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[languagelearning]

Korean progress report

Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Goals
3. Journey so far
4. What I'm doing right now
5. Change of pace
6. Anki
7. Language exchange groups
8. So this is how they get me
9. Navel gazing
10. Artifacting
11. Conclusion

Introduction (§)

This is a bit of a journal entry, a bit of a progress report, a bit of a snapshot of my Korean learning progress. I've never given a progress report on my Korean study despite making passing mention of it as far back as 2020 in other articles. There are reasons for this, some of which may become clear in time. But, for other reasons, I have decided it's time I finally do this kind of update.

I would like to make it very clear that the things I say here are thoughts and feelings, not necessarily facts or recommendations unless explicitly stated.

You know that I like for these articles to get long, and I like to think they are complete before publishing. But of course this is something that will never be complete. And although I can tell myself I should wait until the next milestone before this is worth sharing, I can also say that the milestones I've passed so far are worth sharing. And, since it takes some minimum amount of time for me to think and write, this snapshot is really more of a temporal smear anyway. It's nice to have a deadline.

I started studying Korean on October 5, 2018. Day one, hour zero. That day is eight years ago, but I do not say, and I can not say, that I've been studying for eight years, because I haven't. Although eight years have passed, I have fallen off course more than once, more than twice.

In a way, it would be nicer for my ego to not know exactly how much I've studied and how much I haven't. What I mean by that is my skill level is still not very high. This is the crux of the matter. So if I were to say I've been studying for eight years and can not confidently hold an adult conversation, it would be quite a tragedy and a failure, and would reflect very poorly on my abilities and intellect. On the other hand, if I were to say that I've done only one year of "actual study" and seven years of being off course, that would... well, it would still reflect poorly on my discipline, time management, and priorities, but it wouldn't mean I'm quite as stupid. So you see what I mean, it is perhaps better for the ego to not really know for sure.

But of course, we do know for sure, because Anki reveals the truth. I wasn't using Anki from day one, but once I started, it looks like I did two years of consistent, but admittedly not very intensive[1] study. By 2021 the heatmap becomes pale as I was clearly having some days of trying a little harder, and some days of doing the bare minimum to not technically break the streak. This continued through 2022 with light and patchy study and broken streaks. All of 2023, 2024, 2025 represent essentially no study. In May of 2026 I became reinvigorated, which leads us to today.

[1] The color scale on the heatmap is relative to each year. The highest day in 2020 barely crests 600 reviews which is now my daily average.

Goals (§)

Why did I start learning Korean at all? I suppose the simplest answer is... 한국여자 예쁘니까. If you're not happy with that answer, you can spare me the comments. I have more thoughts on this than you'd ever want to hear. In fact, I have more thoughts on this than I'd ever want to hear, but they are in my head and I am stuck with them.

In college, and especially during my last year of college, I felt like I was surrounded by people who knew two, three, or even four languages. It made me feel inadequate and pushed me to get back into language. "Back into" meaning that I had taken four years of high school French and one year of college French and couldn't hold an actual conversation, though I did read most of L'Etranger. This kind of experience is pretty common, and has either to do with high school language classes letting everyone off too easily, or the student not having enough intrinsic motivation — understandably since language classes are a school requirement. But anyway, I felt like French wasn't sparking my curiousity at this point in time.

For a period of several years I was very hardcore into watching movies. I watched lots of movies, both domestic and foreign including French, Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Swedish, Spanish, Mexican, Thai, Polish, and Minnesotan. There was just something about Korean that I liked the most. Some of my favorites are 친절한 금자씨, 봄, 여름, 가을, 겨울 그리고 봄, and 사마리아. In my article on Ghost Dog I already explored some of the American/Western fascination with East Asia, and I am in this aura as well. I've always liked ninjas. I mean who doesn't like ninjas. So besides French, it was pretty obvious that if I choose to learn another language it would be an Asian language, and amongst the big three CJK, I like Korean the best. Partly this is because every other white person is already obsessed with Japan and I like to avoid doing the most popular thing. Partly this is because I like the sound of Korean more than the sound of Chinese, though Japanese is pretty as well. Partly this is because the Korean alphabet is interesting from both a technical and historical perspective, and makes learning to read so, so, so much easier than the other two.

Then, why have I suddenly become reinvigorated? Well, I recently passed my 30th birthday and... you know how it is when people pass a decade. I've had to think about my priorities and goals in life. For all these years I've been dissatisfied with my Korean study. I have felt like a failure and, despite having an interest in the language, this interest has carried a sense of shame and embarassment because, if I were to want to tell someone anything about it, and if they were to ask me "oh, you know Korean?" my answer would truthfully be "uh, not really". So it has been a kind of secret that I carry and don't tell anyone about because all it does is reveal my failure. So, it's time for me to really do this, and take it more seriously, and not be a failure. I am the kind of person that goes through lots of hobby phases and dabbles in all kinds of things and very explicitly does not intend to become an expert in all of them. But the fact that I'm still interested in Korean after all this time seems to suggest it's not just one of those phases.

To be more precise, my wave of renewed motivation started after Matt vs Japan uploaded a new video, which led me to discover that he actually has a second channel now, and also to rewatch a lot of his older videos. The content of the video that re-motivated me wasn't particularly out of the ordinary for Matt. It was just good timing.

In some circles, Matt has earned a negative reputation, but I'm not part of all that and that's not my relationship to the material he's made. I've never paid for anyone's courses or resources of any kind, I just watch the videos he's made for free and, as far as I'm concerned, his information is both good and motivational. The ideas and philosophies behind input-centric study resonate with me. You may like to read my previous article Are children better at learning languages? for more thoughts on that.

Suffice to say, I appreciate the things Matt has shared during his language learning journey of over fifteen years, and this is part of the reason I feel I should express my own thoughts here.

To say a little more about these goals and priorities brings us back to 한국여자 예쁘다. By the time you get to the age of 30, everyone around you is trying to get out of the dating phase. Everyone is "dating with intention" and "looking for my future husband" and "done wasting time". So I don't want to waste anybody's time who feels like their clock is ticking and, if I meet someone who isn't Korean, no matter how nice and sweet and pretty she may be, what would I do with all this Korean? There are plenty of pretty girls out there that I wouldn't mind spending time with, but at the moment I cannot see myself becoming committed with someone not Korean. Not until I have some catastrophic crash-and-burn disaster relationship that changes my mind, perhaps. I won't bore you with the rest of my thoughts on this, now. So the other option is to get back in there and actually learn it this time.

Journey so far (§)

When someone asks me how I learned Korean, my answer is... well my answer is 아직 안 배웠는데?. But let me try to give you an idea of the study resources I've used on my journey so far. I have not taken any classes or worked through any textbooks.

On my very first day of study in 2018, I downloaded Duolingo. I used it for a few weeks and decided it was not very good, and the consensus online at the time was that their material for Korean was not good, so I deleted it.

I next used Lingodeer for a period of a few weeks or a few months, and it was probably better than Duolingo but truthfully I don't remember very much about it.

For the first few months of my study, I was reading through the lessons on howtostudykorean.com. This is where I got my grasp on the alphabet, pronunciation, and basic grammar points. Although I have not done a critical re-read of his lessons since then, my memories of HTSK are positive and I would recommend them, especially since they're all free. Being the type of person that I am, I've even downloaded all the webpages and turned them into an epub ebook file.

In December 2018 I downloaded HelloTalk, which is an app that connects you with someone for language exchange. This is not an endorsement since I haven't used it since then and don't know what their reputation is in 2026. On HelloTalk, I met someone that I liked and, by April 2019, we were in a long-distance romantic relationship. Of course, there was the goal of meeting up, but between the impacts of Covid, some changes in her educational and career goals, and my cowardice to take a leap, this did not happen, and we eventually broke up in 2022.

The truth is, she and I never had any significant conversations in Korean. Her English skill was very good, my Korean skill was not very good, and I did not have the courage to be willing to fail in the way you need to to speak a language. So our conversations were always in English. But we did read catlab articles and fairy tales together. Although I did not do very much language study with her, I learned lots of cultural touchpoints and the kinds of things you don't get from a textbook. You know, like this.

My primary listening resource has been Talk To Me In Korean's Iyagi series, which ran most of its course from 2010 to 2012. These are 5-10 minute conversations between two members of the TTMIK team. They used to be all available for free on Soundcloud, and I downloaded them along with the transcripts. The episodes are no longer available for free. I have listened to each of these 145 episodes so so so so so many times by now. Some of them are still difficult for me, although some of them I can follow pretty well. The reason the harder ones are still hard is because I just haven't taken the time to thoroughly scour the transcripts for whatever it is that I'm missing. In a way, I do feel that it has been an imperfect use of my time to listen to material so high above my skill level for most of this period, and I would have been better served by some more comprehensible input. But, I've always liked the fact that in Iyagi they strike a good balance of speaking clearly and properly (because they know their audience is learners), without speaking baby-talk or dumbing it down. It is difficult to find a resource that is at the right skill level and also available in large quantities to download, though part of that difficulty is just the friction of stepping out of my comfort zone to go search for something new.

My primary reading resource has been fairy tales (전래동화). I said I've never paid for any resources but, well, I guess I've found other ways of getting them. I have a large book of 전래동화 and have read through quite a few. It's neat to learn some of the stories that most Korean people would probably know from their own childhood. Though, there are some stories where nobody did anything wrong and everyone dies and I wonder what was the point.

When you put this all together, my study regimen so far has been fairy tales, a single defunct podcast, and branching through the dictionary to find more words? It's no surprise I'm not an expert yet. But somehow it seems like my results are coming along ok, considering.

What I'm doing right now (§)

At the moment, I'm in the mood to absolutely cram vocabulary. I have much more to say specifically about Anki in a few minutes, but basically, I am trying to do 100 new words per day and am averaging 600-1000 reviews per day, which takes me between 60-90 minutes. On the Anki forums, people recommend 20 new words per day as a starting point and say that, depending on your parameters, you can expect to do 7x to 10x your New quantity per day in reviews. Some of that information comes from the days before FSRS but it's a general guideline. Looking at my historical Anki heatmap, it seems I was probably living by those guidelines since I seldom did over 200 reviews back in the day.

During my recent restart, though, I realized... my entire Anki collection only has about 7,000 cards (which is now over 8,000 as I've been adding more), and I thought if I can do 100 new per day, I'll get through the whole deck in just 70 days. That's over 1% of the collection in new per day! That doesn't mean I'll have all 7,000 cards perfectly memorized, and certainly not perfectly acquired, of course, but at least they'll be in rotation, they'll have seeds planted in my brain, they'll be hooks into the listening that I do and, really, 70 days is not a long time at all. In the grand scheme of things, across all the time that I've spent studying and all the time that I've not spent studying, 70 days is truly nothing.

To tell the truth, I do simply enjoy the party-trick aspect of having a high vocabulary, even if I can hardly use these words in a sentence. I know that memorizing low-frequency words is not the most important thing I could be doing with my time. But again, wasting a little bit of time over 70 days is a paltry sin compared to the past three years during which I've done absolutely no study at all.

Having a high vocabulary really does make listening so much easier, because your brain has a larger set of candidate words to work with, whereas if you have a small vocabulary it is hard to know what might have been a word and what might have been two words and what might have been a grammar form. Furthermore, it is a misconception to think that low-corpus-frequency words are less important to learn. They're often the words that define the entire point of the conversation. So to think that within the next 70 days I can at least pat myself on the back for having 7,000 words under my belt seems like a very worthwhile trade.

And 60-90 minutes is really not that hard to accomplish. I have found that I am really bad at studying while I'm at home, though. At home, I get distracted too easily and can hardly get myself to do more than 50 reviews before closing Anki for reasons that I don't fully understand. I have to get out of the house, so I go sit in the nearby plaza and do my reviews out there. On some days, I've been there for nearly three hours doing reviews, digging through the dictionary, looking up images of vocabulary, making new cards, and updating my existing cards.

I will go ahead and clarify that when I say "party trick", I mean of course that is it relative to the rest of my abilities. On an absolute scale, I am still learning basic words — card #7945 in my collection is 기저귀. Diaper. It is only a party trick in the sense that after someone rightfully judges my ability to be fairly low, they'll be impressed that I know words like 백수, 격주, 맨투맨, 줄임말. Those are from experience.

In 2024, I did a massive reset on my Anki cards to set them all back to "new" status, because I had not kept up on my reviews. I decided it was better to reset them all and let the easy ones graduate again rather than wreak havoc on the intervals. Of course I didn't actually start studying again in 2024, but anyway. So although I am doing 100 "new" cards per day, a lot of these are actually coming back to me very quickly, and it's not the same as actually encountering 100 new words from scratch, and my experience of doing Anki this way is not the same as it would be for someone who's actually starting right now.

There are of course some days that I don't finish all my scheduled reviews, which mainly are the days that I go to language exchange. On those days I am up in the morning at 5:30, working until 4:00, driving until 5:00, have 2 hours until the meeting, and am not back home until 10:00-11:00. So those two hours from 5:00 to 7:00 are my time to eat dinner and do some Anki, but also I take this opportunity to explore some of the local points of interest because I don't normally spend much time over there. I'd rather visit some places I've never been before than sit in my car doing Anki before the meeting starts. So usually I have a backlog to catch up on Fridays.

I wrote the above a few weeks ago and, unsurprisingly, my hubris has caught up with me. I am intentionally trying to keep my life as busy as possible, getting out and meeting people and all that. Even 60 minutes of study is not always attainable. Also, the past few weeks of August have been way too hot outside, making it impossible to sit in my usual plaza spot for study, and I truly am unable to bring myself to study at home.

So, I have now gone several weeks without breaking through the due cards into the new. This slows down my "70 days" timeline into at least 90-100 days minimum, and that's only if I can get back on track and stay there. But that's ok, this is still quick in the grand scheme, and some of the things I've been doing with my time are more important than Anki.

As I near the publication date of this article, I'm at the point where my remaining count of New cards is lower than my typical Saturday/Sunday review count. Should I...?

Here's my Anki stats from this time period. I wrote a quick and dirty, non-optimized script to pull the point-in-time history: ankipit.py. I'm not sure my method was 100% correct but it's pretty close.

I have had some difficulty finding youtube channels that are of an appropriate difficulty level and are enjoyable to watch. One channel I've found recently is 태웅쌤 - Comprehensible Input Korean. He plays video games and describes / narrates what he's doing using easy sentences, but again not baby talk. I think video games are good idea as a source of comprehensible input since he can point to things on screen and describe what's happening without having to give any English translations.

Change of pace (§)

I have spent quite a lot of time describing the ways in which I have failed. Failed to study, failed to speak, failed to be brave, etc. Let's have a slight change of tone here by saying something I am good at. I have always enjoyed listening to international accents and doing voices and, in my own opinion, I think my pronunciation is okay, though of course I will not say perfect or great. All of the Korean people I've met tell me that my pronunciation is good, always unprompted, but still I am careful to accept it. When I am doing a cold read on a new piece of text, I still have to go slow, and my rhythm is poor. I am not able to sight read yet because there is still so much vocabulary that I don't know. Even in English, you know it's hard to sight read quickly through a text that contains too much unknown vocubulary, such as something very dense with domain-specific jargon, so that's kind of how this feels all the time.

Agh, wait, this was the positive part. Anyway, when I am reading something that I'm familiar, I think I sound not terrible. Here:

요즘에 한국어를 열심히 공부하고 있습니다. 매일 Anki로 어휘를 공부하고, 운전할 때 팥케스트를 들어가요. 매주 목요일 일을 끝나서 얼바인에서 한영 언어 교환 모임에 가요. 그리고 격주, 이 주에 한 번씩, 수요일 OC 소스 몰에서 다른 모임도이 있어요. 집에서 혼자 있을 때나, 팥케스트를 들 때는, 제가 잘한다고, 많이 이해할 수 있다고 생각해요. 근데 현실의 상대방이랑 직접 얘기하면 참 어렵잖아요! 제 생각에는, 제 발음이 괜찮는데, 억양이나 진짜 문장을 만들기가 힘들다. 언어 교환 친구들이 다 착하고 응원해 주고 힘이 되어주세요.

와, 한국어에 관한 기사에 한국어 문단이 있네! 문법이 맞는지 틀린지, 표현이 자연스러운지 잘 모르겠는데, 재밌군요.

Listening to this, I think I need to fix my "서", but I'll leave it for now.

Anki (§)

I will describe to you my note and card templates, some practices I've been doing since the beginning that I'm glad for, some practices I wish I had done since the beginning, and some practices that I was doing at the beginning but have stopped.

I do 99.9% of my Anki on my phone with AnkiDroid, including the adding and editing of cards. Even when I am at home, I would mostly rather use my phone for Anki than my computer, which is funny since for almost everything else in my life it would be the opposite. The posture of sitting at the keyboard is not a pleasant way to study, for me. I have long since disassembled the ankibutton, but I've just recently bought a bluetooth controller and am enjoying it very much.

