Cost of creating

I spent most of my working life in what is said called, somewhat overly grandly, “creative industries”. In my case, it was doing design and layout of ads, newspapers, magazines, and various other printed materials. I’ve owned products by Adobe for years—right up until they stopped selling the software and instead made users subscribe to their “Adobe Creative Cloud”—at fees that keep going up. We had no other choice than to accept that because the software was vital to do our jobs. I’m not sure that’s true any more.

Now that I’m not working anymore, it doesn’t make sense for me to pay nearly $100 (roughly $US60) a month so Adobe will allow me to use the software. To be clear, I DO still use their software: I use Photoshop to prepare all the photos I post to this blog, I use Illustrator to create things like album art for some episodes of my podcast, and I use InDesign for general layout work, including all the labels I made for my pantry reorganisation. I’m really glad I have the software when I meed it, but am I nearly $100 a month glad?

Last year, I started researching alternatives to Adobe. At the time, Affinity was highly rated and cost less to buy permanently than paying for only three months of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Last year, Affinity’s publisher was aquired by Canva, an Australian-own software company whose site, Canva, is used by people to creat visual assets, like title cards for YouTube videos. Affinity is now “freemium”, but a paid subsription is needed to access AI features (Adobe also offers AI features).

Today I got an email from Apple about their new subscription service, Creator Studio. Some of the programmes are more powerful versions of their free software, like Final Cut Pro to replace iMovie, and Logic Pro to replace Garage Band, but everything seems to have added other things under the paid model, including—surprise!—AI features. Apple also promises to protect users’ privacy.

The various parts of the “suite” can also be purchased separately, basically like all software used to be. As is often the case with Apple, subscription pricing is—interesting. Here in New Zealand, users can pay $24.99 per month ($US15.08), or $249 annually ($US150.30), which is like getting two months for free. This is a fraction of what Adobe charges, but that assumes the Suite is comparable. However: In the USA, Apple charges users US$12.99 (NZ$21.52) per month, or US$129 ($NZ213.72) per year. As usual, in other words, Apple charges overseas users more than it charges users in the USA for something entirely digital.

At the moment, I don’t have a solution to entirely replace the Adobe software I’ve depended on for decades. Rightnow, I think it may turn out that “good enough” will have to be enough. I hjave a lot more research to do. All of which means this is yet another project for this year.

Photographic reality

It won’t surprise anyone that uses social media, but social media isn’t reality. There are all sorts of ways in which that’s true, but maybe the photos and videos shared are the best example of that. But, it doesn’t have to be.

I recently watched a YouTube video by a photographer who was talking about how people aren’t taking photos for the fun of it like they used to, and how so many people now only share photos to reflect a sort of curated reality, what they want their life to look like to others. Put another way, rather than showing what is, they share what we want they their life to look like.

I thought the photographer’s larger point—that we should all do more creative stuff for the fun of it, that we should take photos of things that speak to us, that we think are beautiful, that make us happy, whatever, rather than just trying to present a curated version of reality. That much I totally agree with.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that there are any users of social media who don’t understand that folks—especially “influencers”—share things that present them and their lives in the best possible way, and may never share “real” glimpses of their “real” lives. If I'm correct that people do know that, then does it really matter if some people only share highly curated glimpses of their lives?

Naturally, this made me question myself—not a new thing for me, of course. I sometimes share photos on social media, and regardless of subject, I share the best version of that photo (and I usually take several shots of the same photo to give me options). The photos I share are real, but by no means perfect, though as a former professional in printing and publishing, when I look at photos I’ve shared, I often wish I’d taken the time to touch up the photo.

Selfies are harder for me, but I still don’t try to present “perfection”. Instead, instead I usually try to take a lighthearted approach, or else take a photo with Leo so his cuteness can draw the viewer’s attention. That sort of insecurity is probably the best reason why I could never be an “influencer”.

And yet, I reflected back on my photos and wondered if maybe even my photos were too “perfect”, even though they were never actually perfect. Last Friday, I decided I wanted fried eggs on toast for my brunch, and as I always do, I cracked the eggs into small ramekins so I can easily pour them into the pan (same with poached eggs). Not only is it easier, I can also change plans one or both yolks break. That happened on Friday.

When I cracked the second egg (it’s always the second egg…), the yolk broke. I put that egg into a container for the next day, cracked another egg—and that yolk broke, too. I decided to fry them anyway. The photo up top is the result, and it’s similar to the sort of photo I might’ve share if both eggs had been perfect—but I wouldn’t have shared it precisely because it wasn’t perfect. I instantly realised that, and took the photo, anyway, because no one is perfect 100% of the time, and maybe it really is better to be honest about that.

The next morning I took that egg I’d set aside, added another egg (the yolk of which didn’t break…) and made scrambled eggs because I decided I wanted a scrambled egg sandwich for my brunch, rather than eggs on toast. When I make that I put a little mustard on it and some tomato sauce (aka ketchup). And that led to a problem.

Many years ago, Nigel and I started using a squeeze bottle that we could pour the canned refills into (for so we could fill it with two cans and not have to refill it as often). When I opened the little cap on top, the tomato sauce shot out the top (it was under a bit of pressure for some reason). By accident, I noticed that by accident—which was fortunate!)—that the sauce hit the kitchen ceiling (photo at right; it cleaned off easily). It struck me that it was another bit of reality that most people would never take a photo of, much less share, and that just slotted into my thinking about how reality and what we share online are often very different things.

I’m absolutely not judging people for what they share or don’t share, and since I don’t strive for perfection in the photos I share, I’m unlikely to change much, if anything. As it happens, the VAST majority of the photos I take are of things that interest me, scenes I think are pretty, or maybe things I want to remember later (like where I parked in a large and unfamiliar carpark so I can find my car later). And yet, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for us to pause and consider how “real” the photos we share really are?

In the case of the two photos in this post, they’re no more “real” than other photos I share, but they are ones I wouldn’t necessarily share were I not making a point of sharing harsh reality. Maybe “real enough” really is enough.

Photo stories

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the old adage puts put it, and it’s meant to describe how much easier it is to convey information (and, by extension, meaning) through images rather than words. The advertising industry alone certainly suggests that’s true. At the same time, though, images can also have their own stories. This post is about exactly that.

I’ve said many times that most of my photos have stories behind them, something I mentioned most recently back on March 5 . Sometimes, though, the story is about the HOW of the photo, how I took it, whether technically or even just what I was going for.

