Pre-Visualizing the Whole Frame

I’ve been thinking about this photo a lot recently. I don’t think it’s a particularly interesting nor beautiful photo — nothing interesting is happening in the left half of the image — but it naturally splits into quadrants of its frame.

This was totally accidental on my part, but it made me realize how under-practiced my eye is at pre-visualizing the world two-dimensionally, and how unintentional I am with my framing and scene analysis on the field. Typically, when I’m out shooting, I’m trying to notice specific details, like a light filtering through the trees to highlight a specific subject, and center-frame that, ignoring everything else happening in the scene. This typically gives my photos a single focal point, and they tend to be fairly simple.

But some of my favorite photos are ones where the whole frame is pulling its weight. Stephen Shore talks about this in this video describing two of his most famous exhibits in this video below (Relevant discussion at 5:54)

So that’s one thing I want to start focusing on, to start flattening the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional picture frame, so I can pre-visualize the scene better, not just as light/shadow, but also as spatial relationships.

10,000 photos

If I take 10,000 photos of my neighborhood, surely I’ll end up with 10 spectacular photos, right? Like statistically the chance that all those photos would be terrible would approach 0%.

Over time taking these photos, surely I’d change my process, hone my eye, practice my timing, practice my route.

I’d take photos of the obvious subjects, then I’d take photos of more subtle, surprising subjects.

Surely some coincidences would make for a spectacular photo. Surely at some point, I’d be at the right time and the right place for a unique event to happen, and for me to capture it, with 8,000 photos worth of experience making it automatic and natural.

Surely taking 10,000 photos would take so much time that by the time I take the last one, the first photo has gained interestingness by virtue of time passing (c.f. https://youtu.be/GPRZ8VxZ5Mw)

“Content” Creators in Arabic

My engagement with Arabic and the Middle East hasn’t been updated for 10 years, though things filter into my streams occasionally on Twitter and YouTube.

I started seeing this a year ago, people would use “content” to refer to media they create, much like we do in English. It’s a direct translation. But it sounds a lot like “content” as in, the contents of a container. Like the “contents” of a jar of pickles is pickles.

I know you get used to it and adopt it through exposure and it becomes natural over time, but hearing it in another language makes you really think about how utterly bizarre that choice of word is.

How weird is “content creator” as a phrase, anyway? At least in English, there’s a tech history of compound terms like “user-generated content” that were more explicit and bridged us over to the abbreviated “content”, but Arabic seems to have skipped that transitory phase.

Struggling to slow down and operate with structure

I have a habit of brute forcing through challenges. I did this recently when rock climbing for the first time in years and yesterday in the darkroom.

The photo I was printing had some bright highlights that were not coming through into the print, and I spent the evening and 3 sheets of paper futzing around. I find myself stubborn, unable to stay nimble and agile as I navigate this challenge, trying to stay analytical, adjusting only one variable at a time, etc.

This probably comes up in life more than I’d like to admit. I gotta keep an eye out for it, and think back on what I should have done.

I like hobbies because they can act as experimentation labs for how I learn/process/improve/iterate.

Glove80 Keyboard

I just got the Glove80 keyboard unboxed. Coming into it from an Advantage 360 Pro. Decided it was time to change when I realized my pinky was getting sore (though that’s likely due to the 15 Pro Max than the keyboard).

Initial impression is super positive. It’s way lower profile than the 360, which makes the whole setup way more comfortable to use.

I opted for the very low force switches. I kinda regret that, I find myself mistyping too much, but I find myself typing fast when I’m going. This too is a much nicer experience than the 360, whose switches I didn’t like.

The key caps on the glove80 are also lower profile and closer together, without weird bumps between the keys, which makes it much easier to move fingers across keys.

The thumb cluster was useless on the 360 and it’s much nicer on the glove80, though the two large buttons were nice on the 360. I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

I haven’t fully adjusted the layout yet. Biggest issue is that I had the home row setup well enough on the 360, but I want to iterate on it and make it more responsive. That’ll come later. I kinda want to get used to the default layer first so I “unlearn” the bad habits from the 360.

Very excited about this. If the low force switches remain a problem, I’ll switch and sell this one.

Noah Kalina’s YouTube channel

Lots of people are familiar with Noah’s videos and persona, but his YouTube channel is my favorite new subscribe. I get excited when I get the notification that he posted a new video. You should watch it too.

One video that resonated is this one: https://youtu.be/MRNlOLNIEUA?si=yAvd4d1rky-KRgmj

I’ve been thinking about this recently as I looked through old negatives from 10 years ago, and I got that rush of nostalgia. The photos all seemed so good and so lovely, but I had stopped shooting film because I didn’t think they were at the time.

The only thing that changed since was time, and my own relationship to those photos.

I’ve been seeing “on this day” features for just as long, and they do give you a dopamine hit, but it just isn’t as deep or strong or personal of a connection. Maybe it’s because the film photos were so much more selective in what they captured, and subsequently, what they resurfaced 10 years later for me. Like a highlight reel.

