or so, we'll replace the TV in the main room with a big TCL Roku screen, and go streaming first on it, with the DirecTV as backup for a bit. And once we're sure that's fine (and the DirecTV DVR is drained of back episodes) it'll just get cancelled and we'll move on.

The two things that I still need to sort out: the NHL Network is not on Playstation Vue, and not on the NHL App (for some weird reason nobody can explain), and we'd rather not do without it. It looks like we can get it via Hulu live, and pay for both Playstation Vue and Hulu Live and still pay less than our monthly DirecTV bill -- plus now take out channels with us when we travel. Not bad...

And the other? PBS, which seems to be a general hot mess. There are four shows we watch on PBS. One of them does a reliable iTunes release with season pass. The other three are cooking shows, and I haven't yet found a way to be able to subscribe to them somehow. It seems PBS isn't on the streaming services like Vue because it doesn't license streaming rights to many shows, and so this is still a muddle. I'll figure it out.

I expect to talk more about this when it's further along, but I was surprised, once I decided to dig in and actually start it, how fast and easy it was to get it done. And it may actually save me money once I'm done with the migration.

I really like the Roku interface on the TV and stick, and where most companies doing Smart TVs either have terrible track records at software updates or on user privacy issues (or both!), I trust Roku mostly to do the decent thing with my info, and I've already seen updates to their systems since I've bought the TVs. So I'm hopeful this won't turn into a privacy trap full of security holes nobody cares to close, like some Smart TVs.

What's New?

Here is what I've written since the last issue:

  • Anatomy of a Road Trip: Breaking down a day with a camera: I did a daytrip to Sacramento NWR, and I talk about the outing from the alarm going off to posting the pictures.

  • 2019 Goals and Priorities: yeah, it's that time of year again.

  • 2019 Birding Goals: TL/DR is "bird more".

  • 2018 in Review: It was definitely a year: let's just say I'm looking forward to 2019 being a better party.

  • My Favorite 5's for 2018: In which I try to call out things that deserve special mention at the end of the year, without turning it into twelve blog posts and 20,000 words you'll never read. This is the TL/DR of that. I hope.

  • My 2019 Photography Goals: TL/DR -- take more photos. Stress about it less.

Pro tip: don't drop your camera (Things Photographic)

So, here's a pro tip for all photographers: don't drop your camera.

I did on December 26, as we were getting ready to head out to our boxing day visit to Merced NWR. Or more correctly, I set it down on a table, and when I went past it again ten minutes later, it was on the floor. I evidently didn't set it down so it was stable, and it took a bit of a walk.

At first glance everything seemed okay, and we were headed out the door, but when we got to Merced, it wouldn't power up, and I realized the UV filter on the front had broken. I first tried replacing the battery, and found that the latch that held the battery in place was broken. I could fix that with a fingernail, and then the camera powered on, but while I could bring up the menus, I couldn't navigate them, I couldn't exit them, and turning the power off did nothing, and of course, it wouldn't take pictures. Other than that, perfect.

So I packed it up, pulled out my X-T20 second body -- this is one good reason to have a second body -- set everything up, and tried not to think about it while we worked our way around the refuge. As it turns out it was a bad day for photography and I threw out the entire card of images, but it was a fun day's outing with Laurie.

The poor images wasn't the X-T20's fault, or even my fault for not really having my head in my photography (although it was kind of true). It was simply one of those days where nothing really interesting happened with poor light where most of the images shot were ID shots so I could verify species later at home for my ebird trip report.

Those days happen, and you can't worry much about them, just like broken gear happens, and you just figure out how to get it done anyway and not stress out over it.

I've actually had a pretty good run, given I self-define as someone who doesn't baby my gear. The last time I had to send something in for repair was about 7 years ago when (surprise) I dropped my camera and my Canon 100-400 went out of alignment, which those first gen lenses did with easy enthusiasm.

I packed up the Fuji in lots of bubble wrap, handed it to the nice UPS person, and it was signed for at the Fuji repair depot on January 2. I'm now waiting to get an estimate. One interesting option Fuji has is they have an option to accept a refurb unit instead of waiting for the repair of your own body; I've said I'm willing to do that, and I'll be curious if that shortens the cycle. Right now, I expect it's in a tub waiting for the techs to work through all of the boxes of broken stuff that arrived ahead of mine.

Hopefully next issue I'll be able to give you details on timing and cost and how well the returned unit l got is doing, but.. with these repair depots, you never know.

So, seriously: don't drop your cameras. And carry a second body. I love that X-T20, and it's half the cost of an X-T3, but works quite well for most of what I do; I could live it it as my primary for almost everything if I had to. Which right now, I kinda do.

Photo Friday

I posted my 2018 Best Photos of the Year. 