My Anki notes contain these fields:

I have been adding the hanja to my notes since the very beginning and I am glad that I have. I absolutely recommend you do the same. This makes it so much easier to search your collection for other words with the same hanja and therefore build a deeper understanding and connection to the vocabulary. Hey, 전차 has the same 전 from 전쟁. Literally, a war car!

I did not store the Korean dictionary definition in my notes until recently, and I wish that I had. I have not yet made the so-called monolingual transition of looking up words exclusively in the Korean dictionary and understanding their definitions that way. I hope that by capturing the KDef now, I can prepare to eventually do cards that are Korean→KDef, and anyways for the time being to engage with the Korean definitions moreso than I have in the past.

If/when I do switch to monolingual K→KDef cards, I'll have to be judicious with which of these notes become cards. Even if I've added the KDef for a word like "apple" as a way of helping me get familiar with how a dictionary defines an object or expresses an idea, I don't actually need that definition to help me understand what an apple is. There are going to be lots and lots of words for which the K→E cards are perfectly sufficient.

Almost all of my cards are just a single Korean word on the front and the English translations on the back. Sometimes I'll have a single verb as its own one-word card, and also as part of a set phrase card, because set phrases basically need to be memorized as independent vocabulary. For example, 간지럽다 = to be itchy, and 입이 간지렵다 = to be dying to say something (mouth is itching).

I know that some people encourage using mostly sentence cards. Once I get to the point that I am no longer encountering very many new single words, I may shift into a higher gear and start adding more and longer phrases as cards. I think this framing of "gears" is reasonable, since at the beginning you need to memorize the alphabet, then you need to practice reading syllables, then you practice words, then you practice phrases and idioms.

At my current skill level, I find that sentence cards or even phrase cards make it too easy to memorize the shape of the card and remember the answer before even reading the main key word in the sentence. For example, I can recognize "가슴이 덜컥 내려앉다" simply because I know it is the only card I have that starts with 가슴이, even if I completely ignore the rest of it. However, once there are several hundred sentence/phrase cards in the system, they will probably stand out less and less in this manner.

I added the Sentence field recently, at the same time that I added KDef. Although I fill in the KDef for all new words that I add now, I don't always add a sentence. For a lot of words, I think a sentence does not help me internalize the meaning moreso than the definition alone. The problem with vocabulary is that there's so much of it, but not usually that it's actually hard to understand. I do add a sentence if the word seems non-obvious to put into usage, or if it helps demonstrate an interaction between this word and another verb, or if it just seems interesting. If there's a particular usage or set phrase that I want to learn, I would just add it as its own card in the main field, rather than as the Sentence field of this word card.

I do not use audio or images on my cards.

From time to time I like to enable the whiteboard mode on Anki so that I can practice writing words. I do think this has helped with my ability to handwrite, but it does not otherwise lead to higher retention of the words for me. It winds up just being a slower way to review, and I think handwriting practice is maybe better done as a separate activity if the goal is handwriting improvement.

From the very beginning in 2018 until my recent restart, I had always had my Anki set to generate both Korean→English cards and also English→Korean cards. In language learning, these are referred to as Recognition (can you recognize the Korean word when you are reading/listening) and Production (can you produce the Korean word when you are writing/speaking).

I had both cards generating from the same Note. This, I have realized, was a mistake. I have now deleted the production cards and I am only doing recognition at the moment.

Production cards themselves are not the problem. The problem is using a single note to generate both the recognition and production cards. The root of this problem is synonyms. When reading a single Korean word on the front, there are usually several English words on the back in order to capture the nuance, connotations, and possible usages of the Korean word. This means that when generating a production card from this note, I'd have multiple English words on the front asking me to remember a single Korean word. But this is pointless, because of course there could be several Korean synonyms to pick from.

Given these notes:

• 맞다 = to be right; correct; be a good fit
• 옳다 = to be right; correct; righteous; better
• 바르다 = to be straight; upright; correct; righteous

You can see that using these notes to generate English→Korean production cards, having multiple English words on the front and only only one Korean answer on the back, is futile. Which is what I was doing.

During the time that I was doing this, I would add an E→K hint (this was another field, which I have since deleted) to disambiguate which of the Korean words was the right answer. But this becomes increasingly convoluted when both Korean words start with the same letter (oftentimes because they derive from the same hanja), and then when the second letter is also the same, and then when they have the same length, etc.

• firewood (ㅈ) = 장작
• firewood (ㄱ) = 군불
• firewood (ㄸ,2) = 땔감
• firewood (ㄸ,3) = 땔나무

If you want to add production cards to your study, you really need to make them as a whole separate note. Maybe it would be something like:

• to be right = 맞다; 바르다; 옳다
• to be correct = 맞다; 바르다; 옳다
• firewood = 장작; 군불; 땔감; 땔나무

Besides the synonym problem, there is another serious problem with generating both recognition and production from a single note: It is absolutely, completely normal for your passive vocabulary to be much larger than your active vocabulary, even in your native language. That means you can understand more words when you read or listen than you personally use when you write or speak. The ratio of your passive:active vocabulary in your native language is probably between 3:1 and 5:1 based on some quick internet searches. By generating both cards out of a single note, this creates a 1:1 study workload for recognition and production, which is fundamentally out of line with the reality of vocabulary. Plus, those production cards get failed more often because production is harder and because the cards themselves were flawed to begin with. Make separate notes.

At the moment, I am not making separate production notes, though. I want to finish working through all of my existing cards, get more listening and reading input, and see what comes out.

For most of this time, I tried to organize my newly added cards into subdecks. So my primary Anki deck is called "ㅎ", and within that I added ㅎ1, ㅎ2, ㅎ3. When you click on the main ㅎ to study, Anki will draw cards from all subdecks for review. And when you finish reviews and move into new cards, it would draw from ㅎ1 before ㅎ2, etc. So, when I was adding new words, I would use ㅎ1 for high priority words that I want to enter rotation soon, ㅎ3 for low priority words that I will not need for a long time, and ㅎ2 as the standard option. For whatever reasons, my experience with this was never quite perfect. When I would accidentally place cards in the wrong deck I would have to go fish them out again, and sometimes my card browser would browse ㅎ2 when I wanted it to search all ㅎ and I would not be seeing the results I expected. I don't know, I won't criticize it too much but it just never felt like an extension of me.

In my current phase of cramming vocabulary, I have dropped the subdecks and merged everything into ㅎ. I'm going to have all these cards in rotation within a few months, so there's no more splitting hairs about priority.

If I add a word and I want that card to be in rotation right away, I'll use the "grade now" button in AnkiDroid's card browser to mark it Again. If I add words that I know I don't need — such as, say, the majority of the periodic table of elements — I'll suspend them so that I can keep them around as a dictionary but not waste time memorizing them. So that is now the method of coarsely setting priority levels.

I just created a new page on my website which holds iframes to the different dictionaries (K→E, K→K, Hanja) as well as an image search and translator. This is useful because sometimes I want to try reading the K→K dictionary first, but fall back to the K→E dictionary if I need some help, and sometimes a word is in one dictionary but not the other, and of course it helps to have an image search to provide visual aid. So this all-in-one page saves me from having to open multiple tabs or go back and forth between links.

https://voussoir.net/koreaniframe

It would be neat if, instead of just iframing these pages, I would fully proxy the search and manipulate / minify the HTML to provide a more perfect interface. But I do not want to have to keep up with anything they might change along the way.

On my card template, the word itself is a clickable link to my iframe page. Up in the corners, I have links to Naver images (because their site wouldn't work with the iframes) and the word's hanja. At the bottom I have the KDef and sentence.

Here is my card template:

Front:

<div class="frontface" lang="ko">
<div><a href="https://voussoir.net/koreaniframe?q={{Korean}}">{{Korean}}</a>{{#Hint}} <span class="hint">({{Hint}})</span>{{/Hint}}</div>
</div>

Back:

{{FrontSide}}

<hr>

<div class="backface">
<div lang="en">{{English}}</div>
{{#Pronunciation}}<div lang="ko">[{{Pronunciation}}]</div>{{/Pronunciation}}

<div id="upperleft">
<div lang="ko" id="hanja" data-hanja="{{Hanja}}"><a href="https://hanja.dict.naver.com/search/?mflag=1&query={{Hanja}}">{{Hanja}}</a></div>
</div>

<div id="upperright">
<a id="imglink" href="https://m.search.
naver.com/search.naver?where=m_image&query={{Korean}}">img</a>
</div>

<div id="bottomstuff" lang="ko">
{{#Tags}}<div id="ankitags">{{Tags}}</div>{{/Tags}}
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Language exchange groups (§)

I have been going to two different language exchange groups (한영 언어 교환 모임). Every other Wednesday I am at the OC Source mall in Buena Park, and every Thursday I am in Irvine.

Attending these meetups has been extremely helpful and I am grateful to the organizers. The main thing is these groups have helped me build the courage to actually speak. The first time I arrived it was completely nervewracking to say anything at all. I actually said oui at one point in my frazzled state. Everyone there tells me I'm doing pretty good.

In June, I visited K-Town LA to see if I could find any interesting spots. I wandered the streets for five hours and didn't strike up any conversations with anyone, and I spent most of my time regretting that I had answered the shop attendant at Kim's Home Center in English rather than Korean. I left town feeling pretty lousy for a number of reasons besides that.

Earlier this week, I went out for a walk in my neighborhood, and suddenly I heard a familiar sound behind me. Another gentleman was walking in the same direction as I was, listening to something on his phone. I stopped until he was a little closer, then, 안녕하세요, and we talked for several minutes about me learning Korean, him learning English, and his daughter trying to learn Korean as well. This conversation was maybe only 20-30% Korean and the rest English, but that's really good compared to where I was a few months ago. The confidence to even try talking to a stranger is exclusively thanks to spending time at the meetups. He lives around the corner from me and we exchanged phone numbers.

I have also realized how fortunate I am to live next to multiple large bubbles of Korean demographic. I imagine that if I were learning Korean while living in a different state, I would have a hard time finding people to practice with. But I'm within an hour of K-Town LA, Buena Park, Pasadena, Irvine, and broadly speaking the LA and Orange counties have large Asian populations. This is something I didn't properly appreciate when I was thinking "I shouldn't go to any meetups because I'm not ready to speak yet".

I always come home with notecards and new words that I should add to my Anki when I have some time.

There have been some days at the meetups where the conversation is largely dominated by a particularly talkative person with a particularly low Korean level — sometimes I mean not even knowing the famously-easy-to-learn alphabet — who spends the entire time talking in English. I'm not referring to one specific person, this is an archetype that I've seen a few times. Usually, the rest of the group is very excited to teach this person the basic yes/no/please/thank you, and then I am sitting there not learning anything for the better part of hour. Those days are frustrating to me. I would be 100% more fine with this if they wanted to just sit and listen, which is what I do when two native speakers are having a conversation at my table. Why would I interrupt free in-person native listening practice to ask an ignorant question in English? Of course I'll stay silent. This practice harkens back to an ancient tradition from my culture called "lurk more".

There are other days where the tide shifts, and I am at a table outnumbered by 원어민 and I can't keep up with what they're saying. So, I don't mean to be insulting, but to describe my feelings because that's the whole point of this website; and to say that if you try a meetup and it doesn't seem to be quite what you were looking for, you probably should keep going for a while to see what happens on a different day.

Based on my positive experiences so far, and the fact that these groups are still relatively far from home for me, I have been trying to muster the inspiration and courage to start a group, too. I think the population is here and they simply need a catalyst. I'll invite my neighbor.

So this is how they get me (§)

During the past several years' boom of so-called AI and more-aptly-called LLMs, I have completely avoided using them, mainly because they are surrounded by so much bad marketing that I don't want to endorse, and because I like to go against the mainstream.

But... they're pretty good for asking language questions. So that's how they've got me after all.

I saw one of the guys at language exchange asking the computer to provide expressions using a word or grammar pattern, translate the answer between both languages, and rephrase a given sentence into a more natural / idiomatic form or other variations. So, I'm sold on it after all. I gave mine the instruction to never use romanizations (which makes the answer so much more pleasant to read, even if the information is just coming from Wikipedia), to provide the relevant hanja for advanced vocabulary, and to not do any of that "you're absolutely right!" type stuff. I have caught the computer making factual errors more than a few times, so you probably shouldn't ask questions that are too high above your ability to comprehend the answer.

Give it a try, I guess.

Navel gazing (§)

People often wonder how many words an average adult knows in their native language. They also wonder, more anxiously, what is a reasonable minimum number of words to be conversationally fluent in a new language. These are interesting trivia in their own right, of course, but the true combinatorial explosion of fluent language is in phrases, expressions, and idiomatic speech. It is not enough to use grammatically correct verb conjugations to sound normal. At language exchange, all of the English learners I've met are out of the basic vocabulary/grammar phase; they're learning expressions. 표현.

With such an infinity of examples available, it is hard to pick a representative few to write about here. But take for example "put down", which can mean literally placing an object somewhere, or insulting/mocking someone, or euthanizing an animal, or writing into a form/document, or making a down payment on a purchase, or making a bet at the poker table, or... Even though each of these figurative meanings is pretty easy to trace back to the literal meaning, they still take on a value of their own. I know for sure that my flashcards for verbs do not capture this much nuance.

Then you have expressions like "all bark and no bite", the meaning of which seems not too hard to intuit, but it's a set phrase you wouldn't just make up one day. You must hear it from someone else first. How about "all hat and no cattle", which is similar in meaning but evokes the cultural context of cowboys and surely must be regional in usage. I have not reached the level of learning many Korean 표현 quite yet, and certainly not with that level of integrated social context. Maybe the best 표현 I can give you so far is "빈 수레가 요란하다".

It is overwhelming to think of how much cumulative experience with phrases, idioms, and movie/song/cultural references there is in one's life. There is too much that you just won't find in a dictionary, and I don't just mean that euphemistically. You have a limited number of hours in the day, and every hour you spend ingesting one form of input is an hour that you are not ingesting another. I should think it impossible to fully "catch up" in a second language, and the goalposts when learning a language must be set with this understood. For what it's worth, this is not even a language phenomenon at all, really, because it's the same for your career and hobbies and community subcultures — you can only be in one place at a time.

But, there are pages full of idioms if you want to go ahead and learn some out of context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English-language_idioms

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Korean_idioms

I find that people are too fascinated with little differences between languages that aren't actually different. Almost more than anything else, attempting to learn a second language will show you that people are pretty much the same everywhere. Everyone talks about the same stuff — it's just different words. I suppose I'm not allowed to make such universal claims when I barely know one and a quarter languages, but.

Take for example the concept of honorifics. Most monolingual English speakers, or at least Americans, probably don't know this word, but as soon as you step into Japanese, Korean, etc., everybody's talking about honorifics, not to mention speech levels in general. How foreign! How Asian! How tradition! But if you've ever seen a movie with a stereotypical English butler character, then you know very well that English has honorifics, and you know exactly what they sound like, and you can reproduce them on command. Even if you didn't know the word for it. Everyone around the world has ways to talk respectfully; in English we just do it with diction and register rather than grammar and morphology.

When people talk about the differences between two languages, I often think of this XKCD comic where he describes "sleep" as "go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and then maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience". You can make anything sound weird by putting more words to it. So I think what happens is people seek explanations for how their target language works, and they put a whole lot of words into these explanations, and it psyches them out into thinking that the target language is so crazy different from their native language, only because they've never put so many words into explaining their native language.

People often say that Korean and English are "backward" because English uses SVO and Korean uses SOV word order. In Korean, it's "I pizza eat". 나는 피자를 먹는다. I feel that for basic sentences, the difference is quite trivial and really does not come across as weird at all, after a moment. It's kind of like when you watch a black and white movie, and it barely takes a minute to get used to it despite, superficially, the huge difference between black and white film and our own color vision.

The larger and more daunting task is the ordering of entire phrases. It is not just a grammatical problem — thinking about this has made me even more aware and self-conscious of sentence- and conversation-level ordering of information. Depending on how you deliver an opinion, story, or question, you can prime the listener's understanding of your context, intentions, and emotional state, and convey the relative importance of each part. And crucially, you can hit them with a joke. We often start sentences with a disclaimer like "I know this is going to sound weird, but..." because we anticipate how people will react to what we're going to say and we try to deliver it appropriately.

Especially in speech, being strictly linear, the order of your words slowly reveals your thought to the listener, and you have to appreciate your level of control over that reveal, like a magician. When I am trying to construct a Korean sentence, I find myself thinking "wait, I don't want to say that word yet, I want to save that for later", but I can't because it's supposed to come first.

I have been particularly aware of the differences in "importance" ordering when I am reading definitions in the dictionary. I'm not sure if I'll find the best examples now, but here's a few:

계기
길이, 면적, 무게, 양 등이나 온도, 시간, 강도 등을 재는 기구나 장치.
literally: "length, area, weight, quantity etc. or temperature, time, force etc. measuring tool or device"

Compare with English:

meter
an instrument for measuring, especially one that automatically measures and records the quantity of something, as of gas, water, miles, or time, when it is activated.

