Yesterday, I started to read Sean Tucker’s Parable 6 which talks about different personas we take on. I came to the sentence.

Every London photographer knows Soho George, for example, and we all have shots of him somewhere in our back catalogue.

– Ha, I’m not a real London photographer, but I was in London last week, and I have no photos of this guy. I don’t even know who he is.

But he seemed to be an interesting character, so I did a search, and found quite a few pages about him. For example, this article. And when I took a closer look … I recognised him at once, it’s the man I noticed when I was walking around in SoHo, and since I liked his style I took a picture.

So, I need to change my mind, Sean was right, if you have been in London and taken some photos in the SoHo area, you probably have a photo of SoHo George.

Sigh, just discovered a few things that’s going to cost me some money.

I have a couple of flashes that I used to use a lot, this meant that I had a fair number of AA batteries. About 1.5 year ago I bought a Godox flash with a special battery (+ one extra battery) and I’ve been using that flash exclusively since then. This means that my AA batteries have been left unused since then … and uncharged.

Yesterday, I decided to try a camera that I haven’t used in a long time, so I put the camera batteries in the charger, and also started to charge my AA batteries. And … very sad face … it seems like all my AA batteries are dead, I’ve tried several different chargers but the batteries don’t take any charge at all.

Even worse is that the camera batteries doesn’t seem to charge either, when I put the first one into the camera - after charging it - I got a message “This battery can’t be used”.

In short: look after your batteries!!

I logged into Instagram and it was fantastic. I scrolled through photos uploaded by friends or photographers that I followed, there were no ads, no recommendations, nothing, just the photos I wanted to see.

And yes, this actually happened.

Let me explain, over time, Instagram has become less and less interesting/useful to. This is, of course, by design, it’s exactly how Meta has planned it. So, I used it less and less. About a year ago, Meta required that users in the EU either agree to being tracked and shown too many ads, or pay a ridiculous expensive subscription. So, I stopped using Instagram. I still had access to Instagram through an organisation, so I could see how the feed looked like … and to be honest, it was both amusing and crazy to see how many ads and “recommendations” that were shown.

Anyway, a few days ago, I decided to see if I could log into Instagram and check a few things. I could log in without problems, I checked what I wanted to check, and then I thought “ok, since I’m already logged in, I might as well check my feed”.

I did and after 20–30 seconds, I realised that there was some was something strange going on. It took me a few seconds before it hit me, there were no ads, and no “recommendations”. Just photos from the people I followed, and it was really, really nice. I could just scroll and see updates from friends, etc.

This made me realise that the basic idea behind Instagram is great, and the implementation is also good (let’s forget about the bloat, etc.). In short, Instagram is wonderful … without the ads, and the “recommendations”.

Of course, this was a temporary thing. The next time I opened the app, I was met with “ads or pay” choice, so I closed the app and will not be opening it again for the foreseeable future.

But Instagram is very enjoyable, and I would actually be willing to pay for it, but not the amount of money Meta wants. There is of course one additional reason not to use Instagram. I have zero trust in Meta, and even if they introduced a reasonable subscription fee, I wouldn’t subscribe. I would expect Meta to do all kind of shady stuff … and when they are discovered doing this, they would just say “opps, there was a bug in the app. We’ll fix it” and then we start over.