Photography is just arranging rectangles.
Came across a shot of my desk 10+ years ago at the coworking space where I started out. I was “working on a documentary” that I never ended up making. There are a lot of these projects in my cabinets. I’m interested in not feeling guilty about this kind of thing anymore.
I was never actually interested in doing most of the projects. To be more clear, I was very interested in some small aspect—usually in love with the idea of the project. But I never considered that 91-94% of the project I had neither the skills nor the inclination to pursue.
If I had forced myself to follow through on even one of most of these projects, it may have meant ruin for me. Truly. But as one after the other has found its way into the dusty failfile over the years, I’ve just built up substantial guilt, shame, disgust with myself.
One thing I realize now is that I should have been doing smaller things. Every idea I ever come up with seems to appear fully-formed at massive scale. The smallest ideas are feature-length films, often period films. Those are the small ones.
So yeah, I often say “I haven’t done anything I said I wanted to do.” That’s true when viewed narrowly. The great thing that has come into my life in the past years in the idea of doing little things, which I now do daily, and they give me great satisfaction.
I just wish I could feel the same way about all the scenes and screenplays that I wrote over the years, and all the sketches and designs and JavaScript proofs-of-concept and the reams and reams of prose that exploded from sudden inspiration.
If I’m totally honest, I still have a subtle obsession, a glimmer of hope, that all those old things may come back to help me create something someday. But my true intention is to settle for making peace with them all as they are.
Those were all the little things I made back then, and I made a lot of them. I just never showed them to anyone. And I never finished what they were pointing toward. And of course I didn’t.
My friend Tom was looking for a place to set up a serious recording studio, and I think he’s found the coolest possible space: An 1800s Lutheran Church.
He makes music under the moniker Thantaphobe, and he’s got great songs, some gnarly analog synthesizers, cool microphones, and a WHOLE. GODDAMN. CHURCH.
When we walked into the sanctuary he said “This is the reverb room.”
(By the way, it’s hard to shoot photos indoors and I haven’t pushed film yet so sorry these are so dark and moody, though I’m not saying that doesn’t fit some of Tom’s vibes).
In case you were wondering, yes, there’s also a 100-year-old organ the size of a house, in there, but it’s currently not functioning.
All in good time.
Nothing is cooler than when a space that has been lying fallow for years finds an ideal use. I’m very glad this church found Tom.
I’ve fallen in love with photography again thanks to shooting film, but there are some practical things that I’ve needed to implement (still easier for me than shooting digital, by the way).
One of these practical things is that I can now develop my own film.
By the way, developing black and white film at home is easy. They even have monobaths now where it only takes a few minutes and one chemical.
Color is more complicated…
What makes color complicated is that the chemicals need to be at a precise temperature. People do this with sous-vide implements and setting up a whole chemistry lab in their kitchen or bathroom…
I’m at a point in my life (and my wife’s life) where I can’t do that.
When you’re shooting as much film as I am, the cost adds up quickly. But the cost is only half of the problem.
The waiting… is the hardest part.
Too soon?
Now you say “But with film, the waiting is half the fun!”
That’s true… But I don’t want to wait on someone else’s schedule.
And the anticipation is actually so much better when you do it yourself and reveal those negatives.
So in order to do this at home without taking over our kitchen or leaving any smelly hazardous chemicals around my house, I got this amazing device called the Filmomat, which looks like a piece of hifi audio gear (but doesn’t cost quite as much).
This device was created by a German engineering student who got mad one day that a lab messed up his film so he built the best and most beautiful automatic home film processor in the world.
I love stories like that. That’s how most great things come to be.
The Filmomat cleans itself, lets me run 4 rolls at a time (or 2 35mm and 2 medium format), and I can do color, black and white, or slide film (haven’t done slide film yet).
It’s not like this takes no work. You still have to go in the dark to spool your film and get it in the tank and you need to mix up chemicals to use, but this machine makes it possible for me to do this at home.
As an added benefit, I get to offer friends and family the gift of reconnecting with photography on film as I have, and I can process and scan for them.
I know this won’t happen, but I hope that everyone who ever loved or fancied or liked photography will one day pull their grandma’s old Pentax out of the attic (it still works, guys) and shoot a roll of film and feel that magic.
At least I can help loved ones who will.
I’m generally not proud of my work (not being melancholy, I think it’s fine, some of it may even be okay-bordering-on-good, it’s just my standards are high), but there is one thing that makes me proud: 50+ people have used a photo I took as their profile picture on Facebook.
I HATE having my picture taken, and most people do. To be able to give a person a picture of them that they’re even mildly happy with, let alone happy enough to put as the avatar that represents them online, that feels like I’ve done a real service.
About half are people I know, half are people I don’t. I used to shoot professionally and I shot a lot of weddings, and photos I took there would pop up as a random guest’s profile photo.
Those are some of the only moments where I could unequivocally say “I did a good job!”
Much of my psyche is characterized by a sense that I’m not doing enough, contributing enough… but every time I’d get that notification (thanks, whatever nerd was working in the belly of the beast at Facebook) I’d be like:
I was reminded of this by a friend who let me take his picture when we met at the playground while my kids were running around. He said the obligatory “I hate pictures of me” but when he saw the result, he liked it.
He may not make it his profile photo, but that’s enough.
I can’t tell you how nice it has been to fall back in love with photography after getting pretty numbed out through many years doing it professionally.
I would urge anyone in the same boat to seriously consider taking another look at film photography.
Film photography is
- (way) more fun than digital,
- better quality than digital for almost everything, and
- _significantly less expensive_ than digital (yeah you heard me)
Supporting evidence for my claims is way too overwhelming to cover, but here are a few points:
Lack of constraints is terrible for creativity. Unlimited, automatically-exposed images that you can check immediately upon shooting (photographers refer to this as “chimping”) creates an unaware, disembodied, screen-centered photography experience.
Knowing you’ve only got a limited number of shots makes you take them with much greater care, and not being able to chimp keeps you in the moment, seeing, experiencing.
And don’t even get me started on editing.
Going through hundreds of digital images is anxiety-producing, tedious, and soul-draining, comparing slight differences between 25 of the same shot to figure out which one is the keeper… We end up with thousands of unedited photos in our backlog that never see the light of day.
With film, the editing experience is the exact opposite: You _can’t wait_ to see your developed images. Each keeper feels like a gift from the gods. There is intense excitement and joy every step (the feeling is even better when you develop yourself).
Pretty much every improvement in camera manufacture and editing software is designed to make our images look more like film… Just shoot film to begin with.
Here’s a film shot followed by the digital version with some editing. The digital setup cost 3x as much.
Yes, film photography is way cheaper. You can get an incredible camera a) with lenses, b) that’s already lasted 50 years and c) will last another 50, for less than $200.