In English, you get "an instrument" within two words, and to clarify it's not for music, you get "measuring" within four. Whereas in Korean you don't even find out that it's a noun until the very end (context clues notwithstanding).

Another:

단열재
열이 밖으로 빠져나가거나 안으로 들어오는 것을 막는 데 쓰이는 건축용 재료.
literally: "(heat) (going out or coming in) (used to block) (construction material)"

thermal insulation
material of relatively low heat conductivity used to shield a volume against loss or entrance of heat by radiation, convection, or conduction

To me, the Korean ordering seems backward, not because of the VO/OV difference between "blocks heat" and "heat blocks", but because it seems more prudent for me to start a definition of an object with what it basically is, then clarify with further detail. If someone asks me what "thermal insulation" is, I'd lead with the fact that it's a material, then describe properties of that material. It seems more ... respectful? ... to the listener's attention to order it that way? The Korean dictionary describes all the properties first, and then the word 재료/material is literally last. This is the difference that must be learned.

Yes, I've been watching some English linguistics videos recently, too.

People also like to notice how Korean often omits subjects or objects that can be inferred. For example:

밥 먹었어요?
Eaten food?

예, 먹었어요.
Yes, eaten.

Yes, it sounds weird when it's translated so literally that way. But this is just another case of "hallucinating vividly", where you can make anything sound weird if you do it on purpose. In English, we'd say "have you eaten?" and "yes, I have". Have what? The actual verb for the past tense auxilliary "have" is omitted in the English response, because it's obvious. So the subject is often omitted in Korean when it's obvious, too, even though Korean may choose to preserve the original verb where English drops it.

Here's an example of how omitted subject can be used humorously:

경은: 효진 씨, 친구들 자주 만나요?
Hyojin, do you get together with your friends often?

효진: 자주 못 만나요, 바빠서.
Not too often, busy.

경은: 아, 바빠서. 효진 씨가 바빠서요? 아니면 친구들이 바빠서요?
Ah, busy. You're busy? Or your friends are busy?

효진: 친구들이 바빠서...
My friends are busy...

You've noticed by now the way I talk about "other people being too fascinated by ..." as if they should be embarrassed for being fascinated by something. What a jerk! Do I actually believe that? On one hand, yes. There is a lot of thing, Japan that goes on out there, and a lot of "In Japan, they have an ancient tradition..." about something mundane, and a lot of "hallucinating vividly" to make the foreign language sound more exotic than our native language. People get tattoos on their spines of hanzi/kanji meaning "love" or "strength" that they don't actually know how to read because hell if hanzi don't look way cooler than our alphabet.

I go to the international market, buy some Korean candy for three times the price I'd normally pay for candy, and then, yep, it's just candy. We seek to buy products that come from our country of interest even if they are not actually different or better simply because they carry the aura we want to carry. This behavior smells desperate, insecure, uncritical. When I go to events like the 626 Night Market or, yesterday, the LA Korean Festival, I am disappointed by how many of the stalls are just selling ordinary plastic, consumerist, intellectual-property-laden crap, and by the 화채 stalls advertising "AS SEEN ON TIKTOK". I will once again direct you to Ghost Dog for more on this.

(nota bene: The LAKF had a long corridor of stalls selling food products that came across as very authentic to me, with lots of handwritten prices and many clearly handmade goods. Those were the vendors you'd have to speak Korean to if you needed to ask anything.)

On the other hand, no, I don't like this negativity either. I have made the mistake once or twice of stopping by /r/languagelearningjerk, a wonderfully egalitarian community in which everyone is treated as a complete loser. Here, anything you think is interesting is actually not interesting; anything you think is fun is actually not fun; and your motivations for doing absolutely anything are absolutely wrong. A visit here is a complete and total drenching in self-doubt.

Clearly I have standards, maybe high standards, for tasteful appreciation of other culture. But it is not fun to be constantly questioning myself as to whether I think such-and-such is beautiful because I actually think it's beautiful, or because I'm a basic normie falling for the exoticism trap. There is not a single person in my life asking me to justify any of this, except myself.

People say that there are some 7,000+ languages spoken in the world, which, for reasons that are hard to articulate, genuinely stresses me out when I try to think about it. One of my reasons for choosing Korean is because I want to be different from all the people learning Japanese. So I basically took one step down the trendy-language ladder, a ladder with 7,000+ rungs, and I pretend that's even a little bit out of the mainstream?

When I once told someone at language exchange that I want to be different, she taught me the word 홍대병, basically "hipster disease", which is perfect for me.

Artifacting (§)

I don't want to be a complete -boo per se, but I wanted to get a few decorations at home of an Asian aesthetic. Yes. Sorry for the whiplash.

I became interested in the 훈민정음 (wikisource), the document that introduced the new 한글 alphabet to the public. I ordered a large 24x32 canvas print of the first page.

I produced the vector file for this by taking the best photograph/scan I could find online into Inkscape and, over the course of several evenings, tracing each character by hand.

Here you go:

I'm too busy getting this tattooed on my spine, so I don't have time to memorize the Chinese reading of this text, but working on this project has helped me get a little more familiar with a few more hanja — I won't miss 音 in a lineup, at least. I can point to some of the landmarks and paraphrase it, if need be.

I also bought one pack of Japanese 花札 cards and two packs of Korean 화투 cards with the intention of turning these into framed pieces of wall art, like as tall 4x12 grids. But I haven't gotten around to it yet.

And a cute 뚝배기 from Kim's Home Center.

Conclusion (§)

omg look at how much time I spent writing this when I could have been studying instead!

I have been very busy for the past few months and felt overwhelmed most of the time. I have been slowly adding to this article up to and including October 5. So I don't feel I have written this out as well as I'd like, and I wonder if my pessimism got a little bit way too strong for a moment there.

Just today, I passed a group of 할머니 at the farmers market, so I said 안녕하세요 and 좋은 하루 돼세요. Merely an hour later, I was introduced by a mutual friend to another neighbor of Korean background, who coincidentally happened to be walking by, who said she doesn't have enough people to practice with. I really think I need to be the one to start this 모임, so I am working on a poster and looking for spots to post it.

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• 2026-10-11 Add tag:languagelearning.
• 2026-10-11 Updated my anki template.
• 2026-10-11 Replaced controller_mapping with an svg.
• 2026-10-05 Add korean_progress_2026.md.

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Kitchen island table

or I built a table without sufficient tools, knowledge, or workspace.

I moved into a new place, where the kitchen does not have very much countertop area to work or to hold permanent appliances.

I wanted to find something that would match these requirements:

• Needs to fit next to the stove, max size about 2ft × 5ft.
• Needs to be standing countertop height, not a sitting table.
• Needs to have empty space underneath, not shelving or bracing, so my trashcan can live there.

I made a few rounds through some furniture stores, but actually I got it into my head pretty quickly that I would make the table myself, so I didn't really search the stores very hard.

I decided I would buy a premade 2×4 laminated slab top (purists would prefer you don't use the word "butcherblock" unless the work surface is all endgrain), and assemble the legs and frame from 4×4 lumber. To join the legs, I would try a floating tenon technique with some pieces of dowel since it only requires one tool: the drill. For extra stability against racking I can add some shelf brackets to the inside corners.

I went to a local lumber yard and bought some 4×4 douglas fir. I bought a 12ft and a 10ft and had the shop attendant chop that into 3×6ft and 1×4ft to fit in my car. If I had had him do all the cuts for me, the final table probably would have turned out a little more flush and plumb, but hey that's not the point.

I wound up doing most of this project in my kitchen. Partly so that I would not be leaving the wood out in the moisture overnight, and partly because vacuuming up the sawdust indoors was easier than trying to get it out of the strange fake turf / carpet in the backyard.

I used some masking tape to mark my cut lines. If the tape wraps perfectly on itself, that should mean the cut line is exactly perpendicular.

I use a Japanese-style pull saw because the Japanese are smarter than us.

Rotating the piece throughout the cut, most of the cuts turned out decently flat.

I tried to cut four legs of the same length by stacking them and drawing a line from top to bottom.

It was time to try the floating dowel joint.

I put the dowels into the short aprons first. The exact positioning does not matter since they are transferred to the legs next. They are wherever they are.

I used some paint to transfer the dowel positions from one piece to the other. This didn't go as easily as I thought it would, and my assembled edges were very far from flush with each other. I had to take another pass with the saw, and several passes with sandpaper to solve those later.

A big part of my problem is that my drilled holes were often not perfectly vertical. I didn't have a bullseye bubble level on the drill, or a drill guide besides a scrap cut of the 4×4 which itself was not plumb, and my eyeballing was not good enough.

They barely came together as intended.

But, caulk and paint...

It was time to seal the top. I used a 50/50 mix of oil-based polyurethane finish and mineral spirits, both of which had to be ordered online because these chemicals are known to the state of ██████████ to cause ██████ and aren't sold in stores.

Again, I started outside but quickly took it inside so the project would not be outdoors overnight. I ran the stovetop exhaust fan and another fan 24/7 for about a week, doing one to two coats per day. The fumes were not really the fumes were not that really that fumes were not really that bad and my cancer is doing fine thank you very much.

It turned out pretty nice.

I did another set of floating dowels to connect the two sides to the long aprons.

And added the shelf brackets, though in a different position than I had originally drawn.

I bought a pack of figure-8 fasteners for joining the top to the frame, but I wound up not using them. I have been satisfied with the good old fashioned gravity joint: the top is just sitting there.

After sanding some high spots in the frame and shimming some low spots in the floor, the table was done.

As you can see from my photo timestamps, this project was done in May / June 2025. The table has been doing a fine job of holding my stuff.

Approximate materials cost:

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[today_i_did_this]

28-400

A couple of years ago, I bought this bottle of shampoo. I have been reusing it and refilling it ever since.

I particularly like the translucent, frosted plastic more than a crystal clear bottle or an opaque one. I think it's a pretty effect.

In fact, I've bought several pieces from a range of home goods that follow a white + frosted color scheme to keep things cohesive.

And several of the ikea pepprig spray bottles which I like for their shape.

At some point during my ownership of the blue shampoo bottle, I realized that I wanted to get two more so that I could have my shampoo, conditioner, and bodywash all in matching frosted bottles. But that brand has switched to clear bottles and I missed my chance. When I would go to the store I would check if any nice bottles might catch my attention, but I couldn't find a good match or a new bottle worth switching to. And since this isn't that important I just continued living with the mismatched bottles at home cuz whatever.

Recently though, I really got determined to buy some matching shower bottles. I wondered if I should join the bourgeoisie and buy actual frosted glass instead of plastic, despite the obvious questionability of keeping glass in the shower.

When searching for glass pump bottles online, it quickly became apparent that the Boston Round style of bottle is the most common for this purpose. My blue shampoo bottle holds 32 ounces, though considering that a 32 oz Boston round might not sit on the ledges of my shower as well as the oblong plastic bottle, I would be willing to accept a 16 oz instead.

My dreams and lacerations were not to be, however, since I absolutely could not find a suitable product except in large wholesale quantities. Search after search after search on multiple websites with all combinations of keywords simply could not produce for me a small set of 16 or 32 oz frosted glass Boston rounds.

Instead, all I could find were:

• Frosted glass less than 16 oz, which will simply be way too small for shower use.

  

• 32 oz frosted glass in too large a quantity

  

• Bottles in other colors, mostly clear, amber, or an opaque coating.

  

Don't get me wrong, these cobalt blues are very pretty as well, and I'm nearly tempted to buy some. But I don't actually have any use for more such glassware.

Having nearly given up on finding bottles to buy, I decided to try putting my shower products in the hand soap bottles that I already own. I have a few spares, and at 18 oz they're a decent capacity. But, the experience was poor: the dosage of those pumps is too low, requiring two or three presses to get a normal amount of shampoo; and the straws too narrow to deal with conditioner, often sending up nothing at all. So I aborted that idea and went back to searching.

Since I've gone down one corner of the rabbit hole that is glassware, and noticing that I'd probably have to buy the pump heads separately from the bottles themselves, I learned that the standard threading used on Boston rounds is most commonly of the 28-400 or 28-410 variety.

There's actually a second, contemporary storyline that intersects here, which is that the pump heads on my hand and dish soap don't seem to be the most durable. One of them had already cracked pretty badly and started leaking (not pictured here, I threw it away — keeping the bottle itself of course — before deciding to write this article), and another has now started to crack as well.

These hand soap bottles cost me $5 each, so if the pumps crack I'd like to replace just the pumps and not the bottles. Do these also use a 28-400 thread?

I still don't need 500 of them, but you know what I mean.

Hmm, looks like 28mm to me. Sorry, this color is difficult to photograph.

I found that someone had already made an STL file for a 28-400 pump, so I printed up one of those to check if it fits.

Yes!

What else does it fit?

What else does it fit???

Does that mean...?

It does!

It means the pepprig are now my shower bottles. At 20 oz and a conveniently small footprint, they are a good size for the shower. Using the pumps that came from the original shower products, the dosage is correct, and nicely color matched with the contents. Though not matching the white + frosted theme, I like this too.

Here they are in situ.

This made me curious what else might be 28-400 compatible, with a few... cursed results.

The lesson today is:

• appreciate standardized interfaces whenever you find them, and
• try putting random stuff together

Have fun.

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[film] [introspection]

Ghost Dog and selective philosphy

When I saw Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai for the first time, it went straight onto my list of "tip top favorites". It's a rare kind of movie. Ghost Dog uses the popular, fast-paced, domestic genre of mafia hitman to deliver slow, contemplative, foreign philosphical messages. I've recently rewatched it, and although it maintains its place on the list, I have some new critical introspective thoughts on how I feel about this movie.

I think most people can admit they have at least one fictional character they see as a role model, and unique characters like Ghost Dog really lend themselves to that more than usual. Sure, he's a mafia hitman, but he spends all his free time reading Japanese philosophy, meditating, and studying martial arts. This is someone's role model for sure.

Ghost Dog reads passages from Hagakure, which is a real text written in the 1700s. Of course, I had to get ahold of it in the original Japanese. No, I can't read Japanese. Do you see where this is going. I found this PDF copy (80 MiB) which is quite complete, and some plaintext which is less complete but easier to search and run through machine translation.

There are plenty of great movies out there, and plenty that I've given the letterboxd ♥ to, but Ghost Dog gets to be a tip top favorite because those passages really stick in my memory. For an indecisive, anxious, over-thinkerly person like myself, these are inspirational:

〇一二一〜分別も久しくすればねまる、武士は七息に分別せよ

一、古人の詞に七息思案と云ふことあり。隆信公は、「分別も久しくすればねまる。」と仰せられ候。直茂公は、「萬事仕だるきこと十に七つ悪し。武士は物事手取早にするものぞ。」と仰せられ候由。心氣うろうろとしたるときは、分別も埒明かず。なづみなく、さわやかに、りんとしたる氣にては、七息に分別すむもの也。胸すわりて、突つ切れたる氣の位也。口傳。

〇〇七九〜俄雨も初から思ひはまつて濡れる心に苦しみがない

一、大雨の箴と云ふ事あり。途中にて俄雨にあひて、濡れじとて道を急ぎ走り、軒下などを通りても、濡るゝ事は替らざる也。初めより思ひはまりて濡るゝ時、心に苦しみなく濡るゝ事は同じ。これ萬づにわたる心得也。

〇一八九〜時機を逸するとだるみが出來る、武道は率忽に無二無三に

一、打果すと、はまりたる事ある時、たとへば直に行きては仕果せがたし、遠けれども此の道を廻りて行くべしなんどと思はぬもの也。手延びになりて、心にだるみ出來る故、大かた仕届けず。

〇〇四六〜直茂公壁書「大事の思案は輕く」とは平素思案を定め置く事

一、直茂公の御壁書に「大事の思案は輕くすべし。」とあり。一鼎の註には、「小事の思案は重くすべし。」と致され候。大事と云ふは、二三箇條ならではあるまじく候。これは、平生に詮議して見れば知れて居る也。これは前廉に思案し置きて、大事の時取出して輕くする事と思はるゝ也。兼ては不覺悟にして、其の場に臨んで輕く分別する事も成り難く、圖に當る事不定也。然れば兼て地盤をすゑて置くが、「大事の思案は輕くすべし。」と仰せられ候箇條の基と思はるゝ也。

〇二四〇〜花見提重は歸りには踏み捨てる、萬づ仕舞口が大事

一、上方にて花見提重あり。一日の用事也。歸りには踏み散らして捨て候也。さすが都の心附け也。萬づ仕舞口が大事と也。

Ghost Dog pulls some great snippets out of Hagakure, and as I read through dozens and dozens of these translated vignettes it is difficult to resist the urge to paste them all here for how good they are, but I've already given you the file so you can go ahead and read them yourself.