The photo up top is an example of that. On the surface, it’s just a photo of Leo being cute, something that was underscored by the caption I gave it when I shared it on social media: “Leo promises he’s not judging you—he’s just basking in the sun.” That was true—he really was basking—but the first part was because he looked kind of like he was judging me. The story behind it is that I got down on the floor to take the photo from a low angle—his height—rather than from above as I ordinarily might do. Choosing the best angle for a photo often takes experimentation—like, for example, taking several photos from different positions. I mean, Leo’s cute regardless, but taking the photo from a more equal position that improves it, I think, like we’re entering his world for a moment.

Next is a photo I took a couple days earlier, but never shared online:

In this photo, Leo was laying on the back of the sofa, his favourite spot in the daytime because he can look at the world outside. For this photo, I used the “Portrait” setting on my phone which adds background blur (probably by reducing the depth of field). Technically, this is known as bokeh, and it’s kind of difficult to do on phones, which for the post part are “point and shoot” cameras (there are exceptions, and manual configurations are possible if one wants to learn the techniques). I never shared this photo on social media because the Portrait setting produced a photo in which Leo was quite dark—in shadow, actually—because of the window behind him. I had to adjust the light balance, something I find much easier to do on my Mac using Photoshop rather than the Photos app on my devices.

Finally, two more photos of Leo that I shared on social media on Sunday, March 17:

When I shared the two photos, I described them as “My boy and one of his toys,” and I said that Leo has for or five toys five he plays with the most often, and his toy bone is one of his top three. For the first of the two photos, just above, I again got down on the floor, this time on one knee, and lowered the phone until the bottom of the photo was just a bit below the top of the sofa cushion Leo was laying on. I liked the way his paw was on his toy bone, and the way the midday light from the window shone on him. There really wasn’t anything more to it than that.

The other photo I shared on March 17 (at left in the two-photo montage below) is one I actually took the previous evening, and in it Leo is standing on the sofa arm and I was sitting in my chair—roughly at the same level as him. I took it because I’d never seen Leo hold his toy bone like that before, going backwards from his mouth. It was a straightforward photo—and one I took vertically, not square as I normally do, so I could be sure to get the whole picture. However, I also took another one in Portrait mode (at right in the montage below), and that didn’t work: The photo focused on part of his toy bone, leave the rest of him blurry. This is why I don’t rely on Portrait mode—or any other automatic setting, for that matter. Instead, I try take several versions and I pick the best of them to share—if I share any at all.

What all this really means is that getting photos WE’RE happy with is about trial and error, using different techniques, different camera settings, different angles, etc., and see what we get. Fortunately, modern digital photography makes this extremely easy to do.

I’m definitely not qualified to comment on the technical or artistic merits of anyone’s photos (including my own), but I know this one thing: When it comes to our personal photos, what matters is that we like them. If we choose to share them online, and others also like them, too, that’s a bonus—but we have to please ourselves first.

I often share what I did to get a particular photo that I liked for the very same reason I share all sorts of things online: Because it may help someone else working on the same things (in this case, getting better photos). Seems to me that’s one of the best uses for the Internet. And in this case, it's a great reason to take more photos, too.

Looking up

I’ve shared a lot of photos of the sky since I moved into my house in Hamilton. It’s not that I didn’t notice a pretty sky before, though maybe I notice it more often now. Instead, the vast improvement in the iPhone camera has made my photos so much better, especially at night. It’d be rude not to share them.

The photo above was the sky above my neighbourhood a week ago tonight, something I saw when I took the recycling out to the kerb. When I shared it on my personal Facebook, I said: “Went to put the recycling out before going to bed and, as usual, I looked up. Those white dots are stars, of course.”

Someone asked me if I was sure it wasn’t a Starlink satellite, and I wasn’t—though I’ve since found a site that tracks the satellites’ positions around the globe (one can rotate the globe to look in a specific region). However, my understanding is that once they’re in position they turn their shiny side away from earth, though I don’t know that for certain. In any case, the stars are quite bright in the sky overhead, possibly because this part of Hamilton isn’t very built up.

Three days (well, nights…) later, I let Leo outside and noticed the moonlight. I went outside, looked up, and the photo below shows what I saw. The moon would appear through the clouds from time to time, but because the exposure is a long one, that’s not what I captured: The clouds were moving too quickly. Even so, I love this photo, too.

I always knew that if I tapped on a spot in the image on my phone’s screen. The cameras would focus on that spot, however, I recently learned that if I put my finger on a particular spot and hold it there for a couple seconds, the iPhone camera will lock on that spot. That’s really helpful for night photography because the low light requires a longer exposure. The thing is, though, I’m pretty sure this is the first time I thought to do that for a nighttime photo, even though it was so obvious (or, maybe it being obvious is why I didn’t think of doing it?).

I never shared the photo below anywhere before because I’d shared a night sky photo only a few days earlier. The good thing about having a blog, though, is that I can share the two of them together. And so I have, along with the story behind them.

Sometimes I think I share too many photos of the sky since above my neighbourhood, but to be completely honest, it’s the most attractive thing about the area where I live: Right now, we have no parks, no interesting walks, nothing particularly pretty or that's interesting to me except, sometimes, for the sky. Sure, I noticed pretty skies before, but the vast improvement in the iPhone camera has made me so more likely to share photos of the sky precisely because they’re so much better. It’d be rude not to share them.

Story depiction

All photos tell stories, one way or another. Sometimes we may try to make photos tell a specific story, or part of one, and that may or may not work. Or maybe both? As I recently discovered.

I took the photo above Tuesday afternoon because I had an idea for photo to go with my post on the tenth anniversary of when Nigel and I were married . I decided against using it, however, and instead used the same photo I have in previous years, partly in order to keep consistency with my earlier posts, and also because I felt the older photo better depicted what the anniversary was about.

My idea for the new photo was that it depict a contemplative me, because contemplative and reflective are two of the best words to describe my mood and thinking over the past week or so, and that reality was at the core of Tuesday’s post. I also wanted to appear more or less casual, and I wanted my marriage and civil union rings to be visible, too, mainly because they directly related to the post. I was seated in my chair and looking out the front window at the only tree on the street I can easily see from my house (I included a photo with that tree and a rainbow in a blog post back in September).