The best bargain out there right now is the Olympus OM-1, by the way. It’s… amazing.
A “full-frame digital” equivalent (it won’t even be half as good) with lenses will start at $3,000 and will be broken or obsolete in less than 10 years, and I’m being being charitable.
Digital photography is a trap, and this is from a guy who owns a _lot_ of digital cameras (which have their place/uses, just not for maximizing the enjoyment of photography).
One of my favorite cameras is this little half-frame Olympus Pen from the 1950s that I got for less than $100. It’s got a beautiful lens, fits in a jacket pocket, takes 72 shots per roll, and like most of my film cameras, needs no battery.
Think about that for a second… how refreshing that is. This camera could sit in a drawer for 5 years, 10 years, and be pulled out and take a beautiful shot that very moment. Here are some grainy black-and-whites.
Here are a bunch of half-frame shots I took with the Pen in the winter before the world locked up. It didn’t take any time to clean up or color because it just looks nice. The Pen is in portrait mode by default, so you get these unintentional side-by-side mini-stories/diptychs.
And with the Olympus Pen, I’m intentionally showing you the “lowest quality” film camera I have.
Film is the best quality and the least costly. Look, is it the most convenient thing in the world? Not usually. Is it the best tool for low light and sports and nature photography? No.
But it’s the most fun. And why are we doing any of this stuff anyway?
Globe and film processing capabilities have arrived.
My mom died when I was 5 years old (33 years ago). I think I’m doing okay with it but it’s hard to know.
It’s a tricky age to have that happen.
The problem with 5 years old, I think (and I don’t know anything, for the record, I’m just making sense of my experience here), is that you’re old enough to understand your mom died but not really old enough to do anything with that.
In my case I just kind of turned off my emotion chip for a while (a couple decades?). Like sometimes it would fritz out and I’d fly into a rage, but I don’t remember feeling sad really. In my recollection I could count on one hand the number of times I cried.
This might be the best way to describe the dissociation: Today, when I hear that a child has lost a parent, I feel compassionate feelings about that tragedy (my emotion chip works now), but it does not occur to me that I share that child’s experience.
It’s the most bizarre thing: I’ll be thinking about how sad it is that a 45-year-old dropped dead leaving two little kids behind, but something will have to explicitly jog my memory for me to think “Oh… right… My mom died too… I have experience with this.”
The truth is that I don’t feel like I actually have experience with it.
I was too young—wait, that doesn’t make any sense—That’s the experience, the one we’re talking about, losing a parent when you’re young!
And by the way, ask anyone who knows me: I like to share my experience, maybe too much. Every exchange I have is comparing experiences, looking for similarities, verifying assumptions, etc.. It’s what I do.
But not with (probably) the most important event of my life.
The other issue I’ve had with losing my mom that young is, by the time I got around to “doing something with it” it was already so long ago. 5-year-old me just doesn’t have much to say about it.
I remember we had the memorial service on a weekday at the Unitarian church where my pre-school/kindergarten was in the basement. I wore a double-breasted navy blazer with brass buttons.
It was very important to me that my friends downstairs see me dressed up importantlike.
I have this one picture of my mom, who I don’t remember much. I was looking at it today and it stirred the emotions that led to this post. Now that I have kids it means a lot more to me, how devastated I would be to leave my kids (I mean, I’d be dead, but—you know what I mean).
The reason this picture makes me emotional now is that I wish I could let her know that I’m okay. Not to worry.
I feel I can relate much more to her experience than my own.
I’m happy to be able to write this down because it’s helped me to do so, and I’m happy to be able to share it in case there’s anyone else whose experience is like mine and, like me, they just haven’t heard others talk about it much
Blackmagic Design is a company that I’ve always made fun of, usually unfairly. They’re, frankly, amazing, and they’ve made incredible cameras and color science and color grading tools available at price points that are insane.
But their brand photography though…
Blackmagic has done more to democratize filmmaking than maybe any other company ever. I love them. The OG Pocket Cinema Camera (the only one that should ever have been called “pocket”) will always be one of my favorite cameras ever.
But their brand photography is hilarious.
Everything that Blackmagic makes is decidedly good and the prices are great.
But the brand photography is usually beautiful people using Blackmagic products in ways that no one would ever use them, and these beautiful people are SO COMFORTABLE.
Look how comfy this camera op is. He’s apparently on a volcanic island surrounded by komodo dragons and his flannel shirt is Downie fresh. This man is so clean.
But you want to talk about clean. Just look at this immaculate broadcast desk. Look how comfortable this person is, and the lighting. It’s really relatable. You can really imagine yourself using this beautiful gear. All of this photography is art directed by Patrick Bateman.
There has never been a colorist who looked this good while color grading, or who was ever in a room less conducive to color grading.
Lastly, my personal favorite: The Cintel motion picture film scanner. This is one of the most niche devices on earth. I’m one of eleven people in the world who wants one. It’s for SCANNING MOVIE FILM. It costs $30,000. Look at this Bond villain who has it mounted in her foyer.
Apparently the Cintel motion picture film scanner is very popular with Bond villains. This one keeps his under the stairs in his billion dollar torture bunker.
Look, someone made these images, and the truth is they are beautiful, and we all keep clicking the Buy Button, so they’re doing their jobs perfectly. Beautiful renderings of great products composited on gorgeous 3D sets.
And the hair. ALL of the hair. It’s perfect.
I don’t want to represent that I have a comprehensive understanding of the history of business, but I can say that in my lifetime, the single greatest corporate failure was America Online not following AOL Instant Messenger to its obvious conclusion.
AIM was the place where an entire generation, the first generation of Digital Natives™ (with experience of the prior world of rotary payphones), connected with one another online, and AOL got nothing from it. The failure is truly astounding.
AIM was where all kids lucky enough to have computers lived, particularly during those awkward sit-on-the-phone-for-hours-sometimes-in-silence-with-boys/girls years. AIM let us conduct multiple conversations with boys/girls simultaneously.
So addicted were most of us to AOL Instant Messenger that, when there was no one around, we would look at each other’s AWAY MESSAGES. These could be styled in different colors.
An entire generation of, the FIRST generation, of web citizens, spent hours curating AWAY MESSAGES.
All these kids were screaming, in bRiGht, cOlorFUL, aLteRnATe CAPS, for a Facebook timeline, for a place to post. AOL had them all!
It’s no wonder they became the first company to fail at trying to own the Internet.
To run AOL Instant Messenger the way it ran in the late 90s is leaving a trillion dollars (actual approximate number) in cash sitting in your car (and not even locking the door because you don’t want to have to fish the key out, yes we unlocked car doors with a key back then).
You can tell me if you think you’ve seen a bigger, more obvious miss. A more catastrophic result of business incompetence. A more spectacular wildfire of hundred dollar bills just from pure negligent oblivion.
