I Got a Haircut!

6FPS V2#8 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
August 14, 2020

Editorial: Life Goes Forward


Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

As I write this, the parts of California that aren't burning are melting. We had another day of 100+ here in Silicon Valley, with lousy air quality as we are forced to breathe what's left of the forests that have been burning. It's been a fun few weeks of summer, that's for sure. 

Fall is almost upon us and fall migrations are starting; I took some time off from work and did some birding and turned up three nice warblers: a bunch of Yellow Warblers, an Orange-Crowned, and a rather special visitor on their way south, a Nashville Warbler. Shorebird migration is going and we have lots of phaloropes in a few places in the county, but I need the e-Bike to get to them and I haven't had the time to actually get that done. And in this heat, it's not going to happen for a bit.... 

Oh well.

I got a haircut!

I think it say a lot about how 2020 has gone that I am calling out that about a week ago, I went out and got a haircut. The county is now allowing haircutting shops and salons to open with restrictions, and so I went in and got sheared before our stupidity spikes the virus and closes things down again. 

That this is a highlight of my month sort of defines 2020, no? 

I also had to actually find a haircutter, because the one I've been using for 25 years (and Laurie for longer) decided to retire rather than re-open his chair, and he's now actively in process of moving to Oregon for retirement. We'll miss him, but I can't blame him one bit, and this just accelerated this idea by a year, maybe. 

Laurie thinks I got it cut too short. I kinda like it, but we'll see how I feel when the next shearing time comes...

Using your love of photography to tell a story

So hey, a video for you to consider:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iJoNTUSVY

I will note up front it's going to piss some of you off (but no, I won't apologize when it does) -- but... I think it's a great idea of how you can take your love of photography and use it to start talking about and telling stories around other things you love.
Watch it with that as your mindset and see how he uses photography as a stepping off point here, and then ask yourself what you could do by taking ideas from what he's doing here.

Moving to Oregon

There seem to be a lot of people making moves like this. Talking to my new haircutter, she was saying she's been hearing from a number of regular clients that they're leaving the area, and many off to Oregon.

I also recently looked into renting a cargo box from Pods and considered moving the boxes in storage into a Pods until we get settled down (hopefully around Poulsbo) next year. The idea of simply putting a bunch of stuff into storage and having it show up at the new place rather than paying moves to haul it seems to make sense, except....

Well, near the start of the Pandemic I checked out prices of Pods units and decided to hold off because the cost was a chunk more than my storage locker is. Since then, the rent on the storage locker has slowly shifted upward a couple of times (not unexpected) -- but when I went to price out the Pods again, the prices had almost doubled and one of the sizes was completely sold out. That seems solid evidence a whole bunch of people are moving stuff out of the area....

Seriously, if you don't have strong ties and you are working remote until well into next year -- and believe you can probably convince your company to let you do it permanently -- why not? It seems a lot of people who can do that are, and it's going to be curious what rental and housing prices do over the next year.

I think in general, I know there are lots of people living with 90minute (or more) commutes who will see softer prices here in the valley as an opportunity to move closer, and I think that stabilizes prices in areas like mine. But I am already seeing apartment rentals going down, and I expect housing prices in outlying areas are going to soften. I think there are going to be opportunities for some people doing smart moves and purchases, and I think some people are going to find themselves in trouble. Just not sure who is who yet. 

But it's pretty clear -- the Silicon Valley I lived in a year ago no longer exists, and will never return. What I (and nobody) knows yet: what the future Silicon Valley will really look like. 

Welcome to chuq.me

If you're curious about the details of how and why I made the move from Wordpress to Squarespace and chuqui.com to chuq.me, check out Pouring one out for chuqui.com. One TL/DR: I cut my costs of running the place from $71/mo to $42/mo.

In general, if you haven't explored the updated site, I suggest it to you. I've added some lists of articles I think might be of interest to people in specific topics, both on the front page and on each of the main topic pages. You might find an older piece that you missed earlier that's of interest.

I really like how this turned out, and I really like the Squarespace editing environment more than the one I had with Divi, although like any "drag and drop wysiwyg (kinda)" setup, it has its interface quirks and bugs. But I'm loving the results so far... 

Bird Names Matter

If you're not a birder, this is going to be a bit nerdy, but it matters. If you've seen my twitter feed, you probably have seen me chattering about the problem of Eponymous bird names: birds who's common names are honorifics of people. Well, of white men, because pretty much every bird named after someone is named after a white guy. 

With the rise of Black Lives Matters some birders took up the call to start fixing this, starting with a bird known as McCown's Longspur, named after a Confederate General. A proposal to rename the bird was put before the AOU, but when their set of 2020 changes came out, that was rejected. This got more birders upset, and they have organized around a name and web site called Bird Names for Birds. 

The AOU did come out and announce they were studying changes to their naming protocols and policies, and then shortly thereafter issues and "out of season" name change for this bird, which is now known as the Thick-billed Longspur. A good summary of this birding controversy is here:  The McCown's Longspur Is No More, but the Debate Over Bird Names Continues

The controversy isn't over, since we still have a lot of birds named after dead white guys, and almost no birds named after women or people of color. 