I’m the first to admit that what I intend for my photos doesn’t always work, but I think this one is pretty close to what I wanted. However, I realised that it wasn’t going to work because it was about me, and I staged it to make it related to the post.

I finished the first draft of my post and went to have some dinner. As I watched the evening news, I began to think again about using a photo of me, and the result was the photo at the bottom of this post. I took a framed set of three photos from our marriage, ten years earlier to the day, and held the frame to avoid the photo of the family at the bottom of the frame showing (because I don’t normally share photos of them). I got the idea for it from a post I did in 2021 for Nigel’s 57th birthday, and I thought the framed photos from our marriage day might work. For the record, the top photo was right after the Registrar declared us married, and the middle one was as we were signing the official paperwork.

By the time I took that, the daylight was fading, which is why I have a slightly grumpy look on face, though I was actually intently staring at the screen: With the light fading, I had to hold my phone still while its electronic brain took a longer exposure to process and brighten. I then took a bunch more, including some where my rings were visible, however, some were slightly out of focus (I’d moved too much), or else my expression made me look positively pissed-off. This was the point I gave up the idea and went and finished the post using the same photo as I have in the past. I realised this was for the best. After all, it’s not the sort of anniversary I’d normally take a selfie on, anyway.

Nearly all of my photos, especially the ones I share here, have some sort of story, like why I took it, how I took it, what I was trying to depict, etc. These two photos are the same, however, there’s an unusual added story to them in that I had an idea and tried to make it work, only to finally accept it wouldn’t because the photos wouldn’t fit perfectly with the post—they’d have partly worked, sure, but not perfectly. Had it been any sort of ordinary post, it probably wouldn’t have mattered‚ and I may have used one. But while anniversary posts like Tuesday’s may be common because they’re annual, for me they’re very different, and I alter my story-telling rules and expectations accordingly.

Sometimes I try to make photos tell a specific story, or part of one, and that may or may not work. This experience reminded me that both can be true of the same photo. It’s not the first time, and certainly won’t be the last, that I abandoned ideas for a photo for a blog post, but I think it probably took me quite a bit longer this time to reach that decision. This makes perfect sense: It’s an indication of how much the anniversary itself means to me.

Still, it wasn't for nothing. I decided to use that photo up top as my new Facebook Profile photo. For now.

When the arc appears

Every once in a while, we may be confronted with an awareness of how the arc of change in our lives shifted us in new directions. Yesterday, I faced exactly that when Facebook served up a “Memory” (image above. When I shared it on Facebook, I said:

This is so interesting to me: Back then, I brought an actual camera with me to take photos, though it was digital, of course (Nigel and I were early adopters and had been using them for MANY years by then). Nowadays, I exclusively use my phone—and have for at least six or seven years (with very rare exceptions, chiefly for digitising old photos). This is one of a handful of areas where I can actually map out my own shift in the use of technology.

In that Memory, I was talking about some trips I’d made around Auckland that month, and I took photos that I shared on this blog (a list of the posts I think I was talking about in 2009 is at the bottom of this post). In those days, I used a digital camera because I didn’t yet have a smart phone (the iPhone was released on 29 June 2007, a little more than two years earlier). We had several different cameras over the years, and as far as I can remember, the first time I ever took one somewhere to take a photo was around 2000 or 2001—though that probably wasn’t the first time I ever took a digital photo. So much time has passed, though, that I simply can’t remember for sure, and, anyway, most of us aren’t paying attention to the shifts in our own personal technology.

I remember feeling very uncomfortable taking photos in public back in those days, partly because some of the cameras had the sound of a shutter that couldn’t be turned off, as it can now with smartphones. A bigger issue for me in those early days was that the general public wasn’t as used to seeing people taking photos of anything and everything; I wasn’t, either. Facebook had only been available to the general public since May 2006, and Twitter began in March. MySpace had been around since 2003, but people shared other stuff, and was pretty much over by 2007. Instagram wouldn’t begin until 2010.

All of which means that in 2009, I was still getting used to taking random photos, and was barely even starting to share them, However, in addition to this blog, I also shared the photos I was referring to in the “Memory” on my Flickr account. The service launched in 2004, was bought by Yahoo in 2005, acquired by Verizon in 2017 when it bought Yahoo, then sold to SmugMug in 2018. The current owners announced restrictions related to space in early 2019, but by that time I was already using Instagram to share photos. Besides, I was quite busy in 2019, what with turning 60 and… everything.

In the early years of my photo taking, the quality of the photos taken with a smartphone wasn’t even nearly as good as could be taken with one of our digital cameras. Over time, I started using my phone more than camera, especially because I always had my phone with me, and I had to plan to bring a camera along. My deliberate exclusive use of my phone really took off in February 2016 when I did my ”Nature Photo A Day 2016” series of posts. It was the first time I tried to use my phone’s camera to for more serious photography, something I’ve been working on ever since—helped along by constantly improving camera technology in my phones.

When Nigel and I went to the USA in 1997 and 1999, we used a film camera. In the 1999 trip, we also used a video camera that recorded on mini-VHS cassettes. I still have those cameras. I also still have the camera I used for the photos I took in 2009, and another, better camera that Nigel bought maybe a few months later (maybe longer), he after researched to find the best possible camera we could afford. I also have an even older digital camera that we once used a lot, along with two different digital video cameras. Maybe some day I’ll do a sort of “show and tell” post about all that history.

The thing is 2009, I wasn’t even remotely aware of how I was in the midst of an evolution in how I shot photos and videos. In 1999, I was still shooting film photos and our video recorder used tape. By 2009, I’d completed the move from still film cameras to fully digital, and was also in the midst of moving there with video, too. Ten years after that, in 2019, I was not only fully digital for everything, I was also using my phone exclusively.

That Facebook “Memory” yesterday helped me be fully aware of the arc of change in my life, and how it shifted me in new technological directions. I love when that happens.

Related

”Walking the street: Along Karangahape Road” – 12 September 2009
”On Broadway (Auckland)” – 9 September 2009
”Auckland View: Birkenhead Shops” – 5 September 2009 (photo taken 4 September)

Stabilising goals

The image above is a Facebook “Memory” that popped up today, as it does every year on this date. I blogged about the story behind it back in 2021, but what I didn’t talk about back then (or very often) is that the goal for that stabiliser is one that’s still not realised. I often wonder if it ever will be.