I have never seen one. AOL’s failure is truly astonishing.
Every time I bring this point up to economically-minded friends, they respond with some version of “alas, this is just how math works 🤷♂️.” The version of the Capitalism Game we’re playing right now is designed terribly. This is how the levels work, roughly:
There is no good game that is designed like this. The first level is supposed to be easy, then the next level is supposed to be a little harder, and then a little harder, and then it should become very hard. We’ve set up the rules of Capitalism Game I exactly opposite this.
And to make the design even dumber/more tragic, the “points” in this game translate to actual alleviation of suffering but only in the first few levels. The points amassed beyond that are the equivalent of confetti explosions that don’t even benefit the people who win them 🤦♂️.
And the curve just continues to get flatter. If we’re honest, it ends up going downhill. Once you get to a certain level, the game just starts giving you money. Is there any wonder why people hate this game? What child would play a game where you start at the hardest level?
This is how the Capitalism Game is supposed to work:
This is how you design a more fun and humane game. This is a game that would make sense to a human child (it even makes sense to other mammals, in fact).
“So, errrm, the compounding nature of—” use your imagination! “Actually, errrm, the incentive to invest—” maybe take like eight seconds to think of new ideas while people everywhere lose faith in every institution. “Well, errrm, punishing success—” USE YOUR FUCKING IMAGINATION.
I’m asked this once a week: “Which microphone|camera|lens|mixer|etc. should I buy?” This always requires a conversation (which I do love to have).
Most of the time, there’s an option that’s 90% as “good” as the 10x-as-costly option, but the expensive one has great knob feel.
Most people don’t really have a choice here. They need to get in as unspendily as possible and even the “cheap” option represents a big investment. But if budget is available, the choice is not as simple as it would seem.
Knob feel matters. A lot.
The difference between a sound file that comes out of a cheap mixer/recorder and a Sound Devices mixer/recorder is like the difference between a filet mignon from Outback and a same-source filet mignon from Ruth’s Chris. Ruth’s Chris will be better, but they’re both filets.
The difference between the feel of using a cheap mixer/recorder and the feel of using a Sound Devices mixer/recorder is the difference between eating an Amtrak-microwave hamburger and a 12-course meal prepared by a Michelin-starred chef.
By the way, I’m mentioning Sound Devices here because they are one of the OG grandmasters of knob feel, but I do have to mention that the legendary Sound Devices knob feel is absent from their MixPre series (which are totally fine, I have one, but that ain’t knob feel, folks).
You can try to convince yourself that you don’t care about the feel of using a tool, but that isn’t true. The creative process is complex and psychologically messy. Sensations, emotions, and friction that come from using creative tools always affect the process and the output.
The good news is that if the only thing that matters to you is output sound/image quality, audio/video prices have never been lower, and quality is pretty much maxed out.
The better news is that, in many cases (I can tell you which ones), investing in tools with knob feel is less costly in the long run than investing in tools with cheap plasticky knobs.
This is my Leica M3. It was manufactured in the 1960s. I could sell it right now to a happy buyer for $2,000 or my great-great-granddaughter can just use it for her entire life and then leave it for her great-great-granddaughter. And the knobs, by God, these knobs…
You’ll always have to pay up front for knob feel.
True knob feel cannot be mass-produced or outsourced. Knob feel requires attention and care. There’s no recurring revenue to attract investment in knob feel.
Many product categories may have experienced their last great knobs…
I really love when extra attention to detail has been put into something where no one asked for it. This is a hoagie I bought from High St. Philly yesterday. This packaging is delightful.
Yes, that’s custom-printed masking tape holding closed a double-layered wrapper. The inner layer of the wrapper is deli paper with an oldschool (presumably Philly) street map printed on it. The outer layer is clear plastic, holding in all that traditional Italian hoagie goodness.
Here’s the thing: This is really beautiful, thoughtful, and elaborate packaging for a hoagie, but really the most important adjective of those three for me is the middle one: it’s thoughtful.
Being thoughtful lets customers know you care about what you’re doing.
High Street also happens to make some of the best breads in the city and we always have a couple of loaves sliced up and frozen for toastmaking (we love toasts). But I think you could probably already tell that from the way they wrap their hoagies.
By the way, the hoagie was good, the bread was better, and the buttermilk fried chicken sandwich was Top 10 best sandwiches I’ve ever experienced in my life, without question.
Good packaging/thoughtful details will always get a hat tip from me.
I’m on a real film set today for the first time in quite a while. Two years ago, I transitioned to a more businessy role at my production house. I’m still involved in the creative process, but I’m pretty much out of the execution part.
This is as it should be.
I love the film medium and I love the shooting process. I love the collaboration, the melding together of so many different art forms. Part of me even loves the pressure. Unfortunately, most of the pressure comes from the overwhelming cost of the process.
For most crew on a production, the jokey characterization is “Hurry up and wait.” The larger the film crew, the more specialized each person is on set. One person’s job could be just to watch a couple of strands of hair on an actor’s head for continuity or post-production needs.
Someone unfamiliar with the process can look at a film crew, maybe one who has shut down a couple of blocks in your city, and think “What are all these people doing? No wonder these things are so expensive. There’s gotta be a better way…”
They’re not completely wrong…
But as with most things, there’s a reason it’s done this way: Creative attention is a hyper-limited resource and this has never been more stark than when a camera is rolling, microseconds are elapsing, and dozens of nuanced interactions are simultaneously unfolding in the frame.
When directing an actor’s performance, as I was today, I am fundamentally unable to notice anything about what the actor is wearing. I can’t check lens focus. I don’t know what else is in frame. All I’m focused on is “Do I believe and understand this character?”
Now, I’m a particularly monofocused person in general and there are some people with the talent to take in a whole frame, every detail, and give actors good notes on top of that.
For the record, I could have a wider awareness of the frame, the shot, and how it fits into the edit if I had rehearsal time ahead of the shoot to dial in performance, but that’s rarely available in commercial work.
And I’m still never going to notice a stray hair.
I used to be able to creatively lead multiple projects at once, and I think I did an adequate job (customers were happy and came back), but it eventually led me to burnout, one of the reasons I switched roles.
Context switching between high stakes creative projects and further context switching to business/sales/management and the hundreds of little details involved in each of these… I spent a few years pulling an all-nighter at least once a week.
I really fucked myself up.
Creative projects, especially complex creative production projects, deserve focused, loving attention. And creative people can’t provide that level of attention to six projects at once, at least not healthily. And everyone deserves to be healthy.
It’s a treat when I can let myself become fully enveloped in a film production but in the meantime I’m very happy assisting at the idea stage and watching my amazing colleagues execute at a level they (usually mostly hopefully?) have the creative attention for.
