They’re not as close as they were two nights ago, but I managed to frame them with a more interesting foreground.
Author Archives: Kelson
The Lesser Evil of Selfie Sticks
I’ve known about portrait distance for a while, and often thought that was a downside of using fixed-lens phone cameras for portraits. To frame someone’s face in a phone you have to either zoom (losing detail) or hold it close enough that the viewing angles distort the face. I prefer using my phone for long shots and using a camera with an optical zoom for portraits.
Unexpected consequence: Selfies are now a major source of young people’s self-image…which is distorted, leading them to feel worse about themselves and even seek out plastic surgery.
The researchers looked specifically at selfies taken from 12 inches away — a common distance for someone snapping a selfie without the assistance of a selfie stick. In a selfie taken from that distance, men’s noses appear 30 percent wider and women’s noses appear 29 percent wider than they actually are.
I think we can all agree that selfie sticks are a lesser evil than unnecessary cosmetic surgery!
Update: From the Facebook comments, here’s a link to a series of portraits taken at distances ranging from 2 meters down to 20 cm, demonstrating how different your face looks at each distance.
Venus and Mercury Spotted!
Venus and Mercury close together after last night’s sunset.
I lucked out in that…
- I remembered they were going to be visible when I got to the store on the way home.
- The parking lot was both wide and slightly uphill from the western side of the street, giving me a clear view.
- The sky had just darkened enough to see both.
- The clouds were just wispy enough not to block them.
As it is, I still had to crop out a street light and its lens flare to get this photo, or I would have framed it better.
But hey, it’s not often you get to see Mercury from a city at all, never mind right next to another planet!
Late Start
From yesterday: the first significant snow in the mountains above Los Angeles this winter, courtesy of last week’s storm.
Unfortunately, it’s almost spring. The weather has already warmed up again. Last week I was wearing sweaters and a medium jacket. Today I’m back to short sleeves, and I had to put the jacket away on my lunchtime walk.
And there’s not much of that snow left today.
KQED has some great photos of snow in the Sierra Nevadas after the same storm. That’s more important, as California depends more on the Sierra snowpack for water during the summer.
They’re expecting another storm to come through next weekend. I guess we’ll see how much snow we get. And how long it sticks around.
Plastic Guilt
I hate when any organization preemptively sends a membership card in the mail hoping to guilt you into joining.
But an environmental group?
On plastic?
Not. Cool.
It’s ALL the off-topic boards now.
Remember when we’d talk on topic-focused message boards? Flame wars got heated, but rarely spilled over.
If you dared, you could also visit the off-topic boards, at the risk of seeing people at their worst.
Social media dispenses with topics. It’s all the off-topic boards now.
Flickr vs. Instagram / Who’s in Control?
Social media is a mess these days. Most of us follow too many people and organizations to keep up, so we need some way of narrowing it down…but the tools are typically built into each service, which has different priorities about what it wants you to see than you do. As they say, if you’re not paying, you’re the product.
I realized this is why I still prefer Flickr to Instagram: I’m still in control when I browse Flickr. With Instagram, the best I can do is pick from one firehose or another. Flickr has its issues, but I can find stuff there, and the timeline isn’t re-ordered to suit someone else’s priorities.
Ironically, I post more often on Instagram than on Flickr. Because I like Flickr more, I feel like I should take my time & curate my photos better. But I also end up posting many at a time on Flickr, and single photos on Instagram. I don’t feel like I’m spamming if I post twenty pictures to Flickr, but I do if I post that many* to Instagram.
I mentioned this on Mastodon, and my brother remarked that Flickr feels more like “adding to a collection,” while other sites are more “shoveling things at my friends/followers.” That’s true of most social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Mastodon are all about now. Going back to look at someone’s history feels like an accident. Or stalking.
On Facebook, it would be really weird to go through someone’s old posts and comment on them. On Flickr, that’s totally normal. If Twitter is like shouting into the void, hoping someone will hear you, Flickr is like building a gallery and hoping someone will visit. When someone finally does,** they’ll see it, and look around. But that scream on Twitter is already fading on the wind.
Especially if Twitter thinks your friends would be more interested in seeing a sponsored post instead.
*Instagram does let you post multi-photo stacks, but the stack only ever appears as a unit. Only the cover photo appears in timelines or searches, and the whole stack shares one description and one set of tags. Flickr lets you group photos into albums however you want, and people (including you) can find any individual photo and go from there to the rest of the album.
**Not that Flickr isn’t subject to the siren call of now either, but the long tail still exists there.