That stabiliser wasn’t exactly cheap, though less expensive than a good oue would’ve been, and that’s the reason I was so determined to get it working—and why I still haven’t given up on it. However, not being able to use it didn’t stop me from taking photos, many of which were to illustrate blog posts. None of them needed that stabiliser, of course.

In 2015, I started making some YouTube videos, and the stabiliser would’ve been handy for some of them. I might have eventually worked it out, but in October 2016 I stopped making any videos. I always intended to make more, but just never did.

At that time, I had plans to make a portable studio for the garage, and was researching lighting options. However, in February of 2017, we moved to the other end of Auckland, along the southern edge of the Manukau Harbour, and there was too much work to do to settle into the new house.

Even so, I continued making plans for a garage studio, and in March 2019 I refurbished some old worklights that I planned to use for photography and video lighting. Nigel and I used them to take photos for some stuff we were selling on NZ’s auction site, Trade Me.

Then, of course, all my plans stopped on September 20, 2019.

Once I was here in my current house, I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and I knew whatever it was, it would include all sorts of creative work. The various Covid lockdowns gave me plenty of time to work on ideas and plans, including for making videos again.

In October 2021, a couple months after I blogged about that Facebook “Memory”, I ordered some studio lights from a photography supply company in Auckland, along a light cube (basically a small collapsible cube used for taking photos of objects). I planned to use both for photos, and the lights (possibly?) for making videos. In the end, the only thing I’ve used them for (so far…) was—once again—to take photos of things I was selling on Trade Me.

In that same era, I also got a ring light, which are used for vlog-style videos, selfies, and video conferencing (I used it for the latter, a family night on Zoom during a Covid lockdown). More recently, I bought a rig to hold a cellphone, something that gives me two handles on either side of my phone, something that makes it more stable than holding the phone by itself using one hand—or even two. Since phones’ video recording includes image stabilisation, the rig gives me just enough stability to make the image appear as if it my phone was on a tripod—well, it did in my tests, anyway. The rig also has a tripod mount and can accept “cold shoe” camera lights (this means lights that don’t get power from a camera), and I bought a pair of battery-powered lights for it, and all of that was pretty inexpensive.

Meanwhile, I also shortened the length of my audio podcasts, trying to keep them to around 18 minutes or less. My idea was that if I could shorten the podcast episodes, I could record them as video to upload to my YouTube Channel, and also post the audio as I always have. The videos have never happened, obviously, but my audio podcast has become weekly, which I think happened in part because I started making them shorter.

All of this lighting and other filming gear was always about making videos again—in fact, that’s the only thing a stabiliser is used for (nearly all the other equipment I bought could be used for photography, too, or it was usable only for photos). I’d enjoyed making videos for the time I did, and I thought I’d like to see if I could get good at it.

More recently, it became obvious to me that what many people now perceive of as a “podcast” is in video format, not audio, and audio-only podcasts have become kind of a quaint relic in some ways. I watched various YouTubers to get a sense of how they did what they do, but I noticed that much of what they did was about “monetising” their channels, which allows them to make a living from YouTube, something that was never my goal (not the least because it would mean paying tax on the income to two countries, along with twice the compliance costs). As it happens, YouTube places ads in front of some of my videos right now, but I don’t get a single cent of that—YouTube gets all of the money (my Channel isn’t even eligible to be monetised at the moment). I think it’s funny how much time I spent entertaining the idea of trying to make money from my videos while YouTube already was—but just for Google, not for me!

I still have no idea whether I’ll resume making videos of any sort, but my equipment has been, and will continue to be, useful for photos. For me, right now, that’s enough. I guess there’s stability in that, too.

Autumnal realities

It’s autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, and the weather in Hamilton is clearly begining to shift toward late autumn. Currently, there’s still nearly 11 hours of daylight, however, due to the move bach to NZ Standard Time earlier this month, sunset is now around 5:45pm, and the light starts dimming before that. Since the sun is also getting lower in the sky, afternoon sun streaming in the windows on the Western side of my house begins to end a few hours before that. All of that is normal, obviously, and I notice the shortening days around this time every year. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The photo above is a tree on my street, and it’ll soon have no leaves. The photo below is of some leaves on my lawn—fortunately that’s about as bad as it gets, really, probably because there just aren’t than many trees in this neighbourhood. I was actually kind of surprised that the trees didn’t start turning colour earlier, but I’ve noticed that once it starts, it doesn’t take long for this tree, at least, to lose all its leaves (I don't watch all the trees in the area…).

The last two months of summer were WET, and the cleanup from the January and February storms still isn’t finished. However, in March, this area had less rainfall that usual—a chance to dry out? Well, yeah, but over the past couple months we’ve had some rainy periods and times with very heavy rain—just not as much as at the end of summer. April has seemed quite rainy (or, at least, cloudy and gloomy) a lot of the time, but in another ten days we’ll find out how rainy April really was: NIWA (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) releases monthly climate summaries online.

Rainy weather, or even cloudy days that seem to threaten to become rainy, are really only a potential problem for me because they can delay my lawn mowing. On the other hand, the gradually lowering daytime temperatures and reducing daylight hours mean the lawns don’t grow as quickly, so cloudy and/or rainy days aren’t all that bad (aside from being inherently depressing when they go on any on…). Soon I’ll be mowing every two or three weeks instead of weekly. This is a good thing.

Not a good thing is the fact that we’re now only about two months away from the shortest day of the year—definitely not a good thing. It’ll soon get dark early and cold at night, and I’m not a fan of either—maybe I should live close to the Equator?

I know plenty of people who seem to love autumn, but I’ve never been one of them. Summer’s my favourite season, though I don’t mind early Autumn or late Spring because both can be at least somewhat summery. Right now, we’re still in mid-ish Autumn, and the weather is still kind of summery-ish. That’ll be gone by this time next month as we slide toward Winter. The trees will be bare and the days shorter still.

Yes, all of these Autumnal changes are normal, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Clearly, I don’t.

Good day delivered

The other day I made a sarcastic post on my personal Facebook (image above). I joked about shopping, both about how those of us in Auckland and parts of the Waikato can’t go into shops, and also about how anything we order online can take forever to get to us. Today I had a shock: Stuff I ordered from Photoshack in Auckland Thursday evening was delivered today. This morning I thought about checking the shipping status (they emailed me the tracking number yesterday), but I thought, “What’s the point? It’ll still be stuck in Auckland.” Yeah, well, certainly got that wrong (and happy about it).

