More Annoying Camera Blogging (With Cats)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Someday I will get bored of regaling you with pictures from my new camera, but that day is not yet. It turns out that burst mode is both a blessing and a curse.

First the curse. With my old camera, I never culled any of the photos I took. I just copied everything onto my desktop PC and left them there. Storage is cheap, and no matter how many pictures I took, I was never going to run out of room.

Then, a few days ago, I ran out of room. Not on the desktop machine, but on my tablet, which is synced to the desktop. For some reason, Microsoft uses MicroSD for expansion memory on the Surface Pro 4, and at the time I got it that meant a maximum size of 128GB. But the new camera takes pictures that are about twice the size of the old Canon, and burst mode means I can crank through a couple of thousand shots in a few days. So the Surface croaked.

In the short term, the answer was a bigger memory chip, which is thankfully available now. In the longer term, it means—what? Going through all the files every time I transfer them and weeding out 90 percent of them? That sounds tedious. Stop syncing some of the folders? I’m tired of that. It’s handy to have everything available everywhere at all times. I’ll have to ponder this.

But burst mode is a blessing too. I’ve tried a few times in the past to get a picture of Hilbert scurrying down a tree after climbing onto the roof, but I could never do it. My old camera had terrible shutter lag, slow autofocus, and no burst mode. Unless I timed it perfectly—and I never did—I couldn’t get the shot.

But burst mode plus fast autofocus makes it easy! Check it out:

Now we can all pretend to be Vogue editors, choosing just the right shot for this month’s cover. I chose No. 3, which shows Hilbert at his graceful best:

So there you have it: better action photography, but lots and lots of gigabytes. Is there a solution that’s neither mind-numbingly tedious nor exorbitantly expensive?

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate