I just may be the lunatic you’re looking for

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 1

You may be right
I may be crazy
Oh, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
It's too late to fight
It's too late to change me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right

The Sunday Reader, April 7, 2024

I am by nature and by nurture a happy warrior, so I’ve been puzzled lately by the photographer agonistes postings of a blogger who is an accomplished pro portraitist. Should I keep writing? he muses. Should I keep my photography studio going?

I hope he finds happy answers, but to me these questions are incomprehensible. I breathe, I photograph, I write…

It’s just me. I’ve always been rather bemused that anyone would read what I write, or want to see my photographs, and it’s still something of a shock that I’ve made a living at it.

So when I started Perfecting Equilibrium in April, 2022 I wasn’t sure anyone would read it other than blood relatives forced to by Sicilian guilt (Q: How many Sicilian grandmothers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Zero-That’s alright. I’ll sit here in the DARK. You shouldn’t worry yourself…)

To my continuing wonder and gratitude, hundreds of people completely unrelated to me choose to read my ramblings. As we enter another April, it’s time to kick off Volume Three of Perfecting Equilibrium with a look back at the first two years and Volumes One and Two.

In a word, Year Two was the year we got serious.

Sort of, anyway.

Some highlights: Feola Factory LLC was formed; it’s a certified Veteran-Owned Company, so that took months and months, natch. Everything involved with the Army is hurry up and wait. I started writing for Pentax Forums again, and then launched a second newsletter, the Best of Pentax Forums.

And readership is way, way up. It’s a little complicated. Perfecting Equilibrium is actually two newsletters: one on Substack, and a clone on LinkedIn. I started posting excerpts on LinkedIn at the very beginning; when LinkedIn launched a newsletter tool I thought why not give it a whirl?

So now there are 157 Perfecting Equilibrium subscribers, plus an additional 168 followers who get notifications when I post. Over on LinkedIn, we have 324 subscribers.

Substack’s analytics…well, they’re terrible, to be blunt. As near as I can tell we’re doing 2,000 plus views a month on the 12 to 15 articles posted, plus the digests.

There’s a lot more readership on LinkedIn, where Perfecting Equilibrium columns had 54,256 impressions over the past year. The most read column with 4,402 impressions, alas, was A Requiem for David Swint.

Ironically, I was also named a staff writer for Pentax Forums this past year. It’s not the sort of staff writer day job with a salary David had in mind; those hardly exist anymore. Like most current publication positions, it’s more of a super freelancer position; I can write articles without having to pitch them, and have enough access to the system to publish them myself.

We launched the Best of Pentax Forums newsletter; it’s a curated look through the thousands of posts that appear weekly discussing all things Pentax.

But enough of the past; let’s look to the future. I’ve been dabbling in vlogging every Thursday, and have been quite surprised by the positive reception. The second and third most popular articles on LinkedIn are Fight! Adobe Photoshop Generative Fill vs. Adobe Firefly, and Tutorial: Photoshop AI Tools.

So we’re about to relaunch the Pentax Forums Youtube channel, which has about 10,000 followers despite no new videos for two years. It will be a Best of Pentax Forums recap; I’ll let you know when they go live.

And sometime in the next few weeks my photos on Google Maps will cross 40 million views. It bothered me for awhile that the most popular pic I’ve ever taken is this thing with 8.1 million views:

Taqueria Jalisco

Then I remembered that this is the most famous photo of all time because it was the default Windows XP wallpaper:

Ah well. That’s the story of my life. Spend hours and dollars perfecting my craft as a photographer, and my most popular photo is a random snapshot I took of a restaurant.

It no longer bothers me; I’m grateful to have an audience. Especially since the only marketing I’ve done for Perfecting Equilibrium is cross-posting each article to Facebook. I have exactly one paid subscriber: Thank you, LAC!

And I’m fine with that. I keep saving reviews of marketing packages…and never reading them. Which, with me, is definitely a tell-tale. And the 1,100 subscribers to the Best of Pentax Forums and the rest of that freelancing is consistently profitable, and the Youtube kickoff looks promising. Plus there’s a certain amount of consulting, which is interesting in its own lucrative way.

All of which brings me, eventually, to our photographer agonistes friend’s questions, which remind me of a story fly-fishers tell each other. When you first become a fly fisher, you just want to go fishing. Then you become obsessed with mastering the craft, of being able to work a fly line back and forth without hooking yourself in the back of the head. Then you want to catch fish. Then you want to catch the most fish. Then you want to catch the biggest fish. Then you want to catch the most difficult, willy fish, the ones that grow old living where nothing can challenge them under a fallen tree festooned with flies and fishing lures gone astray. Then you want to catch exotic fish in foreign lands.

And, finally, you work through all of that.

And you just want to go fishing.

Feola being Feola, my journey was a bit more complicated. My family started me off with heavy tackle saltwater fishing. I wanted more of a challenge, so I worked my way to light and then ultralight tackle, and then taught myself flyfishing.

As usual, I may have gotten a bit carried away with mastering that craft. I learned to cast. Then to tie my own flies. Then to tie my own leaders. Then to build my own rods.

A bit carried away…

And after all that, with an entire world of challenging fish in exotic locations, I took all that hand-made tackle and went fishing where my kids could wade, and sitting on a bridge with my 80-year-old dad.

I’ve always just wanted to go fishing.

Tomorrow at noon the fam and I will walk over to a little local park, set up, and watch the total eclipse of the sun as it passes directly over us. I’ll likely take some pictures of it. Or squirrels. I’ll definitely take pictures of the fam. And trees.

And I’ll be amazed.

But here’s the thing: On Tuesday, with the eclipse long over, I’ll be walking through that park again, taking pictures of trees and birds and squirrels and whatnot, as I’ve done most days for years.

And I’ll be amazed. I hope you find everyday amazement in your life, too.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Tuesday April 9th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup

Thursday April 11th - The PE Vlog: We’re starting a new series on building Large Language Models — AIs — for our own applications. Welcome to Virtual Grad Student! We’re going to set up a Large Language Model to run locally, feed it a clean set of data, then make it available to authors as a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re diving into h2oGPT to see if it’s a good fit for our Virtual Grad Student.

Friday April 12th - Foto.Feola.Friday

Sunday April 14th — About that time I accidentally spent all my money on lenses. And tripods. And art. Every month for four years and fourth months... I was a typical soldier; always broke. But I was probably the only soldier ever broke because I’d spent every last dollar on Pentax lenses and woodblock prints…