If you’re a photographer, I have the best business card for you. It reuses beautiful things that will otherwise be thrown away, it’s unique (for now), and handing it to someone creates immediate delight, conversation, and connection.
This is my business card (it’s not this).
Right now, in your parents’ and grandparents’ closets and attics, there are thousands of these 35mm slides, intricately detailed, each one unique, and I can’t stress this enough, they are what that light was physically captured on, directly exposed at that time in that place.
Millions of these beautiful, one-of-a-kind objects are being thrown out every day. They should become the business cards of photographers everywhere. But photographers everywhere won’t take the time. YOU will, because you’re an interesting, fun-loving, enterprising go-getter.
My first stab at this idea was right out of college in 2005 using old slides and a rubber stamp. This is still the best way to do this, in my opinion. Rubber stamps have a beautiful quality all their own. The issue is that many slides are plastic or have writing all over them.
When I ultimately had my own company (film/video, not photography), using old slides didn’t make as much sense and it was more important that the logo be prominent. This defeats at least 61% of the coolness of the idea, and they’re also TERRIBLE to make:
Eventually we did find a great company, J.S. McCarthy Printers in Maine, who came up with a much better way to do these for us, still with a bit of manual assembly, but nothing like before.
The way we had done them previously (with our original name) was with die-cut stickers.
1st phott
Now that I’m reconnecting with photography and taking portraits of neighborhoods and strangers who live in those neighborhoods, I finally have a reason to do my original idea. I found some low-priced eBay auctions for old Kodachrome slides and I’m making a rubber stamp.
The cool thing about Kodachrome slides is that the colors are incredibly vibrant like an old Technicolor movie and one side is blank for rubber-stamping.
For those who don’t know, Kodachrome was a complicated development process with brilliant colors and it no longer exists.
Now, when I meet a stranger whose photo I would like to take, in addition to dressing myself well and some other strategies I’m experimenting with, I’ll be able to hand them a piece of film with my name and a website where their portrait might show up.
You should totally use slides as your business card if you’re a photographer. And if you’re not a photographer, what might be out there, readily available, with a little bit of space on it where you could print or rubber stamp your contact info?
One of my very favorite concepts in the infinite ocean of metaphor is kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with resin mixed with precious metals. The repaired object is both stronger and more beautiful than the original.
Kintsukuroi is a reminder that things are worth fixing, and not simply to recoup losses.
Kintsukuroi is a reminder that much of life should be spent fixing things that are broken, in ourselves, in others, in the world around us.
Kintsukuroi is a reminder that no matter how broken we feel at times, our brokenness is ultimately no more than an expression of our beauty.
Kintsukuroi is a reminder that every setback can make us stronger and better in a way that only a setback can.
Kintsukuroi is a reminder that life is messy, that evolution is a series of mistakes, that growth in resilience is inevitable, unstoppable, automatic.
Someday I would love to own one of these objects or make one myself. I can’t think of a more beautiful or hopeful artistic expression of the truth of lived experience.
It has begun. I did the first short walk today with my friend and colleague Newton. I have a tendency to make projects bigger than they need to be, and I’ve done that here, but with an emphasis on ease and sustainability.
There are 2,215 miles of roads in Philadelphia, minus a few highways. So if I do a 4-5 mile walk 3 days a week for 3 years, I can easily walk every street. I plan to shoot one roll of film on each of the walks (that's a lot of rolls of film but I can develop and scan myself).
— Zach Phillips (100/100 posts) (@zachphillips) March 16, 2021
Now, in addition to shooting a roll of film, I’m also wearing a GoPro. I just think it would be a cool hyperlapse to really quickly walk down every road in Philadelphia (I mean, come on, that would be cool) and it takes little effort other than to remember to charge the GoPro.
Then I realized that since I’m wearing a GoPro and walking with a friend, I may as well mic us both up running our separate wireless audio into the GoPro. This way if we have a cool conversation I could maybe use it for something later. I don’t know, a podcast?
And of course, since I have video of each walk, I could easily turn that video into little photo walk videos where when you hear the shutter you can then cut away to the picture that’s been taken.
Another thing I’ll need to have is a “calling card” I can give to people if I ask to take their portrait. This way they can go check out the project somehow, see if their portrait made it in. I have a very specific idea for this business card of course… More on that later.
You can see how this project is spiraling out of control, right?
Anyway, this is what’s wrong with me. But I think I’m actually doing this.
Look at that first little sprout of green… Can you see it?
Can you see it now? I’m gonna ALL that red to green. Just watch.
I got my second vaccine this morning. There’s a part of me that still thinks of medicine the way I did as a child.
When I was little and sick, I would visualize medicine I took as elven armies rushing into my body unleashing hails of arrows on the pathogenic orc hordes.
I still secretly think that these visualizations help the medicine work better.
The immune system is an astonishing thing and it’s sad how much science has been used for evil and faith in institutions so damaged that the entire narrative isn’t solely how amazing vaccines are.
It was the Moderna second shot so I’m going to become unbearable to my wife shortly. Maybe I’ll watch the Lord of the Rings films even though they are terribly disappointing.
Devastatingly, they told me no ibuprofen and acetaminophen is just Bitter Smarties.
The first shot felt a lot like this, but I want to mention how much of a feeling of civic pride there was being in this shuttered theatre in Philadelphia receiving this life-saving medicine from fellow Philadelphians (in fairness, some of them may be from New Jersey).
Now I hope the president does the only sane and moral thing and puts this intellectual property in the public domain so that our fellow humans can get vaccinated everywhere, protecting us all. We guaranteed pharma companies billions (thanks companies) and they’ll be fine.
Today was like a lot of recent days when I’ve been preoccupied with BIG DEAL things that cause me anxiety but are probably fine and will totally be fine.
Also today: My son got his first haircut. I stumbled out the door in pajamas already ten minutes late to the appointment.
One of the problems with being a parent is that everything feels like both a big deal and nothing at all. I mean, everything this little Wendell does is his first experience of it. This was the first time he smelled a barber shop and felt clippers buzzing against his head.
Looked at one way, Wendell’s first haircut is a really big deal, but also, his hair was getting in his eyes so we got his hair cut before feeding him hotdogs and apples and washing his butt and putting him in bed.
I struggle with switching between being way too precious about every moment and wanting to make a 16mm film (literally) of my kid’s first time on the beach and totally phoning it in, stumbling unconscious from milestone to very special milestone.
The truth is: neither is great.
When I’m hung up on everything being special, I miss the moment just as much as when I’m preoccupied with a work thing. Also, if everything is special, nothing is special. It isn’t sustainable. It’s like people who give everyone hugs.
What does this hug even mean? What are we?
There’s no holding on to these moments. Yes, we saved some hair to throw in a scrapbook. Yes, we got at least the picture above where he’s looking real proud like “Lookin’ sharp.”
