Day: August 12, 2004

Why Delete Bad Photos?

An ABC News story freaks out about people with digital cameras deleting pictures they think are not worth keeping,

The cameras are convenient, stylish, and — this is crucial — virtually every model allows you to delete a picture on the spot if it did not come out the way you wanted.

To historians, that delete function may not be a good thing. It has done more than change photography. It has changed the way we record our lives.

Of the 1,000 or so photos I take every month, I usually delete 2 or 3 — typically taken just to test the white balance or other features, and sometimes I feel guilty and leave those in anyways.

Storing a digital photograph costs almost nothing. I’m using a relatively expensive portable 2.5″ drive to store my photos, so it costs about 1 penny per photo stored. If I were just saving them all to my desktop drive it would be something closer to 1/3rd of a penny per drive.

Flash memory is also cheap (unless you’re using a camera with a proprietary system, like Sony’s Memory Stick). You can pick up a 1 gb SD card for under $300 today (I’ve got a couple) and a 1 gb CF card for significantly less than that.

The rule for digital photographers should be — shoot some photos, shoot some more, then shoot even more as every successive image costs so close to $0 that the additional expense isn’t noticeable.

Especially when you consider how much non-digital photography costs. At my brother’s recent wedding I took about 700 photos with my digital camera and about 200 with a film camera. For what it cost me just to develop the film and get prints, I could have bought another digital camera.

Source:

Don’t Touch That Button. Ned Potter, ABC News, August 11, 2004.

Maxwell Mehlman: Let the Athletes Take Their Performance Enhancing Drugs

In USA Today, Maxwell Mehlman offers a defense of performance enhancing drugs. As Mehlman notes, most of the arguments offered against performance enhancing drugs just aren’t very compelling. Rather, the argument against PEDs is largely aesthetic,

This leads to an unavoidable conclusion: There is nothing inherently wrong with athletes using relatively safe drugs. People simply find it distasteful. It offends their aesthetic sensibilities.

Make no mistake: Aesthetics are important. Our sense of aesthetics is what allows us to distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly. It drove XFL football out of existence. But people’s tastes differ. Some fans don’t seem to mind steroid use by professional baseball players, for example, as long as it lets the stars hit more home runs.

Tastes change, as perhaps they will when people realize that the ultimate justification for the policy against all drugs in sports is the same reason that we get upset when the neighbors paint their house purple.

I’m not sure they will change that much. There is one pseudo-athletic area where fans not only tolerate but seem to, by their behavior, encourage steroid use. That, of course, would be in wrestling outlet such as the WWE. Part of the appal of wrestling, as far as I can tell, is people want to see larger than life characters and having exagerrated almost comic book-like muscles adds to that effect (it also tends to kill wrestlers at relatively young ages).

But competitive athletics are a bit different. Part of the attraction of athletics is identifying with the athletes in a way that is very different from wrestling. The use of performance enhancing drugs detracts from that identification, and would, I suspect, make competitive sports less attractive to watch for many people.

Source:

What’s wrong with using drugs in sports? Nothing. Maxwell Mehlman, USA Today, August 11, 2004.