I was struggling with using flash on my mirrorless cameras. When using flash on non-TTL (through the lens) cameras my usual camera settings are:
- set the exposure to manual
- set the aperture to 5.6 (though this sometimes changes)
- set the ISO to 200
- set the shutter speed to 1/125 of a second (though this depends somewhat on flash sync speed for the camera)
I then set the flash to auto mode and set the flash aperture and ISO to match what is set on the camera.
The problem with this is that on mirrorless cameras the EVF is set to preview the exposure by default, so the EVF typically shows as nearly black with these settings. After much messing around I finally figured out the solution–turn off the EVF exposure preview. On my Leica SL that setting is called Exposure Preview, and it is possible to turn it so that the preview is only active in all modes except manual. Voilà–flash now works perfectly.
I’ve been taking photos for 45 years, mirrorless for 8 or 10, and I’m just now figuring this out, so I guess a) I don’t use a lot of flash, and b) this isn’t easy to find with a simple online search.
In the last couple of months Spotify’s algorithm seems to have lost its way. For years Release Radar was very good at discovering new music by artists in my library, as well as other similar artists. I have very eclectic music tastes, but recently Release Radar is filled with 90% bands I’ve never heard of, as well as styles of music that I don’t enjoy: metal, electronica, teen pop, etc.
Maybe they’re using too much AI?
The algorithmic internet is why the world has gone to hell.
I’ve had an infrequently updated blog since 2003 or so and I’m interested in keeping it alive, if for no other reason than I value human-generated and curated writing and photography, and I miss it on the increasingly algorithmic internet.
My first blog used a “blogging” tool called Greymatter, the very first of it’s kind. That was quickly followed by a move to Moveable Type, which I found more interesting than the newly arrived WordPress. Then I moved from Moveable Type to Perch, and eventually Perch Runway, but lost interest in that platform when it began it’s long decline and eventual sale. At the time I thought it was amazing.
And now I’m toying with Blot, which takes files stored in a directory on Dropbox or Google Drive and turns them into posts. It uses the very simple Mustache templating engine, is quite simple in concept, has great support for Markdown (as well as plain text files or even Word files), a decent number of starter themes, and costs $5/month. The nicest thing of all is that all of your files are stored on a local folder, so you’ll never lose control of your content, as I did when Perch Runway suddenly stopped working because of compatibility problems with a newer version of PHP.
We’ll see where this leads, but Blot is the first tool that I’ve seen that has made me want to move away from Instagram/FB/Twitter/Threads in order to take back control over the ownership of what I post.