If I can be present for 3 seconds at a time, that’s better than running to either extreme for me.
At least right now, right this minute, I’m here for this critically unimportant moment in my little son’s little life.
I’d like to report a crime.
When we renovated our apartment, we made the tragic decision to tear up these wonderful, beautiful, amazing, 100-year-old wood factory floors. This little thread is me offering my respect and thanks to this beautiful, functional surface.
We walked on this warm, soft, creaky floor for five years. It was polished smooth by ten million steps before we arrived.
This building began its life at the turn of the century as a cigar factory. It also spent some time as a cookie factory. These floors saw it all.
It’s hard to describe just how against my nature and values it is to erase something so perfect that has existed for so long and still functions. The truth is that the folks who developed this building into artist lofts in the 80s didn’t think about: Sound. At all. Not even once.
If you want a perfect recipe for neighbor hatred, separate their living spaces with two to three inches of wood.
We deemed this change necessary first for sound insulation. Then for design. Then for a bunch of other technical/code reasons which take too long to explain.
I trust that our new floors will last at least another hundred years, but I’ll always miss these.
Thank you old Philadelphia factory floors. You kept our steps warm and soft through challenging times. You held up our daughter for her first crawl. You were perfect.
I love awkward little in-between moments in technology. One of the funniest was a two-year period (about 2006-2008) when all filmmakers used these things called “35mm adapters” mounted on camcorders. Here’s a picture of one setup that I used to use.
That little metal monstrosity in the middle with the M on it has a 9 volt battery spinning a piece of ground glass inside. You can attach old Nikon lenses to it. The back of it is a macro adapter that screws on to the camcorder.
This let us actually get larger image circles into our tiny-sensor camcorders literally by making a tiny movie theatre inside a black metal box and filming it with the camcorder. The results were beautiful though.
Every filmmaker was screaming for a large sensor digital cinema camera, and then the 5D Mark II came but it didn’t shoot 24 frames per second 🤦♂️.
So we kept using these goofy adapters until Canon stopped being idiots and this brief awkward moment in history was over.
Still, there’s something I like about the 35mm adapter over the 5D. Something analog about that ground glass (but losing 3 stops of light was a bit much 🙂).
I’ve been showing favorite childhood movies to my kids (as you do). Man, they sure are violent. It doesn’t seem to bother my kids (didn’t bother me either, I don’t think…) but this sadistic, monstrous scene from Sword in the Stone has forever scarred us all.
I have to warn you before you watch this scene again (don’t watch it for the first time, just don’t)—I feel like when it ended, a part of me was lost forever. I can never be fully myself again:
There’s no resolution. We don’t pick up the story later. It’s just pure sadness, loss, a death deeper than death.
77.4% of these movies begin with one of the protagonist’s parents dying but nothing touches the sadness of this girl squirrel. Nothing.
Perhaps the innate defenses we have to protect us from serious trauma (like the death of a parent) don’t get triggered by this girl squirrel scene, so we’re open to the full spectrum of excruciating pain.
As someone who lost his mom at 5 years old, I can tell you, there are some complicated (if crude) protective mechanisms in place, kind of like a safety valve that shuts off when the flow of negative emotions is too great.
I wonder if the Disney scientists discovered the optimal, maximum pain they could deliver without triggering the safety valve, forever altering all children with the true pain of loss.
One thing is clear: Ratings boards don’t know what’s going to have the biggest effect on kids.
Clickety-clackety keyboards are the best keyboards, but they annoy other people. So you need to be able to swap out something your daskeyboard (with all black keys, no letters on them1) for an Apple Magic Keyboard (the black version). But what if you want even more clackety…
The Mattias Tactile Pro echoes like the feeling of hacking into a mainframe in 1986 with Matthew Broderick looking over your shoulder, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, rubbing his fingers together, anticipating the very moment when BAM! SYNTHESIZERS!
WE’RE IN!
Sometimes you want to really work out your fingers and make little snapping sounds, with every keypress SNAP, SNAP, like you’re SNAPPING the letters and words together with little snap’n’pop firecrackers you hurl at the page. The Underwood Champion is for you… Champion.
But when you really, really want the clickety-clacketyest keyboard of all, you switch to this one… It’s like firing a machine gun. No one can deny you are WORKING. VERY IMPORTANT WORK. I made a video some years ago about another magical thing it can do (sorry for the dated music):
You have too much self-respect to accept without scrutiny the keyboard that’s issued with your computer. There’s too much clicketyness out there in the universe…
But probably keep your Apple Magic Keyboard (the black version) for calls/not making everyone around you hate you.
- You’ll need to put some tape over the ugly-ass logo, but the switches are ktink, ktink switches, they rock! [return]
There are many examples of words that are ruined long before they actually become useful to describe something.
Today, let’s talk about “Multimedia”!!!!! 📽️✍️🎙️🌈….. 👇
The word “multimedia” calls to mind a CD-ROM, the kind that you had to mount inside of a little beige plastic caddy before inserting it into your Macintosh Quadra.
At that time multimedia generally meant “words AAAAAND pictures and maybe SOUUUUUNDS all on ONE THING.”
Later on “multimedia” became a catch-all word for anything that someone might make (like the awful word “content” is used today).
Some tools (and words are just tools) need to sit around in a drawer for a few decades before we find a good use for them…
As the world becomes more conscious of accessibility and the fact that different people learn in different ways at different times, the word “multimedia” finally has a good use: Much of what we make is published across multiple media. Prose/Film/Radio is the most common combo.
A note on multimedia work: Translation between media shouldn’t be automatic. Some thought should go into how something is best presented in each medium, even if sometimes it’s as simple as a text-to-voice, voice-to-text, or just saving out an audio version of a video.
Many works are single-media-only and they must be. There’s no clear film version of most radio stories just as there’s no prose version of a great film.
This is multimedia.
But there can always be a radio version of prose or poetry. 98% of YouTube videos could just be audio.
But because the word is ruined, we’ll need to use a word like multiformat, which I don’t hate, but—
It shoulda been you, multimedia… It shoulda been you.
My next experiment on my little blog is to begin making these posts multiformat.
Today I had this perfect set of tasks that fit neatly into all four quadrants of an idea I’m playing with called the Want/Must Matrix.
The counterintuitive thing I’m arguing is that the tasks that create the most resistance are those we both MUST do and WANT to do.
Common productivity advice when you want to do something but have resistance: “Find a way to force yourself through public accountability, promises to others, etc..”
Softly/playfully, this can help, but when taken seriously, it’s the perfect recipe for procrastination.
When we procrastinate, we’re usually avoiding something that we must do in favor of something we want to do. Right?
This is exactly wrong.
We’re often avoiding the things we most want to do in favor of things we neither want nor must do. 🤦♂️ Why do we do this?
