A few folks wrote in after last week’s foray into politics, wondering if attempts to understand or sympathize with Trump supporters was ceding some hard fought moral ground. I struggle with this quite a bit. There’s no denying that so much of what’s driving this mad season — the overt racism and sexism, appeals to base fears, outright violence — is morally reprehensible.

Still, I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by writing off half the country as merely racist or even “deplorable”. It might be helpful to remember that many of the “back row kids” lost everything in 2008 and the people who caused the financial crisis are all doing just fine — better than ever, in fact. And we might remind ourselves that we, the sort of folks who read email newsletters, almost certainly have more in common with those 0.01%ers than we do with the Trump crowd. That doesn’t excuse this sort of awful behavior, but I suspect we’d have fewer demagogues if we built a system that did a better job of taking care of everyone, not just those lucky enough to come out on top.

While I’m pre-rambling, here are a few related links: 1. Why so many people want Donald Trump to “make America great again” 2. Tyler Cowen thinks the idea of progress is bunk 3. Fantastic, long NY Times piece on the changes to worldwide trade over the past 4 decades

And one more! It’s homework for next week that I haven’t even read yet! Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism. That opening Langdon Winner quote has me all aflutter. Ok, now let’s talk about something fun.

I was on vacation last week with my full extended family — mom, dad, brothers and sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, and my own wonderful wife and child. We were up in the Sierra Nevadas and it was delightful, I wish such happy times to all of you.

I took three cameras with me. My brand spankin' new iPhone 7 Plus in matte black (aka The Dadphone 2000); the Sony a7 we bought just before our son was born for family photos; and a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 with a bunch of film, which I thought the kids would get a kick out of.

Much to my delight the Instax Mini was a pretty big hit. “Oh, I love those cameras” my oldest niece exclaimed, giving me just a shred of cool-uncle cred. If you’re not familiar with the Instax Mini, it’s basically a plastic toy camera that shoots credit-card sized instant film (kinda like Polaroids of old). It has a serviceable light meter with some adjustments to switch between indoors and out and a flash that works best for illuminating faces in sunlight. It’s super fun and throwback and analog and even kids addicted to their iPads fight over who gets the next pack of film.

The iPhone 7’s camera really is as good as everyone says it is. I’m upgrading from a 5S and just floored at the difference. The second camera on the Plus is worth the added bulk of such an unwieldy phone. Being able to quickly switch between the two really does make it that much closer to the camera you left at home. I haven’t installed the beta OS that enables the dual lens “portrait mode” with software-simulated bokeh yet, but I’m anxious to see it in action. (Steve Sinofsky just wrote a wonderful piece on the shift to “mobile, computed photography” that the iPhone’s portrait mode exemplifies perfectly.)

The iPhone went everywhere I did, of course. We hiked up mountains, across streams, I even took it kayaking and pulled it out for a few pano-selfies around the edge of Lake Tahoe, daring fate to test Tim Cook’s promised “water resistance”. It performed brilliantly and then transformed into an augmented reality star finder at night.
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The Sony a7, a range-finder style camera with a full frame sensor and a fast, sharp normal lens, stayed in my bag. I should add: I love this camera. It’s the camera I’ve wanted since I started shooting digital over 15 years ago lugging around borrowed Canon DSLR’s from my journalism school’s labs. It has the romantic qualities of Cartier-Bresson and some serious digital horsepower. It has the heft of something well crafted and feels nearly perfect in my hand. Still, I only took it out in the very last hour of our trip, to shoot portraits of everyone against the pines. And I genuinely don’t regret not pulling it out more. Climbing a mountain with a toddler strapped to your back or paddling a kayak as the wind whips whitecaps across the lake is no place for an extra piece of equipment hanging off your shoulder.

The real star of the trip, a bit unexpectedly, was Google Photos. I started using Google’s photo app in addition to the built-in one from Apple a few months ago as a backup but it’s become my go-to organizer. Once Google has your library on hand, the AI “Assistant” starts feeding you back collages, slideshows, and on-this-day remembrances. The results are usually mediocre but every once in a while, like when a video slideshow titled “They Grow Up So Fast” featuring my son from his first days through last week magically appeared, they can actually be arresting. For this trip, I set up a shared album that everyone in the family added to, in real time, collecting dozens of photos and an instant scrapbook.

This post reads much more like a gadget review than I’m entirely comfortable with, but it pulls together some ideas that I thought worth exploring.

The story of photography at least since circa the iPhone 4 has been that a good enough camera, with fun and tactile software, and the internet/social media will win over a superior piece of hardware with crummy software and no internet connection.

The tech giants building end-to-end ecosystems that we pour our lives into really are in a brutal war. Apple’s built-in Photos app does everything Google’s does — automatically backs up my pictures, has shared albums, has an AI-powered “memories” feature. Google’s is just better — and not even a lot better, almost imperceptibly so. I’m even willing to give up a little on something I care about quite a bit — my digital privacy — for Google’s server-based AI vs. Apple’s supposed privacy-enhancing device-based AI.

I don’t know if this is just my own predilections but it feels like Instagram missed an opportunity by not building in better sharing control. We’re pretty strict about where we put photos of our son and, since that’s pretty much all I take pictures of these days, I don’t even bother with Instagram anymore. Their all-or-nothing approach to what’s visible may have made sense five years ago when they were keeping it lean and simple, but it feels posturing today. Flickr (mostly) figured out the perfect sharing controls over a decade ago, it still baffles me that no one has followed suit.

I really could not be happier that we seem to have crossed the threshold where the best camera really is the one you have you with your already.