For me, I approached this with some trepidation, and considered simply skipping it this year. I wasn’t even sure if I had 12 images I wanted to select. I entered the year with my head in a bad place, my landscape vision completely broken and my overall interest in photography wandering between “why bother, it all sucks” and “throw that stuff in the lake and be done with it”. Some of the choices I made in 2017 put me in a position of failing my own expectations, and that sent me into a bit of a spiral of self-doubt, and it all fed on itself for a few months until I could sort it out and start rebuilding both my motivation and my idea of what I wanted to do with the camera.

In the end, I did find 12 images I’m happy to display, and in some cases I’m quite proud of. The first ones selected are from a trip to Morro Bay in June, meaning the first six months of the year produced zero images worthy of making this list, and in fact, zero images that even made the preliminary list. The Morro Bay trip was intended to clear my head, take a break and start figuring all this out, and it seems to have worked. In August I finally got my tabletop photography studio set up and did some test shots, and ended up with one image I really loved — and I’ve had no time to use it again since, of course. It’ll be a bigger part of 2019. And after that, it’s back to my core, birds, birds and a bit of wildlife, but mostly birds.

One Thing: The toxic cesspool of Social Media

I keep talking about social media, but that's because it keeps making news, because we keep getting disclosures about how the companies that run our social media sites -- especially Facebook -- are screwing it up and screwing us over along the way. We've long past the point where we can perhaps cut Facebook some slack by merely being naive and bumbling, the lates disclosures show they're quite consciously screwing over users and our privacy to protect their profits. 

It gets worse: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually takes a deep look into the world of fake followers, bots, advertising fraud and finds that a huge percentage of what goes on online is fake. Are you someone who watches your pageviews and follower counts? guess what? Most of that data is bogus. That's why when I was at Apple I used to argue that anyone who promoted the success of their online things by talking about how large their subscriber list was should be fired: focus on engagement. And unfortunately, this article shows that that may not be a good metric, unless you're tracking for whether the responses are real or not -- big hint: anything that's just a button click, like a like or a thank, is worthless. Yeah.

It's gotten so bad that the latest news about Facebook convincedt Walt Mossberg to give up, and he  threw Facebook to the curb and deleted his account. 

And he's completely right, but... It's complicated. 

I would really like to nuke my Facebook account, but right now, I don't feel like I can. It's the classic Facebook conundrum: an organization I'm involved with uses Facebook as a primary way of communicating with members, and is looking at it for possible fundraising activities. They don't really have options, and I have to be around to follow what they're doing, and to advise and offer suggestions on how to best do it. 

On top of that, I'm in two communities there for which there is no other place to be part of them. They simply don't exist outside of Facebook and I can either be part of them on Facebook, or leave them. 

I'm uncomfortable being on Facebook, but my answer has been to slim my profile there: I've unfriended a number of people (and if you're one of them, I'm sorry), cutting that list to a very small number of mostly close friends and people I interact with a lot in real life. I've unliked most pages, I've reduced what I've followed, and I think about 70% of what I was doing on Facebook two months ago has been dropped. Facebook is now more or less only those things I can't do any other way, whether it's a person, an organization or a community. 

And I can live with that for now. 

I'm still not happy with that, but I think it's the best tradeoff for me. But I continue to be convinced Facebook needs to die in a fire., 

Here's the problem, though: the things on Facebook I'm still involved with? They don't really have a place to go. I can't talk to the admin of that Facebook group and say "if you move your community here, you can be successful and be free of Facebook". For a lot of these things, those alternatives don't exist, especially with Google+ shutting down. 

As I mentioned above, one option I'm starting to play with, that I hope lives up to my expectations: Flickr, under new ownership by Smugmug, is being reborn. And their community stuff used to be great for photographers, and then rotted from neglect by Yahoo. They have some new group capabilities in open beta, and that's one reason I moved the 6fps-chat list over to Flickr, other than it really felt silly to have a chat discussion tied to what I feel is a photography-forward (but other stuff as well) newsletter basically not really have good options for sharing photos or talking about images. That's why I started the 6FPS-chat group, and I hope you'll decide to join up and we can see if this is a non-toxic alternative to all of  those places we hoped would good places to build communities in that have turned out to be more problem than solution.

Once this issue is mailed out, I'll be creating another Flickr group for one of the other things I'm involved in that has a facebook group as a secondary outpost, and maybe it'll suck the life out of that (in a good way) and shift that conversation to a healthier place. Or amybe not. 

We'll see. I'd love to have you join the group, kick the tires, and see if the rebuilt Flickr Smugmug is building is worth your time and attention again. Drop by and let's chat about it. Maybe there will be a good outpost there for those of us trying to survive the toxic destructiveness of social media elsewhere. 

For Your Consideration

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (6fsp@chuqui.com).

Coming out about every two weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

See you in a couple of weeks


And with that, I'll see you in a couple of weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

Copyright © 2019 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.