The most common procrastination activities are usually no more than tics disguised as Wanty or Musty or some combination. We spin artificial webs of want/must/must-want to distract ourselves from the discomfort of the friction between obligations and our true desires.
We check email ten times, organize stuff. If we play a game, we do so with a sense of duty (“just need to finish this level”). We aren’t “playing” at all. This isn’t the romantic procrastination we were promised!
Why would we do these things in lieu of what we most want?
If our obligations and true desires are perfectly in line, why wouldn’t that be advantageous? If we get to do “what we love” for “our job,” isn’t that ideal?
Ask someone who has made their “passion” into their “job” and see how smoothly it’s gone for them.
The most common explanation for this incongruity is that we’re somehow afraid of failure and so we don’t start. Sure we’re afraid of failure, but fear of failure is insignificant next to the true cause of the really bad resistance.
The big cause is adding more Must to our Wants.
The great paradox is that, if you Want to do something, adding Must to it adds resistance. The part of us that Wants (and always knows how to do the things we want, needing no help) is completely gummed up by the part of us that tries to coerce and control it.
If you think I’m talking only about work, I’m not. This applies as much to reading or playing with your kids. We have an incredible knack for making anything into an obligation, and when we do, even the thing we want most in the world becomes a massive struggle.
Our coercive/extractive cultural discourse says human behavior is “lazy” or “not lazy”. “Good” people do what they must, and “bad” people do what they want.
This doesn’t hold up. People who do the most are people who have figured out how to do what they want to do with ease.
Learning to do what we want to do is less a process of learning as it is a process of _un_learning. We already naturally know how to do what we want. My 3-year-old never needs to ask herself what she wants to do or try to motivate herself to do it.
“But your 3-year-old doesn’t have real work to do.”
Irrelevant. She begs to help with everything: dishes, cooking, picking up. She’s just not good at these things yet.
Some of the most satisfying work I’ve ever done was cleaning a restaurant kitchen at 1AM or shoveling stone.
There’s nothing precious about the work it takes to write your book or app. It’s no different from stacking firewood or doing dishes. /your thing/ is just something you want to do that you’ve made so Musty that you can’t even access the part of you that wants it anymore.
All Must isn’t bad. A bit of Must can appetize Want/Play. But the Must can’t have judgment attached. “I must post a thread today” = ok. “I must post a GOOD thread today” = dead.
“This better be good” or “You’re in trouble if you miss this deadline.” Not helpful. Not once. Ever.
And the Musty voice needs to fade into background noise if you’re going to actually do/enjoy doing the thing.
The only way for that to happen reliably (Flow) is to actually stop believing that you need the Musty voice. To believe that, you’ll need evidence.
This is proving to be a pretty wide-ranging topic and I’m not going to be able to encapsulate it in one post/thread nicely the way I wanted to. But that’s okay, because there’s nothing about this that I MUST do other than post it, which is fun.
It’s fun to post every day.
Oh, oh! One more peculiar thing on the topic of procrastination:
In The Want/Must Matrix, it appears that procrastination can only happen diagonally. You can only procrastinate with stuff you actually want to do if you’re avoiding stuff you have to do but don’t want to do. 🤔
If you smell something musty, turn around.
Some 35mm pictures of Wendell with Agnes.
If US leaders were actually interested in talented people starting businesses, they would implement these two policies IMMEDIATELY:
Universal healthcare not tied to employment
Universal childcare
Right now, we needlessly eliminate most businesses through dumb policies. 👇
The idiotic lack of these wildly popular, zero-downside policies destroys potential jobs, INNOVAY-SHUN, and particularly scalable businesses.
Even those with the moxie and hubris and acumen to succeed in business have to hedge their bets and start non-scalable services companies.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with non-scalable services companies and many business starters (and potential ones) love the work, but in my anecdotal experience a solid percentage of them would (and have tried to) pursue more scalable concepts but couldn’t risk healthcare/family.
“But that’s what venture capital is for. Raise the money.”
91% of VC money goes to men, and 94% of VC money goes to white or Asian (17%) people. And the biggest checks always go to the same guys from the same colleges cycling through the same circuit.
“But immigrants with nothing start businesses all the time. We’re just lazy.”
Immigrants with nothing have two choices: Work the jobs Americans aren’t interested in for low wages or start businesses chosen from a proven list of formulas a la franchising.
“But real entrepreNEURRRS will take the risks necessary to succeed.”
Dude, I’m probably the riskyest risktaking riskyboy I know, but I’m not risking my children’s lives. No one should.
Hundreds of thousands of potential JAHHHB creators are stuck in a job for the healthcare.
“They shouldn’t have kids if they want to start a business!”
Go think about that and wait for the heat death of the universe.
Also, having been both a parent and a non-parent business owner, I can assure you that parents are better at business (sorry non-parents, you’re great).
There are many reasons why US leaders will never do these obvious things, but it’s actually worse than that (and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt): They will actually never even UNDERSTAND why they might do these things.
The Venn Diagram of US leaders looks like this.
I’m done with leaders saying that small business is important while standing in the way of everything that actually leads to more and better businesses.
Both parties are complicit. One is just shameless while the other lies through its teeth and wonders why people don’t trust it.
Now that @JoeBiden is safely inaugurated, I want to talk about how crazy it has been to be a Wilmington/Philadelphia (née Syracuse) person through this past year.
The word “surreal” has grown soft through overuse, but… this shit has been surreal.
I’ve met Hunter and Beau and I worked on a project (incidentally the project I’m most proud of) with Ashley. But here’s what you need to understand about Delaware: That’s not special. Everyone knows everyone in Delaware. Truly. We have this thing called “The Delaware Twist.”
“The Delaware Twist,” coined by Kristen Kuipers, is this thing when you’re about to talk about someone in Delaware and you look around because it’s entirely possible the person is right behind you.
Here’s a picture of my wife. She and the guy behind her both went to Syracuse Law.
I’m not exaggerating about The Delaware Twist. It is a physiological, pre-cognitive, reptilian response. You just check who’s behind you before speaking.
This picture of my wife (girlfriend at the time) was at lunch in our building in Wilmington in 2010. I was in my pajamas:
I spent four years with an office IN the Joseph R. Biden Railroad Station in Wilmington. Our office was ON the platform. When he was VP, we’d have black SUVs pull up in the alley, Biden would get off the train, wave to us, and disappear. I’ll never have an office that cool again.
My current office has a network link and Senator Chris Coons uses it to go on TV.
In March, my COO, in a not-good-joke way, asked Coons “So, are we all gonna die?” He responded: “We’re about to experience the greatest disruption of civilian life since the Second World War.”
“Oh.”
