Starting right off with the pictures, I just attached my old Canon 5D to the computer for the first time in a while – the first time in 2026 it turns out! – and was staggered again by how, uh, much better it is than the phone. I have been mostly shooting film lately and I’ve had some technical and other difficulties with my digital cameras – I will probably get to this long tale of woe later – so I sort of just haven’t bothered hauling the Canon around. Well. Um. Yes, it is true that my phone now has more megapixels than the old Rebel with which I started this obsession over twenty years ago BUT! It was true then and is true now that megapixels aren’t everything. My old Canon 5D with a fungus infected ancient kit lens, the trusty 28 – 135 mm that I call Old Faithful, takes, by and large, way better photos than my Samsung Galaxy S22. Not to diss my phone! I love some of the photos I have taken with it! But look at Sunday and Friday. You cannot get to that level with a phone. You just can’t.

The week in photos: Last Sunday, I took Harvey to the beach for the first time in way too long. This seal was sneaking around right at the edge of the beach and I wasn’t even sure she was there but lo! She was! On Monday I went to a work event at a very nice little distillery/bar/restaurant on the riverwalk and this is a not great shot from right outside. I ended up drinking too much that night – not at the work event, oh no, give me credit for some brains – and I must have needed it, because I’ve been less depressed this week than last. From Tuesday, here is the rainy stormy view from one of the college classroom windows. Never gets old. I am actually considering trying to set up a permanent camera in one of those windows to do an auto photo a day for a year. On Wednesday it was utterly beautiful by the afternoon so I walked home along a different route than I usually take and this is one of the two staircases down the hill that I passed. On Thursday I went to work and so on, but here is Harvey keeping an eye on the neighborhood. On Friday, Harvey and I went for a long walk at the Fort Stevens Historical Area and chatted for a bit with some elk. Here, for comparison, are those elk same elk taken with the phone.

Part of it is indeed the zoom lens. Can’t really ever get that close to the elk with a phone and phone zooms, while they have dramatically improved, are still, well. There is no substitute for real glass. But also, there is just depth and feeling in the real camera that there isn’t in the phone. I love my phone photos and the best camera is the one you have with you, but still. I need to start hauling the Canon around again.

And on Saturday and in other forms of picture news, I am rather pleased with my No Kings sign. It is a reference to a beloved small local ancient takeout restaurant called Custard King – here are the Google image search results so you get an idea of the referent – and while I should, in retrospect, have actually put in a surfing protest frog rather than a big hippie flower, I still am okay with it. Of course I painted the whole thing on Saturday morning while simultaneously helping Four paint and talking to my daughter and making breakfast for my brother and dealing with the guys I hired to come clean out the backyard and put up an actual dog proof fence around at least part of it. So it got a bit sloppy and also, rubber cement does not, it turns out, work as a resist with tempera paint, leading to a lot of last minute taping and subsequent ripping of the cardboard. This is why I was 45 minutes late to the protest and my hands were all painty. It didn’t really matter: we seem to have a Peoples Front of Judea vs. Judaean People’s Front situation going on here because Oregon: there were dueling No Kings protests in different places at different times. I only made the last 45 minutes of the second one, but many people laughed and took pictures of my sign and so, win. Another No Kings! The biggest protest in American history! I participated in the last biggest protest in American history too, and gosh that changed history. Not. Sigh. No, the patriarchy has proved horribly resilient and I wish I had more faith and hope but, unfortunately, I do not. But I will continue showing up with paint on my hands and, I don’t know, some kind of crazed magical thinking in my heart. Maybe this time it will work.

Tales of Photo Woe: My Canon 5D needs to be rehabbed, cleaned and fixed up and I’m just hoping against hope that that will do the trick. I have to call around to find someone who will even do that, given that this is now an old camera, not supported anymore and so, while not as impossible to fix as my beloved actually antique cameras, getting close. I switched a couple years ago to a 7D because the 5D had gotten sort of wonky, and also because lenses for the crop sensor 7D were so much cheaper than the ones for the 5D. It took some getting used to but eventually I grew to be fond of it. Alas, on New Years Eve my zoom lens and the 7D went ass over teakettle into the sand on the beach and fuck it, rather than try to repair them, I want my 5D back and working and some new lenses. Unfortunately, most of my lenses are gone. I am pretty sure they were stolen. I don’t want to talk about it. There still exists just a tiny, tenuous thread of hope that they weren’t, that they are just lost, misplaced during all the upheavals and moving / not moving of the last year or so. It’s a very thin thread, that hope, and it’s getting thinner all the time. So all I have now is the broken Tamron 18 – 400 designed for crop sensor – it vignettes way too much with the 5D – and my 24 mm, which I love for landscapes but is not super versatile, and my old Lensbaby fisheye which is also broken because I shoot at the beach and eventually, everything gets sand in it. And Old Faithful. This is a horrible state of affairs and I am sad. So I need new lenses and I might need a new 5D body and bah, hell and damnation, I need to win the lottery.

I also don’t have a good printer and this is causing me pain. The Canon TS 3720 that I bought in desperation as a stop gap to just have something is the absolute worst piece of shit printer I have ever, ever encountered. Really, absolutely terrible. Beyond terrible. The print quality is almost OK, or seems like it might be – IF, and it’s a big big IF, you can get it to print at all. It will not print from Photoshop. It will only print from, like, the windows photo print dialogue which will only print in certain sizes and dimensions and on certain media not as high res as I would like and then it will refuse to print because, I don’t know, Saturn is not in retrograde and then. . . anyway, I’m going to start screaming again so I need to stop. I need a good printer to make cyanotypes, which I love to make. I would like to try encaustic, too, like all the cool kids, and for that I need not just a printer but also some extremely expensive art supplies. And of course I don’t have any money. So that was this week’s long self pitying whine. See you next week, when hopefully both the patriarchy and capitalism will be overthrown and we will all have won the lottery.