These passages make me think wow, I should apply that to my own life. I should make decisions quickly, and stick to them. I should go into difficult situations straightforward and headlong instead of waffling at the edges. I should take pride and care in my work with the expectation that it outlives me. Hagakure tells you to be strong in your resolve, be brave in the face of doubt, be prepared for unexpected circumstances, and be ready to commit seppuku for your master at any moment. Haha wait can you say that last one again?

Yes, much of Hagakure is inspirational, and encourages a lifestyle of thoughtfulness and care. But along the way, it also advises us that we should swiftly murder anybody who challenges social hierarchy:

〇一八九〜時機を逸するとだるみが出來る、武道は率忽に無二無三に

一、打果すと、はまりたる事ある時、たとへば直に行きては仕果せがたし、遠けれども此の道を廻りて行くべしなんどと思はぬもの也。手延びになりて、心にだるみ出來る故、大かた仕届けず。或人、川上御經の内、渡船にて小姓酒狂にて船頭とからかひ、向へ上りて、小姓刀を抜き候を、船頭竿にて頭を打ち申し候。その時、あたりの船頭共、櫂を提げ駈集り、打ちひしぎ申すべしと仕り候。然るに、主人は知らぬ振りにて通られ候。小姓一人走り歸り、船頭共へ斷りを言ひ、申し宥め連れ歸り候。その晩、右酒狂者の大小を取拂ひ申され候由承り候。まづ船中にて酒狂者を呵り、船頭を宥めざるところ不足也。又無理にても頭を打たれてからは、斷りどころにてなし。斷り言ふ振りにて近寄り、相手の船頭打捨て、酒狂共も打捨つべき所也。主人はふがひなし也。

Do not hesitate once you have decided to cut a man down. Bypass any thoughts of postponing for alternative options premised on the excuse that diving in headfirst will likely fail. You will miss your chance, and will not accomplish your mission. In the Way of the warrior, be ready to leap headlong into the fray without a second thought.

A man went to a sutra reading at the Jissōin Temple in Kawakami. His page became intoxicated on the boat ride and started a fight with the ferryman. When the page climbed up the bank and drew his sword, the ferryman struck him on the head with an oar, and the others converged with their oars at the ready. While these events were transpiring, his master walked by as if nothing was happening. This prompted another page to run to the ferrymen and apologize for his colleague's behavior. He ushered him away from the scene while trying to mollify him. That evening, they say the drunken page had his swords confiscated.

First, the master was amiss for not scolding the page, nor did he try to pacify the ferryman. Even though the incident was sparked by the drunken page's belligerent behavior, an apology was unnecessary as the ferryman, a commoner, struck a samurai on the head. The master should have approached the ferryman as if he was going to make amends, and then cut him and his page down together. The master was sadly remiss.

And... I'm just gonna ignore that lesson because it doesn't match the value system I came here looking for. I will also disregard any passage that tells me to sacrifice my life in unwavering servitude to powerful men, since this doesn't fit with our 2025 sensibilities about social hierarchy, capitalism, and dignity as an individual:

〇〇三五〜生きながら幽靈となつて二六時中主君を守り國家を固めよ

一、今時の奉公人を見るに、いかう低い眼の着け所也。スリの目遣ひの様也。大方、身のための欲得か、利發だてか、又は少し魂の落着きたる様なれば、身構へをするばかり也。わが身を主君に奉り、速やかに死に切って幽靈となりて、二六時中主君の御事を歎き、事を整へて進上申し、御國家を固むると云ふ所に眼を着けねば、奉公人とは言はれぬ也。上下の差別あるべき様なし。此のあたりに、ぎしと居座りて、神佛の勧めにても、少しも迷はぬ様覺悟せねばならず。

The gaze of retainers today seems to be very low. Their eyes resemble those of crooks driven by covetousness and cunning. Even if a samurai seems to have spirit, this is merely a feigned exterior. A samurai is not a true retainer without placing himself in absolute servitude at the feet of his lord, thinking of himself as already dead, like a ghost, always mindful of his lord's wellbeing from the bottom of his heart, and thinking of sound solutions for the resolution of problems within the domain. This is the same for samurai who occupy stations both high and low. He must be completely unflinching in his resolve, even if it falls contrary to the bidding of the gods or Buddha.

Here's one that starts by telling us to be humble in our expectation for reward, but then veers off into seppuku again:

〇〇八七〜無實の切腹仰付けられても、一人勇み進むこそ御譜代の家來

一、何某事數年の精勤にて、我人一廉御褒美仰付けらるべしと存じ居り候處、御用手紙參り、諸人前方より祝儀を述べ候。然る處、役米加増仰付けられ候に付て、皆人案外の儀と存じ候。然れども仰付けの事に候故悦び申し候へば、何某以っての外貌振り悪しく、「面目無き仕合せに御座候。畢竟御用に相立たざる者に候故、斯くの如き行掛り、是非御斷り申し候て引取り申すべし。」などと申し候を、入魂の衆色々申し宥め候て、相勤め申し候。これ偏へに奉公の覺悟これなく、唯我が身自慢の故にて候。御褒美の事は扨置き、侍を足輕に召成され、何の料も是なきを切腹仰付けられ候時、一入勇み進み候こそ御譜代の御家來にて候。面目無きなどと申すは、皆私にて候。此所にて篤と落着くべき事也。但し曲者の一通りは別にあるべき事也。

A man believed he was owed a generous reward after serving his lord diligently for many years. His friends were quick to offer their congratulations when he received a much-anticipated letter from his lord, but he was to be disappointed. To everybody's surprise, all he was awarded was a small increase in stipend. They continued to rejoice as this was still a welcome reward, but he looked surprisingly dejected. Full of woe he lamented: "I feel so embarrassed, and find it hard to face you all. I suppose I was of little consequence to my lord after all. I will retire from service and become a recluse." His close friends consoled him, and persuaded him not to retire.

Yet, his attitude clearly demonstrates that his heart was not really in service. His main motivation was self-aggrandizement. It goes without saying that when you receive a reward, or even in the case of demotion from samurai to foot soldier (ashigaru), or if you are ordered to commit seppuku for a crime you did not commit, a hereditary retainer unflinchingly accepts his fate. Saying he was too ashamed to show his face proves that he was an egoist only concerned with his own standing. All warriors should bear this in mind, although it will be beyond comprehension for conceited rogues.

These are the passages that reveal my flawed relationship with the material. One moment I'm thinking "yes, I want to be more like that", and the next moment I'm thinking "no, that's stupid and irrelevant".

Selective philosophy.

I am reminded of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. If you find yourself disagreeing with one part of a text, you probably should go back and reassess the parts you agreed with before, because it probably suffers from the same problems you're identifying now.

It's easy to get caught up in romanticizing the good parts of a philosophical text while conveniently ignoring the bad parts, and yet still pretending that you have been inspired by "the way". Maybe it is wise to pull bits and pieces from a variety of influences, to take advantage of the net of information we have access to that these ancients did not; or maybe it is lazy, gluttonous, and a sign of an undeveloped palate, like eating only the chocolates out of a trail mix. The good parts?

Hagakure was not written specifically to act as a rulebook. It's simply a collection of vignettes, some historical and some parabolic, and the kind of life lessons that come up in conversation over many years. So, it's not like you have to do everything it says. But it raises the question: if I'm the one deciding which parts to follow and which parts to ignore, am I allowing it to teach me anything I didn't already know? What exactly is the point of being inspired by a message if you're not going to accept the whole message, but only the parts that are convenient?

When Ghost Dog holsters his pistol, he does what he might call a flourish or perhaps 血振るい, but what I'll call "waves it around a bit" in an attempt to evoke the way one sheaths a sword after combat.

This flourish is obviously ridiculous, and pokes a rather large hole in the idea of Ghost Dog as a role model. You thought that following the ancient and mystical ways of the samurai, today in the 21st century, would make you appear enlightened, strong, and wise? No, it just makes you look like the "power of god and anime" kid.

Suddenly, Ghost Dog is a cautionary tale. The lesson is that if you spend all your time and energy pretending to be something you're not, the seams will crack open sooner or later. This smoking gun is the smoking gun here. It is an adherence to the form of 血振るい, impotently lacking its function, for of course there is no blood to be shaken off the ranged weapon. Ghost Dog waves it around a bit because he believes he's supposed to in order to look like a samurai, to maintain his image, but it's hollow. It reminds me of a child imitating a parent without understanding what they're doing.

In the age of the firearm, there are gun-native flourishes to behold. I think you'll agree this takes more skill than just waving it around a bit:

Sticking to the 血振るい is anachronism, an attempt to have it both ways despite his supposed commitment to the way. Even though Ghost Dog trains with swords at home, he does not use them in combat. He embraces modernity when it suits him — the convenience of firearms as a weapon, including a sniper rifle which I'd say is decidedly not in line with the honorable samurai ethos — but rejects modernity when he has the chance to feel superior to others. "Sometimes you gotta stick with the ancient ways", he says. But only sometimes.

Westerners have long idealized and fetishized Asian exoticism, the Japanese in particular. As an American (not to conflate Western with American, just giving my own perspective), I feel that our 250 year history seems a bit short and boring compared to what we see in other places around the world. We are hungry for things that have a thousand-year history and cool, dramatic characters like samurai and ninjas.

We like to surround ourselves with things we literally do not understand to provide the image of deep and refined scholarly taste, because if you can't understand it it must be good. Asian exoticism is more alluring than European exoticism partly because we have no hope of even pronouncing their written word; the simplest of Hanzi/Kanji look like magic runes in contrast to the Fisher-Price toyset that is our Latin alphabet.

Did you know that 愛 means love? Oh my god that's so deep.

I've included a lot of Japanese text in this article, none of which I can read nor write. That's all copy-pasted. It does no service to you, the reader, who is surely glancing past it and reading the translation instead. This article would be just was well with all that text removed. But I keep it because it serves the ego, the aesthetics, and the image of myself as someone with multicultural taste, much like Ghost Dog keeps his 血振るい.

I can't read Japanese. Can Ghost Dog read Japanese? It's not necessarily ruled out by the film, but I don't think so, considering his copy of Hagakure is in English. But he decorates his walls with Japanese newspaper:

The content of the newspaper is probably typical and boring, and if it were written in English it would be worthless. Its value as decoration comes solely from the fact that we don't know what it says. You'd probably think I'm singing 'bout some pretty serious stuff.

A movie like Ghost Dog is catnip for a person like me: someone with a fetish for Asian culture, unusual artsy film, and a philosophical bent. But in asking myself why people like me latch onto these types of movies, characters, and messages, I find it is not as easy as saying you want to be more like that. More like which parts, exactly? The good parts, but not the bad. The easy parts, but not the hard.

Sometimes, it is difficult to figure out whether you really believe something because it aligns with your value system, or you believe it because it is easy. If someone told you that you should be ready to commit seppuku for your master at any moment, you'd reject it immediately because it doesn't align with our modern beliefs about the value of human life. But are you actually sure there's no enlightenment to be gained from getting yourself into that state of mind? No, you're not really sure, and you're not willing to put in the effort to find out. Is this a belief or a convenience?

And of course, the amount of philosophy, advice, beliefs, and rulebooks available for you to pick from is so huge and intracontradictory that you'll only ever practice a tiny portion of it. You could choose to dedicate your life to the Samurai way, or the Buddhist way, or the Catholic way, or...? You only get one life (well, maybe Buddhists would disagree), so you either stick with one Way the whole time and miss out on the others, or dabble in each and miss out on the experience of being truly dedicated to any of them. When you bail out of one school of thought, is that because you lack the discipline to stick with it, or because you actually don't believe it? And is that really a lack of discipline, or is it a realization that our assumption of difficult=good is not true?

You can't just pick up a rulebook and follow along, because as soon as you throw out any of the rules, then you're guiding the rulebook instead of letting it guide you. Even Ghost Dog, who is in fact willing to kill and die by the code, breaks parts of the code for his convenience. I also find that if you try too hard to slavishly adhere to a sacred code, you wind up carrying forward some emptily performative aspects like the 血振るい which lack meaning in their modern application. And worst of all, we have a weak spot for foreign exoticism, which bypasses our logic centers on the assumption that difficult=good, even though there's probably plenty of insightful philosophy to be found domestically. Put this all together and what even is anything worth believing if I'm going to be the one picking and choosing what stays, and my choices come from what I already believe?

The majority of this article was written in December 2024 / January 2025, back when "recently rewatched" was a truer statement. I have been stuck sitting on this for a few months because I haven't been able to figure out a real point. It is easy to complain and not easy to say something more constructive, but I can't publish without something constructive. I also can't figure out if this has gone way too far into fake-deep, navel-gazing territory or if it actually means anything.

I will answer my own questions at least a little bit. Taking inspiration from these texts, even if only the parts that align with my existing values, can help by giving me a vocabulary with which to express those values. Vocabulary in and of itself is a very important part of our ability to think at all; see linguistic relativity (not that I agree with everything theorized there). Next time I am stuck on a decision for too long, I can think to myself "seven breaths" instead of "golly, I wish I wasn't so indecisive". And when I have used something up beyond its working life, or it's time to say goodbye to a person or place, I can think "the end is important in all things" — I've already dropped that one in the chat at work. These are shorthand for a larger thought, and that is worth something.

Furthermore, reading these texts can help me learn more about myself by confronting me with ideas I hadn't specifically considered before, and forcing me to decide whether I agree with it or not based on other ideas I've had in the past. Even if the bases for my opinions already existed within me, the act of consciously deciding yes or no can help me understand what exactly those opinions are. To put it another way, even if you have all the ingredients for a cake in your pantry, there is value in actually baking the cake instead of sitting back and saying yeah, there's basically the equivalent of a cake in there somewhere.

So far I have criticized Ghost Dog (the man) for not following The Way with absolute purity, and that's part of my problem. No matter which Way you try to follow, it is unlikely anyone can or even should be so dogmatic. The authors of the texts probably didn't follow it that well, and in fact it's probably the other way around: if the author is trying to convince you to sacrifice your life for their benefit, or live in a way that empowers them, they are probably not following the same rules they set out for you. And even if they were genuine, it doesn't mean they were right. This again leaves you as the judge of what is worth believing and following.

I'll have to say again that Ghost Dog (the movie) remains on my list of tip top favorites. The best thing art can do is make you think.

I am still not satisfied with this conclusion. I keep stretching this article out longer and longer, telling myself it's not ready to publish because the thought process has not come to an end. But you know what they say.

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[photography]

[introspection]

Further thoughts on hobby photography

Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. EDC
3. Black and white
4. Subject matter / subjects matter / subject matters
5. Originality
6. What if everyone just has poor taste
7. Street photography
8. Privileged eye, outsider eye
9. Videography
10. Money and recognition
11. Zooming out
12. Website, portfolio, gallery
13. Instxgrxm
14. how
15. Fuji dial slip-ups
16. Conclusion

Introduction (§)

It has been two years since I wrote down some early thoughts on hobby photography and I thought it would be worth following up as a separate article.

This article contains brand names and I'm sorry about that. While there's plenty to say about the philosophy and ideals of photography in the abstract, I also want to give a few thoughts about the specific items I'm using.

EDC (§)

I have not been able to convince myself to bring the Fuji camera everywhere. Although it is not humongous by any means, it is too large and conspicuous for me to go and do normal stuff without looking like I'm trying to be a "photographer" all the time, especially since it must be worn on a shoulder strap as I'm not in the habit of carrying a backpack, which seems to be a key factor amongst those who do carry these cameras daily. I want to increase the quality and quantity of life memories that I capture, but I don't want to feel like every day needs to be a photo shoot or like I'm playing a character. I want photography to be available to me whenever opportunity presents itself, but I don't want it to consume my entire personality and perception.

So, I bought a Ricoh GR III.

I told myself that even if I fail to EDC this one too, at least it can act as a B camera for when I've got the telephoto lens on my A camera, and indeed it has been a helpful addition there.

I tried a couple different ways of carrying the GR, and wound up making my own little bag for it. This became its own article.

I have been carrying it this way for a few months, even though I am constantly nervous that people will ask me "what is that you're wearing?". Surprisingly, this really has not happened. I wore it under my jacket back when the weather was cooler, and for some reason none of my coworkers, who would not be used to seeing this suspicious line of paracord, ever asked about it. Maybe they think it's a piece and if they ask too many questions I'll pop 'em.

One of the final big pushes that got me to buy the GR was this video by Clint of Lazy Game Reviews about an Intel pocket camera. Based on the pictures he shows here, it's clear he was in the habit of carrying this camera with him frequently, possibly every single day for some time.

Most of the scenes he took pictures of are just ordinary, but that's what makes them interesting. After 24 years, even "ordinary" is different. A picture of a retail store shelf will make you say "wow, they used to look like that?" or "wow, they still look like that!". It's a winner either way.

This video really made me feel like I've been missing out by not carrying a camera every day. A lot of times we think "I don't need to take this picture today, it can wait until tomorrow", but that will be a picture of tomorrow, not today. If you want a picture of today, this really is your only chance. By tomorrow you'll have missed it. So although I knew I would still deal with discomfort and embarrassment, I felt like I had to try.

