Costco + Social Distancing = Not gonna happen

Went to pick up some meds at Costco yesterday.  Small business’ are closed due to Covid.  But pack a Costco with a 1000+ people and it’s fine.  What could possibly go wrong?  

Oh yeah, the photo was shot with the iPhone camera app.  ProRaw was used of course.  Not much was edited.  Just used Pixelmator Photo on it 2018 iPad Pro.

More social distance photography and videography

This past weekend, the fiancee and I headed out to the middle of nowhere.  Literally the middle of nowhere.  We actually headed out to a little town of Moosecreek which is situated between Ottawa and Montreal.  The site we went to was actually in the middle of a farmers field which is accessible by a public road.  This public road is known to a few astronomy clubs here in Ottawa and in Montreal.  

The above shot was taken with my Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max (64GB) Space Grey model.  I wish I bought the 512GB model but I'm not willing to pay $1999 plus tax for a phone.  

It was a beautiful night with some clouds in the sky.  You can check out my Shutterstock portfolio here to see the shots I got with the Sony a7Rii and the Sony f3.5-6.3 24-240MM lens.  I only uploaded 5 shots and they were all accepted.  I'm still editing the footage from that night and hopefully those will be approved soon.  The above shot is of my brand new toy, the Canon Vixia HF G50 4K camcorder.  I absolutely love the Canon Vixia line of camcorders.  The only thing this model is missing is 4K/60fps as it only shoots 4K/30fps.  

My goal now is to buy an Apple Macbook Pro 16 inch that is completely or somewhat completely pimped out.  I want to buy a Macbook Pro 16 inch with at least 1TB of internal storage, 8GB video card and 64GB of RAM.  I don't want the 8TB internal storage as it is too expensive.  I'd rather get two external drives with 8TB of storage.  If you want to help me out, you can go to my site and click on one of the links on the right hand side which will take you to one of my portfolios where you can buy some of my photography or some of my footage.  You can also donate via Paypal via the Paypal button on my site.  If you donate, I will send you a jpeg file of one of my photos that you can print or use wherever you like, just as long as you don't try and sell it.

A social distancing drive to a small Canadian town on the border

Plus 13 degrees Celsius with a blue sky and some white, puffy clouds in it and they want people to stay at home.  I don't think so.  This coronavirus pandemic is a total farce.  How many people die from cancer, lung disease, HIV, AIDS, old age?  There is no cure for death.  Death has a 100% success rate.  No one and I mean no one has come back from the dead.  Well, except maybe one guy.  But that was over 2000 years ago now.

The fiancee and I decided to goer a drive to Cornwall, Ontario today.  Cornwall sits on the Canadian, US border.  Not surprised that the border was still open.  We saw a lot of people with New York State license plates in Cornwall.  We saw a few cars with Ontario and Quebec plates heading towards the border.  I am pretty sure 99% of these border crossers were unnecessary.  This pandemic was created in a lab in Vuhan, China.  The Chinese of course have a cure for it but are not releasing it or are asking an exorbitant amount for it.  On the world scale, more than a few trillion dollars.  Would not put it the Chinese Communist Party to do this.  Anyone believing that the Chinese Communist Party is a benevolent government has their head so far up their ass, they'll eating Coronavirus for breakfast.

It's time to open up the economy in North America and bomb the shit out of Beijing.

Today's social distancing walk around Ottawa

Went out for my social distancing walk this afternoon in downtown Ottawa.  Ottawa is currently empty of government employees, locals and tourists.  Everything is being cancelled.  All the festivals and concerts are no more.  All the museums are closed.  Seems like the summer is cancelled in Ottawa.  The good thing is there are no people or cars in my shots.  If there are cars or people in my photos, I can remove them using Affinity Photo.  Today, I just had to remove some cars.  Some of these shots are available on http://josefpittner.photos/.  I know times are tough right now for everyone.  I was laid off from my job 3 weeks ago now because of this Covid19 virus.

Not having social media

I have no social media to advertise my stock photography.  No Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter.  They’re all pretty useless as far as I’m concerned.  They’re all full of fake news, frauds, con artists etc.  Facebook pretty much spies on you 24/7 and sells your data to pretty much everyone.  Google is censoring everyone who they disagree with.  If you have wrong thought, you are pretty much banned and making any money on their platform.  I come from a communist country and this is exactly how the communists acted.  Put everyone who disagreed with them in reeducation camps or goulash.  Patrion, PayPal are pretty much the same.  All of these California type oligarchy, communist, crony capitalist are all the same.  You and I are just peons in their little game.

No social media except...

...my blog, my online media portfolios and maybe a Youtube Channel.  I use Google' Blogger platform only because Wordpress is a nightmare to configure, use and secure.  Wordpress gets attacked hourly because it stores your credit card numbers on its platform for payment and such.  I will not use it just for that.  With Google, they spy on you and use sell your data.  I no longer use the Google search engine personally.  Duckduckgo all the way.

Twitter was completely worthless.  A lot of photo and footage theft.  You can only put low quality stuff on there so you couldn't get any sales on there.  90% of my followers were other photographers who would steal your stuff and call it their own.  Instagram was full of spammers.  I'd say 99% of the users are spam accounts.  Everybody was asking for iTunes gift cards which is a total joke.  I hardly use a Google product.  I just permanently closed my Facebook account which should be done in 30 Facebook days.  

So all I have now is my blog.  I can control the content on the blog.  The size of the photos and footage is limited but better than Twitter or Instagram.  Facebook is crap as well.  Looks like the whole media companies are banning conservatives or anyone with an opposing or different view point.  Media companies are not good for western democracies anymore.  Most are socialist or commie type establishments.

People should support small entrepreneurs and artists like myself.  I saw a quote on the web years which in effect stated that you shouldn't support a CEO of a company to buy his/her new jet but instead support a small business so the owners can support their families.  It may be more expensive than Walmart but you're helping a family business.

No Social Media

I finally shut off my Facebook account today.  Instagram and Twitter were completely useless as far as marketing my services go.  Never ever made money with social media.  All I got was trolls and spam email and requests to send money to someone in Nigeria.  

Those platforms never really did work as I only upload my photography and footage to sites like Shutterstock, Pond5 and Videoblocks.  I've recently started to blog in the hopes people find my photos and footage appealing.  I think it also helps people to know me a little better.  

Facebook and Twitter for me were very polarizing.  Especially over the past decade or so with what's come out about Facebook and Twitter, with what they've being doing and trying to do in recent elections.  There is a lot of fake news and a lot of propaganda which is dividing people against each other which does not help.  I don't want my blog to be about politics, censorship or anything of that nature.  I want my followers to be constructive when criticizing my photographs or videos.  Don't make hateful or offensive comments.  It does not add to the discussion but rather detracts.  I am open to ideas.  Good and bad.  I am willing to help and learn.  I want to teach what I know.  I want to learn from other people.

I find social media makes people very anti-social.  Smart phones are making people not so smart.  Growing up, we did our own research.  We did not have Google.  We actually read books.  That's where we learned from.  Now you can find everything on Google or YouTube.  Well almost everything.  I hope that people actually use less and less social media.  I hope people instead go for walks and drives out into the country.  Take their cameras and camcorders with them.  You actually have a device that fits in your pocket that does both.  Actually talk to each other.  More importantly listen to one another.