I purchased this camera back in January but a busted arm and cold weather prevented me from plunging in as I usually do with a new toy. Additionally, I found myself overwhelmed by the number of features and settings. All excellent features, but there are so many of them. I couldn’t find a place to start. So yesterday I turned the camera on and headed into the woods, paying to attention to settings. The video below was shot at 1080/30fps. I’ve reset to 4K/60fps for the next shoot. Watch this space. (PS: A YouTube search will tell you all you might want to know about this little gadget.)
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Fallout
“The end of the world is not what it used to be”
Is that a great tagline, or what? I’m about four episodes in. Making the end of the world funny is a tall order but the series manages to do so. Walton Goggins (Boyd Crowder!) is the perfect bad guy; Mykelti Williamson (Ellstin Limehouse, also from Justified) makes a early/brief appearance; Dale Dickey, another Justified alum (who was wonderful in Winter’s Bone) does her redneck thing, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing other familiar faces. Oh, and the soundtrack. Absolutely brilliant.
Public relations technology in 2006
In 2006 I was asked to be on a panel discussing new technology tools for public relations professionals in the greater St. Louis area. Blogging was still relatively new at the time and I’d been at it for five or six years, consulting for advertisers on our various radio networks. It was a packed house.
2006 was a busy year for technology (social media?). Twitter officially launched in July; Facebook opened up to everyone over 13 years old, leading to explosive growth from 12 million users at the end of 2006 to 50 million by October 2007; YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in October, cementing its position as the leading online video platform.
I spent most of my working years on the media side of things rather than the PR side, but one (of many, no doubt) go-to tool was the written press release. These went out (fax, USPS, email) to any media outlet that might do a story (Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) followed up by a phone call “pitching” the story. I don’t recall there being any way to get a release into the hands of the public. The internet –and, later, social media– changed all that. We started seeing and hearing the word “disintermediation.” Communicating directly to a target audience, bypassing traditional media.
By this time many (most?) businesses, organizations and institutions had websites but it took some technical skill to update these, a task made easier by the advent of blogs. And a well-written, frequently updated blog could be followed thanks to a bit of tech called RSS.
As I prepared to write this post I tried to recall what the field of public relations was like in 2006 (18 years ago!). Instead of googling I used a new (for me) tool called Perplexity that describes itself as an “answer engine” rather than a search engine. If you discount the personal touch, the result was much better than what you just read. I’m too new to this tool/tech to write intelligently about it does feel like a very big deal. I’m already starting to go to Perplexity for answers I once searched for on Google. And all we really wanted was the answer, right? Here’s a short (6 min) video overview of Perplexity and I’ll be sharing my experiences here.
Perfect spring day gets perfecter
You So Zany by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ [Artist: http://audionautix.com/ ]
Is Perplexity a “Google search killer?”
They call it an “answer engine” rather than a “search engine.” Can it/will it replace Google search? Hard to imagine but I have it on my laptop and my phone and will post thoughts and updates here.
I keep pinning this post because I keep finding better reviews of Perplexity.
Draining the Swamp
The floodway ditches. That’s what we called the series of small drainage ditches just outside of Kennett, Missouri. I think there were four or five of them. They have a rich history.
How Many Pictures Are There (2024)
The following statistics are from an article by Matric Broz at phototutorial.com. The article presents “photography and photo statistics procured with scientific and mathematical methods, including answering questions like “How many photos are taken every day?”
How many photos are taken every year?
- 1.81 trillion photos are taken worldwide every year, which equals 57,000 per second, or 5.0 billion per day. By 2030, around 2.3 trillion photos will be taken every year.
- According to Photutorial data, 1.2 trillion were taken worldwide in 2021 and 1.72 trillion in 2022.
- The global pandemic reduced the number of images taken by 25% in 2020 and 20% in 2021.
How many photos are taken every day?
- The average person takes 20 photos daily. This number is higher among younger people and lower among older people.
- According to Phototurial data, 4.7 billion photos are taken every day worldwide in total.
- By region, the number of photos taken by a smartphone user is led by the US: 20.2/day, Asia-Pacific 15/day, Latin America 11.8/day, Africa 8.1/day, and Europe 4.9/day.
How many images are on the internet?
