Comment and blog questions, answers

It depends. Yes. No. Maybe. Always. Never. Sometimes. 42.

More seriously.

But first a flower to put you in the mood and take your mind off the snow.

The other day I discovered the little thingie down at the bottom of the blog that suggested several other blog posts you might enjoy had disappeared. It was called LinkWithin and I liked it because I know some of my readers used it and it was periodically handy for me.

At first I thought it was upgrade degradation and I could fix it, but no, it's gone for good. What's worse is there does not not seem to be a replacement. All the Google suggested replacements are themselves gone. Another symptom of the decline of the blogging world.

My usual browser is Safari. But overnight it started being fussy. I couldn't add photos to the blog or see the photos in the Google Photos folder that I use to share photos. I was beginning to froth when I remembered there are other browsers. It's been a while since I've used Firefox on this computer, a quick upgrade and voila! Back in business. That's when I figured out LinkWithin was really gone.

For a while, back when I got lots and lots of comments on the blog, every day, I had a thingie that made commenting threads easier. Then that got unworkable and I made it go away. That's why some of the comment threads in older posts look so chaotic.

Now I have one main commenter, and several others that comment periodically. I have several that will text or email saying they commented asking if I see it. Sadly, often the answer is no. Blogger still seems to be really pissy about comments from mobile devices. Sorry about that, but there's nothing I can do. This is something that should have been fixed a decade ago, and never will be.

But really, in spite of all that, I love getting comments, and I do thank the people that comment. If you even thought about commenting, but realized you were on your phone, and you meant to come back on a laptop, and then life happened and you forgot, I thank you anyways.

There's a daily blog Linda always follows, and I periodically do, that gets several hundred comments a day. It's moderated, and every day there are at least several comments that only have the word deleted. Given the toxic spew in some of the published comments, I can only imagine what it takes to get deleted.

In my blog I loved the active comment, but admit that moderating hundreds of comments would get old. For a while I was responding to comments, then I realized that the commenters most likely didn't see the response.

One of my main commenters is someone I met at a work that seems like not long ago at all, but in fact is. We went our separate ways, and then he bubbled to the top of my awareness at another job, when my boss asked what I thought of this guy. He ended up being hired. That was fun, and as was life in the contracting corporate oil and gas world, we both went our separate ways again, except this time we stayed in touch with periodic lunch/beer/photo expeditions. Several of his comments merit serious discussion over beer, and I regret that shouldn't happen for a while. So here are some responses, inadequate though they might be without the lubrication of beer.

From the March image of the Month.
He asked "As much as I love a good panorama, 2 feels like it is too wide (especially on the left side) for its height - mmm interesting. 3 is great and worthy of the "Image of the Month" honour. I have a technical question. Is that a single frame or a composite of multiple exposures?"

Here is the photo under discussion.

This beach panorama is assembled from 3 landscape images, and is 8237 x 3276 px, for a an aspect ratio of 2.5:1. I used my 24-105 mm lens at 24 mm. It will be no surprise that I did this handheld, thus the height is somewhat less than the expected 4160 px. I was trying to do it quickly so I didn't get ghosting in the waves, or have the waves mess up that utterly gorgeous reflection.

 Here is a similar image not published on the blog, though I think it appeared on Facebook.

This one is assembled from 5 portrait images, and is 8397 x 5455 px for an aspect ratio of 1.53:1. Note that a single image from my camera comes out 6420 x 4160 for an aspect ratio of 1.5:1. As a further note, a 16x9 image (typical widescreen tv ratio these days), is 1.77:1. Many of my images get cropped to this ratio, and it seems natural for me. However, as regular blog readers know, I'm not tied to that; I do love me a wide image, even when it isn't of a typical wide screen subject.

As should be clear, they were shot about 10 minutes apart, from somewhat different locations on the beach. Both were at f7.1 to balance depth of field with the intense sunlight and still capture the darker parts of the image.

Back to the wide one. It's quite easy to crop the left side a bit to just left of the main cloudbank. This is 7661 px wide (2.33:1). To me, this feels a little constricted, given I see the open image. Sean might think it perfect.

One of the things I love about NZ beaches is the sense that they go on forever, all that sea, and sky and beach, forever. (Note, this is Muriwai and it really does go on for the better part of forever.) Having that bit of cloud taper off into almost nothing on the left helps bring that feeling of openness.

Now if there were something, or someone at the focus of the leading lines, or along them, that would change the dynamic of the photo. It would then be about that focus point. As it is, it's about all of the photo, all the different elements that we know go on forever. I want the viewer's eye to have a chance to wander around all that, explore the reflections, follow the ripples and flecks of sea foam, enjoy the fluffy clouds.

In the more square photo, the same elements are there, but it's more about the reflections. I think the first one is a beach scene that includes clouds, and the second is a cloudscape that happens to have been shot on a beach. A subtle difference. Viewers might disagree. Much beer could (and maybe should) be consumed in the discussion.

I took many photos of this scene as I was walking along. They're all subtly different and these are the two I like best. Someone else might look at the choices and think I'm an idiot for not editing one that is the most amazing beach photo ever. Such is life.

The galaxy over Invercargill is one exposure. Normally I don't discuss settings, but since you ask so nice. Sigma 14 mm, f1.8, 13 seconds, ISO 1600, careful editing. The image of the month version is subtly different than the ones published earlier. The difference is editing on a big (mostly) clean desktop monitor, as opposed to a small filthy laptop screen.


Given my copious free time, I'm about to tackle the star shot images. I've seen assembled photos of the galaxy that look awesome, and I'm tempted to try some of those just to see what happens.

There was another comment on What is Normal that merits further discussion, and would be much better for beer lubrication. I have an idea. Stay tuned.

Two artsy photos. Somehow they seem related to me.

Driftwood of the Day
Different views of the same chunk.