Earlier in the week, I’d ordered something from a different shop in Auckland (for a project I’ll talk about in due course), and a couple days later they emailed me with a projected delivery “date”: Mid-November. While that’s unusually long, it didn’t surprise me, either. But the long shipping time for that order is part of what inspired my sarcastic post.

The truth is, though, that these are the only two orders I’ve placed in quite awhile: Most of the time I just close the tab in my browser without ordering anything. I haven’t even been able to get motivated to order anything by click and collect from the home centres, even though if I did I could get a bit done on my projects outside. It’s the shipping delays that cause me to not order for delivery, and the overwhelming boredom of Lockdown makes me feel like I just can’t be bothered doing click and collect. Different reasons, same result.

This is all related to widespread shipping and delivery problems, like the ones I faced last month. The problems aren’t just about getting stuff from overseas, but even about getting stuff from one part of New Zealand—especially Auckland—to another part of New Zealand. It’s bad enough that yesterday “NZ Post [asked] customers to change how they shop” for Christmas. Against that backdrop, I didn’t expect such delivery, and certainly not overnight!

Now, about the order that arrived today: I ordered a pair of softbox lights with 2 metre (max height) stands. They’re used for soft, diffused lighting for photography and videos. I’ll definitely use them for photos (no more “make do” lights!), and if I ever do re-start making YouTube videos they’ll be very handy.

The other thing was a collapsible cube used for photographing objects (like products, still lifes, bowls of chicken soup…). It folds into its own carrying case (which is way cooler than it sounds). The cube has its own light diffusing panels so any white light can be used, including natural daylight, without it being too bright/glaring. It came with four pieces of fabric that attach at the front and curve up the back so there’s no back visible in the shot (it remains a true background). I’d looked at this sort of thing elsewhere, but they were always too small (this one is 60cm square by 60cm high). I’d planned on trying to repurpose bits and pieces that I have to kind of fake it, but I knew it wouldn’t be right, so I was putting off working on it. The thing I bought will be perfect for what I want, and it’s first job will be to help me take photos of some stuff I’m going to put on TradeMe to (try to) sell.

So, today I had a huge and very welcome surprise that will help me with several different things, including both stuff I want to do in the years ahead and also to advance the decluttering project here in the house. It turned out to be a very good day.

This is a revised and expanded version of something I posted to my personal Facebook this evening.

Random stabilised memory

This morning, Facebook served up a pretty random sort of “Memory” (image above), about the time I bought a stabiliser for my video camera. I never got it to work, partly because it was badly designed, and also because my camera was too light. So, I never made, let alone posted, any videos using it, and I posted my last YouTube video about four months before Nigel and I shifted to the last house we lived in together (oddly enough, that was also my most-viewed video by FAR, with some 15,000 views to date—I wonder how many of those were mine…).

The thing that’s odd about this Memory is that until I saw it today, I was sure Nigel bought it for me. Over the years, he bought me lots of things, especially equipment, to help me do creative stuff: Microphones and other equipment for podcasting, camera equipment, even computers & peripherals to help with literally everything I did. Maybe I only asked his opinion before I bought it? I know I asked him to see if he could make it work, since I couldn’t. Turned out, neither could he. I can still picture him walking around the house on Auckland’s North Shore, camera swinging around wildly as he moved.

Nigel almost never stopped me from buying equipment for my creative endeavours, not even when (I now realise) he should’ve. Maybe it was because I almost never talked him out of anything (except for when he wanted to buy a JetSki and, later, a motorcycle). Generally, if he wanted something for one of his projects or hobbies, I was all for it—and I’m now paying for that as I slog away in the garage. I don’t mind that, though: That stuff brought him a lot of joy over the years, and that made me happy, too.

However, I clearly remember one time a few years ago when he didn’t encourage me to get something, and it was a camera stabiliser. It was 2017, and we were in Australia for his sister’s birthday. We went to some sort of tech store (I don’t remember why) and they had a stabiliser on display. I didn’t notice until Nigel pointed it out and said how good it was. I always valued his judgment on such things, and him saying that something was good was always enough for me. But he kind of discouraged me getting it—I don’t know why, though he may have known he could get it cheaper, or maybe he wanted to get me one for my birthday. No idea. All I know for sure is that less than two years later he was dead, and I didn’t care about such gear anymore (I can’t even remember what brand the thing was).

I still struggle to meet my tech needs without him, which isn’t a surprise considering how much I still struggle in general without him. But tech stuff is by far the worst, actually, and it takes me much longer to figure out than I generally have patience for (which just adds more time onto the process, and so, adds more lost patience). Still, I always get there in the end, and that’s in no small measure because I had 24 years with the best teacher ever.

I never did get a camera stabiliser that works, and I don’t actually need one now. But every time I run across it in my box of camera-related equipment, I think of Nigel, and also how much I learned from him. That stabiliser never worked, but for it to still deliver those good and happy thoughts? It was worth every cent we paid.

This post is a revised and expanded version of what I wrote on my personal Facebook earlier today.

A photo’s secret tale

The office project has been turning up a lot of unexpected things, and one of those led to a something I haven’t mentioned before: My post yesterday had an unannounced extra, hidden feature: The photo.

That photo was taken with the macro lens of the Ztylus lens kit that Nigel and I got for our phones back in 2018, around ten months before he died. The journey to get to that point was a bit of a twisting road, though.

The first problem was that, quite frankly, I misplaced my lens kit at the old house and didn’t find it again until I began unpacking boxes this past week. Actually, I think it may have been the same day I found that formerly “missing” knife.

Another problem was that it requires a special case on the phone, and I didn’t have one for my current phone. That’s because last year the battery on my iPhone 6 suddenly died, and I needed a phone with my phone number. I went to the technology store I’ve mentioned several times and found the cheapest new iPhone model they had, which at that time was the 7. I planned on upgrading my phone, and I didn’t want to invest in an expensive phone right then. The bigger issue was that at that time I was still having trouble with my patience and tolerance for frustration, and back then I just couldn’t deal with working out what the best newer phone model would be, not when I had no phone (this was before my Internet was connected, so I relied on my phone for Internet connection).

So, I bought an iPhone 7 and got it all set up the same day—something I’d never done before because Nigel always took care of that for me. I had to learn how to put my SIM into it, transfer my data, and so on (fortunately, I had a recent back-up on my MacBook, so I didn’t really lose any data.

