And Now A Word From Our Sponsors.

Hello, Reader. We hope you have been enjoying this blog thus far. Though it may not be apparent, we here at DIDOMENT’S DIARY are constantly striving to bring you the best product possible, the most cutting-edge, raw, and unvarnished look into the mind of a neurotic and obsessively introspective self-aware middle-aged man making his way through the first half of the 21st Century. Yes, we recognize that most of his output is comprised of First World White Guy preoccupations: love, loss, death, parenthood, cologne addiction, and the lessons he’s learned on his quest for self-actualization. No, this is not the stuff of racial struggle, overcoming misogyny, or finding the best water source in the desertifying Sahel Region of Africa. But they say “Write what you know,” so this is what he does. He writes what he knows. Or what he’s feeling or thinking in any given moment. Some of these feelings and thoughts are fleeting. A lot of them are, actually. But many of them have deep roots. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. Heck, he doesn’t even know half the time. Even when he’s writing in the third person like a pretentious asshole. Point is, he gets it all out, and it comes from a real place, even if it’s a middle-aged, First World white guy place.

In his perpetual desire to improve this blog experience, one that we share wholeheartedly as this blog’s Sponsors, he has expressed concern that this site provides a stunted visual experience. Part of this is intentional. The author, Middle-Aged, First World White Guy (“MAFWWHIG”), prefers this simplicity and a barebones interface because he wants people to focus on his words, not glitzy graphics. The problem is, as he’s written before, MAFWWHIG is a big photography buff, and he would like this site to serve double-duty for both his writing and his photography. In this regard, he has repeatedly complained to us, his Sponsors, that the photo gallery he threw together with a WordPress plug-in a couple of years ago is totally inadequate for his needs.

In his words: “It sucks balls! That stupid plug-in compresses my photos, which degrades them, and there’s no organization at all! So I’m literally just throwing pictures in there with no subject, no location, just a long scroll full of unrelated images. And 99% of the time, they take forever to load, and I have to try four times before it works. What the FUCK, guys? Can’t you use some of your advertising revenue to spring for a better plug-in or something? There has to be something out there that’s better than this garbage at a low enough cost.”

This is when we remind him that we’re not earning a dime on his self-absorbed exercise in mental masturbation, and we’re not inclined to pull any money from our uh… more interesting and financially successful blogs, which have thousands of subscribers. We told him he needs to find another solution. Or maybe pay for the pricier plug-in himself, since this site is all about HIM, after all.

He didn’t like this. He can be a bit of a prick when he thinks he’s right about something.

Then, one day, something changed. Without an appointment, he stormed into our Madison Avenue office with a big grin on his face, threw open the glass door to a packed conference room–where we were voting on his demand that we divest from the Genocidal State of Israel–slapped his palm on the table, and in a raised voice announced:

“I solved our problem! One of our problems. Okay, one of MY problems.”

He had our attention. We let him speak.

“A couple of months ago, I took a photography class with a local photography group. It was to teach us about photographing light and shadow, and we walked around the Bronx River for 2 hours taking– Nevermind, the details don’t matter. At the end of the class, I asked the teacher which website he uses to show his work online. Squarespace? Flickr? Something else? You know what he said? He uses ADOBE. ADOBE! He said that as part of his Lightroom subscription, you can create your own photography website, it’s all included. I couldn’t believe it. You know how smart I am, guys. You know I’m really detail-oriented and on top of everything. You know I don’t miss much, even with my full-time job as a BigLaw attorney, duties as a single parent, intermittent dating, my work-out schedule, and all the demands imposed by my active and always witty Twitter and TikTok engagement. It’s truly a wonder that I can do it all and do it so well, am I right? Anyway, I really missed the boat on this one. I’ve been subscribing to Lightroom for almost two years, and I had no idea that I could use it to make my own photography site. Sure enough, I went home, checked my Lightroom subscription, and there it was: ‘Adobe Portfolio.'”

“So problem solved, guys! I’m already paying for it! FUCK all y’all, I handled it my own self.”

Then he slapped his hand on the table again and said “I’m OUT! PEACE! (Just make sure you divest from that genocidal country of fascist nutbags. It shouldn’t have taken this fucking long.)”

And with that, he was gone.

On a far calmer Zoom call a few days later, he informed us that for the past several weeks he’s been learning the ins and outs of creating his own photography website while culling 20 years’ worth of disorganized old photos–thousands of them–and trying to decide which ones are decent enough to add to his website, and which ones aren’t, which photos can be reprocessed with the knowledge and skill he’s acquired since he took them–sometimes more than a decade ago–and which ones can’t, or aren’t worth the effort. For a month, this tedious, time-consuming process has occupied the better part of his free time, and it likely will take him the rest of this year to get his site to a point where he’s satisfied with it.

He further conveyed that this process has been immensely frustrating. For example, seeing out-of-focus, unsharp, or heavily noisy photos he took in Japan 19 years ago that are totally unusable, but which he easily could have taken the right way if he knew then what he knows now. (Story of life, right?) He’s pissed that almost all of the photos he took in the furthest place he’s ever traveled to in the world are unusable. Witnessing his lack of skill in those early years where his camera was way out of his league, and he was still learning the fine arts of focusing, composition, and figuring out the right aperture for the subject and situation, has been a thorn in his ass, and viewing some of his older work makes him wince.

And yet, he still managed to find a few decent images to use despite his inexperience and the fact that his old cameras had fewer megapixels than his current Samsung cellphone. Moreover, it has been immensely gratifying for him to see how he has improved as a photographer over time. The more time he spent on this craft–especially in recent years–the faster he improved, and he continues to get better every time he goes out. This pleasure outweighs everything else. He has long wanted to collect his best photos in one place, just like he did on Flickr many years ago, and eventually find a community of like-minded hobbyist photographers to join and learn from.

So… finally fending off his perfectionist propensities, he recently deleted his old photo gallery–the one he hated–and linked to his new photography website instead. It can be found here, or at the header link above, which is in the same location as the link to his old gallery.

MAFWWHIG wants to make clear that his photography website is a work in progress, and he is nowhere near done collecting, processing, and adding his favorite old photos, while continuing to take new ones with an emphasis on his new favorite genre: street photography. He will be engaging in this process over and over again for the rest of his life, including reprocessing photos he posted as his Lightroom skills continue to improve, or if he changes his mind about how he wants them to look. Indeed, after 20 years as a photographer, he learned a far better, less blunt way to sharpen a photo just last week. He now wants to apply this new technique to virtually every photo on his website. This alone, and his constant, dysfunctional quest for optimization and perfection made him want to wait to disclose his new website until it was perfect, or at least better, in his eyes.

We talked him out of this. After consulting with a focus group comprised primarily of Gen Z and Gen Alpha participants, we told him to ‘Chill, Bruh.’ Perfection in photography, a subjective art, is totally unattainable. If he waits for his elusive Goldilocks moment he’ll be waiting forever, and what’s the point of that? Besides, this ain’t exactly National Geographic we’re talking about. He’s a hobbyist, not a professional photographer, and most people will be looking at these things on their phones. He’s only competing with–and only needs to please–himself. Posting the imperfect and incomplete, images that are subject to change later, will be good for him as a person too.

Let Go, and Let God.

And so he did.