Moving to the New Normal

6FPS V3#2 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
February 8, 2021

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

January got really busy and was not a great month for original writing; when you see the new material listed below, it's one blog post. Part of this is side effects from spending a chunk of December dealing with that onslaught of the vertigo; that put me behind schedule on a bunch of stuff, especially some work deadlines, and so I've spent much of January trying to pull those projects back in. On top of that, I've kicked off a few new projects. Here's one:

What you see here are about 30 boxes of hockey books, things that have been sitting in boxes in one of the rooms for a while waiting to go to the storage locker to join the rest. Instead, I've brought in a Pods container, and now that these are in the Pods, I'll be pulling all of the stuff out of the locker and shifting it to this box as well, and then finish filling it with other "cold storage" boxes to put away. With the plan still being to move to Washington sometime in 2021 (or at least, nothing has derailed that yet), it makes sense to put the long-term storage in something that I can have transferred up there for unloading, rather than shove the boxes in a storage locker and then pay movers to load them up and move and unload them. While the Pods is more expensive (about double) per month than my storage locker, it can be stuffed on a truck and shipped to Washington when I'm ready, and it seems worth doing it this way. 30 boxes of hockey books (we have about 500 titles) is about half of our hockey collection, by the way. Once I get the locker empty and handed back to the facility, then I'll finish filling the box out of the garage, and maybe even find room in there again.

I am really looking forward to a new place with enough storage for all this while we organize it, enough room for lots of book cases, and a workshop space where I don't have to spend 20 minutes moving stuff out of the way to get to the tools. I frankly sometimes wonder how two people with no kids have run out of room in this house, but.... living here 20+ years will do that. I expect Goodwill will reap some benefit as I start doing this first phase of move prep.

Another thing I've been working on: This is my Fuji X-S10 being fitted out as a video hybrid shooter. One of the reasons I didn't write this morning as I might normally is we went out to Merced and San Luis NWR for the day, and I spent the day experimenting with this (with some success and some abysmal crap). I'll talk more about this later, but figuring out how to outfit it and getting the gear set up has been a fun and interesting process, and reminds me that as much as I sometimes feel photography today has gotten really complicated -- working in video is way more of everything.

Starting, obviously, with gear to buy. It's been fun, and stressful. 

I'll have more about all of this down the road, right now I'm in the "figuring it out" stage, which is sucking up time and energy but still too early to talk about intelligently. 

Taking Care of Those that Support You

Thanks to Covid, the last year has been hard on a lot of people. Some of those intersect my life and I've tried to find ways to help those that help me. For instance, I have both housekeepers that come in and clean the house every two weeks and a gardener -- and they are the kind of small businesses that are effectively 1 or two people who hold it together. When we were in hard lockdown, my gardener was able to keep working because he's outside and not interacting with anyone, but the housekeeping had to stop. 

At that time, I made an arrangement with them to keep paying them as if they were visiting and cleaning, because I didn't want them to get destroyed by the pandemic, and I could afford to do it. It at least gave them some money coming in, but I expect most of their income disappeared for a few months. 

A couple of months ago, I also realized neither had raised their prices in at least a couple of years, so I wrote them both notes and arbitrarily gave them raises. A business like that should, to be honest, make small price increases on a regular basis -- I'd probably do it annually, more or less, but I also think a lot of them are intimidated to ask. My plan moving forward is to not wait and make sure they get paid what I can afford and what I think they're worth, in hopes it makes their lives a bit easier.  I feel like both sides benefit from thinking about how to keep these kind of business relationships healthy. 

And my question to all of you: do you have people like that in your life? And when was the last time their prices went up? If it's been a while, and if you can afford it, would it make sense to give them a promotion and a raise? 

A different aspect of this that I started pondering around Christmas: I follow a number of YouTube channels and other creators, and in many cases, the pandemic devasted their businesses -- photographers, for instance, have generally relied heavily on workshops as an income generator and they just stopped dead, and it's unlikely that'll change significantly for much of 2021. Many of them have shifted towards Patreon or something equivalent to try to bridge the income gap. 