This reminds me of another concept I picked up from Noah on a podcast he did: the Effort heuristic. Things feel like they’re worth more if they took more effort to create. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_heuristic

There’s something to that

Working on the Vision Pro

Taking off the Vision Pro after a session of work is a depressing experience. The world shrinks to the 14″ display on my laptop, and I lost my spatial headphones, my multiple windows, and my large display. It feels sadder to use the laptop on its own.

What makes this particularly frustrating are all the downsides of using the Vision Pro as a computer. It feels like you’re forced to live in an unhappy transitory world, between the laptop past, and the wearable future.

Restarting the blog

I’m going to ignore the many failed attempts at blogging over the past few years. I’m also going to ignore the urge to be overly verbose or profound. I’m going to keep these short. I haven’t been posting to social media much, so I’ll redirect my thoughts here. You should subscribe. I’ll post whenever I feel like it, both photos and videos. See you soon!

Reflexions on my 28th Year

Every year, since my 23rd birthday, I share a blog post, summarizing the year and my experiences. It’s a personal retrospective I share in order to string a narrative through the year, and define and describe my life as it stands at the time. This is the fifth installment. 

Darkroom was just selected by Apple as one of the best apps on the App Store for 2015. It’s an indescribable honor to be featured alongside great products by a company I have admired and looked up to since I was a child.

When Matt and I started Darkroom, we wanted to model it after the Apple and Leica ethos. To us, that meant no gimmicks, and a profound respect to the user and their time using our product. It’s humbling to see that recognized today with Darkroom rated so highly and Apple recognizing it. Thank you for all your support throughout. I’m excited about Darkroom’s future. 

Today is my 28th birthday. I’m on a Greek island where 6 weeks ago thousands of people were arriving daily. It was an overwhelming experience and we’re back here to profile the locals. It’s a village of dreams and fantasies, and I’m thankful to spend my birthday here among a fantastic array of friends and friendly faces. 

We have only a few days left on the project, and after 2 months on the road, I’m spent. Over the past few weeks, Sara and I have started seeing mental snapshots of what some of the pages in the book might look like and we’re unbearably excited about bringing it to life. This book will be the first step in a long march to capture and share this historic event. We’ve seen this crisis from many angles, and witnessed it first hand. 

The world is in a precarious place today, and a nuanced understanding of reality is important as we continue to shape our policies and opinions through our elected officials. An educated public is a fundamental component of a healthy democracy, and we hope to do our part in sharing what we’ve experienced and learned first hand. 

When I left my job at Instagram, I wasn’t sure what I was leaving it to do, and at many points along the journey, I wasn’t sure whether or not I made the right decision. The decision to leave was made out of an inner conflict with where my life was headed. 

In San Francisco, what success was measured by and what I as a competitive person was competing with was pulling me down a road that felt foreign to me. Even today, when I try to more purely pursue my passions, it’s hard not to look over the Facebook fence and see what my friends in Silicon Valley are doing and not feel like I’m dragging my feet in the sand and falling behind. 

The same trait that made me successful in my time in the valley is also making it very hard for me to pull away, but what brought me to Silicon Valley is not what was keeping me there last year, so I had to face that reality. That much I knew. Where I go from here, I’m still figuring out.

It has taken a long time — Too long if I’m being honest with myself — but I’ve made a bit of progress. I’m still not where I want to be yet, but I’m working through it

A lot has happened this year:

Released Darkroom – February
London Trip – February
Middle East Trip – May
Released Darkroom 2 – August
PNW road trip – July
Month in NYC – August
Displaced – October to December

…along with a lot of other little trips along the year. I’ve visited so many countries, met so many people, and wrote a lot of code. Like, a lot. I’ve gone on my first backpacking trip, and I started writing my first book.

I feel more self aware than I ever have before, but I’m struggling to articulate it and actualize it. Sometimes it felt like I might be running away from something, but I feel good about how I’ve grown over the past year. I’m looking forward to a year of introspection and solidifying some big changes in 2016 as I crystalize Darkroom’s future and write Displaced’s first draft.

As 2015 comes to an end, I feel cautiously good. I feel like my relationship to the world is stronger and more mature. My thinking is still morphing, and I’m re-evaluating my emotional reactions and decision-making process. It’s taking time, but I’m slowly becoming more aware of the journey, and ultimately, that’s what helps me steer and push forward.

Thanks Sara Kerens for the photo.

Entering Washington

I was ready to get out of Portland. It had be a few days and on the one hand, I was starting to feel a lot of the same anxiety and stress that caused me to leave SF in the first place. On the other hand, I felt like I may not get the chance to visit the Pacific Northwest with Sierra again, but I can fly and Uber around Portland whenever I want. Alright, we passed by the maps section at Powell’s Bookstore and I picked up a PNW map.