Then I got a call from one of my nerd heroes in California that they potentially wanted to use our studios as Biden Media HQ. I met with the Biden team several times, and I recommended The Queen for one of the things they needed. They ended up using it for everything. 🤦♂️
Then, on election night, when I knew Biden had won Arizona and Georgia (yes I called Georgia election night, I have proof, texts showed the Trump team knew it… use Twitter, it’s amazing), it became clear this thing was going to be called for Biden when Philadelphia was counted…
I live in Philadelphia. Our count put Biden over the top. There was no better place to be in America the day they called the election. It was a lot like the other good thing that happened in the last four years (the Eagles winning The Greatest Game Ever Played).
Then there was Four Seasons Total Landscaping, objectively the funniest thing that happened in the last four years. Here’s the worst brag in this whole unintentional bragthread: My wife and I had stayed in the actual Four Seasons for our one date night of the year that week!
Then there’s this guy, who fixed everyone’s Macs, and whose shop (“shoppe” 🙄) I personally hung out in, nerding out about Steve Jobs/Apple lore with him.
He never gave any indication that he was bananapants aside from the hat. For any doubters, he is, definitely, blind.
There’s more but I’ll stop. This thing has just felt really… close to home. Thanks for allowing my unbearable indulgence. Needed to purge this. Philadelphia, Wilmington, and the 30 minutes between them got a front row seat for a really important fight.
Thank God it’s over for now.
My sister Liz is a genius. In addition to being a dance instructor, a composer who plays all instruments, and one of the best improv performers I’ve ever seen, she’s now doing surface pattern design.
For Christmas, she pulled photos of my kids off Instagram and made this fabric:
Somehow, this pattern manages to maximize cuteness, tastefulness, and versatility. Fully personalized, just stuff she found on my Instagram.
I think people would pay for this (and she would want that). I’m curious if the price that feels fair to the consumer would be enough…
The reason I think it works as a product is that it’s one-of-a-kind but totally repeatable. Send photos, Liz makes the pattern, choose color and items—sheets, napkins, wallpaper—there’s an issue of proofing and “notes” which add to the cost—but this is a serious amount of work…
Here’s a side-by-side of a photo I took and how she treated it. It’s just so cool. If there are any people with business knowledge in this space that could help my sister evaluate the opportunity, I would be most grateful if you hit her up: www.elizabethand.co/.
One of the things that bothers me most (I often can’t sleep at night thinking about it) is a missed opportunity. Not my missed opportunity, but someone else’s.
The one I’m thinking about right now is the missed opportunity of one of my favorite products of all time: @Airtable 👇
Before I go into what I think Airtable has missed, let me start by saying that I was/remain one of its earliest/biggest fans. At a 2015 hackathon (when I used to go to hackathons), I built a CMS backed by Airtable that I called Airguitar which I went on to build many things with.
(side note on Airguitar: it never became a commercial product or left my own company’s use, and surely it would have had some trademark issues 😃, but also, Airtable’s colors were so much cooler back then… that’s not the missed opportunity, sorry for the digression.)
I legitimately believe that @Airtable belongs in the Hall of Fame of user interface design. Using its database for the first time was like watching Michael Jordan play basketball. The only other experience I’ve had in the same league is using @figmadesign. Both web apps. Bananas.
I’ve created hundreds of workflows (and fully-functioning applications) hacked on top of Airtable, not because Airtable made them easier, but because Airtable made them POSSIBLE.
But, in my opinion, Airtable went on to repeatedly make decisions contrary to their mission.
Airtable’s stated mission is “to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs.”
Airtable, right now, COULD enable this, but over and over, they have needlessly blocked toolmaking functionality in the most frustrating ways imaginable.
To be fair, Airtable is now a unicorn “worth” billions of dollars and I’m just a toolmaking-obsessed chump who sees a tool for toolmaking that is intentionally impaired by its own toolmaker, shaking my fist at the void.
There are too many examples of Airtable’s anti-toolmaker decisions to name here, but I will go over a few:
This first one may in fact be an honest oversight, but it doesn’t make sense because the Airtable team is Michael Jordan:
1. The inability to link between bases.
My God, the Zapier hacks we have had to build to get around this, yet Airtable Sync somehow manages to be worse.
2. After building a regular-person-readable alternative database view, perfect for a Normy Dashboard, they released it as a marketing tool called Airtable Universe and didn’t give it’s far-more-usable interface to the toolmakers and the users of the tools themselves. 🤦♂️
3. User/API pricing remain a kaleidoscopic nightmare for actual toolmaker use.
To be clear, I love paying for software. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. But pricing should MAKE SENSE. Our team can do everything for $25/month but add a user field and it’s $400/month… What?
just got a $3360 charge from @airtable because i invited some folks to review a base i made. no info that inviting folks would cost $240 a year each.
— harper 🤯 (@harper) June 15, 2020
¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I’ve moved on now to build my own tool which I hope will achieve Airtable’s mission. Who knows, maybe I’ll run into the same problems they had that forced them to torture and rip the guts out of their most fervent believers and fans.
I wish I could have just used Airtable.
(also maybe add a simple messy page model (there are already “comments”) to each record so people can write some stuff (humans need messy places to write stuff) and embed table views and Airtable is suddenly a better @NotionHQ for what Notion is used for… easy peasy)
Are you an English-speaking grown-up who never learned to roll your Rs? Do you avoid speaking beautiful languages like Spanish and Italian?
Here’s a post on how to achieve luscious Rs as an adult. The key is contained within the blooper reels of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
As a child, I had a great ear for languages. I loved them, and to this day, if I were offered one superpower by a Power Genie, it would be hard not to choose “Understand and speak every language.”
But at the age of 18, I still could not roll my Rs. And no one could describe how!
One of the cruelest phenomena in nature is that people who intuitively understand how to do a thing are the ABSOLUTE WORST at teaching it. Kids who can understand immediately how to roll their Rs (and make cool machine gun noises, too!) are infuriating to those of us who can’t.
I discovered the solution to the R-rolling problem completely by chance:
Watching Fresh Prince bloopers (as one does), I came across a scene in which Carlton, CANNOT get this line out without creating an R roll: “But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time.” Over and over… 💡
So I tried it. I repeated the line slowly, over and over again—
“But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time… But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time…”
You may want to do this alone. You may sound a little crazy.
Going faster and faster: “But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time… But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time…” and suddenly(!)—”BUT IT’LL” became buh-rRrRrRr. I was rolling my Rs! I was MAKING THE SOUND.
I still needed those first two words as a crutch for some time.
Within a few days I no longer needed the “Buh” sound to start. I could roll my Rs at will.
This is THE way to learn to roll your Rs no matter what age you are. It will work if you’re willing to put in just a few minutes for a few days, unlocking sound and capability forever.
I’m going to attempt to deliver a complete photography course in 5 tweets.
I originally made this on 5 index cards for my wife, corresponding to the 5 concepts you need to know.