 I am frankly late to realizing this, but I've decided I need to pick a few of my favorites and start supporting them through their membership programs. I'm currently budgeting $25ish a month and that'll allow me to help probably 4 or 5 creators. I'm trying to finalize who they are in the next week or so. Is there a creator in your data streams you'd hate to see shut down because they can't afford to keep things going? Perhaps you can find a few bucks to throw their way to make things a bit less stressful for them. Every little bit helps. 

And with that, on with the show!

What's New from Chuq?

It was not a great month for new public writing. Will try to do better next month....

  • Could Your Organization Use Some Free Photography?

Moving to the New Normal

January 1 is an arbitrary symbol that I think we tend to put too much importance on. I find the whole concept of the New Years Resolution silly, because most of the time, we are encouraged to try to make changes we aren't really prepared for properly -- and so most resolutions fail miserably quickly. I stopped doing formal resolutions years ago when I realized that.

That said, symbols are useful reminders, and so while I don't start major changes to my life because we hit the date, the time around the change of calendar is a useful reminder to do some reflection and planning. One of the things I've been pondering are what 2020 plans that got shelved by Covid to pull forward into 2021, and which to simply discard.

One that I'm working to re-activate, especially with a potential move in the plans for this year, is some estate planning. I'd planned to do some revisions to my will and to put some things in place for "after", but when Covid hit and we went into lockdown, everything stopped. After -- well, this stuff takes emotional energy I just didn't have, so I let it slide. I should only do that so long, and we're far enough into all this that I think we can start thinking about what "normal life" is going to look like.

What we won't be doing is going back to the way things were. Covid's not going away, and it's looking more and more to me like we're headed to a place where annual vaccine shots or boosters for it will be a way of life the way flu is -- except Covid is a lot worse in terms of long term health problems for many people and so will have a potential for causing ongoing health issues for many. In some ways it's a lot more like AIDS/HIV than flu and I think it's going to lead to some permanent shifts in how we think and act as a society.

This is going to be complicated by how Trump botched and politicized the pandemic and has convinced a non-trivial part of the population to try to ignore it. It's going to be rough going and with the new variants and mutations starting to emerge, the whole idea of "herd immunity and back to normal" is pretty clearly out the window.

What's this all mean? I'm honestly not that sure. I think it'll take 2-3 months to see how the shift to the Biden administration will affect all of this and get us moving in the right direction. I think there's also going to be some group stress and anger as it sinks in that we're not going to get back to normal, but instead are headed to whatever our new normal will be.

Me, personally, I am trying to use this cycle of disruption to invent a better life for myself and those where I can assert some influence on outcomes. I also think it's time to stop just sitting in place waiting for things to get fixed, which is part of why I'm trying to figure out what I want my new normal to be and how to start aiming myself in that direction.

Also, as someone in a higher risk group for Covid due to age and health, estate planning actually should be a bit of a priority in case I do catch the bug and in case it does hit me hard or kill me. Things aren't in terrible shape; if I were hit by a bus tomorrow it'd all sort itself out okay -- but it could be a lot more painless for those left to clean up the mess. Since I have no children (stares and the future we have given them with Covid and Climate change and whispers "good choice") I have to figure out how to deal with an estate where there's nobody to dump it on and expect them to spend a year or three sorting it out. I want to try to do as much of that sorting now, rather than leave vague hints and instructions that people will struggle to follow, or just ignore and stuff it all in a dumpster. Actually, "stuff this stuff in a dumpster" will probably be a part of the planning...

I'm curious what everyone reading this is thinking about for 2021 and beyond, and where you see this new normal coming into being and how it's going to affect you. Would there be interest in me setting up a place to have these discussions?

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds, Birding, and the Outdoors

Health and Fitness

Technology Nerdery

Fun Stuff

See you Soon!

And with that, I'll see you in 2021 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 (chuqui@mac.com)

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.

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