So I've been practicing a little bit of this lifestyle photography thing with some of my coworkers. Like when a group of us goes for a walk to stretch or we have a Thursday pizza party, I've taken a few casual pictures then. I keep expecting people to ask me questions about this camera, but they don't. I keep telling myself how abnormal it is to carry any kind of camera at all these days, and especially how abnormal it is to wear it on a homemade sling. Yet no one questions it. That's a good thing and all, but wow does it make me feel like the autistic one.

Even still, I sometimes see pictures online of people working at their desk / cubicles in what seem to be candid or spontaneous circumstances, and I can't figure out how exactly those moments come about.

I can feel that my mindset is still lagging behind the physical act of EDC. It is not enough to carry the camera if you do not use it. Last weekend I went out to see a band, and unfortunately the show got cancelled. I got to hang out with the band for about an hour anyway, and yet I didn't take even a single picture of them. It would have been so great to have a "We tried!" photo, and I can't believe this thought didn't cross my mind at the time. I just completely missed it. I still feel like I need some kind of clear event or scene to grant me permission to take photos — I need to get better at realizing the value of the present moment even if it is not what I came looking for.

I said last time that I don't like PASM dials, but the GR is a PASM camera, so has my opinion changed? No. I still don't like PASM, and I consider it a downside of this purchase. This will spend most of its time in P anyway. In general, the shooting experience of the GR is a lot worse than that of a bigger camera. Even though it is simple, and it is a big step above a phone camera, I would not recommend it to photography beginners because it sacrifices a lot in the name of EDC. I miss my dials and focus ring. The on-screen preview always looks uglier than the photo, so you have to learn to ignore the preview and trust the camera. The blackout interval is so bad that in burst mode you literally don't know what you're getting after the first shot. The face-detection does not work in continuous autofocus, only single autofocus, which is weird since the face detection algorithm runs continuously during live view to present the white box in the first place. There are all around little touches to the firmware that could be improved — to give a hyper specific example, when the Fuji is in burst mode you can still chimp if you release the shutter button quickly enough, but if you keep it half-pressed it stays in live view mode, so you get the best of both single and burst shooting in a single mode. On the GR, it does not go back to live view when half-pressing the shutter in burst mode unless you turn off chimping entirely. I'd rather at least the chimp setting was stored separately across single and burst shooting.

Maybe I didn't do enough research before buying, because the Sony RX100 VII apparently slashes a lot of these concerns with better continuous AF, no blackout time, a zoom lens, and even a flip-out screen, though with a smaller sensor to compromise. I can't say for sure I would have picked that if starting fresh, but darn. Of course, if there was such a thing as a Fuji X-T Mini I probably would have bought that.

So far, I haven't addressed the elephant in the room, which is that my cell phone is already an everyday carry camera. Why not use that? I don't think I'll be able to give very convincing answers because it really is more of a psychological block than a practical one. I'll say first of all that I don't like the pictures my phone produces very much: they are simultaneously oversharpened and soupy despite what you'd think is a sufficient 12mp resolution.

I don't want to buy a new phone just to prioritize cameras, because I feel like that's what almost everybody is doing these days and it has led to the severe atrophy of other good qualities and features: the 3.5mm headphone jack, the SD card slot, removable batteries, lay-flat back design, overall software UI and UX, cloud dependencies, and the squandering of local processing power. It's not that these things can't coexist with good cameras. They're all completely unrelated, technically. But I feel that the top producers of cell phones are able to abuse their customer from every direction and the customers put up with it because "the cameras are better than last time". I don't want to be stuck in the same cattle line.

Hypocrisy alert: there are not many phones that still include a 3.5mm jack, so my next phone might be a Sony Xperia which happens to be definitively camera-centric. I don't want to get into the Chinese brands or Samsung so there aren't too many good choices.

Black and white (§)

I like black and white. There are many stereotypes about noobs / losers who think that black and white is a one-click cheat code to make any picture a masterpiece work of art. Am I one of those losers? It's possible. Personally, I think I actually like black and white, but of course that's exactly what one of the losers would say, wouldn't they.

The wife of a friend of mine decided one day that she was going to be a "professional photographer".

She bought a cheap digital SLR and then she ran around taking random pictures of everyday bullshit, then spent a few minutes de-saturating them in PS or applying sepia-tone filters to them.

She proudly displays them on her "professional photographer" website for all to see.

What a disgrace to the profession.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gclsg/_/c1mnxwx/

Oops!

I like black and white artistically because it accentuates geometry and texture. I like that it places distance between the photo and reality, allowing it to act as fiction. Once you get used to looking at black and white, you start to forget that anything is even missing at all, it just seems normal. Black and white pictures give off what is perhaps an illusion that they are sharper and more defined, which makes them more fun to zoom in and pixel peep and be amazed at what's resolved — every time I zoom in on a picture and see the individual threads of a person's shirt I am amazed. But I also like black and white pragmatically because at maximum ISO, black and white pictures look acceptably grainy but color pictures look hellishly bad. So when I'm shooting in the dark without a flash, I'll get better results in black and white.

Oftentimes, I think I want to only shoot black and white forever. For the early decades of photography, that was the only option, and people got good results, so I probably could too. I feel like when I switch into color I am not being true to myself or my vision.

When I shoot pictures that are going out to other people, though, I know that everybody else wants and expects color. I'm the resident event photographer at my workplace and it would be pretty dumb of me to send out pictures of a corporate event in black and white. A couple bands have paid me for my photos, and of course they want them in color.

For a long time I was shooting both black and white and color, and trying to figure out how to mix them when I grouped photos together. It felt like two different photographers or maybe more like five different photographers.

I took a workshop with Alex Webb and his wife Rebecca. They looked at the pictures and moved them around and whispered to each other, and then they both turned to me and Rebecca said "yeah, you don't really ever need to shoot color again the rest of your life".

And I was like "thank you, so much". It was the greatest gift, I mean I still get chills when I think about it because it was such a defining moment. I became a black and white photographer in that moment and never looked back.

Reuben Radding

Frankly, black and white is very often easier than color. Color is hard because it adds an extra dimension for failure, another opportunity to make things look bad. Even in good conditions, the colors of your subject might look bad against those of the background, or there'll be someone wearing a distracting neon-yellow sweater that ruins your shot. And in poor conditions you're fighting with the white balance or low-CRI indoor lights to keep people's skin from looking pale or sickly green.

If color is hard, then black and white is a crutch, and to say "I will only shoot black and white forever" is to say "I'm not willing to take on a challenge and learn new skills". So it's probably important to do some portion of color photography pretty consistently, in order to be sure that the decision to use black and white is actually a decision and not a tar pit.

Likewise, of course, color can also be a crutch. It's a people-pleaser, because the majority of people are normies content with "ooh, look at the pretty colors!". Color is an easy source of praise, so it can be difficult to stick to a black and white vision when others are involved. But remember also the difference between taking a beautiful picture and taking a picture of a beautiful thing; I often think to myself that if a scene doesn't look good in black and white then it's not a good scene, so there's nothing to lose by always shooting B&W. But I've never actually said that out loud because I don't have these kinds of conversations with anyone. One thing I know for certain is that if I'm shooting black and white and I see something very colorful so I switch the camera back to color, that'll be my worst photo of the day. "Look at the pretty colors" is the least convincing reason to shoot color.

When I shoot color, am I betraying myself to satisfy others? Yes. Is it good for me to betray myself, to force myself to try new things and learn? Yes. What does it mean to stay true to yourself, then?

The fantasy of noble self-martyrdom tells me to reject everyone's expectation for color photos; to tell them that if they want color photos they'll have to take them themselves; to tell them that if they want to hire me they'd better be aware they're only getting black and white. The less-stupid side of me tells me that's stupid. If the people around me don't like the pictures I take or find it weird/uncomfortable that I insist on a black and white identity, then they won't want me around, and won't want me to take pictures of them, and then I'll just be alone with the camera, which defeats the point. It's only been two years, so it's too early to say I've found what I'm best at, yet. It's like a child watching the same movie on repeat dozens of times because they haven't discovered or can't process anything else yet.

I took pictures at a 4th of July party in 2023 in black and white, and I regret it. I never sent the pictures out to anyone because I am embarrassed and I do not want to be confronted with the question "why are they in black and white?", since I don't have a reason. Noble self-martyrdom? It would be nice if I was at least personally satisfied with them, but I'm not. When I look at those photos, the only feeling they give me is that I was sticking dogmatically to the identity of black and white photographer as if that was important somehow. In 2024 I shot the same party in color.

I think most of us assume that the general public doesn't like black and white, but for what it's worth, when I've shared my photos with strangers I've never gotten the sense that they were disappointed by it.

I'll be leaving the GR in color mode by default. The purpose of the EDC is to capture life memories and documentary, which simply makes more sense in color. B&W might look better artistically, but it is pretentious to insist that every waking moment of life be a piece of art. Sometimes you want to remember something as it actually appeared. I think this will help me keep my use of black and white deliberate.

I would be willing to buy a monochrome-only camera body, despite what I just said. My reasoning here has changed over time. I used to imagine myself buying a monochrome body to remove the option, temptation, and doubt to use color; to enforce the decision to shoot B&W at all times. So that when people ask me for the color copy of a photo I can tell them "ha, this camera can't even take color pictures". But after my experiences and reflections, I don't want that any more.

I still would buy a monochrome body because when it's time for some deliberate black and white, a true monochrome sensor would feel like the right tool for the job. I would like to fully embrace the black and white power when the situation calls for it. Now, monochrome sensors do have a technical advantage in sharpness and low-light performance since there's no bayer filter in front of the pixels, but I feel that's not actually a big enough point and only provides the guise of rationality to an otherwise lusty desire.

Despite being a reduction in featureset, monochrome sensors of course cost more because the consumer demand is smaller. There are people out there who do monochrome conversions of color cameras by physically destroying the bayer filter off the sensor, but because the camera's firmware is still programmed to be a color camera, this essentially breaks the in-camera jpeg engine and requires all shots to be done in raw and processed on the computer. That ain't for me. If Fuji released a monochrome X-T body with all the dials and switches to my satisfaction (see below), it would pretty much be an instabuy for me at a price up to about $2,000.

I must acknowledge the effect of gear on this so-called black and white identity, for a lot of things that we think are innate about ourselves are really just a product of circumstance. I think the fact that I did not start photography until the age of mirrorless cameras with EVFs is absolutely critical to my use of black and white. If I had started with a DSLR, looking through an optical viewfinder, I'm certain I would have taken all my pictures in color. And I mean that's exactly what happened when I borrowed my dad's DSLR at the rennaisance faire. And if I had grown up in the days of film, perhaps the time, effort, and cost would have kept me out of the hobby entirely.

Subject matter / subjects matter / subject matters (§)

I said last time that pictures of plants and flowers were not meaningful enough, and at this point I am staunchly against taking landscape and nature photos. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just saying I don't want to. When I go for a hike I'll bring my camera, but I'll only take a few pictures to represent the day. I feel that 99% of people can't possibly care about a photo, like truly care beyond its moment of eyecandy, if it doesn't have a person in it. And before you say I'm submitting to people-pleasing, yeah, I'm part of that 99%. Documentary photos of places are still important historical artifacts that our society should continue to produce. But as an individual, while I might find place photos interesting to look at, they rarely evoke any deeper feelings. When they do, those feelings are usually envy that I don't live in a more interesting and beautiful place. So the emotional range of place photos is typically neutral to negative. Instead, I really focus on taking pictures of people and giving them away.

For me there is the intrinsic satisfaction of creating art and memories that will last a long time, and the extrinsic satisfaction of giving people something they enjoy. To put it selfishly, I want people to like me? I use photography to get myself out of the house and into places I would not otherwise be, so that I can meet new people, have something with which to break the ice, and have a reason to keep them in my contacts. I do photography to socialize and connect. A lot of photographers say that they do it to "spread the love" or "tell our story" and... I don't really identify with this. When I talk about making connections, I don't mean it in the 1960s flower-power hippie looove, man kind of way, more like the 2020s computer-science major "I don't have enough friends" kind of way.

I no longer take photo walks through residential areas, either. It's just not interesting enough in a car-dependent place and the pictures do not mean anything to me. I do still take walks through the local colleges because at least the architecture and scenery is more interesting to look at. Still, the photos I take there usually aren't too great or meaningful. For me it is a chance to practice with different camera settings or styles I haven't tried before, so that I am more ready to use them in a real shoot. And every once in a while I come across something that might have lasting cultural value.

By chance, I have spent a great deal of time in the genre of music photography. I personally don't play any music, and I never considered myself to be that interested in live music. But music photography is available in a way that some other genres aren't. First of all, there's kind of a lot of people that play music. You can probably find at least one or a few people in your circle of family, friends, or acquaintances that play. Secondly, music provides a clear and obvious reason to take pictures of your subjects, whereas asking family, friends, or strangers to do posed studio or environmental portraits might feel embarrassing, fake, or forced. Music, like photography, intersects art and business — most people get into it for the love of the art, but also acknowledge the need to promote themselves in order to make the financials work out — so bands are glad to have pictures to use in their own promotion.

I feel I am indebted to the city of Claremont for putting on the Friday Nights Live series of free outdoor concerts. I stumbled upon them in early August 2023, just days after publicly ruminating over my lack of meaningful subjects to shoot. I decided to go for a walk through downtown after work, and heard the sound of music, and I've come back every concert since. I've met a lot of kind and encouraging people here, and it has brought me opportunities to shoot with some really great performers and receive positive feedback, not only from the bands but also from the regulars. On a few occasions, I have brought stacks of 4x6 prints of pictures I've taken of the dancers and given them to the dancers as gifts, and I've got some thank you cards in return.

I made it my goal to attend every single Friday in 2024, and I stuck to that, but I don't think I will do the same in 2025. These last few weeks, my motivation to cull, edit, and publish has dropped like a stone. I think I am burnt out on shooting music for a while. Most of the bands in the Friday rotation I have seen two, three, or four times at this point. I don't want to keep shooting the same thing over and over again, and I don't think the bands need hundreds of pictures of themselves, either. I think I have hit a ceiling where my photos are not improving week to week and I am not learning. Partly this is because I am just an ordinary guest at these concerts, though a regular, with no particular authority or control. So when the band seats themselves in a way that is difficult to photograph, it is not my place to ask them to rearrange themselves, or pose, or move their lights and speakers out of the way. It's not a controlled shoot and while it's great to "challenge myself" looking for creative solutions to these problems, and the skills should be transferable to shooting in the real, uncontrolled world of event and street photography, it does put a limit on how good my photos can be that week.

Furthermore, I want to spend more time in crowds a little closer to my own age, not to disparage the crowd here which has been so generous to me. I will have to look for a new way to use my Friday evenings, though I am not sure how to break the news to the dancers.

A lot of my photos are not great. When I look back at the older ones, even and especially the orchestra concert that I said I was "very proud of" two years ago, I think a lot of them are downright terrible. I'll still give myself the excuses that it was a dark room and not under my control. If I was exclusively publishing my pictures online for the satisfaction and praise of random internet strangers, this would be a bit of a travesty. But because I prioritize sharing my photos directly with the subjects, I've quickly learned that even if my photos aren't great, it's possible they're the best they've ever had of themselves, and they'll tell me they love it. With the vast proliferation of cameras in the world, one might naturally assume that every single person has already been photographed to death, but the reality is you might be giving someone the best non-selfie photo they've ever had, and especially so for men. Sometimes I think about this and I worry it will make me complacent with mediocrity, but when I do look back at older pictures and I can see reasons they're bad, I know that means I must still be improving at least in taste if not in execution.

It's okay to keep some bad photos, anyway, for a few reasons. First of all, and maybe this is just a coping mechanism, I'll say that it's exhausting when every single picture in an album is trying to be the crown jewel. Like if every photo looks like it's trying to wow you, it comes off as tryhard. In narrative media like books and film, the audience is given breaks between the setpieces, and a photo album needs that too.

I think most photographers will agree that the real "wow" photos are rare; maybe one in a thousand or one in ten thousand in the age of burst shooting. I tend to think that my albums are a mixture of artwork and document. Yes I want to get some wows when I can, but I also want to document a place and event so people can see what it was like to be there. It's just not possible for every single one of those to be a wow, and that's ok because they still serve a purpose. It would be silly to delete everything but the wows and say yep, that's what I got out of tonight's performance: one picture, or maybe zero.

I get some wide-angled establishing shots of the environment and key characters before going in for the closeups. I'm not very good yet at making these wides artistic (more on that later) but they too are critical to the album which would otherwise be heads floating in space. Some basic facts-of-the-matter boring pictures set the context for what comes. And finally, sometimes I keep a boring or bad picture because it might be all I got of a particular person and I feel it would be disrespectful to erase them entirely. When people look at the album, they'll say "oh hey there's Susan!" and it will make them happy even if it's not an expert photo. Obviously if it's really bad it might be worse than nothing, but that's a judgement call.