- 750 billion images are on the internet, which is only 6% of the total photos that were ever taken since most of the photos we take are never shared.
How many images are on Google Images?
- There are 136 billion images on Google Images.
- By 2030, there will be 382 billion images on Google Images.
How many photos does the average person have on their phone?
- The average user has around 2,100 photos on their smartphone in 2023.
- iOS smartphone users have approximately 2,400 photos on their phones, while Android users have around 1,900 photos on their phones.
Other photo stats
- 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history. By 2030, this number will increase to 28.6 trillion.
- Users share the most images on WhatsApp: 6.9 billion per day. 1.3 billion images are shared on Instagram daily, with about 100 million in posts and more than 1 billion on stories and chats.
- 92.5% of photos are taken with smartphones, and only 7% with cameras.
Bleak, Crime Infested Towns In the (Missouri) Bootheel
There is a seemingly endless variety of genres on YouTube, and one that has been showing up in my feed more frequently of late is what I call the “driving tour of small town America” videos. During my many years, on the road in the Midwest, I had occasion to drive through lots and lots of small rural towns, so I’ve found this series interesting.
The video above offers a rather depressing look at four towns in southeast Missouri: Caruthersville, Hayti, Kennett, and Cardwell. Some of the demographic statistics were almost as bleak and shocking as the images.
1,000 Books
LibraryThing is an online database (for books) that launched in August 2005. I started using it a month later and in the ensuing 19 years have cataloged 1,000 books. I always have a book close at hand but I am not a fast reader. I love to read and do so for a couple of hours every day. Perhaps my favorite pastime. And I can’t think of anything that would tell you more about who I am and what I’m interested in than the books I have read.
Fiction gets most of my reading time (692 titles) but in recent years I have developed a taste for nonfiction (245 titles). Together, the work of 351 authors. Most popular:
Robert B. Parker (51), John Sandford (46), Michael Connelly (36), Lawrence Block (32), Elmore Leonard (28), Sue Grafton (23), John D. Macdonald (23), Ross Thomas (21), Robert Crais (19), Mick Herron (17), Bill Granger (15), John Grisham (15), William Gibson (14), Carl Hiaasen (14), Neal Stephenson (13), elson DeMille (12)
I give each entry in the database one or more tags and that probably provides the clearest picture of my interests. (Note: tagging is more art than science)
I purchase most of the books I read because I love highlighting passages which was one of the main reasons I started a blog in 2002. When I finish a book I transcribe the highlighted passages into a Google Drive document as well as creating a blog post. Think of these as really short Cliffs Notes. Lots of examples here.
I only keep a book if I think there is chance I’ll read it again (I’ve read each of the John Sanford Prey novels half a dozen times). All others are donated to the local library for their annual book sale.
I couldn’t guess how much I’ve spent on books in the last fifty years. I’m sure Amazon has that number for the last 30 years, but I don’t regret a penny. Fiction is my virtual reality and non-fiction the better part of my education. With a book close at hand I am never bored.
Lots of my acquaintances prefer audio books and I’ll confess to some bias on this topic. Having someone read a book to me is not the same as reading the book. Might be a better experience for some but it’s not the same as hearing my mental voice tell the story. I love the smell of a book…the feel of the turning pages…the physical experience of reading.
Snore
The company I worked for (28 years) held a managers retreat every year. The boss would take half a dozen of us to some nice resort for three or four days. One year, probably 20 or 30 years ago, the retreat was held at a very nice, almost swanky, resort in New Mexico or Arizona one of the rectangular states. The rooms were expensive enough the boss asked us to share rooms and I was paired up with our chief financial officer.
Not long after the lights went out my roommate started snoring more loudly than I have ever heard a human being snore. After half an hour or so, I got up and went down to the lobby with the intention of sleeping in one of the nice chairs. However, the night clerk politely explained that was against resort policy. I asked if there were other rooms available and he assured me they were booked up.
In desperation, I asked him to accompany me to our room. When we reached our floor and started walking down the hall, we got about halfway to the room when the night clerk stopped, tilted his head to the side, listening. He looked at me and asked, “Is that…?” Half a hallway away he could hear my roommate snoring through the closed door.
I followed him back to the lobby, and he was kind enough to find a room for me.