This Old Dog Learning New Tricks

When I started blogging people didn't have smart phones, or at least not very smart phones.  I had my Canon Spotmatic which I quickly realized I could use to make videos or audio recordings as well as photos.  And I learned how to get them up on YouTube, well I also used .  So in 2007 when I was first blogging news stories - the political corruption trials in Anchorage - I could type up a post, add photos, and even videos before I left the federal building.  I was just doing what came naturally to me at the time.  I didn't realize this was the new journalism.

But as time went by, Google took over Blogger (here, where my blog is) and YouTube, and smartphones added cameras and videos and internet and I fell behind.  Yes, I could still do it the old fashioned way I'd cobbled together, but journalists with a smart phone could do it all from that one device.

Let me pull in another thread to this story.  The warm, dry weather has meant we have wasps joining us for dinner out on the deck.  No one's been stung, and we get a bit of exercise waving our hands to move them away, but it's a bit annoying.  I've got some jars out on the deck with the lids off and a bit of salmon inside.  A wasp inevitably gets curious and flies in and I cover the jar with the lid.  This clashes with my Buddhist tendencies, but I remember the explanation they gave me in Thailand for leaving out poisoned meat for feral dogs to eat.  If the dog chooses to eat the food, then they didn't kill the dog.  The dog did itself in.

So I was trying to take wasp pictures at dinner tonight and I accidentally had it on 'live' instead of just 'photo.'  That means you get a second or two of motion as part of the photo.  So I looked up how to turn that into a GIF.  I figured out then how to send it to someone on WhatsApp and then how to get it up here.  But I'm not sure it worked.  It's not working on my draft nor in preview.  It might work when I post it.  Or not.  We'll see.

Do I need this?  It's more compelling than just a still picture of a wasp, but it's not really necessary.  But there may be something where the motion does matter.  I promise not to use these as visual snark.  Just in case it doesn't work, here are a couple of pictures from a stop at Potter Marsh this afternoon.

This has been sitting as a draft for a couple of days.  I'm going to put it up, not sure if the GIF will work.  Took nieta to Apple store for a kids photo class yesterday and Chris there showed me an app to make gifs.  But I'm having trouble getting it from my phone to my computer as a gif.  Maybe later.  [UPDATED a few minutes after posting:  Well, you can see the 'live photo' but it's as a movie, not a GIF.  More work to do.]