I hope the new e-mail subscribers find this useful! I don't have any set schedule, but I've been trying to write down interesting information as I go throughout the month. Thanks for giving it a chance.

Here is the Sony A6600 hands-on gear video! I made this around the middle of December. The camera is their current top of the line in APS-C mirrorless e-mount.

There was an uphill battle on making this video. The SD card with samples almost got corrupted. Part of that was my mistake but also due to some type of incompatibility with the Lexar UHS-II card and a USB OTG SD card reader I use with my phone. I almost lost a 30 minute talking portion due to a loose microphone. I had to fight the editing software Magix Vegas to properly render out the video The Nvidia gfx card accelerated render wouldn't work on stills this time and had a ton of corruption in that portion of the video (see this video clip on Twitter), so I switched to the MainConcept MP4 encoder. The downside is that a 15 minute render (times like 8 tries and attempted workarounds) turned into a 2 hour render with the MainConcept CPU based one.

I think it's commonly known for a while that Instagram and Facebook are pretty lacking with the quality of images on those platforms. Twitter on the other hand has been pretty good at display quality. Apparently, this is about to get even better (according to a developer at Twitter named Nolan O'Brien with the vast majority of images being sent and displayed as their original JPEG files. (when clicked to view the full size). Anything under 8 megapixels should be saved at any aspect ratio and anything square ratio up to 16 megapixels. I uploaded a test file to try things out. See the result here.

I've been working on revising my old videos on Youtube. Currently around half way through over 450 videos. I'll also be changing the website to reflect some of that. When I fix up an old video there are a bunch of things I change. First is the thumbnail. I designed a more cohesive look a while back where each video will have text describing the overall theme like "camera talk" or "photography". Second is other aspects like the description of the video as well as cards and end screens. All of this requires a bunch of things open on my computer. I use Acdsee to find old graphics. I use my old copy of Photoshop to edit the thumbnails. I have multiple browser windows open. I use the open source application called Notepad++ to copy/paste blocks of text I have saved. I use a few File Explorer windows to access files in different places. After searching around, I see there is an open source application called Explorer++ that allows for multiple file browser windows to be tabs in a single application window. The program also defaults to reloading whatever tabs were there after closing/opening the application, which will save me from re-opening all of the folders I need between sessions of working on this. It should speed things up just that little bit more! I've just started testing it, so we will see how it goes. Every little bit counts to make this task finish sooner. It's been weeks off-and-on so far.

To make a long story short, kit.com is now kit.co (see my kit page here). If you use the site you need to update your links. They offer a tool to do it with Youtube videos or you can use something like "tube buddy", but I personally am doing it by hand because I don't trust letting any 3rd party write access to my videos. I like the kit website and will continue to use it. Basically it allows you to assemble lists of links, often with the theme of camera gear load-outs. You can also link your affiliate IDs to make a little cash in the process. It's too bad whoever owns the original domain wouldn't finalize the sale. I do know I will very much not want to use whatever kit.com turns into. Their selfishness just wasted a lot of time for many people. The new owner geni.us link appears to be doing a good job and I hope kit.co gets better and better.

This can apply to any type or work or hobby. In my case with making YouTube videos I ran into a mixture of my mistake along with the limitations of the equipment I'm currently using. A day of filming for a video about a tripod was hindered due to some problem with the Canon EOS M50 and the Boya microphone I use. I think the cable was not seated properly on one end, so the audio turned out totally unusable. This could have been avoided if I had seen the audio levels not moving when I talked to the camera. It's so bad I can't even boost it to see what I was saying. The problem with the M50 is that only one info screen on the camera shows audio levels. None of the live view screens show it. I actually had that screen disabled to streamline the camera's interface, but I'm now going to use it before filming anything by cycling the screens. It's a hassle, but I've got to work with what I have available! I went over the setting in this YouTube video.