I like the idea behind Bird Names for Birds: that naming a bird after a person creates a virtual statue honoring them, and that birds and bird names should be about people, especially since those being honored are not remotely representative of humanity in general. So I'm hoping this group continues to work with (and as needed pressure) the AOU to work towards changing the common names we call birds to something more appropriate for birds. 

It's all politics

Not surprisingly, as the person who manages the social media accounts for Santa Clara Valley Audubon, this topic was the first time I've been told by someone to keep the politics out of it and just talk about birds. 

My response back was that we can't, because these things matter and all of these political issues impact the birds and birding, and so we can't ignore them and pretend they don't exist. If you look at some of the stories that came out of Black Birders Week, where a bunch of virtual events were organized around talking about and promoting diversity in birding, it's painfully clear that even birding is a much different and less safe activity for people who are not white (and to a lesser degree, not male). 

Within SCVAS, we've been talking a lot about improving our diversity, and there is some good progress being made. There's lots of work to do yet, but it's a start. I see that same thing happening elsewhere in birding, and it's long overdue, but at least we've started.

It's easy to say "leave the politics out of birding" when you're a white male and never had the police called on you for standing somewhere with a pair of binoculars. If you're black? it's probably happened, and there's a non-trivial chance they showed up with guns drawn. So yeah, it really matters and we have to find a way to drag society past that. 

And we can perhaps only do this in small ways within birding and the birding community, but if a bunch of people all make smalle changes, it can build into a larger change, and help make some of those larger, systemic changed easier down the road, also. You have to start somewhere.

And the thing I tried to point out to the person complaining about my posting is this: 

It's all political. And the act of telling me to leave politics out of birding is itself political, because you're promoting the cause of the status quo, which is a poltiical act. And since we (both myself personally and SCVAS as an organization) feel the status quo is not acceptable, we can't just let it go any more. We're trying to find ways to affect change, and we'll continue to. 

Funny, but they never replied. But it's something to think about: the act of telling people to stop being political is a political act. Something to be pondered the next time you see people advocating that at, say, athletes. Or birders. Or friends of yours. 

Man, I have a bunch of things to talk about, but this is long enough... I'll defer some things on to next issue, I think...

And with that, on with the show!

What's New?

  • With the completion of the move to chuq.me, I sat down and rewrote my article on my camera gear, since it was pretty badly out of date (amazing how things can change when you haven't bought new lenses or cameras -- but your attitudes have changed a lot). You can see that at What's In Chuq's Bag.

  • I'm thrilled with how my Virtual Field Trip to Ulistac Nature Area turned out. It's a piece I wrote for Santa Clara Valley Audubon's site as we try to find ways to help birders enjoy and learn about the county since we can't show it to them in groups right now.

  • Do You Like This Image? -- my first non "about this site" piece written on the new site.

The Joy of Photography?

In a recent posting titled The Joy of Photography?, David duChemin admitted the following:

A couple of weeks ago, I confessed to you that I hadn’t picked up my camera for six months. The replies I received by email and comments on the blog were like a big collective sigh of relief from so many of you—like we were all holding our breath, thinking we were the only ones who had lost some of our previous motivation.

He's not alone. Looking at my Lightroom library, I did some nice photography in January, and added 2 photos to it in March -- and nothing since. I do have about 300 images in the incoming folder yet to process, most from July, but there's a big gap there where nothing much happened. And to be honest, one of the reasons things are still in the Incoming folder is I know without processing them few of them are decent.

The pandemic, of course, is a big part of this. I know a lot of photographers who couldn't leave the house and couldn't go and shoot the kind of photography they love. Many of them felt compelled, from what I can see, to try to figure out how to shoot other things at home -- and a lot of them hated the process, and it's something that just didn't click for most.

A lot of them feel guilty about this; I sympathize and felt that way at times, too. But the reality is, it's okay. And possible good. We all need breaks away from the grind, and when you get back to it, it can be with fresh energy and a better attitude.

That was the point of David's essay, which I solidly endorse.

One of the things I don't like about modern photography culture is the overhwhelming at times idea that the only thing that matters is clicking the shutter. People are conditioned to not like the digital darkroom part, made to feel that if they aren't out creating new images, they aren't really doing photography.

That's bull. Check out any of the photographers doing youtube channels, and you'll see major aspects of the final aspects of their image are created in the digital darkroom. That was true of Ansel Adams and it's true today. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is lying.

I'm starting to see this change a bit; the "it has to be right in camera and you can't photoshop it" crowd is falling out of favor. I think it's about time. I think with my own images, where 5 years ago my final image was about 80% what I shot and 20% how I processed it, today it's more like 50-50, and I've embraced the digital darkroom as a creative tool.

And while I haven't created a lot of new images in the last few months, I've been busy re-visiting older images and giving them a new look based on my current skills, tools, and preferences.

