Isolation Photo Project, Day 36

Inspired by Ritchie Roesch's post on aspect ratios and his Agfa Optima Film simulation recipe and the 100% cloud cover over the area today (and probably tomorrow), I drove into downtown Princeton to see what had changed in the last two weeks since I had visited.

I parked on Nassau Street and walked up the steps to the publicly accessible garden, Betsey Stockton Garden, between Firestone Library and Nassau Street.

According to Princeton University:

Stockton was an enslaved person in the Maclean House home of Princeton President Ashbel Green who, upon gaining her freedom, became a missionary and then served the Princeton community as a founder of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church and as a teacher and founder of the first school in Princeton for children of colour. She is commemorated in a stained-glass window in the church her former students presented.

I don’t usually shoot square images, but I experimented with various compositions while walking around the Firestone Library.

So that you know, the square images below are captured using the 1:1 ratio on my Fujifilm X-T2. My goal was to shoot using the Agfa Optima Film simulation recipe and the SOOC JPEGs for this post. However, I could not get the Agfa Optima Film simulation recipe to work under lighting conditions. I looked at the JPEG images but didn’t like the result. They didn’t feel right compared to the example images on Ritchie’s website. I scrapped all the JPEGs but kept the square format. I applied an Adobe Lightroom Preset that I created to give my photographs a cinematic look.

Stairs to Betsey Stockton Garden at Firestone Library, Princeton University
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Firestone Library, Princeton University
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April, 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Firestone Library, Princeton University
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April, 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Firestone Library, Princeton University
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April, 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Bicycles in a rack at Firestone Library, Princeton University
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Firestone Library, Princeton University
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April, 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Firestone Library, Nassau Street
Firestone Library, Princeton University | Monday 27 April, 2020 | Day 36 | FujiFilm X-T2 | XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR | f/8.0 | ISO 400
Submitted as part of the 100DaysToOffload project.

Backup strategy for MacBook Air for college student

Kiran has a MacBook Air which we just purchased as both high-school graduation (2019) and birthday gift (November). We did the same for her sibling in 2017. When she starts college next year I want her to be somewhat self-sufficient when it comes to tech support. I was thinking through the options for backing up her MacBook Air, and I realised that a Time Capsule would not be a viable solution.

Based on our visit to the college tour, we learned that the colleges she is considering (Oberlin, Smith, Mount Holyoke, etc.) provide campus-wide W-Fi. There are no Ethernet ports in the student residence rooms to connect a wireless access point or router. For the Apple Time Capsule, it could not be connected physically to a router or an Ethernet port. It's also not possible to connect the Time Capsule to the campus Wi-Fi as a Wi-Fi extender.

The bottom line here is that the Time Capsule has been designed to connect permanently to wired Ethernet, college residence halls do not have Ethernet, my daughter will need an external hard drive to use with Time Machine.

College?

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education.

...

The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the video lagged—but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic.
Graeme Wood writing in the Atlantic