As someone who spends most of his time either shooting, teaching or hustling, this truly is phenomenal. It makes some of the more mind-bending aspects of photography perfectly clear. Great post!
I work in TV, in an environment that's very strict. We're tested up to 4 times/week (I have friends who are tested daily), asked not to use mass transit, and many of us work so many hours that we have no time to do much socializing outside of the group of people working for the production who are all in the same boat. It's really the only place I go where I feel perfectly safe. Even when unmasked to eat, we don't sit together, we're always socially distant.
Contrast this with my friends outside the business...they're going out semi-regularly, have only been tested when they want to see their family or get out of quarantining for 2 weeks after travel, think nothing of eating in the outdoor huts that are slowly getting more and more enclosed as the NYC weather gets colder. I'm very sympathetic to this woman and all restaurant owners in general, but the situations are not the same.
Restaurants were never a major source of transmission and your industry isnt really more essential. The only fact you stated is that you get tested more, which is a good argument, but I dont really buy your anecdote that you guys go out less than anyone else and this somehow justifies your privilege. This is a very sensitive topic because small businesses feed families and are being destroyed across the country so you'll have to do better than say "We're totally more well behaved than people who go to restaurants"
Restaurants are majorly associated with spread. They’re unmasked, indoor environments where people talk.
Here’s an interesting report where two people were infected with just five min of overlap by an unmasked person. Extremely detailed contact tracing by the south koreans.
TV, by contrast, gets other people to stay at home in front of the TV and not be bored. A super vital service right now!
I have to object to TV being vital in any way, shape or form. Come on. Even if you accept that watching TV is somehow essential during this period, which it is not, there are enough archived shows and movies for people to watch for multiple lifetimes.
I never said TV was essential. Entertainment in NY and LA feeds families as well, however. My Broadway friends who are losing their homes and apartments with no hope of work until at least June (but most likely September at least) might want a word about feeding families.
Then perhaps all the restauranteurs ought to get together and self-regulate. An industry practicing discipline is not "justifying" any privilege. In my city, many of the businesses forced to closed in the last week due to covid violations were restaurants
Figure it out and you too can enjoy that "privilege"
I am a (white) photographer for an organization where I am photographing a bunch of Black people, and nightly one or more of those photographs wind up on Twitter. This would explain some issues with terrible automatic thumbnail choices we've had in the past.
Professional photographer here who does portraits and product. I’d say not “dead,” just very different.
We’ve taken a hit, yes, but mostly amongst the problematic clients who say things like “you shot this in 2 hours, why do I need to pay a whole day rate?” They go and shoot their stuff with a phone, it looks like garbage but in some way they can’t quite articulate but it’s good enough, and we’re happy to not have to deal with them any longer.
There is another segment, that of the client who bought a consumer crop-sensor DSLR and a white box off of Amazon and told us “hey sorry but anyone can do this now.” Or they picked up a cheap strobe kit and a lens that the blogs said had “creamy bokeh” and they can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong. Generally we see them slink back in a month or so later and quietly hire us back. This is very common.
Is the future scary? Yes. Am I sure I’ll be able to work as studio photographer forever? Nope. But as with anything, doing one’s homework and having a commitment to quality while paying attention to what’s happening in the photo world can keep you successful for the time being. The points addressed in the article are good ones and I try to stay up on all of it, but there are plenty of companies who still pay good money for photography don’t have access to the level of digital rendering that he’s talking about. They have a small product and a couple grand and they need a well-done photo in two days.
And yes, you can bang out something with a phone and an app or two, but it’s not “there” yet. Is it a privilege to hire a professional photographer for your headshot rather than something someone did on a phone? Of course. I’ve also shot plenty of headshots pro bono for aspiring folks who have a dream and work their asses off and can’t seem to get there, whether or not I was already set up for a paid shoot. My friends mostly do this as well.
Another end of the company I work for (I'm in media operations, digital) is focused on custom content which is largely comprised of marketing materials, catalogs, etc (and they still print on paper!).
The company actually maintains a selection modern photo studios solely for use within the company. The clients still want that kind of quality. (There are a couple of glimpses of their large studios in the slides on the homepage https://www.stjoseph.com/)
Of course, I can't speak for the entire industry—but it's not dead yet! At least in the less sexy areas like product shoots for grocery stores, or car promos.
I suspect you're wrong. Economic uncertainty hammers birthrates, and this pandemic has been the ultimate demonstration of uncertainty: in the space of a few weeks, we went from a humming economy to 20% unemployment. It's a brutal reminder that in the contemporary economy you can have the chair kicked out from under you at any second, and that's not conducive to having children.
There also seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that people are having way less sex right now, for what that's worth.
> It's a brutal reminder that in the contemporary economy you can have the chair kicked out from under you at any second
This is how I’ve felt my entire career. There are no guarantees for future success, but family planning requires an incredible amount of stability to pull off responsibly.
I briefly looked for numbers around the Spanish flu but couldn't find any.
My gut says you will see a mini-boom though. A lot of dogs are getting adopted right now, and adopting a dog is a gateway drug to children for a lot of couples. Would be interesting to see how many kids are "happy accidents" vs intentional though. Oh, I just looked it up and one article says 45% in the US... yeesh.
The chart in the article shows a dip around the time of the Spanish flu and an over-correction a few years later. But it's probably impossible to isolate the impact of flu vs WWI.
Could definitely see an increase in accidents, but I really doubt that there will be an increase in planned births at least in the short term. Lots of economic uncertainty + general fear of going to the hospital.