In a music shoot, your favorite type of picture might be the lead singer belting out a big note, but I swear that you must get some pictures of them with their mouth closed, too, or else you make them look like their jaw's stuck open. Even the pictures that aren't your favorite still play an important grounding role in the album.

Yes, rules are meant to be broken. All that about composition, exposure, and focus are really just suggestions and you don't have to obey any of it. But nobody is unique, and it turns out that nobody is really even that different, and after 200 years of people taking pictures it's not surprising that we mostly agree certain things look good and others look bad.

Of course it matters who you're taking pictures for. If it's just a job to pay the bills, then the client's opinion is all that matters. If it's just a hobby for yourself alone then it's the complete opposite. And in reality most of us will be somewhere in between, hoping to be liked and recognized but without selling our soul.

Anyway, I think I actually do a good job, at least some of the time. I've got photos that still impress myself. I never feel like I'm doing perfectly, and that's partly because I keep getting myself into new types of shoots I've never done before. In that sense I am glad to be eternally amateur — it means I am not stagnating.

When you read my blog articles, not only about photography but also about GPX recording and document archiving, for example, you'll see a recurring theme of recording and capturing things to be enjoyed in the future. The word "memories" comes up a lot in the discussion of photography, in particular. We're all out here capturing memories, aren't we.

I don't consider myself to be excessively nostalgic, and I really am not the type to earnestly use the phrase "the good old days", but if something is valuable and enjoyable today it'll probably be valuable and enjoyable in the future, too. I watch a lot of movies from the 70s and 80s not because I have nostalgia for a time I did not experience, but because the movies are well-made and still fun to watch — I'm sure there are just as many well-made movies happening today, they're just buried under a lot of junk and the great sieve of time needs to separate them out. But the fact of the matter is there are people I used to know and places I used to go that I cannot even picture anymore. I feel like I should do a better job capturing memories of these things.

Photography is a tool for timeless, high-quality art just as much as it is for personal/family memories. A studio portrait with dramatic pose and lighting might rank highly on the art scale, but not so high on the memory scale except insofar as you remember the creative process that inspired or brought you to it. A moment captured at a birthday party or baby shower might not be so artistic, but could be cherished as a family memory worth framing on the wall.

Other types of photography can fall elsewhere on these scales. When I shoot music I try to take photos that are good, artistically, but I also hope they evoke fun memories of a fun time, even if that means some technical misses. Street photography aims to be artistic while contributing to the history books of tomorrow with scenes of today. Contrast all this with product photography or promotional photography used in advertising, streamlined towards short-term financial interests, not carrying any emotional weight for anybody involved, except perhaps for the young fledgling model getting their first big break.

How much does this focus on "memories" or "the future" indicate a dissatisfaction with, or insecurity about the present? Is it the case that the time I spend now, capturing for the future, is not fully enjoyed in the present? I'll admit that when I'm shooting music, I'm not really listening to the music, and I might not be able to tell you which song was my favorite after the set ends. And in the nebulous future when I am looking back, will I be failing to enjoy that present for being too engrossed in the past? When exactly is the right time for all this? This is a lot of rhetorical exaggeration, of course — if we can waste a few hours today watching TV or scrolling the internet without an existential worry that we're failing to enjoy the present, then surely we can afford to spend a few minutes looking at an old photo. But as the stack of photos gets bigger, so too does the question.

We visited my grandfather in the hospital about thirty six hours before he passed away. I brought my camera knowing this could be the last chance for any pictures. My cousin gave him a shave using a disposable razor and a bowl of soapy water. At his wake, it came up: "did anyone take a picture of that?".

But I hadn't, and nobody else had either. I took a couple of pictures of the exterior of the hospital building on our way in, but I did not take a single picture inside the room for the two hours I was around. It's one thing to take a picture of someone with the thought of "you're going to die some day so I need to do this while I have the chance" echoing in my mind, but it's quite another when that person is literally about to die tomorrow and we both know it. He was still completely lucid and conversational, though struggling; he never did lose his mind. I imagined myself in his position: physically unable to perform a basic task and being made a photographic spectacle of so everybody can remember my moment of weakness for the rest of time, like a zoo animal for amusement.

I'm sure a lot of family members would have been happy to see that picture. I'm sure that if it had brought him any embarrassment, shame, or feelings of mortal fear, those feelings would have been erased the next day anyway. Funerals are for the living, as is everything. But I am one of those living and the feelings of that moment would have persisted through me. I didn't think it was a worthwhile exchange. By writing it here I am preserving that moment in another way.

In a lot of ways, photography is one of the "easy" arts. When an artist wants to make a picture in ink or paint, they have to sit down and actually make it appear on the page. Like, by hand. And the musicians I shoot demonstrate great skill with their instruments and voice, these skills acquired through many hours of practice and hard work. All I do is find a neat place to stand or crouch and press a button.

When I watch street photography videos I'll sometimes hear the phrase "making photographs", and I really dislike it. I know I'll sound like a jerk, but this phrase makes me think less of the person saying it. Especially in the context of street photography where most pictures are candid, and even the non-candid ones are only minimally posed from how they were found, pressing a button on a magic box for 1/250 of a second seems like an exceptionally low bar to be called "making" anything, and I feel it discounts the effort that goes into most other forms of making. I think the phrase "making a photograph" only sounds acceptable in a fully controlled environment where every element of the scene is deliberate. Otherwise, just admit the fact that you're taking what is given to you, and say "taking".

I put a tally on the bottom of my portfolio that adds up the exposure time from all my pictures according to the EXIF data. With over 3,000 published photos, I'm coming up on just 40 seconds, and 10 of that was light painting long exposure.

This tally serves two purposes. The first is the willful self-deprecation of photography as the easy art that doesn't take any effort, so that's out of the way. The second is a reflection on the strange feeling that I get when I think about the nature of photography, and how it locks in a particular millisecond out of the 86,400,000 milliseconds that occured that day to be preserved for all time. What made that one so special? The moments captured by a typical photograph are so brief that we truly have no other way to perceive them. When I am talking to someone face to face, I can see their gaze shift and their brow wrinkle and their mouth move and their hands gesture, but I never see the totality of their person at once because human vision is still limited by foveated rendering. When you look at a person, you never really see the whole person. But the camera captures the whole thing, all at once, for a level of scrutiny not available through any other means. It's pretty weird if you think about it.

Originality (§)

This section was drafted after I watched one of Paulie B's videos with Reuben Radding where they talked about how to be original in street photography. I thought I would publish this as its own article, but let's just lump it in here. I like when these articles get long.

There is a beautiful and illuminating irony in the act of submitting the question "how can I be original?" to a Q&A session like this. Surely once you're on the internet and you have a search bar under your fingertips, you're able to find hundreds of thousands of articles, youtube videos, think pieces, and motivational speeches on how to be original from people who think they're qualified to tell you. Instead, you choose to submit it into a Q&A for one particular artist to answer, forcing them to retread a territory so often trod before them, definitively unoriginal, not because their answer is the only one available to you, but because you respect that particular artist's opinion over the opinions of others, and hearing what they think is more important to you than hearing what just someone thinks. And now here I am being reached and influenced by it, instead of all the other opinions out there from other people that have never reached me. We've blown so far past full circle we're coming up on spherical.

Turn this around on yourself and you'll see what I mean. You want to hear Reuben's opinions because you like him. So if someone likes you, they'll want to see your work and hear your opinions, and they will not care if you're being "original". Ta-da, it's that easy.

The internet allows us instant access to many of the best works ever made in every category, and if you compare your work against the greatest of all time, of course you're going to feel like you're behind. But I'm going to keep hammering this same point over and over again: when you give the photos to the group of people that actually matters instead of trying to impress internet strangers, all that infinity of better works vanishes in a puff of smoke. The notion that Winnogrand took better pictures is preposterously irrelevant when you have the opportunity to give someone pictures of themselves and their friends, which no Winnogrand can do for them. How unoriginal!, they'll surely complain.

There are eight billion people in the world, and every second that passes in your life is eight billion seconds passing for everybody else. Everybody is missing out on 99.999% of everything that happens at all times. So even if you take a picture that you feel is trite and cliche, someone will say it's the first time they've seen anything like it.

I'd like to specifically comment on the originality of travel and architecture photos. There is a certain kind of light mocking people get when they take a picture of a famous place. "Could have saved yourself the effort and taken one from google images, and it would look better too".

The Camera Restricta is an art/tech project that encourages creative photography by physically disallowing you from taking a picture in places where too many pictures have already been taken.

The project is not only a piece about censorship in a political sense, but also questions our photographic practice. With digital photography displacing film, taking pictures has essentially become free, resulting in an infinite stream of imagery.

Camera Restricta introduces new limitations to prevent an overflow of digital imagery. As a byproduct, these limitations also bring about new sensations like the thrill of being the first or last person to photograph a certain place.

The Camera Restricta is itself a creative work, and I'm not here to criticize it. They're not saying every camera should behave this way, but it's a deliberate limitation you can give yourself by wielding the Restricta. Taking on deliberate limitations is an important part of being an artist. But the idea that "too many people have taken this picture" and "this has been done before" is what I'm scrutinizing.

Taking pictures of a place that has been "done before" is ok, because change over time is imperceptible. If you say that today is not different enough from yesterday to warrant a new picture; and tomorrow is not different enough from today, then you'll have to prescribe some minimum interval that you think is allowed — and I might disagree with you. If you wait for change to happen, you'll miss it.

This kind of rule only works because the person issuing the rule knows that people will break it. Where the heck do you think the pictures on google images came from? They're not mocking the idea of someone taking a place photo, they're just mocking the idea of you taking it. If everyone did follow the rule, and everyone diligently stopped taking pictures of the overdone place, there would come a day when the building is demolished and the most recent photos are decades old. For what benefit? Just a perception of originality, or not being a sheep.

You may have heard the phrase "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns". The type of people who obey laws in general are probably more responsible, cooperative, social, and less likely to commit crime, but the type of people who commit crime don't care if guns are outlawed because they're already committing crime anyway. So then the responsible people are less able to defend themselves, is the point. I feel that the same kind of effect can apply to creativity as well. If there's a supposed rule about pictures you're not allowed to take, it is more likely that the thoughtful and considerate people will obey the rule while the self-centered "don't tell me what to do" types will ignore it. Which one would you rather see pictures from? As another example, if you convince all photographers that candid street photos are immoral and should be stopped, you'll be left with nothing but Bruce Gildens who don't care.

What if everyone just has poor taste (§)

Wizards With Guns made a sketch that gave me some long-lasting anxiety. "I seduce the dragon" is about a group of DnD friends having a laugh before their game. It's a feast of hyper-wholesome bro-love moments that'll make your friendships look pallid by comparison. On one hand, it's nothing but great that bros can get together and reinforce one another. But on the other hand, the backbone of the entire sketch is that they're obviously super lame. Too easily impressed, too exaggerated in praise ("that belongs in a museum", "you should write a book", "you should open a bakery", "you should be an actor"), too deep into their uncool hobby. The characters are played with, to put it indiscreetly, speech patterns and mannerisms associated with being mentally retarded. There's no other way to say it. Since this is fiction and everything in fiction is there because the authors wrote it on purpose, this suggests that Wizards With Guns believes positivity and uplifting compliments are correlated with being retarded. The characters in other WWG sketches don't talk like this, if that counts for anything. At the very least, we can be sure that positivity correlates with having poor taste.

One of them busts out some drawings that blows the others' minds:

Is that me? I hope that's not me.

The comments on the video are, rightfully, very positive themselves:

Need more sketches where it genuinely feels like the joke is on me. Watched 6 minutes of cringe goofballs and in the end was reminded that they don't care, they love each other, and they're happy. I'm the fool. 10/10

I'm almost glad there wasn't a punchline - these characters deserve to be happy

The whole time I had this sense of unease, "When are these harmless goofs gonna have the joke put on them?," but then it never came. Instead just humanity

20/10, I seriously expected a brutal dunking to occur, or for something to go wrong, but instead it’s bros being bros, and loving each other. It hits me right in my softest bones

These guys are true homies. They Gas each other up, rally, and encourage each others potential. This is beautiful.

This was the most stressful video I've seen in awhile, I just kept waiting for the punchline and it never came. So wholesome it hurts

Is it cringe if everything they said made me feel genuinely happy and nostlagic? thats the life man, thats the goal. Its a great phase in your life, being cringe is mandatory

Even if this is super cringe it's also peak friendship goals. So much positivity.

Because of course we all wish we could be so unabashedly happy with ourselves. But I find these comments inherently patronizing. These comments only exist because the commenters enjoy the perspective of an external observer, and comfortably perceive the characters as being more lame than themselves. If the characters in the skit were a bunch of sexy people having a good time, nobody would feel the need to congratulate them on "not caring", because of course what are you implying there is to care about? It is only by virtue of the fact that lame people having fun is considered not normal, and that we imagine we'd be unhappy with ourselves if we were that lame, that it is even worth mentioning. It's like looking at an ugly couple and saying "I'm so glad you found someone that thinks you're beautiful".

Then the video ends, and you go back to your own life, and you assume that you are not that lame, and when you receive a compliment on your work you assume the giver is not retarded. But what if you're on the inside of the joke, and the external observers are patting you on the back, congratulating you on "not caring" despite how lame you are.

The things I'm saying here are not very nice, so I hope you realize I'm writing this because I'm thinking about it and struggling with it, not because it's the right way to think.

By the way, WWG is great. Here's my favorite video by them.

Street photography (§)

I am still interested in the genre of street photography. But, like I said last time, the area around me is not good for it, so I don't even try at home. I've been making trips to Venice Beach, where I serendipitously discovered the Sunday drum circle, and that's been where I've got a lot of my favorites.

Throughout this article you'll see that I'm mentioning Paulie B's Walkie Talkie series a lot. On one hand you might say it's shallow or narrow-minded to rely so heavily on one source for influence, and I agree with that. There's more to street photography than the NYC Leica/Portra gang. But on the other hand, Walkie Talkie is probably the single best thing to happen to street photography in a long time and it deserves more recognition than I can give it.

Looking at the older videos on Paulie B's channel, you can see he was mostly doing POV snap-and-dash street photography. With all due respect, I'm glad he's moved away from that. Walkie Talkie, documenting the thoughts, motivations, and inspirations of a community of artists, is so much more important and meaningful than collecting yet another photo of a random dude smoking a cigar.

When we talk about the philosophy of street photography, we often say we are "finding beauty in the ordinary" or "capturing life's simple moments", or something like that. It sounds very pretty and noble, but I think it's worth asking if this is more than a bit disingenuous, considering that the hotspots for street photography as a genre are some of the most busy and exciting places in the world, NYC being the American epicenter, Tokyo another. In July 2023 I made a POV street photography parody video called YTSPPOVVLOG #49. It's pretty hilarious if I do say so myself, but the humor comes from a place of deep personal dissatisfaction. You can't convince me there is beauty in this ordinary.

Street photography is somewhere between art and documentary. Well, perhaps everything is. We're looking for compositions, expressions, and gestures that are artistically interesting to look at, but also capture the facts of the present that will distinguish the photo from future and past. The architecture, fashion, transportation, commerce, and public events of today will someday be studied as "the way things used to be".

But documentary isn't really documentary if it only captures the pretty parts, is it? If you want to show "what life was like" at this time and place, you'll have to capture the bad parts too in order to do the story justice. Homelessness, drug addiction, conflict, hate.

Everybody wants documentary to exist, but not everybody wants to experience it happening. We as the public want to be able to read about and see the hard times that happened in the past so that we can avoid them in the future, but nobody wants to personally be that face of homelessness or poverty or addiction; to be spotted at a low point in life, captured, and pasted up for everyone to see.

Respectful and empathetic street photographers recognize that even with the legal right to photograph anybody in a public place, it's just not polite to take advantage of struggling people for the benefit of your "portfolio". We can say the same about people struggling with obesity, disability, or other physical differences.

Does this lead to erasure? Erasure of homelessness, addiction, obesity, and the wheelchair-bound? Isn't it wrong to sweep under the rug everybody that may not enjoy being photographed, to preserve their fleeting feelings of shame at the expense of everlasting documentary authenticity, to falsely portray a world in which everybody is attractive and clean and well put together, instead of the real world?

...probably not. This line of thought is tempting, but before you are hooked and reeled in, you should ask yourself if you're really just being a slacktivist. These days (and in the past, but these days, too) a lot of us want to feel like we're doing something important, but don't actually want to put a lot of effort into it. There are actual documentarians out there dedicating their full-time careers to researching, interviewing, working with organizations for access, and spending substantial amounts of time with their subjects before publishing their faces. You can watch a lifetime supply of these on /r/documentaries or documentaryheaven.com and elsewhere. Pointing your Fuji in all directions and pressing the magic button is an awfully low bar to call yourself a documentarian, and it's not exactly a great oppression to say that you should leave the more sensitive subjects to the people who are willing to put in the work and do it right. Despite what I said in the Originality section about doing your thing in spite of a saturated genre, it might actually be a good thing to stay out of the genres that take advantage of others' hard times.

