52Frames – 2021-44 – Shot with a Phone

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A Fujifilm XT-30 mirrorless camera and a Pentax K-1 II DSRL, side by side on a blue mat.

You know what’s the worst timing? Getting a brand new camera, and having the same week “Shot with a Phone” as the weekly theme for 52Frames.

On the other hand, I get to show off my new camera, and the size difference with my lovely, lovely Pentax Monster. The new camera is the Fuji on the left; it’s an XT-30 II with a 18-135 lens attached to it. That whole setup is lighter than the Pentax body, and the lens of the Pentax is again as heavy, so…

I got the Fuji as a more compact, more transportable “travel camera”, and today was the first day I properly tested it. I’m happy to report that it is, so far, meeting my expectations: I like the interface (and the two control dials ❤️, and all the proper mechanical controls ❤️) except for a couple of minor things that feel more like a question of habit than anything else. It also has some neat features such as a panorama mode, that works pretty well (but seems to take a toll on the battery). I have a first set of pictures here: Fuji XT30 Test Walk in Zürich – 2021-10.

Oh, and regarding the picture for this week’s 52Frames – it was also an opportunity for me to test the new masking features of the latest version of Lightroom. ‘Cuz the initial picture was this:

And, honestly, it’s pretty good – may avoid a few roundtrips through Photoshop in the future, which I’m quite happy about.

52Frames – 2021-40 – Dreamscape

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Dreamscape”, with an extra credit for “Nightmare”. I was fairly uninspired, until I saw on the window Pierre’s DOOM plush toys, and went “mmmmh.”

The idea I went with was to try and get these two evil blobs in some kind of corridor, and I was thinking initially of slapping a green filter on it and be done, mostly. I fetched a box in the basement (we happened to have a box of a very good size for my purposes!), and opening the back felt like it was giving me the feeling of DOOM walls, so I kept it that way. I lit the image with a green lume cube, and used one of the other sides of the box as a barn door to get a shadow, again reminiscing of how I remember the lights in DOOM (not necessarily the color, but the angles). For the record, this was the SOOC picture:

I did a few fixes to make the box sliiightly less obvious; I also played with the “wave” filter in Photoshop, because that felt appropriate for the theme. And, while I’ve been grumbling a lot about the theme this week, I actually like that picture a lot – it makes me smile! 🙂

Cool stuff

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How D&D classes use a bow [short video] – I laughed a lot. Absolutely relevant to WoW players too.

eatyourbooks [service] – a (paying) service that allows you to give a list of your cookbooks and to get a proper searchable index (often better than the books themselves) on indexed cookbooks. Not all books are indexed, but the popular ones definitely are. The interface is a bit…. quirky, but the service is very useful to me.

The Wheel Of Time – Official Teaser Trailer [short video] – I am VERY MUCH looking forward to this. The trailer is gorgeous.

Nanowar Of Steel – La Polenta Taragnarock [short video] – hilarious AND an earworm, what more do you want?

The YouTube channel of Sebastian Lague – this person does super nice coding demos (often Unity-based) on various topics, and it’s both very interesting and quite soothing in a Bob Ross way 😉 I particularly enjoyed his Procedural Planet Generation videos!

The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time [text, music] – Rolling Stone made a pretty cool playlist there – I need to update my culture a bit, there are some I don’t know (or that I don’t know I know 🙂 )

Alpha Earth from space [photos] – Thomas Pesquet’s photographs from the ISS are beautiful – and span a lot of places!

3 Unbelievable LEGO Creations [short video] – this comes from a channel called “Brick Bending” – so….. considered yourself warned. But this made me audibly gasp 😀

Is Becky Chambers the Ultimate Hope for Science Fiction? [text]- I absolutely adore Becky Chambers’ work, and this piece that talks about her, her works, and tea, was a heartwarming read. And I love that the first picture of the article is so close from my brain image of her last book!

Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA [text]- a report of a proof of concept that admittedly takes a lot of shortcuts/cheats, but the idea is fantastic and very much into the sci-fi domain. The necessity of input sanitation apparently includes whatever you put in your DNA sequencer 😀

52Frames – 2021-39 – Daily Habit

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Daily Habit” with an extra credit for “First Person View”. I’m not very good at daily habits these days, but the one thing I manage to do consistently is taking my thyroid hormone supplement first thing in the morning, and more than half an hour before breakfast. And the best way I found to manage to do that is to put it on top of my phone when I plug it in for the night – so one of my daily habits is doing exactly that!

I kept the picture simple: this is literally how it looks in the evening on my desk, with the light coming from the light suspension in the office. I kept the exposure on the lower side because it’s late, and I emphasized that with a bit of vignetting.

52Frames – 2021-38 – Curves

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “Curves”. I coincidentally received a bunch of small ovoid polished stones this week (props for another project!); after playing with them for a little while I got the idea of organizing them along a sinusoidal curve.

I had first printed said curve ; I then realized I could use my tablet as a background to set them up and shut down the tablet, which would avoid a significant amount of postprocessing clean-up. Assembling the stones over the tablet ended up being fiddlier than expected (these things apparently CAN be detected as fingers when moving them around… annoying!), which means the setup is not perfect (and I was too lazy to fix in post) – but that’s one more week in the box 🙂

52Frames – 2021-36 – Woman

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames is “Woman”, with an extra-credit of “Environmental Portrait”. So…. here, you see a Balise in her natural habitat – that’s my home office desk, with a tiny bit of clearing up/staging 😉 but otherwise reasonably realistic! It probably lacks a mug of coffee, but I wasn’t about to make myself coffee at the time I took this picture 🙂

And the advantage of working in a free software context is that I don’t have much to hide on my monitors – not that anything is actually much visible either, but eh 🙂

In praise of “I don’t know”

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“I don’t know” is often hard to admit, and even harder to say. Professional or personal circumstances may make that even more difficult.

You may be arriving in a new environment, and be tired that “I don’t know” is every second sentence you want to say.

You may be an expert on a subject, and feel like “I don’t know” undermines your expertise.

You may worry that your “I don’t know” might be used against a larger group of people you belong to.

XKCD – How It Works

You may be afraid of repercussions of your “I don’t know” if you feel this is something that you should know.

You may have issues with imposter syndrome, and fear that “I don’t know” brings you that much closer to being exposed as a fraud (to be clear: that you are not!).

Your personal history may cause “I don’t know” to give rise to fear, anxiety, guilt, shame, or other difficult emotions in you.

But “I don’t know” is a powerful sentence, and the louder it gets, the more powerful it becomes.

Admitting “I don’t know” to yourself unlocks the possibility of learning.

Admitting “I don’t know” to select others unlocks the possibility of getting taught – and to be part of “today’s 10’000”!

XKCD – 10 Thousands

Admitting “I don’t know” to a larger audience unlocks the possibility of fostering a culture of continuous learning, where future “I don’t know”s become all the easier for everyone.

When it stems from a genuine desire to learn, “I don’t know” should be celebrated, and being the recipient of that vulnerability and trust is a privilege, regardless of one’s readiness to teach. Let’s be inspired, and celebrate that learning often starts with “I don’t know”!