Latest articles
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Clarifying the role of my pocket camera
Thank you for your help in thinking through my Canon S95 replacement. You changed the game.
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First results from my latest Nikon N60
The first roll of film in the Nikon N60 I acquired late last year.
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Recommended reading
The best of this week’s blogs, collected for you.
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Blogging in the AI era, part 5: Why still write?
The economics of independent blogging have never made sense, which means the economics have never been the point. The faith that honest work finds the people who need it has outlasted every platform that was supposed to make it obsolete.
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Blogging in the AI era, part 4: The decline of search and social discovery
The data from my own site tells a complicated story that leads me to think we may have overestimated search’s and social’s role in building readership all along.
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Blogging in the AI era, part 3: When the machine quoted me
While preparing a talk on Indiana road history, Claude cited my own research back to me — and didn’t know I was the one who wrote it. That moment was funny, a little unsettling, and clarifying about what happens to careful inference when AI flattens it into fact.
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Blogging in the AI era, part 2: The difference between answers and authors
AI can tell you what battery your old camera takes, but it can’t tell you what it felt like to shoot one — and that difference turns out to matter more than most of us realized.
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Blogging in the AI era, part 1: The accidental contract
For more than two decades, an unspoken deal governed independent blogging: publish useful firsthand knowledge, and the Web’s discovery systems would connect you with the people who needed it. AI hasn’t broken that contract, but it has quietly rewritten it.
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Recommended reading
The best of this week’s blogs, collected.
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Road trip cameras
A look at the three digital cameras that have been my road-trip workhorses.
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Why I don’t scan my negatives “flat”
I ignore the conventional wisdom to scan negatives “flat.” Here’s why.
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single frame: Abandoned
An abandoned buiilding, all gritty in b/w, on James Island, SC.
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Old cars parked: February 2026
The old cars I found parked in February 2026.
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My Back Roads newsletter is back
I’ve restarted my email newsletter and I invite you to subscribe!
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Folly Beach and the Olympus Stylus
I brought the Olympus Stylus and some fast b/w film to the beach.
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Recommended reading
The best of the blogs this week as we wrap up this February.
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Vintage TV: 1983 Alex Trebek Jeopardy! pilot
Looking at an early pilot for what became Alex Trebek’s Jeopardy!
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Protecting the revenue stream
The signs of Amazon’s decline are written in the weird Chinese brand names that dominate search results now.
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single frame: Let it snow
Crap quality from my iPhone camera when zoomed.
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The refilling
On recovering after an intense, sustained burst of creativity.
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50mm f/1.4 SMC Pentax-M
A quick review of the f/1.4 “nifty fifty” lens Pentax made for its manual-focus K-mount cameras.
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Recommended reading
The best of the blogs this week, collected for you.
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Me at John’s Modern Cabins on Route 66
Looking back at a moment I spent on Route 66.
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Memories lost, memories created, memories kept
I don’t dwell much on memories of my first marriage, which was destructive to all of us. But a few photographs of me with my sons there remind me that there were good times. And then after the divorce, I focused on building good memories.
