Monday, July 31, 2023

I have more and better cameras than I could possibly need. And yet, I find myself daydreaming about the X100v, Q2, or M10-R. I'd have to sell something to get either of the latter two, but I love what I have so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

After reading Dave Roger's reaction to my post yesterday about not including things by default in my RSS feed, I realized that I'd been unclear.

I love RSS and will continue pushing everything with it.

What I would like to do less of is broader syndication. Not everything I write is meant to start a conversation. Hell, most of the time I don't want a conversation. I just want to say what I have to say and move on.

Currently, each post on daily.baty.net is in the RSS feed, and the feed is read by Micro.blog and therefore is included in my Micro.blog timeline and then cross-posted to Mastodon. It's the threat of starting an easy argument that makes me self-conscious about what I write, and this is why I mentioned no longer doing that.

By "that" I mean that I'm no longer going to automatically cross-post from the Daily blog to various other services. Everything (almost everything) will still be included in this site's RSS feed, for those folks weird enough to want to read all of it. And if anyone feels like discussing something, there's a "Reply by Email" link right there on each post. I'm happy to have a private email discussion about anything. I get a handful of emails from the blog every week and I love it.

For anything that I do want more widely distributed, I'll manually post a copy to Micro.blog and that will then be cross-posted.

So, sorry for the mistake, Dave. I agree, RSS is the greatest and I wish more people would publish more of everything using it.

UPDATE: The followup discussion on Micro.blog made me think of another component of this, and that is that sometimes I like to spend time away from social media, but continue posting here. If I cross-post, that makes me feel obligated to look for replies so that I don't leave anyone hanging.

The 2023 iPhone Photography Award winners continue to demonstrate that you don't need anything fancy to make great photographs. There are some beautiful and powerful images there.

I own some pretty fancy cameras and my best photos are nowhere near that level.

Still, making photographs with a phone is about the least interesting option I can think of. I can't stand using my phone as a camera. I also don't like some of the so-real-it's-fake-looking in-camera effects that I can't seem to turn off.

Give me an aperture ring, shutter speed dial, focus tab, and a bright optical viewfinder any day.

I love that people are doing such wonderful work using iPhones, but I'll keep my nice cameras that I enjoy using to make mediocre snapshots, thanks.