My collecting of images is massively better than it was six months ago, not because I replaced old, weak images with new strong ones, but because I replaced with with new, strong interpretations of the old ones. Anyone can do this, but the photography culture discourages it by discounting the importance of the digital darkroom piece of today's photography.

The pro photographers know how crucial it is. Maybe we should learn from them instead of the loudest ones out there proclaiming their personal views on imaging purity...

On taking on New Workflows

If you take a look at the updated What's in Chuq's Camera Bag piece I just finished, there are a couple of changes to how I do things that I wanted to call out here:

First, I'm consciously shifting a lot of my wide-angle work from my Fuji cameras to my iPhone.

Second, I'm starting to do more video, as a way to support some of my writing projects and some other things submarining out of sight right now I'll talk about someday.

The latter is, in fact, a reaction to the pandemic and a recognition of the need to change what I'm doing because of it -- since I'm doing a lot less traveling and I'm doing more writing about the county both for myself and for SCVAS, there are places where having video of a place in the county will be useful as well as still images. So this is one way I'm adapting to the reality that that Pandemic will be with me for a long time forward.

The first one, though, turned into its own crazy Pandemic Project, because if I'm starting to take serious photos with my phone, how do I process them? How do I organize them? How does that all tie into and sync up with my Lightroom collection of images?

And those questions were surprisingly difficult for me to answer ot myself and be happy with. But I think I have it sorted out. Mostly. Until I change it.

For now, at least, my answer is to identify those photos, give them a basic crop and cleanup in Apple's Photos app, and then export full sized, high quality JPEGs to import into Lightroom, where I can then keyword and organize like I do my other images. I can't do as much tweaking as I could if they were in RAW format, but for my purposes, this is working. We'll see how that goes as I continue to do this and gain experience, but it's simple enough that I can do it reliably, and I like the results so far.

Now, doing the same with this video I'm starting to collect? How does it get processed and organized and keyworded so I can find and use it later? Still somewhere between a work in progress and a disaster, but I'm continuing to work on it and making some progress. I'll write about this a bit when I feel more comfortable that I'm getting results, but it's taking up a chunk of my time right now.

And in a way, the Pandemic was a really good thing, because it means "I think I'll grab the camera and go shoot" wasn't an option, which made it easier to buckle down and work on these problems, which were at times very much not a lot of fun to grind through. But now that I've made it through the dungeon as far as my still images is concerned, and at least have a battle plan for tackling video, I'm really happy with the results so far and that I put in the time. Which if "going out and shooting" was an option, I might not have done. It's easy to leave the hard, not fun bits to later, even though you really need to dive in and do them. In that way, the Pandemic helped.

And it means that now that I am grabbing the cameras again and starting to shoot stuff -- my systems are really ready to handle them and I feel comfortable with my workflows, so I'm not struggling to make use of the content I'm now creating again.

Well, with still images. Video is still... well, I'm working on it.

There's always a next project, though, right?

Photos: Half Dome

This month's photo is a black and white version of Half Dome I took during a trip to Yosemite over Christmas in 2015. That was the year Mom died and so it was a year where we both really needed a break, and it was the first year that Christmas wasn't a mandatory visit to Southern California for the family gathering, and frankly, it was good for us to be in a beautiful, neutral location for Christmas that year.

I've been using this as a background for some of my zoom calls, and every time I have, I've been asked for copies. Because of that, I'm going to add it to the next batch of wallpapers I produce, but for those of you reading this newsletter, here's a fun little thing. You can download it today, before it's officially released. Just because.

Have fun!

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds, Birding, and the Outdoors

Health and Fitness

Technology Nerdery

Fun Stuff

The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter

I wrote a book!

Download Now!



I'm thrilled to announce the results of a secret project I've been working on the last few weeks. I've written a book. The title is "... And the Geese Exploded" which if you read my blog was the title of a piece I wrote about this year's trip to Merced National Wildlife Refuge, and it was the thing that made me realize I needed to write this book.

This book is available for free -- no strings attached, not even an email address. The download is in PDF, which is easily readable on most computers and tablets (and it looks awesome on my iPad in the Books app, if I do say so myself), and also exists as a hardcover printed copy, but only one copy of it exists, I have it, and no, you can't buy it. But the ebook version is all yours to enjoy.

The book is a combination of a series of short essays about my birding life, how I feel so deeply for birdwatching, and some of the aspects of being a birdwatcher that mean so much to me. It also includes over 100 of my favorite photos that I've taken over the last decade here in the greater Bay Area, out in the central valley wildlife refuges, and here in the western coastal states in the U.S.

Interested? Head over to the download page where you can find out more about the book and how it came to be, and to grab a copy for your enjoyment. If you know of someone you think might enjoy this book, please share this with them, and pass this along through your social channels to help reach others that might want to have a copy.

See you Soon!

And with that, I'll see you in Jult 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

About 6FPS and Chuq

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

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, 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.

Copyright © 2020 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.