 

I remember from my last road trip through the Southwest that highways are to be avoided, and byways are where the fun is. I can’t go past 55mph comfortably anyway, and there’s usually less traffic. Byways usually wind through the country more, and have better views, and stopping to take photos is much more accessible. Plus, in a car as non-aerodynamic as a 1991 VW Vanagon, getting stuck behind a semi-truck makes the van shake like a salt shaker. Google maps is fine for avoiding highways, but tracing the white lines of the byways on a paper map and always having a full overview of the trip has a certain romantic quality to it.

 

After Powell’s, grabbing a beer flight at Bridgeport near Tom’s apartment, hunched over the map tracing my route north along the 101 to drive around Olympic National Park clockwise, David (Tom’s Personal Trainer. A tangent we don’t need to get into) showed up and shared stories his honeymoon in the Cascades and Rockies of Washington.

 

Ok then, I guess I’ll cut my trip short around Olympic NP and retrace David’s honeymoon. He pointed out a very thin and long lake east of Seattle called Lake Chelan with a small secluded boat-access-only town called Steheken on the norther shore. Apparently you can take a boat out to the hiking trails, and charter a flight back. Sounds right up my alley. I marked the path on the map. In the process, my eyes adjusted and I noticed that the map also listed all the public campgrounds in the PNW. Hallelujah! It’s been driving me nuts trying to find campgrounds, ones that have any first-come-first-served spots, and ones that are a reasonable distance away. The instant availability of the entire internet means I’m constantly researching the options trying to find the best one, wasting hours and getting frustrated in the process. You can’t comparison shop on a map. Cool.

 

Later that night, after doing a load of laundry, packing up, setting the alarm for 5:30 AM (I’m a little anxious about those first-come-first-serve spots), I started looking up hikes and things to do around Seattle. That’s when I started looking up photos of the hikes on Instagram (Thanks guys for Places search!) I started losing my mind in excitement. Washington’s mountains look so majestic, so large and numerous, so accessible and well documented, I was left in a bit of a state of shock. Jealous of Seattleites and longing for some deeper connection to the mountains, I decided to try solo backpacking for one night along one of the popular hikes. This is not an entirely straightforward proposition though, seeing as I have a major release coming up in 3 weeks that I’ve been slaving at for months, so having an active internet connection is important, and I’ve never done an individual backpacking trip before, so there’s that anxiety, but on a popular trail, in a popular area, for one night…I should be fine.

—

It didn’t take long for me to get out of bed, still riding that wave of excitement. Quietly left Tom’s apartment and made my way to the van which was conveniently parked right outside a Safeway. A quick supply run later, I had an audiobook going, the engine running, and my tank half full. We’re on, baby!

 

Leaving Portland due west on the 30, I passed by a large forest on my left, and a river to my right. This being 6:30 AM, there wasn’t much traffic, so I was making good time. The road turned right, I crossed the bridge and was back on my way north.

 

It was surprising to me how quickly I was able to get outside Portland and find myself in the open country again. On either side of me, large factories, pillars of steam rising, and piles of timber lay as far as I can see. All along the drive north, timber seems to be the regional industry of note, and every pile makes me a little sad. I’ll have to read that Wikipedia page when I get some internet. Presumably, our sustainability and conservation history plays a role in ensuring we don’t wipe out the Redwoods, and as a city slicker like myself, I don’t know the first thing about the timber industry. It seems to employ most people in the little towns I drive through on the byways, and the subculture of wood carvings and trinkets line the outside of the rest stops and walls of the diners.

 

An hour or so into the drive, I pull over into a diner on the side of the road for some coffee and breakfast. The first thing you see when you walk in isn’t wood panelling with rustic bar stools. It’s a wall of gum and rolling hot dogs with a bored clerk in front of a wall of cigarettes. You see, this is a combination Gas Station and Diner. First one I’ve seen! Sure enough, the bar stools were attached to the side, I grabbed one, and my exquisitely mulleted waitress got me my menu and coffee and off I was doing my usual let’s-read-everything-twice-and-just-get-two-eggs-and-sausage routine. Next to me, two self-proclaimed regulars sat down and started chatting. It was actually really nice to see it, they were older, but they were heckling the waitress and she was heckling right back as if they were in a redneck Cheers revival. “…Wifi stopped working…called them, got some foreigner. Couldn’t understand a damned word she was sayin!” “Only in America.” Yeah. Only in America. 

—

At some point, I crossed into Washington. I wasn’t sure when that happened, maybe when I crossed the bridge? It’s not totally clear to me. In any case, the byway was almost empty the entire drive, I got into my campsite, nobody was there, I went to pay, and discovered, much to my joy, that it was free! (Well, the pass I had to buy cost $30), but it was nice! Unfortunately, there’s no service here in the campsite, and I’ve been working for a few hours making filters.

 

Tomorrow I’m driving early to Olympic National Park, and hopefully going on a nice long hike. Hopefully I can catch some REM cycles despite the ATVs and gunshots nearby. What is it with gun ranges and ATVs and campgrounds here?