Leaderboard

I’m going to ask ChatGPT how to achieve this status.

Finally got some time to navigate all the menu and do some quick tests. Call me impressed. Surprise one: one little old desire (that nobody mentioned in the reviews) was that now the "3d" electronic level could be enabled pemanentely on the screen / EVF; in the X-S10 - and I guess in all the last generation's Fujis - only the horizontal level was permanent, the 3D version should be activated by a custom button, and disappeared after taking a shot. Surprise two: a new focus assist tool, only in video mode - Focus Meter. Is a "needle gauge" that shows where to turn the focus ring to bring the image in focus, and that could be used in conjunction with peaking. Works very well and very accurately. And finally, the AF. The face / eye AF interface and working mode was completely changed form the 4th gen Fuji's. In these (X-S10, X-T4, etc), when face / eye AF is on, the camera selects a face / eye and shows it on the screen in green, the other faces are marked with grey boxes, and you could change the face to focus with the joystick. In theory, a good system - until you hit record, and the camera goes haywire changing the face focused at will. For me, with more than one face on the frame, was unusable. Now, you choose a area box (that you could resize), and the camera will focus on the closest face of the box. Period. And tends to stick quite a bit in that face before switching to other. Not a perfect system - did not tested the worst situation, with all other people standing in place and the focused person going to the edge of the frame, far from the box, which in theory will make the camera changing the face focused - but if you keep the subject in the same spot of the frame, or move the box with the joystick, works perfectly. There are more subtleties to discover - one test was filming my wife's father, my wife and my daughter playing in our living room, tracking my daughter (an electric 4 year old), a case which the X-S10 failed completely; the focus point moved from person to person if they are close. With the X-S20, started tracking my daughter, and NEVER let her go. Focus spot on 100% of the time. And with an unexpected behaviour when my daughter got very close to my wife's father, instead of jumping faces, the old gray box appeared on his face, but the AF was kept on my daughter. One touch on the joystick, and then he was in focus - even with my daughter closer to the AF box. Another touch, returned to my daughter. Just as I wanted to be. The detection is much improved too. In the X-S10, if the person turns and the face did not appear, the camera reverts to the original AF mode. The X-S20 recognizes the back of a head - when the person turns, it starts tracking the back of the head. The person turns back, it revert to the eyes again. And the face / eye detection works in much farther distances than before, and gathers eye / face instantly. Is a completely new behaviour, much, much better than before.

Indeed. I think I am personally relatively safe but otherwise there is always flux in most industries and as long as you spend sufficient time and effort on the medium and long term, you should be generally fine. What seems increasingly to be the case is the focus on short term gain. Plenty of folks I come across selling their granny for a small ‘one off’ pay day whilst rejecting anything longer term. I won’t bore you with the details, but just recently I had the situation where a colleague chose 500 euros over a career length full-time situation…just out of sheer short-sightedness. As has always been the case since man stopped fighting the dinosaurs, just because someone is in business does not mean they are good at business. Most people I find are utterly terrible at business and exist more because there is a market demand rather than any business skills.

Perfect for the Scandinavian market!

Also no need to buy a new camera every year when your Nikon D7100 DSLR (or Sony a6000 mirorless) from years ago still takes stellar pictures. A kiwi company btw! One of my friends founded Serato, I remember going out for drinks with him say 15+ yrs ago, and when we're in a club he'd have a nosy to see what the DJs were using, seeing if they're using Serato or not He also dabbles in acting a little bit (as he's kinda semi retired now), I worked on a film with him a few years ago. Curious how many of those books being read are nonfiction, I bet the stats are even more depressing when it comes to people educating themselves from books

A saying I hear a lot is "a rising tide lifts all boats". The opposite of that is when the tide goes out and the boats that don't float well hit the rocks and sink.