There are lots of arguments on the internet about whether a photo must be candid in order to be called "street photography". If you ever ask someone for permission to take their photo, it is no longer "street photography" and instead it is "street portraiture", or at least that's what people will tell you.

To me this is a lot of pearl clutching. It is like arguing whether the word "guitar" inherently refers to an acoustic or an electric, and forcing the other group to specify that theirs is the non-default. A power play over language rather than an actual benefit to the art. A fight between two groups over who gets to own the implicit adjective. This whole argument goes away if you just specify "candid street photography" when it matters, and also if you recognize that it doesn't usually matter.

When I do street, I like to be somewhere in between. I think some of my best pictures come from people that I was trying to get candid, but they noticed the camera and hammed it up.

Do you want to call these "street portraits" simply because they are technically not candid at that particular moment? I didn't give them any instructions and oftentimes I don't say anything at all — after I get the shot I put the camera down and smile, wave, or give a thumbs up, and usually that's the end of that unless they want to talk or exchange phone numbers to get a copy. They were already there doing their thing, and they shared a second of it with me. That counts as street photography as far as I'm concerned. All I'm saying is this terminology debate and dogmatic obsession with candidness is not helpful so let's just stop.

When we talk about street photography, we spend a lot of time talking about people who don't want to have their picture taken, and how to be respectful about that. I myself don't enjoy being on the wrong side of the lens very much. With all of these preconceived notions coming from discourse on the internet about unwanted photography, it is a genuine surprise when, out of nowhere, a stranger calls out to have their picture taken (shown below), or when the basketball players say "keep the pictures going, we like that". So if you're interested in doing street photography, but don't want to come across as predatory, creepy, or invasive, you should give it a try and you might find plenty of willing subjects. You just won't come home with quite as many photos as the ones who snap and dash.

Privileged eye, outsider eye (§)

Taking pictures of people is easier when everyone is comfortable with the photographer's presence, and that comes from trust. Trust that through choice of angle, lighting, and shot selection, you'll show everyone looking good. When you're capturing individual milliseconds of someone's facial expressions, even a supermodel can be made to look bad, but it's ok because I won't make you look bad.

I think it is worth reflecting on this privilege. I am the one that is allowed to see the derp faces, the sneezes, the unflattering angles of rear ends suspended in the motion of dance. I am the one with the magic box that I can point in any direction and freeze you doing whatever you're doing. I am allowed to spend as much time as I want looking at these moments, locked in time, that nobody else will ever see... And I delete them.

Perhaps this is not such a meaningful privilege, since everybody knows that if you pause a video of a person talking you'll almost certainly freeze them looking derpy. By publishing a video of themselves speaking, the host has already granted every viewer the ability to see their weird intermediate faces.

But I don't want to halt this train of thought just yet.

For this reason, I have difficulty photographing people that I think might not be happy to see themselves in pictures at all, even if they don't say it out loud. Bluntly, I'm talking about people who are overweight or have a physical deformity or maybe just don't look that great for some other reason. These are the kinds of things you're not supposed to say because it's not polite. It would be great if I could say that I'm just capturing reality and I'm not here to judge, but that isn't true. I have to judge. By mere virtue of the fact that I'm taking 500 pictures and delivering 50, it is inherently the case that I have to use my judgement to decide which of your smiles and facial expressions you'll be most satisfied with and which ones you won't. Sometimes my judgement tells me that you will not be satisfied with any of the pictures I've taken of you, so what do I do? Where is the line between projecting my standards onto someone else and thoughtfully applying the golden rule? My trustworthiness and privilege are on the line here.

One easy answer is that you should always get everybody's consent before taking their picture. We've been over street photography so I'll skip that kind of consent here. But even in an event photography setting, getting consent is not so clear. Either you're pre-surveying every attendee and memorizing their answers which I would say is quite infeasible, or you're asking them on the spot. And if you ask them on the spot then their answer is contaminated by peer pressure from those around them.

You can say I am way totally overthinking it, and that my implication that a person could possibly be ugly is itself the most inappropriate and offensive part of my thinking, but I don't have any way to exist that does not involve overthinking. Either I publish the photo or I don't, and I have to have a reason either way. It's either that, or you imply that the final selection of photos is made without reason. This is not an imaginary problem — I have specifically heard people say they don't like having their picture taken or don't like seeing themselves in pictures. And since we don't have all of our insecurities written on our sleeves, it must be the case that more people feel this way than will openly say it, and it has to be my judgement call.

Another easy answer is to say let's just stop taking pictures entirely, to avoid offending those who don't like it. But on the other hand, plenty of people absolutely love being in pictures, and we know definitively that people want to have these memories, so we're not going to let this be the death of photography, either. Can't be walking on eggshells all the time.

To some extent I have to operate on the assumption that since you wake up and see yourself in the mirror every day, you're already used to how you look even if you don't, per se, love it. It's not like the photo is going to be a surprise to you. It is altogether worse to be the subject of erasure — as if you were never there at all — than to be shown as less than perfect.

This is why I'm taken aback when I see street photographers publishing what I would say are unflattering pictures of strangers. I've been describing event photography where there is some level of obligation to include and represent everybody. But when photographing complete strangers on the street, I don't see a lot of artistic merit in getting people in unflattering positions, especially if the composition, framing, and background management are otherwise completely uninspired.

I think one of the reasons candid photography appeals to me, and perhaps other creative types, is that I've always been a behind-the-scenes kind of person. There's a reason movies come with special features, directors commentaries, and behind-the-scenes footage: people want to see what goes into the preparation and production of the main feature; they want to see the things that only the exclusive set of cast and crew got to see. Just as a boom operator does his best to move invisibly across a set, unseen and unknown but crucial to the production of a great work, I try to move invisibly through a crowd and produce great work of my own.

But there is a double edge here. Being behind the scenes and invisible is both a good and a bad thing. When I place myself in the center of a crowd of dancing people to take their picture, you know what I'm not doing? Dancing with them. I am certainly no good at dancing anyway — guilty feet have got no rhythm — but I still want to engage and socialize when I go out, and I'm finding that this doesn't work very well after I've established myself to the crowd as the candid photographer. Once you've trained them to let you get close without drawing their attention, it's hard to get their attention. Oops. And when I'm photographing my cousin's baby shower or my employer's Christmas party, I'm undoubtedly doing less socializing than most of the other attendees. I'm fine with that because I have more fun taking awesome photos than I do socializing, most of the time. But everybody knows that the photographer usually has the fewest appearances in the final album.

The camera has demonstrably brought me quite a lot of positive interactions with people I would otherwise not have met, and by sharing my photos with everyone my rolodex has quickly grown. But I have come to recognize that being the privileged eye often comes with being the outsider eye, and if I want to go out with the express purpose of meeting people or making friends, it probably has to be sans camera.

And don't tell me I'm artistic.

Videography (§)

Photography and videography seem pretty similar to most people outside of the hobby, but wow they are completely different skillsets. Some bands have asked me to shoot video for them, and of course I can't say no. Video is a lot harder because every little bump, wobble, or tilt of the camera is recorded permanently, and you can't just delete the bad milliseconds like you can with stills, so the stakes are a lot higher. The temporal element of video means you have to do the right things at the right time in the right order, whereas with stills you can play fast and loose with the presentation order if you so choose. Video is also more difficult for a few technical reasons. For example, your shutter speed can't be too fast or too slow, especially if you want to stick to the traditional 180 degree shutter, so you lose access to one third of your exposure triangle.

Shooting photo and video as a hybrid is kind of stressful for me because whenever I'm in video I feel like I'm missing out on good photo moments, and whenever I'm in photo I feel like I'm missing out on good video moments. And if I start a video even a few seconds too late and miss the beginning of a song, I feel like the whole thing is soiled, so I'm constantly on edge trying to figure out when to switch. And then the whole time I'm not sure if I'm getting the best angle or focusing on the best person.

One of my biggest sources of music videography inspiration is Naver Onstage which took (RIP) a very mobile approach to camerawork. The camera operator basically never stops moving, breaking into and out of the artists' personal space and sometimes eliciting their hammy reactions. Unfortunately this is REALLY HARD to do well when you're hand-holding the camera without any stabilization equipment. And it's also really hard to point the camera at the right person at the right time when you don't know how they're going to move and don't especially know when they're going to do a solo. I've come to appreciate the value of a wide, static vantage point which lets the viewer focus on whoever they want the whole time.

I am still learning what works and what doesn't. I try not to rule something out until I give it a shot. One thing that I have tried several times and almost always regretted is turning the camera away from the band to get the audience reaction. In my stills, the audience photos are often some of the best, because I think it's important to show the effect the band has on their crowd — that's the whole point of live performance. But I don't like the way it translates to video for a single-camera shot. In the moment, it always seems like an important thing to do, but when I watch the video back again I always feel like I missed out on seeing whatever the band did during those seconds, or else the whip-pan across the audience is so hurried as to not miss out that it winds up nauseating instead. I think audience reactions are better done with multiple camera operators. The exception to this is when you can get an angle from beside or behind the band so you get both at once.

Oh and the gigabytes. So many gigabytes.

Money and recognition (§)

One of the biggest reasons I do photography at all is because I want to make connections with people. Most of the photos I take are given away for free because it makes people feel good and doesn't cost me anything except some time.

The Friday night concerts have become my third place for what feels like the first time in my life. I know the names of maybe three dozen regulars now.

In July, I finally got cards made. Throughout the month of June I got more "do you have a card?"s than ever before. And I hesitated for a long time because I still don't really want photography to be a business or a hustle for me, and I don't want to give the impression that it is by handing out cards. But I finally went ahead for two main reasons:

First, because people are literally asking me for it. They want to see my photos and I want to show them. If I were handing out cards to strangers unprompted, it would be spam and solicitation, which I want to avoid. But if they're the ones asking me for it, and I tell them "I don't have any cards because I don't want to give the impression that I'm soliciting for business", that would really make the interaction more weird than just "yes, here you go". It really is so much faster to hand someone a card than to exchange phone numbers verbally or have them scan a QR code off of my phone screen, which they will lose in their browser history and ask for again next week. Ask me how I know.

Second, even though photography is not my hustle and I don't solicit for business, I'm not going to turn down cool opportunities that present themselves to me. If someone asks to hire me and it sounds fun, yeah I'll take them up on it. I keep telling myself this isn't what I came here to do, but if I stop pushing my boundaries, I'll stagnate. More outings, more new experiences, more connections with more new people. I'm not just gonna say no. One week before this publication date, I've just shot my first wedding — something I said from the beginning I would not do — and I think I did just fine.

One boundary I'd like to maintain is I don't want to take a job that prevents me from self-publishing the pictures to my website, unless it's something like a private party. For anything in the more public, performative, or documentative sphere, exclusivity and blackholing my work into somebody else's pockets are not in line with my ethos.

The fact of the matter is the money I get from paid shoots is not a big deal to me. My day job pays me well enough and I am not relying on photography for income the way categorical professionals do. I also don't want to charge too much because I'm not really confident I'll do a good job, especially in a difficult shooting environment like a dimly lit bar, or for a type of work I've never done before. I can barely trust myself to shoot street on a sunny day because dynamic range is hard. And finally, everybody knows that musicians are starving artists, probably not making tons of money from a gig in the first place. I have heard first-hand from bands that they're not getting paid by tonight's venue, or maybe it's only $100 a head. Without sounding too magnanimous, I don't feel like I need to take too much from them.

Does it hurt professional photographers when people like me are out there charging hobbyist prices? I can imagine the answer is yes. But part of the question is whether these bands would have sought a professional photographer in my absence. The reality I'm seeing so far is that a lot of local bands don't have many good pictures of themselves because they've never hired a photographer before. And I'm not soliciting them for business, they're the ones asking to hire me. What this tells me is they had a latent hunger for photos, and are willing to pay for them, but never reached out to hire a professional until I (an amateur) fell into their lap.

I am normally quite critical of any rhetoric that speaks of preserving jobs. The example I've used before is the telephone switchboard operator — sometimes jobs become obsolete, and although I'm sure the switchboard operators were unhappy to lose their job, life goes on. So if amateur photographers can run around doing shoots for free or cheap and professionals go out of business, that might be seen as the free market at work. The rebuttal is that professionals will deliver pictures of significantly higher quality in terms of lighting, posing, composition and blocking, and tasteful editing, and that this is all worth paying for. The counter-rebuttal is that the majority of the population are normies without taste, and they will be satisfied by amateur pictures just as they are satisfied by sloppy fast food, and they the market will not bear the cost of higher quality work. Sometimes I give people pictures that I think are lousy because that's all I had available, and they tell me they love them. As an agent in this market, I can accelerate this effect by doing a mediocre job for a mediocre price. But since I do have taste and can appreciate that professionals make better work than me, I'll stay out of their way and not massively undercut them all the time. This is how I defend that I'm not hypocritically giving a job-preservationist argument, but rather this is an argument for preservation of quality in craft. Maybe the same could have been said for the switchboards, but it would have been somebody else's position to take.

When I attend and shoot an event on my own accord, I'll give away all the photos for free, but when someone's specifically asking me to do it, it seems essential that I charge at least a bit. As much as I like giving things away, it has to be clear that it's my decision. I don't want people to think they can call me out for free work whenever they want.

Well, luckily, that hasn't been a problem so far. More commonly, people are handing me money that I never asked for. One of the bands I shot gave me the contents of their tip jar, unprompted, and another caught up with me on a later Friday to give me a hundred bucks. More than once, I've taken a candid picture of a dancer or audience member, and given it to them, and they've insisted on tipping me. My instinct is to decline — I want to tell them that art is better when it's free. But I also feel that if I decline the tip, I am denying them from expressing their side of the interaction, forcing things to always go my way. In a way, it is more selfish to deny the tip than to accept it, because it comes off as virtue signaling or magnanimous or like I'm the only one who's allowed to be generous.

The most surprising variation of this is when a complete stranger emerges from a crowd to start this exchange:

Them: Could you take a picture of us?

Me: Sure

Them: How much?

Me: ...Nothing?

These ones have been really surprising to me. The usual narrative from people online is that no one, not even, or perhaps especially not the ones who can afford it most, want to pay for the commodity that is photography when everybody has a camera in their pocket. So I never would have expected that random people would suggest paying me for a photo on the spot. It's not worth me taking your money for that, you can have it for free, guys.

Now, maybe there's actually nothing to this. Maybe if I had answered anything other than free they would have rescinded their request. Even for a dollar, five dollars?

Zooming out (§)

Telephoto makes everything look good. Too good, maybe. I'm trying to get better at embracing wider focal lengths so I can capture more of the subject's context and environment rather than a dramatic eye-candy closeup.

One of the reasons I struggle with zooming out more is my perception of the image size on the viewfinder or rear screen. Because these screens are physically small, I zoom into the subject more than I should so that they are nice and prominent on the little viewfinder. Then I get home and look at the image on my 27" monitor and WOAH that's too big. These pictures usually get deleted and I miss some good ones this way.

It's like I'm afraid that if I don't zoom in enough, the subject will be too small in the image, even though I already know from experience that 26mp is enough to capture individual eyelashes from a surprising distance and there is absolutely no reason to worry about this. I need to trust my equipment and my ability to judge focus without overfilling the frame.

Here's an example of my problem. This is a cool guy doing a cool thing; I'm happy with the timing of the shot and I like how the sunlight shows off his muscles but silhouettes his face. But the crop is too tight — without seeing his feet and the ground below, you can't get an appreciation for how high he is.

I came back a month later to try again. That's better.

The other reason I struggle with wide angles, especially in black and white, is that I feel like the picture just turns to noise. One reason I go for a wide angle is to capture a large crowd. I want the viewer to see how many people were at this event. So far I have not done a good job and I think these photos are pretty terrible to look at. But I keep a few of them because that's all I've got so far.

Website, portfolio, gallery (§)

Currently, my website is a simple chronology of albums and a few single photos, newest first. But sooner or later I'll have to come up with a redesign. Already there are so many pictures on the page that it can be problematic scrolling through.

Because I might have redesigned the page by the time you're reading this, here is an abbreviated snapshot of the homepage. Each album shows a couple large highlights, and then a bunch of tiny thumbnails. The highlights are direct links to the jpg file, but the tinies are linked to the album with an anchor to that photo. I came up with this design because I wanted every photo in the album to be immediately visible without clicking into the album, lest they be never seen at all. Maybe the highlights I chose don't speak to you, but something in the tinies catches your attention. And also because I want to give everybody representation even if their picture didn't make the highlights. Once you click into the album, every picture is big.