Nigel had an iPhone 6 that he replaced with an iPhone 8 when his phone’s battery died (the 6 was notorious for its terrible battery longevity). It was after that when we got our Ztylus lens kits and the specific covers for our phones. When I changed phones, my old cover no longer fit my phone.

This wasn’t a huge problem because I didn’t know where my either of our lens kits were, so I couldn’t use one, anyway. However, I still have Nigel’s phone, so I thought maybe I’d just use that one for photos, because I didn’t want to buy a cover for my phone when I didn’t plan on keeping it forever.

While I was moving stuff out of my office wardrobe, I came across the box for Nigel’s phone cover and found out it was for an iPhone 7 or 8. In other words, I could put his phone cover on my phone, and that meant I could use the lens kit again for the first time in a couple years. The photo with yesterday’s post was that first photo, and doing that made me happy.

I guess the question, though, is what to do with Nigel’s phone. I kept his phone number active, at first in case anyone tried to reach him who hadn’t heard he’d died (like, say, a former colleague he didn’t talk to very often). Later, I planned on using that as my personal phone and using mine for “work”, including podcasting. It turned out that I didn’t need to do that, though it’s still an option.

The plan was to buy an iPhone 12, which allows dual SIMs, meaning I could have one phone with two numbers, but, again, the question is, why? I assume that both SIMs have to be on the same network, which isn’t a big deal, though they aren’t at the moment. It’s really that having two monthly plans is expensive, particularly because I don’t need two sets of mobile data (not the least because the vast majority of my data usage is over wifi, anyway). I could probably put one of them on a prepay plan instead, because that’s much cheaper.

I’m nearly at the point where I could seriously consider just disconnecting Nigel’s phone, or, take it over as my phone—though mine is actually newer/used for less time (but a lower model). This decision would be easier if I knew what it is I want to do with the rest of my life, but I’m nowhere near doing that yet, so this decision is probably a way off, too.

There’s one other thing that strikes me about this tale: As near as I can tell, I never blogged about getting that iPhone 7 or getting the Internet connected. Both of those happened within the first six weeks of my moving in, a time when I wasn’t blogging much. I know I mentioned it on my personal Facebook, just not here, and that makes posts like this a bit more complicated than they’d be if I’d blogged more often back then—yeah, right, as if that was even possible!

In any case, I can again use the lens kit we bought for my phone (I still haven’t found Nigel’s lenses). Like I said in yesterday’s post, baby steps. But now I can at least take some better photos along the journey.

The week of finding things

This has been a week of finding things—and also re-finding things. A lot of the stuff was expected, much of it very timely, and one thing? Well, that was a bit unusual.

For weeks, and in some case months, I’ve been re-looking for things: Since I shifted into this house in January 2020, I’ve found lots of things that I knew I’d need (or, at least, needed to review), but I had to put them aside at the time for various reasons, such as, sometimes I didn’t find everything I needed (like all the parts of phone systems), or maybe I didn’t have any way to deal with the stuff (like loose hard drives my Mac couldn’t read because they had no cases). Unfortunately, I also sometimes misplaced things I put aside “so I’ll know where to find them.” This past week saw progress on all those fronts.

Earlier this week, I talked about setting up a phone system, and it was possible because I’d recently found the missing base unit, but also complicated because I was missing a couple handsets. I found those handsets earlier that day.

I’d also wanted to install my security cameras, and possibly add more devices (like a video doorbell), but first I needed to find the stuff I already had, stuff (like the extra phone handsets) that I’d put away “so I’ll know where to find them.” On Thursday, I found security camera stuff and discovered that its base unit can record to a local hard drive (which is why I need to be able to read those hard drives—I need one to use with the system). Fortunately, back in March I bought a device to read loose hard drives, which is also good because I found a lot of loose hard drives.

Those were probably among the more useful things I found. There was more—and stranger—stuff waiting for me.

I’ve found all this stuff I’m talking about because I’m trying to organise my office, a project I’ll talk about later (when it’s at least close to being done), but it’s meant going through things as I find them. On Thursday afternoon I found a plastic storage crate with what looked like old statements and such, the kind of stuff I used to put aside for shredding later.

That evening I started going through that plastic crate and realised pretty quickly that it was something I’d “packed” when we were decluttering our house (the one before the last one we shared) when we tried to sell it back in 2012. At the time, I had huge piles of statements and such waiting to be filed, because in those days we still got a lot of statements and such in the post (I get maybe a couple a year nowadays, so it’s no longer necessary to file anything). At that time, I bought a bunch of relatively small plastic lidded crates so I could use them as a base for a staged “bed” in my office to make it look like a bedroom (because we used two bedrooms as offices). Our realtor didn’t think that was necessary. So the plastic crates went into storage instead, and they remained untouched ever since, moving from one storage unit to another, then on to our former house, and then here (some of them were re-purposed in 2018 to file receipts in by year, as I mentioned at the time).

As I looked through the crate, I at first thought it held nothing interesting—mostly stuff that maybe needed to be shredded, but not much else worth paying attention to. And then, well, it became very different.

I kept finding receipts and notes from when Nigel and I were preparing for our Civil Union and party back in 2009. I remembered nearly all of that stuff, though maybe not the specifics (like how much we spent, or the various to-do lists we’d written). Basically, though, it was all familiar. I even found the receipt for my ring, something I still wear to this day.

That was all interesting to me, and I felt warm and fuzzy—right up until I found a print-out of the email from our celebrant with the second draft of our ceremony, including our vows. While it wasn’t complete, it did include stuff we’d added—and also our vows. Reading them again made me cry—for how wonderful the day was, for how much we loved each other, and for how much I’ve lost. I hadn’t expected that when I started going though what I thought was just a huge pile of old statements and such, but I suppose that sort of thing is bound to happen as I go through 24 years worth of stuff from two people.

However, the oddest thing I found was a knife.

The knife (an X-Acto Knife, and, yes, it was genuine) is in the photo up top, in the middle of my desk’s pencil cup. The pencil cup, minus the knife, was also in a photo I shared back in February 2019, and that’s how I know sometime before that is when Nigel borrowed my knife to do something or other with his CNC router. He didn’t return it, and when I needed it for one of my own projects, I asked him for it. He wasn’t sure where it was. I looked around the CNC router and didn’t find it. Later, after he died, and the family came round to help pack up the garage, I looked again, but didn’t find it.