Except what can happen is that the people working in the realms that are drying up, will be forced into finding work elsewhere - and within that pool will undoubtably be people who are (i) totally qualified to work in these other realms - it's just that they chose to apply the same core skill sets in a different realm within the same industry (ii) people overly qualified to work in these other realms of the same industry who really need the $$. These people will very likely disrupt said realm, intensify the competition, drive fees downward, and eventually squeeze some people out of said realm. Point is, I can totally see cinematographers, tv/film producers, and most definitely preditors (producer/editors) who might've been working for decades in stable areas of the industry (even unionized gigs) - making a fairly quick/easy transition to the wedding world. So while I think you're probably right about that 10 year window - I think every realm needs to be prepared for turbulence - and not just from AI itself, from similarly skilled colleagues looking for work within the next 10 years.

Some cameras had even shorter limits, just 20 minutes, or 15 minutes, or even just 10 minutes! The first ever HDSLR, the Nikon D90 (and the one I started out with), had a recording limit of just 5 minutes!!! Quite frustrating Go become a rubbish collector! Least glamorous career I really don't like that Software Engineering has become "glamorous". Damn you TikTokers!

There's a name for this already, which I've heard on occasion in videos. IIRC it is "Hollywood" - ie, "we grabbed a few runners and just Hollywooded the lights because we had to shoot quickly as the sun set".

If it's any consolation folks, I suspect in the not too distant future, many of those YouTuber's are going to feel some heat themselves... I think it's a 'temporary madness', this, "I've been in the photography/video industry 5 minutes but I'm jacking it all in and burning all my bridges to follow my dream of becoming a YouTube influencer". They are already complaining about revenues drying up and as even more jump on the bandwagon... Same as so many of our colleagues who jacked in proper paying jobs to become 'part-time workshop trainers for full-time incomes'. How's that now working for you? So many have packed it in and left the industry as that market rapidly dried up due to free YouTube 'education' and they could not face going back cap in hand to venues or planners saying, "err, actually I am available for weddings again". YouTube for the majority I am pretty sure is heading in that direction. Maybe they can leap over to TikTok because surely having to only make 3 second productions, that's going to be an easy life and you will soon not only be rolling in it, but loved by 10 billion fellow shallow fuckwits. Or maybe I'm just also an old goat. Baaaa 😚

Panasonic (and Sony) both put fans into mirrorless cameras before external fans started to become more and more of a thing. You see, until recently, it seemed as though overheating was becoming a thing of the past. See: why I keep saying it feels like we're going backwards. People's purchasing decisions impact all of us. So yeah, I do care that people keep supporting this nonsense. You give these camera companies an inch and they'll take a mile. Only when you hold them accountable and force their hand do they start to improve. You need only look at Canon trying harder after the R5 debacle to see evidence of that. What we've seen from Sony is that their overheating issues have gotten worse despite showing that they are more than capable of doing what is necessary to prevent it, given they did it before. What we're also seeing is an army of influencers and paid shills doing everything they can to downplay it, to the point that now people not only accept overheating but applaud third party manufacturers for creating a solution for a problem that shouldn't fucking exist in the first place! Maybe you weren't around back then, but there was a time when everyone loathed the 30 minute record limit imposed on these cameras. EVERYONE celebrated when those limits were removed. It was one of the things EVERYONE could agree on, a rarity! Just a few years later and now people defend cameras that can't even record for 30 minutes before shutting down! "Who records that long anyway?!" It's ridiculous and disheartening.

Which is also why I think I am pretty safe being in the wedding industry for the next decade until I retire. It really would require something like a Nexus 6 to replicate what we do!

Met an ‘olde schoole’ DJ at a wedding the other day who mixed the various latest tech in lighting (reactive to the music?) but only spinning vinyl. AI can’t replace this guy. You’d need a Nexus 6. Or 5 a least… He’s set up in a tent on the afternoon taking requests (you go through his boxes of discs and pick stuff) and he then mixes it and twiddles knobs and dances along etc… In the evening, it’s a different location indoors and he’s spent several hours setting up his lighting not behind him as ‘all’ DJ’s do, but throughout the entire room. If you want to protect your career, then carve a niche that is hard to replicate and basically impossible to do!

All female DJs I follow are super model first and a DJ second 🙂