Those who watched Boston’s revered Fourth of July celebration Monday night on CBS were treated to spectacular views of fireworks exploding behind the State House, Quincy Market, and home plate at Fenway Park, among other places – great views, until you consider that they were physically impossible.
Sorry the updates have been sparse all week. I’ve spent the past five days at an intense photography seminar with the amazing Jerry Ghionis. I have a TON to say about this that will definitely go into a blog post about the entire experience early next week. But in the meantime, I thought I’d share this interesting opinion piece I came upon by eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren (via Kevin):
[I]nspiring marriages don’t happen by accident. They require highly informed and carefully reasoned choices. Commitment and hard work are factors too. But after decades of working with a few thousand well-intended and hardworking married people, I’ve become convinced that 75 percent of what culminates in a disappointing marriage — or a great marriage — has far less to do with hard work and far more to do with partner selection based on “broad-based compatibility.” It became clear to me that signs which were predictive of the huge differences between eventually disappointing and ultimately great marriages were obvious during the premarital phase of relationships.
I had the opportunity to shoot two events this past weekend: Soccer Nights, held by Vineyard’s Cambridge church, and my friend Matt’s graduation party in Western, MA. For Soccer Nights, I took my trusty old 70-200mm f/2.8 on my Canon 7D, but I also packed along my new Fuji X100.
Soccer Nights is such an awesome, inspiring program. Volunteers from all over the city come to give kids a place to have community with each other. I was blown away both by the organizers and all the people who donated time to make this event as fun as it was:
All the wide-angle shots in the above photo set are taken with the Fuji, while everything close-up is done using the Canon 7D.
Quality-wise, I think you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two cameras. And as I am fond of mentioning, the Fuji X100 even gets better low-light performance than the 7D in many instances.
Focusing on the Fuji stinks. The manual focus (via focusing ring) is essentially unusable, but using regular autofocus is also a pain in the neck because you need to manually select “Macro” mode to focus on anything close up. I leave it in manual focus but hit the “AFL” button, which makes the camera automatically determine whether or not to enter macro mode or not. In low-light situations, this can still be problematic.
The dynamic range on the Fuji X100 is incredible. Images like this provide detail in both the sky and on the ground, in a way that my DSLRs simply do not do:
The Fuji X100 requires a lot more careful composing than other cameras. Since auto focus is slow, you need to choose your shots and your moments carefully. It helps when people generally don’t mind you taking photos of them, as was the case this past weekend at Matt’s graduation party (at which I used the Fuji X100 exclusively):
Overall, I still love this camera and how tack sharp some of these images can be. I just wish the focusing would suck a little bit less, and that the controls were a little bit more responsive.
Ben Trawick-Smith documents the rise of the term “douchebag” to describe generally despicable people:
So let’s put the pieces together. In 1960, when douching was a much more common practice and perhaps more prominent in the public imagination, douchebag would have had a much more disgusting connotation, and likely would have been avoided for this reason. But in the 21st-Century, at a time when many people barely remember what douching was to begin with, it might be taken as a less offensive insult.
John Gruber recently called out AllThingsD for failing to provide name attribution to an Apple-focused website. Today, he elaborates on that:
“Enthusiast site” is pejorative. Enthusiast implies that MacStories is produced by zealous hobbyists. Not naming the site at all implied that the site was not worthy of being named. To later attribute it to “macstories.net” rather than “MacStories” implies that it is something less than a fellow peer publication, and not even worth the effort of hitting the shift key to camelcase the M and S. MacStories is the name of the website; macstories.net is MacStories’s domain name. This is subtle, yes, but it is a disparagement nonetheless — the most begrudging form of attribution that could have been added.
As someone who writes for what many would describe as an “enthusiast” website, I can relate.
Mark Oppenheimer, writing in The New York Times about columnist Dan Savage’s sexual ethic and how it relates to the Weiner scandal:
Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.
Linda Holmes, writing on why serial commas are vital:
The balancing act between how much rule-making you like in language and how much you like language to evolve naturally isn’t necessarily the point of the serial comma debate (to me, the reasons to keep it have absolutely nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with actual utility), but that’s where almost any discussion of almost any arcane point invariably winds up. Language is alive, you see, and it changes, and its beauty lies in its ability to be shaped by an entire society that calls upon its collective wisdom and experience to create a means of communication that accomplishes what it needs to AND NO THAT DOESN’T MAKE “IRREGARDLESS” OKAY AND STOP USING “LITERALLY” TO MEAN “FIGURATIVELY” I AM BEGGING YOU.