That would be kind of my intuition as well, but apparently a few surveys have shown that people were so depressed by the quarantine that they stopped... being intimate.
I hoped so, but Google trends for things like "pregnancy test" should show an uptick then, and they do not. (Ignore the uptick in early april that happens every year because of april fools)
The total executed volume in the market are dominated by automated trading systems, capturing small differences in relative value between correlated products. They don't determine prices because they're not actually putting anything into the market in net, they have their capital and they're just redistributing it back and forth between a handful of different products capturing small amounts of edge from the real investors.
30 year vegetarian here, not vegan, but I definitely look askance at all the massively processed fake meats. I'll happily eat seitan, but I make my own out of maybe 6 ingredients.
I don't know too many vegetarians who eat them with any regularity...to me, they're more to transition meat-eaters to vegetarianism than anything else. Or maybe something for me to bring to a BBQ so I can not stand out like a sore thumb AGAIN.
Roast mushrooms, elephant garlic, peppers and eggplant planks are essential at any BBQ! And I say that as a meat eater...
Years ago in NYC Chinatown I went to a restaurant called "Vegetarian Paradise" with all sorts of fake meat dishes. It was fun at the time but not particularly good. One notable exception which I have had in other restaurants is mock duck breast with mushrooms layered in sheets of seitan. I've had nice versions of that but yes I'd agree on your assessment.
I think it has something to do with the background anxiety. Even if you're not particularly scared of the virus because you've been practicing impeccable social distancing and you still have a job, the uncertainty of it all can completely kill flow. And if you have a partner or kids, household management is disruptive even in the most organized families.
I've been blaming myself for the drop in my productivity and thinking something is wrong with me. It just realized that I must be kind to myself during these times.
I've done strict calorie tracking for restriction, keto as well as IF.
The best I've ever felt was keto, the easiest for me to adhere to was calorie tracking. It's marginally harder if you eat out a lot, but if you cook for yourself and can throw everything on a food scale for a week or so until you get an idea of what's servings of your most commonly-eaten foods looks like, tracking calories made losing weight for me and reducing my daily eating almost comically easy. There's a switch in my brain somewhere that works really well when I have to enter the calories of everything that goes in my mouth into an app....suddenly that cookie or those chips that were so hard to resist aren't a thing for me at all....my brain manages to yell "200 calories for THAT?? Nope." I found myself eating more at the end of the day just to hit my total calories and macros.
The easiest way I found to stay on a diet as a lifestyle (instead of dieting for a bit and then stopping and regaining the weight) is alternate day fasting.
I found I can't just decide never again to eat the things I like and never again feel sated. Feeling hungry constantly isn't exactly my idea for the rest of my life.
Alternate day fasting lets me survive a day with no calories knowing that the next day I can be sated and eat (almost) whatever I want.
I have also found that when I eat every other day I put much more attention to what I eat on those days -- I mean, if I just did not eat yesterday and I won't eat tomorrow I want to eat well today. Even if I am going to eat sweets -- I will try to go for something better and not feed myself with garbage.
I also found that alternate day fasting is good willpower training. Being able to restrict myself from eating for an entire day somehow trains me to be better at other things that require willpower.
So are you saying that you continually eat only every other day? Or is this just something you do time to time? Curious as much as anything. How long have you been doing this?
I have lost 25kg (55 pounds) over a course of a year. Half of that was intermittent fasting (one day eating for about 10 hours, then no calories for the rest, about 38 hours) but accounts for 3/4 of results.
When not eating I would not eat or drink anything that has any calories in it. I typically drink water, black coffee or green tea.
I have also tried longer fasts from time to time (2-7 days typically, 2 weeks once) and then I would supplement with vitamins, l-tryptophan and lean broth/bone broth in moderate quantities (a cup a day), just for safety and general well-being (l-tryptophan is precursor to serotonin and mildly anti-depressant).
Intermittent fasting is hard at the beginning but after about 2 weeks I get used to new regime. It seems it is the same every time I start it anew. It might be getting easier but I think that's because I already know what to expect.
Also, when intermittent fasting it is much easier to start longer fast. I find, when fasting for more than 2 days first two days to be the hardest.
That's interesting, because while I think keto is great in a lot of ways, I've never felt my best on it. It just doesn't give me the energy I need to be effective in the gym.
What I've discovered doing 72 hour fasts is that what I eat when I refeed matters a lot less than when I'm eating throughout the day. Keto made a big difference in my initial weight loss journey, but I find it to be somewhat miserable for maintenance. Yet, with fasting at least 48 hours, I discovered that the macro composition matters a lot less in relation to ketosis. In my eating window, I can eat rice, fruit, etc., and it will knock me out of ketosis for a short while but I'll usually be right back in ketosis between 24 and 48 hours from then. I feel much better in general getting a small amount of calories in, and it hasn't significantly effected my weight loss. In fact, when I was sick a few weeks ago, I stopped fasting and basically ate berries all week. The following week, I went back into a 72 hour fasting routine and still managed to lose a few pounds from where I was at before I got sick.
Put simply, I think the longer a fast is, the less that the need for keto matters. Keto combined with IF can work for a lot of people, and in a lot of ways they are complimentary in their benefits, but people can also tip the balance in favor of either more keto or more fasting and find their own combination that achieves their goals.
I've found this to be the case too. Been on mostly keto for roughly 2-3 years, done several short and long fasts, and I test my blood daily. There were days after fasting and then eating something that really should've knocked me out of ketosis where it barely made a dent. The whole thing is really very interesting.
