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I bought the very first Fujifilm Instax hybrid camera they came out with a few years ago and I did not get it. I didn't really quite understand what the "hybrid" part meant, and the object itself was sort of joyless: Clunky, blobby, fussy. If I wanted to take images that were not as good as I could take with a nicer camera, and if all I was doing was printing images taken with an inferior digital camera, I could have just used my phone along with the Instax printer I already owned. {: .dropcap} ...

A lot of advice and writing on photography is caught up in the difficulties professional photographers face, and is grounded in an assumption that you're taking pictures for commercial purposes. A Lesser Photographer is a good remedy....

I think Cobalt Image may have taken away my last excuse for working on a collection of the last few years’ work. DNGs I shot with the Q2 and RAFs from the X-Pro3, X100V, and X-T4 all fit with each other now. I went on a brief “use it for everything!” over the past day, trying it out on a little of everything from the past few years. This afternoon I took a step back and realized I want to preserve a record of what I’ve been up to with my edits as much as my subjects, so I’m grateful Lightroom has a versions feature: As I pick things for the collection, I can save a snapshot of my favorite edit up to now, then make a new proof for a collection using Cobalt. ...

I took my iPhone 13 Pro along as my sole camera for a quick camping trip to Vernonia. I’ve only had the phone for a week and was pretty excited about its new RAW format. I like the images I get out of it, but in a qualified sort of way that I’ve felt about iPhone photos for a little while now: Computational photography is a wonder that can do some amazing things. I have to do a lot less work to get a nice image out of an iPhone in weird lighting conditions than I do with one of my Fujifilm cameras, especially when dynamic range is challenging. ...

I think we just have to know what we know for ourselves, and not because we need people to agree with us. And we need do the best we can to provide a little bit of light for the people right around us.

On our trip to go pick up our new camper in Eastern Oregon, where we made a new friend and had some good pie.

Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.

Resilience isn’t denial. Resilience is acceptance.

Somewhere mid-summer I decided to take a break and head for the coast. I found a room with a small kitchen close to the beach in Manzanita and I set out to do nothing but walk the beaches in the area and take pictures at my own pace. As COVID-era vacations go, it was just right. I also pulled the trigger on a Q2, Leica’s compact, fixed-lens, full-frame camera. I wanted to start this sentence with “Reasoning that a great vacation deserved a great camera,” but I have not, five months later, convinced myself that reason was involved. ...

Today our family said goodbye to Elsa.