A couple months or so later, I packed up my office, wrapping that pencil cup in bubble wrap, placing it in a box and then putting the box aside to move myself (so I could find them easily after I moved to the new house). In retrospect, I think this was a weird territoriality at play, that because nothing felt under my control, this one one thing was worth seizing.

Time passed, and one day after I’d moved to Hamilton I was in one of our home centres and I saw something similar to an X-Acto Knife, something I knew was missing, and that I’d occasionally needed after my move. I’d found out years ago that finding genuine blades and handles in New Zealand was fraught, so I thought that what I found was better than nothing, and I bought it. Not surprisingly, it was cheaper than the real thing.

Then came this week, and I started work on my office, and part of that meant moving and opening the boxes I packed. I opened the box that had my pencil cup, unwrapped the bubble wrap, and there inside the pencil cup was that supposedly missing X-Acto Knife.

I know plenty of people who’d either be freaked out by this or else they’d assign something supernatural to it. The most likely explanation is that it had been there quite a while. I think Nigel must’ve found it and put it away, and I didn’t know that because he didn’t say, and I never checked again because I thought it was still in the garage. That means that it was probably there a long time and I’d simply missed it, something that’s supported by the fact that I’d shoved my “desk glasses” (reading glasses I kept on my desk) into the pencil cup before I wrapped it up. This explanation is logical and not a surprise: I wasn’t exactly at the height of my powers of observation in the first few months after Nigel died, the time in which I packed up my office, nor was I checking my pencil cup in the weeks before he died. All of which is without even considering my prescription-induced dodgy memory.

Even though I don’t see anything remotely spooky about the unexpected re-appearance of my X-Acto knife, I nevertheless take some comfort from it and all the other familiar things I’ve found over the past week: Finding the phone and security camera stuff allows me to finish long-delayed projects. Finding those Civil Union-related receipts and stuff lets me relive my much happier days. I also have more than enough X-Acto knives now, though how many is actually enough is a matter of opinion. Mostly, I’m slowly getting a tidy office.

This has been a week of finding and re-finding things. It was a bit unusual, but it was also very welcome. Baby steps, and all that. Still, I wouldn’t mind future weeks being a bit less unusual.

Gratuitous furbaby photos

There doesn’t always have to be a reason for sharing photos of my furbabies, and these photos of Jake and Leo are “just because” photos. I’m sharing them just because I can, just because they’re so adorable, and just because I appreciate what they do for me as my constant companions. We need each other, it turns out, but in different ways. There have been times over the past 18+ months in which they were the reason I was able to keep moving, and that right there’s a good reason to share photos of them.

Just because.

I took both photos, one after the other, this past Thursday. At the time, Leo was seated on the back of the sofa, right above Jake. When I saw them, Jake was both awake and in good light. I like both, but I especially like the way Jake's looks a black and white photo, though it isn't one.

Representative of my life right now

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Misty morning outside the house.

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jul 21, 2013 at 2:30pm PDT

The post above was the first I shared on Instagram. So much has changed in the seven years since: Three and a bit years later, I’d be in hospital getting a cardiac stent, six months after that, Nigel and I moved to the southern edge of the Manukau Harbour. Six years after this photo, we were a month out from what would be Nigel’s last birthday (I never blogged about Nigel’s birthdays).

Now, the dogs and I are in a new house alone, without Nigel, in a different city than the photo was taken in, and, seven years after I took it, I think that photo’s representative of where I’m at in my life right now: Some things are obvious, some are indistinct, but it’s kind of hard for me to see anything clearly. It’s familiar and strange all at the same time. And the thing I notice the most about it is something I noticed back then, but didn’t pay much attention to: A feeling of aloneness and loneliness. Like I said, it’s representative of where I’m at in my life.
And today it’s cold and raining. Seems appropriate, somehow.

Related: “And another” – my blog post about that photo, published the same day I posted it to Instagram, July 22, 2013. Back then, I didn’t embed the original post as I did above. Like I said, so much has changed.

This is a revised and expanded version of something I posted to my personal Facebook this morning. Among other things, I added links to relevant blog posts.

New life for old worklights

Who doesn’t love it when a plan comes together? Upgrading my studio lighting for photography and video—and more—has been on my list for a long time, and yesterday I finished a major part of it, converting my old halogen worklight into and LED system. It was a good result.

Last August, I talked about wanting to come up with cheap lighting solutions for videos (and also for studio photography). I said, “I wanted to make it as cheap as possible, or, even better, to use things I already have,” and today’s project actually did both.

The photo montage up top shows the old worklights (also known as “shoplights”) I’ve had for maybe 15 years, on the left. Basically, the project involved swapping out the old halogen bulbs for LED ones. There were several reasons I wanted to do that, and some challenges along the way, but the project was successful (lower right photo in the montage). I mention all that up front so that anyone who wants all the details can continue on, while those not interested in such things can be satisfied with knowing the project was successful. The rest of this post is about the whole story, from the background through to the completion, and also some technical information about it all.

I bought those worklights when we lived in Paeroa because I needed bright light when I was working on our house, which we were renovating. The lights were relatively cheap (less than $50, I think), which was good. However, they had two 500 watt halogen bulbs which used a lot of power and, like all halogen bulbs, were hot—in this case, VERY hot. The upper right photo in that montage shows the warning notice on the top of each fixture, that they get hot, so hot that, as a little picture indicates, everything and everyone should stay at least one metre away from the thing when it’s on. Each one of the fixtures has a little handle to make it possible to adjust the lights’ positions without touching them—well, theoretically, maybe, because I found even that too hot to touch.

The fixtures got so hot that it was impossible to keep one of them locked in place, and it kept flopping forward when it was on. Eventually, it broke the halogen bulb and it no longer worked. That was kind of a relief, really, and I used only the one after that.

We moved away from that house in 2006 and I didn’t use the lights again until I needed to shoot photos of things we were going to sell online, and the lights were perfect for that. When I became interested in making videos, I thought again about the worklight rig, but I was concerned about how hot they got. About that same time, I saw a YouTube video made by some young New Zealanders explaining how they made their videos, and for lighting they used a bunch of the single-fixture models that sit on the floor. But they get just as hot.

I knew that the advantage of halogen was that it was generally flicker free (unlike many compact fluorescents), which is important because sometimes flicker can be seen in videos. Halogen lights also generally have cool colour, which is important for both video and a lot of photography. But have I mentioned how HOT they get?