Most of the people I meet at the Friday concerts are, well, older than me. As the kind of person that writes my HTML by hand and encourages scraping/downloading, I am deliberate in using simple anchors and img tags instead of obscuring the tags behind lightboxes and other javascript dynamism. But now I have seen firsthand the way my page confuses people. They tap on a highlight to see it bigger, and it goes to the direct image file (16 megabytes, sorry data plan!) and they have to use their browser back button to get out. And when they tap on a tiny, it doesn't bring them to a direct image, but still they have to use their back button to get out of the album and back to the homepage so they can see the next album. And although I'm trying to show off a couple highlights and move on to the next album, they want to see every single picture so they pinch-zoom on the tinies which is not a good UX. Oh yeah, did you notice I'm only using phone verbs here (tap, pinch) because this is all happening on their phone and of course these pictures, especially being mostly horizontal, look a lot better on a computer monitor in the first place.

The design of an archive like this is challenging. If it were just a list of links with no pictures, there'd be nothing for the viewer to judge what they might be interested in clicking on. But if it's a complete dump of every single picture on one page (like I'm doing now), then it becomes difficult to scroll through. And if it's just one or a few highlights with a "click to see the rest" link, then I feel guilty for anyone who didn't make the highlights because it says they weren't important enough.

I have already made my case for keeping some bad photos as part of an album, but that doesn't mean they need to be front and center as the first thing a new visitor sees. I don't feel the need to play that off as some kind of rawness or authenticity. I think I should come up with a way to show off my bests or favorites, but I don't want those to become stale while new stuff is coming in, either. I am also thinking that there will come a day when I shoot a more significant project that deserves to stay at the top of the page for a while instead of immediately falling off the chronology under the next band shoot. No offense, bands.

If I redesign the front page to only show a smaller selection of photos, I will always provide some kind of index/archive page with a complete list of everything. If, for some reason, you want to scrape my site and download every photo I've published, I want it to be easy for you to do that. Because that's exactly what I do when I find something I like, too. This is in stark contrast to most other photographers' websites which deliberately obfuscate their archives, or make it difficult to download the photos, or only provide low-res copies. What's even the point of capturing history if you're not going to share it.

My portfolio site is statically generated from my photo database. I'm happy with that, but it's always been a barrier to adding any bespoke elements or sorting things in a non-chronological way. Now that I'm thinking through this out loud, what I'll probably do is use the generator to make the archive page, and handwrite the front page as its own HTML file. Then I'll have the freedom to adjust the front page as often as I want without disturbing the steadiness and reliability of the archive.

So far, I have taken pride in the fact that my photo gallery contains no text on the page except the album titles. No descriptions, no context, no genre tags, no apologies for the photos that aren't great because that would be way too many apologies. I just let the photos speak for themselves, the only editorialization being my selection of a few highlights from each album to be full-size over the rest of the thumbnails. But when I want to write something about it, I put it in /writing. But I think I will have to add genre categories in some way, because if someone (including my future self) just wants to see one genre it can be a nuisance to scroll past all the other stuff. The deliberate lack of categorization is an artistic stance that says "you can't label me" which is cool in a punk kind of way for a few minutes, but it stops being cool when it hinders the usability of the page. I mean, hindering usability for the sake of a message is exactly what an artist would do.

When people publish photobooks, they usually cover several months or even years with only a few dozen pictures. Meanwhile, on my site I publish a few dozen pictures from every single outing. I often get the feeling that I'm publishing way too much, and it makes it harder to find the good ones amongst the bad and middling ones. But my answer to this feeling is the same answer I've given so many times already — I want to publish albums that the subjects themselves would be glad to have, and I make the effort to share it with them directly. I don't want to cull everything down to the 0.1% greatest hits for the benefit of an imaginary, remote, anonymous internet audience.

Instxgrxm (§)

In the past year I've learned something that I really did not expect. It seems that for people under the age of about 40, instagram is by far the number one way they want to exchange contacts. Some older people have asked if I'm on Facebook, but besides that it has all been "what's your instagram?". Nobody has ever asked to connect on any other platform, and I mean never ever. It's really crazy how dominant it is. My answer is of course that I don't use instagram and we'll have to trade phone numbers instead. Or, nowadays, here's my card.

One time I asked a girl out to lunch, and she said no, but she offered that we could add each other on instagram. That had nothing to do with photography — that was just instagram being used as a phone number substitute.

On one hand I understand the desire for a phone number substitute because giving out your phone number feels like a sensitive thing, but on the other hand if you exchange instagram with everyone you meet then doesn't instagram become the most sensitive thing?

I already knew that people still use instagram in 2024, but I had assumed that between the aggressive prioritization of video reels, the rise of influencer culture, and the engagement-maximizing algorithmic changes, that instagram was just a place of consumption / doomscrolling at this point. I really had no idea that for so many people this was their primary way to communicate.

how (§)

I started drafting this article in May so that I would have plenty of time to think and write before publishing in October. Immediately, I wrote "I leave my camera in manual focus because I've given up on the X-T3's autofocus". But I realized it would be a much better use of these five months to challenge myself and learn how to use the autofocus better, instead of leaving that willfully ignorant stance just sitting on this page the whole time.

... so anyway, I leave my camera in manual focus because I've given up on the X-T3's autofocus.

My first assumption was that I don't need AF-S because I use M with a function button for focusing. I thought that M+FBF was equal to or better than AF-S because I can focus when I want to and let go of the shutter button without refocusing. But there were two things I hadn't considered: AF-S with face detect will also expose for the face which I'd have to do myself in M; and AF-S with focus priority will wait until the picture is in focus before firing, whereas in M I'd try my best and maybe get it wrong and not know it was blurry until later. So I gave AF-S a try for a while to see if I had just been narrowmindedly been stuck in M this whole time... and now I'm back already. Fuji's AF still misses a lot and it goes hunting for faces in the background. Believe me, my success rate with M+FBF is also less than 100%, but at least then I know it's my fault and not the camera's.

My second assumption was that I don't need AF-C because when the subject is moving quickly I won't be able to trust the camera to keep up, and if they're moving slowly then I'll be fine with M+FBF. And, yeah, I wasn't able to crack this one either. All I know is that even when I'm shooting what I'd consider an easy subject, the face/eye detect will jump all around, off into deep space, and it'll spend maybe 20-40% of its time not in correct focus. Then you throw sunglasses or hats into the mix and it gets harder, and then the person turns around so the camera finds something else to focus on, and by the time they face forward again now you're starting from scratch.

Keep in mind the X-T3 is now two generations behind, so I don't have experience with Fuji's AF of today. But everyone knows that Fuji is behind competitors in terms of AF, so if I was using one of the other leaders I might have the totally opposite stance here and use AF-C for everything.

I know very well that trying a tool for a few minutes and quickly giving up is not a good-faith evaluation of the tool. I know that there is a learning period, and you have to go all the way through it to the end. The problem is I don't feel like I have opportunities for low-stakes practice on real people long enough to get through it. What I mean is that if I try to shoot an entire Friday Night concert in AF-S or AF-C without falling back to M, I'm going to ruin or miss out on a bunch of shots and I'm going to disappoint that band by giving them my worst album of the season. Or if I try to do this at the beach I'll ruin all the shots there and feel like I wasted the day. And I don't have anyone that I feel comfortable asking to model for me for practice.

Excuses, excuses. I don't pretend any of this is justified. I am lazy, stubborn, and undisciplined and trying to rationalize it.

I listened to an audio recording I made last year and was genuinely surprised to hear the autofocus beep. It's been so long since I've heard it, I forgot it ever existed. I turned it off one night while shooting an orchestra concert and off it stayed.

I am still not very interested in editing. I only do basic levels adjustments to fix over/under exposure, and occasionally I'll crop to fix a bad composition or remove a distracting background figure. I don't like to crop, because it represents a failure to compose right the first time, and because it throws away hard-earned megapixels, but sometimes you just have to.

If I'm shooting something very important then I'll shoot raw+jpeg, because yes the raws will absolutely rescue an exposure that is unfixable in jpeg. I just prefer to not need rescuing.

Underexposed is better than blurry. When the sun is setting, crank the ISO and open the aperture and hold on to your shutter speed for as long as you can. A dark photo can be brightened in post, but a blurry photo is ruined forever. This works better in black and white than in color.

By the way guys raw is not an acronym.

Fuji dial slip-ups (§)

At some point, my camera will be old and battered enough to warrant replacing, and naturally I'll look for a new Fuji. But some of Fuji's recent changes have me worried that the X-T3 might wind up being the peak of their design, and they might be on a downtrend for a while.

In the transition from X-T3 to X-T4 they replaced the photometry/metering dial with the stills-movie switch. In the X-T3, movie mode is part of the drive dial.

I can't help but feel that this is an obviously poor decision and that movie mode belongs on the drive dial. The drive dial is the master switch that sets the context for every other feature on the camera. The drive modes are mutually exclusive with one another, not only because the switch cannot physically be in two positions at once, but because it is logical that you can take photos or videos but not both at once. By pulling movie mode out into its own dial, now there is a matrix of Drive/Movie dial positions that are all meaningless. What is Movie+CL? Nothing. What is Movie+Bracket? Nothing. What is Movie+Panorama? Nothing. If the movie mode is going to continue being mutually exclusive with all other modes, it should have stayed on the drive dial.

Then, in the X-T5 they kept it this way despite the marketing fluff about "coming back to our roots" and being "photography first", explicitly acknowledging that the X-H series are the hybrids, not the X-T series.

I have no problem saying that the photometry dial is the least used dial on my X-T3. But there is no point throwing away a seldom-used feature to make way for a switch that is mutually exclusive with all other choices on the drive dial, and especially not in the product line that claims to be photo-first.

And now, in the X-T50, they've replaced the ISO dial with a film simulation dial.

The X-T*0 line is meant to be more amateur than the X-T* line, but wow, I really do not think people need to change their film simulation more often than their ISO. I don't know what kind of psychedelic photo albums Fuji is expecting people to shoot, where every photo in the sequence is a completely different color tone. I'm not sure if that's low art or high art. Deprioritizing the exposure triangle like this is not cool, even in the amateur product line, because you're supposed to give the artist room to grow, not pad them in. Besides, most people probably have one or two favorite film sims, and the rest will never get used. Hey instead of a stills-movie switch can I get a Provia-Acros switch?

So, yeah, I'm not sure what my options will be when it's time for a new camera. To be honest I'd like to get into medium format, i.e. the GFX line, but the dials there are even less impressive. X-T3 peak?

Conclusion (§)

In the previous article I said I might look back on those opinions in three months and find them unrecognizable. Here we are at two years and that's not the case. Hooray! Seems like my core beliefs are pretty stable, and right now it's just a matter of improving my skills and seeking bigger, more important work.

That's all I've got to say for now.

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• 2024-10-15 Add hobby_photography_2.md.

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[today_i_did_this]

[photography]

Ricoh GR carrying bag

In May, I bought a Ricoh GRIII. I'll write more about that in my next article. Today, we're just talking about how to carry it.

The GR is famously pocketable. Indeed, it does fit in a jeans pocket.

But the thing is, you really have to devote the entire pocket to it, because it is somewhat of a tight fit on its own and I wouldn't want other stuff banging around or scratching the screen or buttons. Also, it looks pretty awkward.

It is "convenient" to carry this way, in the sense that it doesn't require learning anything new, but I found it extremely inconvenient to extract from the pocket and take a picture. The specifics of all this will depend on your pants, of course.

But I'm the type of person that carries a lot of stuff in both of my pockets already, so I can't just move everything else over to the other side. So although the GR is the internet's favorite pocket camera, it won't be staying in my pocket.

I also tried putting some split rings through the holes in the camera body (scratching it up in the process — the lugs are so tiny) and strapping directly to it.

This works ok as long as the camera is concealed under a jacket, but without the jacket I would feel weird wearing an exposed camera like this.

Also, I found the strap inconvenient when actually taking pictures. You see, the strap needs to be short enough that the camera hangs around waist level during carry, but long enough that when taking a picture you can comfortably maneuver the camera out in front of you. I found that when the strap was the right length for carrying, it was too tight for actually taking pictures. And furthermore, the split rings being up against the palm and near the shutter button make the camera less pleasant to the touch.

Before we go any further, I'll let you know that I did go ahead and purchase a crossbody sling bag (man purse) which I now bring with me on day trips.

However, on a typical workday I don't need to carry a purse worth of stuff, I really just want to carry the camera. I wanted a carry method that can fit discretely under a jacket, and also doesn't look totally silly without the jacket. A little silly I can tolerate.

I was inspired by the simple construction of a drawstring pouch, and I decided to practice my sewing skills and make a custom bag specifically for the GR. Then, I use a wrist lanyard when shooting so I have free mobility.

In this article I'll be showing you my third draft of the pouch.

I went to the fabric store and bought some ripstop nylon for the exterior and polyester satin for the interior. Later, I also bought some adhesive basting spray after I realized how hard proper pinning and basting is.

The first draft of this bag was just the nylon and satin layers, with split rings stitched in at the top.

There were two things I did not like about this draft. First, because these are thin materials, the buttons were too easy to feel and press through the bag, and I thought they should be better protected. Second, when I'm done taking a picture and I'm trying to put the camera back into the pouch, the pouch has already self-closed, again because the materials are thin and light. Then it becomes a fiddly operation instead of a smooth holstering.

In the second draft, I added a layer of felt between the other layers. This padding gives protection from bumps and makes the bag a little less floppy, the top staying open by itself more easily for holstering.

The problem with the second draft was that I did not feel comfortable putting the camera in the bag without its aluminum lens cap. Even with the felt padding, I imagine a nice bump against the corner of a table could punch the lens protector blades in a bad way.

The lens cap is a seemingly small but significant friction against taking pictures. It takes longer to get the camera ready to shoot, and then the lens cap must itself be pocketed for as long as I want to use the camera. I found it was really discouraging me from taking smaller opportunities.

So, for the third draft, I made a 60mm × 2mm disc of plastic on the 3D printer, and I integrated this directly into the front face of the bag by patching over it and sewing it tight. I feel much more confident that the lens is protected from impact now.

Please sign up for my six-month CAD course and you too can become a modeling master like me.

The felt layer is the one that has to be sized accurately to align the plastic disc with the lens, then the other layers are just trimmed to that. I had estimated 4in × 12.5in but it turned out more like 4.75in × 11.5in.

I laid out where the camera would be on the inside, then prepared the patch for the disc which goes facing outward. I spray-basted the disc and the patch together, then amateurishly sewed two laps around the circle.

I sprayed the satin and felt together, then trimmed the satin to size. I used an electric arc lighter to melt the edges of the satin to prevent it from fraying. The arc lighter has a much smaller area of effect than a flame lighter and is much more controllable when targeting the edges.

I made sure to cut the satin so the weave is facing longways. When you rub your finger against the fabric, you can feel it is more slippery in one direction than the other, and I wanted that along the length of the interior instead of the width.

I sprayed the nylon and felt together, trimming the width to size but leaving some extra length to be folded over the top and bottom, which are sewn together.

My stitches are much straighter on this third draft than they were on the first two.

In the previous two bags, I hand-stitched the split rings in after the bag was already formed. This was functional but somewhat ugly. I took this opportunity to do away with the split rings by locking in folded-over pieces of paracord with the inner strands removed, just at the last inch of the side seams. I crudely backstitched over them several times so hopefully it will be sturdy.

When the bag is turned right-side out, the paracord does not look as professional as I hoped because I didn't run my seam tightly enough against the edge that matters, so it sticks out a bit off the sides. But it will have to do until draft four.

It almost looks like an intentional design element, and it would probably look good if it ran all the way to the bottom.

Finally, it was time to box the corners. Without boxing, the two bottom corners of the bag flare out stupidly when the camera is inside. This has something to do with the world being three dimensional.

I had to do this stitch by hand because the bag does not fit through the machine at that angle, especially not with the big plastic disc inside of it. I drew a line 0.75in from the tip of the triangle. I spent a lot of time pinning and pre-visualising this stitch because it's very important for it to be accurately perpendicular to the main body line. Luckily it went ok.

It takes a minute to turn this bag out due to the puffy felt layer and the big plastic disc that at first feels like it won't go through the mouth of the bag. It comes out looking like a wrinkly old raisin, but after some massaging it smooths out.

The carrying strap is a single piece of paracord with mini carabiners on the ends. It doesn't need to be adjustable when it's bespoke!

I've been carrying this third draft for ten days now and I can definitely feel the improvement over the first and second. It is easy to withdraw and holster the camera and although the lens cap cost me $15 I'm glad not to use it. Now the goal is to keep this up for... ever.

I am comfortable wearing this out in public since most people do not pay enough attention to strangers to think that it's weird. However, when I'm at work I leave it on my desk instead of wearing it all day because I cannot shake the feeling that I'm playing some kind of character by trying to carry a camera literally all the time in front of everyone. When I wear a jacket I do feel comfortable carrying the camera under the jacket all day since it's out of sight, but it's summer now and it's too hot for that.

1,500 words and 30 pictures for a project on par with Baby's First Sewing Pattern? I still feel like this kind of thing doesn't deserve to be posted as if it's some kind of accomplishment. But I'll say more about that in the next article, too.

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