April 29, 2017

Kevin’s Photography Tip O’ the Day

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Here’s a useful tip. Suppose you do something stupid and crack the body of your camera. This happened to, um, a friend of mine recently, who quickly learned that ordinary superglue is useless. It works about as well as kindergarten paste. What you need is glue that’s specifically designed to work on polypropylene and similar plastics. Allow the Glue Guy to explain:1

My friend stupidly left his camera on the roof of his car before pulling out of a parking lot. What an idiot! The camera fell off at the first stop sign, producing a nasty crack in one corner. The two sides of the crack were pulling away from each other with considerable force, but this Loctite stuff worked great anyway. It wasn’t especially pretty when it was done, but it’s stayed solidly glued together for over a month now.

1I have not been paid for this endorsement. As far as you know, anyway.

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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.

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