Time passed, I got busy with other things and with life. By the time I was ready to go again, LEDs were becoming much more common, and I thought that could be an option.

The first problem was cost—LED double worklights, similar to what I already had, were more than double the price of new halogen ones—sometimes three times the cost. They were also relatively low in light output and were warm white, which was of no use.

A little digression is needed. Old-fashioned lightbulbs were always referred to by their watts, like a 60 watt bulb, for example. But that was only a measure of power consumption, and we all just knew that the higher the wattage, the brighter the light from the bulb. However, watts are never a measure of light output, or the colour of the light.

Light output is measured in lumens, and the minimum lumen rating is now included on packaging for light bulbs to make it easier to compare the output of various kinds. For example, a 75 watt old fashioned lightbulb produces a minimum of 1,100 lumens, as does a 30-52 watt compact fluorescent, and a 10-16 watt LED. By focusing on the actual light output—the lumens—we can fairly judge the relative brightness of different kinds of lights.

The other thing that matters in lighting for videos and photography is light colour temperature, which is expressed as temperature in degrees Kelvin. The lower the number, the redder (or warmer) the light, and the higher the number, the bluer (or cooler) the light. For both video production and a lot of studio photography, the goal is to mimic daylight on an overcast day. The temperature of that daylight is about 6500K. A standard lightbulb is around 2400K or so.

When I had a 35mm film camera many, many years ago, I couldn’t afford photography lights (they’re still really expensive, actually), and I had to use ordinary lightbulbs. The reddish light gave my subjects an orange tinge. So, I bought a special blue filter for my lens which corrected the colours (these days I can usually accomplish the same thing in Adobe Photoshop).

Putting all that together, the LED worklights used to be too dim (not enough lumens) and too warm (too low in K). Old-fashioned lightbulbs could be bright enough, but they, too, were too warm and generated heat (plus, I really didn’t have anything suitable to use them in—clamp on lights for workshops seem to have disappeared). Compact fluorescents were available in versions both bright enough and cool enough in light colour, but they also often flicker, something that matters for video, where that can sometimes be seen. Halogens, well, have I mentioned how hot they get?

I knew that companies were starting to make LED replacement lamps (“bulbs”) that would work in a worklight. Only trouble is, I could only find them in the USA, where they ran only on 120 volt power supply (we’re 220/240 volts in New Zealand).

More time passed, and the bulbs became available here—at a very high price: A single replacement bulb often cost more than a new worklight. Moreover, they were also warm white, which was too red for what I wanted. What was the point of that?

New LED light, left, and an old broken
halogen on the right. The LED's "dots"
face down, toward the reflector.

Still more time passed, and new fixtures became available that were much brighter, had much cooler light, and were much cheaper (though still far more expensive than the old double halogen rigs had been). A range of bulbs also became available, most of which were warm white, but I found one that was listed as “cool white” (it’s in the photo at right, alongside one of the old and broken halogen bulbs). At 6500K, it’s actually daylight (also sometimes called “cool daylight”). Perfect for what I wanted. The bulbs are 1521 lumens each, which is a bit less that an old 100 watt lightbulb, enough for most of what I want it for. I bought two (and together, the lumens roughly double).

At $22 each (or $44 for the pair), the LED bulbs cost me less than the price of a totally new double worklight, but two new halogen bulbs would have cost me about $12 for the pair. In fact, the store sold six packs of halogen bulbs that cost about as much as the two LED replacements I bought. Clearly cost is still an issue. On the other hand, the replacement bulbs should last dramatically longer than a halogen bulb, so maybe halogens aren't really as dramatically cheaper as they seem?

When I got home, I went out to the garden shed and got the worklights, finding that when we moved to this house two years ago, the movers had taken it apart. First step was to put it back together. The thing was filthy—too many years without being used, including two out in the shed, and the paint was starting to peel in places.

When I opened the fixtures to replace the bulbs, I also took out the glass to clean it. Technically, I don’t need the glass anymore because the bulbs aren’t as fragile as the halogen ones were. However, if I ever want to the change the colour of the light, I can use the glass to help hold filters, which are similar to cellophane. The wire cages, which were originally to keep the user from being burned from touching the glass, are quite corroded, but they also aren’t needed anymore. Because they provide some protection, I may keep them, but if I do I’ll wire brush them and spay paint them with silver paint.

None of this actually brings me that much closer to using them as studio lights. Among other things, I need space to use them, and I also have to work out how best to position them. In the meantime, I have some painting projects I need to finish, and the lights will be really good for that—bright, won’t shift the appearance of the colour of the paint, it will be dramatically cooler, and will consume only about 24 watts of power, as opposed to the 1000 watts it used to. And, have I mentioned how dramatically cooler they’ll be?

As it was, the old worklights were pretty useless to me. Their halogen bulbs were no longer working, but when they were they were far too hot and far too power-hungry. By spending $44 I solved all those problems. It gave new life to something that would have otherwise gone to the rubbish tip, and it cost less than a modern replacement would have.

I love it when a plan comes together. Now, I just have to figure out how best to use them for photo and video lighting. That'll be a different plan to talk about.

Sometimes a photo's just a photo

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This photo doesn’t “mean” anything, it was just something I noticed when I sat at my desk to record a new podcast episode. It looked kinda like a porthole (it’s actually a magnifying glass in the pencil cup on my desk—hope saying that doesn’t destroy the magic…).

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Feb 26, 2019 at 8:05pm PST

Sometimes a photo can be just a photo, and this photo is an example. As I said in the Instagram caption, “This photo doesn’t ‘mean’ anything”, and it doesn’t—it’s just a photo of something that caught my eye.

I shared the photo because I like to encourage others to do the same thing. It begins with looking at ordinary things that can turn out to be unordinary, whether because of lighting, or composition, anything really. Then, take a photo and share it. It doesn’t have to be great art or anything, just something that catches our eye at the time.

I think that matters because it can encourage us to look at the world around us—to really look at it. If we do, we might actually make some great art. Or not. Either way, the practice is good.

So, I grabbed my cellphone, and shot several photos to get it just right—something that digital photography makes very easy to do, and smartphones make easier still. I don’t share all the photos I take, but every once in awhile, I do, even when it doesn’t “mean” anything.

Sometimes a photo can be just a photo.