In short: There isn’t much to it, and everyone should understand photography, particularly today.
Concept 1: Aperture
Aperture is how much you open the lens to let light in. Common apertures run from 1.4 (open) to 22 (closed). Aperture works just like pupils. To see In the dark, open wider. In the sun, close down.
More open = blurry backgrounds (and harder to nail Focus).
Concept 2: ISO (or ASA)
The base light sensitivity of your film or camera. A higher ISO number means it’s more sensitive (needs less light) but also more grainy/“lower quality.” A lower ISO number means it’s less sensitive (needs more light) but is more smooth/“higher quality.”
Concept 3: Shutter Speed
How long the shutter is open. Big number (denominator) = faster speed. Small number = lets more light in, but movement blurs.
Correct Exposure (goldilocks point between totally dark and totally white) is a dance between ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed.
Concept 4: Focus
The distance from the camera (in feet/meters) that is the most in focus. You can think of this as a flat pane of glass exactly the Focus distance away from you. Everything closer to you, or further away, is less in focus than that pane. See also Aperture 👆.
Concept 5: Focal Length (and framing)
How wide (zoomed out) or how narrow your view is. We use 35mm film size as a basis for description. e.g. your iPhone’s lens is 28mm equivalent (slightly wide).
Basic Framing Tip: The subject should be prominent in the photo… MOVE CLOSER.
So that’s it: Everything you need to know about photography in 5 tweets. This applies equally to cinematography with one constraint/rule-of-thumb around shutter speed (it should generally be a 48th of a second, or double your frames per second). Here are the original index cards:
In his newsletter, David Perell asked for “the Sonos for home audio-video setups—without the wires and complexity—with the ease and quality of an iPhone camera,” and offered to help/invest in such a company.
- His assumptions are dangerously wrong.
- I built a prototype.
The two biggest problems with virtual conversation, EQUALLY catastrophic to human communication, are Poor Audio Quality and Lack of Eye Contact. Poor Camera Quality and Bad Lighting, while problematic, barely affect communication, so they aren’t problems unless you’re recording.
Audio is a solved problem (more on that later), but any home a/v product that doesn’t FIRST address Lack of Eye Contact is useless. You may as well buy a garbage Logitech webcam.
But there’s good news: Eye Contact is also a solved problem. All you need is a teleprompter.
While Apple tries to solve the Lack of Eye Contact problem with (creepy) software that shifts pixels to move your eyeline, teleprompters already solve this 100% perfectly. Errol Morris, the best talking-head documentary filmmaker ever, used them to build his famous Interrotron.
Okay, so every desk needs a teleprompter. Obviously. But we have a bigness problem: Teleprompters are giant and unwieldy with sharp edges and too many parts and people don’t understand them. There are approximately 12 people in the world who are going to put them on their desks.
What we need first is a really compact teleprompter. What, you say? That already exists? No it doesn’t. Teleprompters built for phones are useless, because a) phones can’t be second monitors for computers, and b) who wants to set up their phone on a thing for every video call?
But iPad prompters do exist and iPads can be used as second monitors… This is true! I spoke with Adam Lisagor and Charles Forman about this in the summer, but at the time you couldn’t reverse the image (necessary because mirrors), even with hacky utilities like SwitchResX.
Of course, Adam Lisagor knows all the nerds, so he was able to get LunaDisplay to make an AstroPad feature for flipping/reversing the iPad-as-a-second-monitor, which is awesome, but… Non-nerds are still never going to do this. Too many components/wires/questions.
The actual solution to desktop audio/video must have:
- A small footprint (less that 6 to 8 inches), or even better, sit on top of an existing monitor or iMac.
- A dedicated teleprompter screen.
- A dedicated camera (16mm sensor or better) with mic input.
- A single cable.
I built this prototype because I need it for me and colleagues. It solves everything, but your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to:
- Get this mess into one beautiful 6-inch box
- Get image/audio to and power/monitor from the computer on one USB-C
- Make it less than $1,000
I’ll follow up with a list of parts and a video I shot of building this thing. For the record: I’m not saying I used the best parts for this prototype. I just used what was lying around my office and some extra bits I got from Amazon. A hacksaw was involved. You can do better.
I didn’t address audio, so here’s the entire secret to unlock all the magic of good audio in your life forever:
- Put (pretty much any) microphone—
- —close to your mouth and—
- —set the level so it sounds good.
- If you can’t do 3., Google “adjust audio levels for “
I also didn’t address lighting. We know this product will have an integrated ringlight but the cool kids will not use it (because it is uncool). There’s no one lighting secret. It’s a nuanced thing. But you can’t go wrong with a large, soft light (window or softbox) 45° off axis.
I also never really covered the camera. That’s because as long as it has a sensor 16mm or larger, it’s not that important. In my opinion, the optimal camera would have a Super-16 sensor (like the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera I’m using) with a fixed, wide open 16mm lens.
I have little desire to build a company making a baby teleprompter/camera combo (which you could call the Eyeliner™️ if you wanted to). If you’re looking for an idea that needs to exist, I hope this thread correcting for David Perell’s forgivable but grievous errors is helpful.
There are already companies trying to build solutions in the home audio/video space.
If there’s no integrated teleprompter, they blew it.
If the camera sensor is less than 16mm, they blew it (less so, but they still blew it). And this includes any magic inside-the-screen tech.
Here’s what I actually look like through the prototype (totally dark, quick in OBS, no color, not well-lit, etc.). The things to notice are a) you don’t need a big sensor to have nice lensing (this one is Super-16mm), and b) eye contact is everything, even in a poorly-lit room.
Here’s a closer look at the prototype minilittlebaby teleprompter. I’m probably not going to post a whole video because it won’t even be helpful because you’ll need to come up with your own versions of some of the parts anyway (or just fashion your own out of wood or something)
This baby Wendell is no longer zero years old.
These were also the most astonishing chocolate cupcakes of all time. Allison baked them with ganache in the middle. Everyone is just kind of stunned and questioning everything we’ve ever understood about the limits of chocolateyness.
This year’s Halloween photo did not go as well as last year’s…
First blurry Polaroids of Wendell
When you forget it’s picture day and send her to school in a Snoop Dogg shirt.
Louisa’s first time at Sesame Place with special appearances by Wendell and Mae. First three are short clips, last three are the full jawn with music on top.
Dreaming Wendell.
Louisa clearly has plans for her baby brother. Wendell has questions about those plans.
Wendell Brooks Phillips, 7 lbs. 11 oz.. He doesn’t have much to say but he seems nice enough. Allison is recovering beautifully. She’s the best.
About to have this baby… UPDATE: Success! Stay tuned.
Enjoying her last weekend as an only child.
The @omega Speedmaster all dressed up for its special day on a dressy NATO from @havestonstraps. 50 years. Still a perfect design.