Coast Photography

The day stretched from democracy theory through pork ragu to pelican photography, from wave-watching painters to overconfident experts, from jetty rocks to Minecraft redstone. Between the south jetty and Yaquina Head I captured one good landscape and one good pelican shot, plus learned that 1/250th shutter speed won't freeze birds in flight and that long exposures of calm ocean lack the drama of turbulent water. Not a photographic bust—just the accumulation of practical lessons that gradually build competence. The painter at the gallery doesn't like photographs because they can't capture the colors she sees, which might be the most honest assessment of the medium's limitations I've heard in a while.

From Theory to Practice to Pixels

October 5, 2025

The morning belonged to democracy—working on the blog post exploring power, stakeholders, and the machinery of collective decision-making. There's something satisfying about wrestling ideas into coherent form, about taking intuitions sparked by a coffee shop closure and expanding them into broader observations about how we organize authority and influence.

Late breakfast at The Dizzy Hen provided necessary fuel and a shift in focus. Pork ragu, executed very well—the kind of meal that reminds you good food doesn't require complexity, just competence and care. Sometimes the best dishes are the ones that simply do what they promise without unnecessary elaboration.

The drive to the coast featured Kristy Jessica interviewing Minh-ly—her modeling experiences, life experiences, and expansion into adjacent creative activities made for compelling listening. I met Minh-ly during my January trip to the Yucatan. She was fun to work with, and we got some good shots together. Hearing her discuss her creative journey months later added context to that collaboration, showing how the work we did fit into her broader trajectory. These long drives become their own form of meditation, the road unspooling while voices and ideas occupy the mental foreground.

Newport's south jetty offered the first photo opportunity—the rocky structure adjacent to the Yaquina Bay entrance where boats typically pass through. A large boat was parked at the entrance, but nothing particularly interesting passed while I was shooting. Spent most of my time there fiddling with tripods, filters, and camera settings, working through the technical challenges of long exposure photography. The water wasn't particularly turbulent, which limited the dramatic potential of the technique. Long exposure works best when it transforms chaotic movement into smooth flow—calm water just becomes smoother calm water, a less interesting transformation.

Looking north from Yaquina Head

Yaquina Head provided better results. That's where I captured the good landscape shot—a long exposure that added subtle but interesting effects to the sea below me and the waves along the beach in the distance. The smoothing transformation worked there, though not dramatically. With the ocean being so calm, the effects remained understated rather than striking—enough to add visual interest without becoming the dominant feature. Also got the good pelican image at Yaquina Head—two keepers that made the expedition worthwhile. The process matters more than the results on days like this—the practice of seeing, the repeated attempts to frame interesting moments, the gradual refinement of technical skill and aesthetic judgment. But it's nice when practice occasionally produces results worth keeping.

Early dinner at Nana's, then an unplanned but valuable conversation with an art gallery owner on the way back to the car. She's a painter, and her work focuses primarily on wave compositions with rocks and clouds—the same subject matter I'd been photographing all afternoon, but approached through entirely different tools and sensibilities.

Her observation about photography struck me as both honest and illuminating: she doesn't like photographs because they can't express the colors she actually sees. For her, the medium is fundamentally limited in its ability to capture the richness of visual experience. Her paintings aim to express something beyond what cameras record—not objective representation but subjective color experience, the world as perceived rather than mechanically captured.

It's a fair critique. Cameras do limit color reproduction, compress dynamic range, reduce three-dimensional experience to two-dimensional representation. What we call "accurate" photography is really just another form of interpretation, constrained by sensor technology and processing choices. Her paintings, whatever their relationship to objective reality, might indeed capture something closer to her actual perceptual experience than any photograph could.

I learned a little from that conversation—not just about her specific process, but about the fundamental differences between mediums, about what each can and cannot do, about honest assessment of limitations rather than defensive claims about superiority. The conversation also inspired me to revisit some training videos I have from Nick Page. His landscape work manages to be interestingly rich and dramatic in ways mine often isn't. I need to understand how he achieves that—whether through processing techniques, composition choices, or some combination of both. Perhaps there are ways to push photography closer to expressing that subjective color richness the painter was talking about, even if the medium has inherent limitations.

The drive home brought Net Assessment's episode on expert confidence levels, which turned out to be both fascinating and disappointing. The central finding: experts express overconfidence in their predictions, proving accurate only about 57% of the time. That's actually impressive compared to non-experts (those with low knowledge and low confidence) or those afflicted by the Dunning-Kruger effect (those with low knowledge and high confidence)—people who know nothing but think they know everything.

The episode offered an interesting observation: experts who expressed low confidence tended to be more accurate than those who expressed high confidence. This creates a perverse dynamic. Experts face enormous pressure to act confidently in the social and media contexts where they operate. Publishers and clients insist on high confidence, creating incentives that work against accuracy. The insistence on confident pronouncements becomes a downward force on the quality of expert work—not fatal, but a consistent reducer of reliability. The market effectively punishes epistemic humility while rewarding overconfidence, even though humility correlates with better predictions.

But the conversation never established what baseline we should compare against. Is 57% good? Bad? Better than random chance? Better than simple heuristics? The implicit assumption seemed to be that experts should perform much better, but without establishing what "much better" means or what alternative approaches achieve, the critique floats without anchor. I found myself disappointed by this analytical gap, by the failure to provide comparative context that would make the finding meaningful.

Still, the core insight holds value: even genuine expertise produces overconfidence. People who actually know things still systematically overestimate the reliability of their predictions. Worth remembering when I'm tempted to be too certain about my own assessments.

Home brought photo processing—reviewing the day's captures, selecting the worthwhile ones, making adjustments, posting a couple to Instagram. The day wasn't photographically a bust by any means. I learned concrete lessons: 1/250th shutter speed isn't fast enough for birds in flight. I'll need to speed that up next time—probably 1/1000th or faster to freeze wing movement properly. The long exposure shots of the ocean came out technically fine, but the ocean was unusually calm yesterday. Long exposure works better with turbulent water, where the smoothing effect creates interesting contrast between solid rocks and ethereal flow. Calm water just becomes... smoother calm water. Less dramatic transformation.

These are the kinds of practical lessons that accumulate into competence—not dramatic revelations, just incremental understanding of what works under which conditions, what technical choices produce which aesthetic effects, where the boundaries of acceptable compromise lie.

Minecraft followed the processing session, bringing the ongoing warehouse project back into focus. Got the Redstone Zone fairly complete, which required interesting problem-solving around natural hazards—specifically a giant cavern lurking right next to the construction site. Virtual engineering challenged by virtual geology, finding solutions to obstacles that don't actually matter but provide satisfying mental exercise nonetheless.

Hogan's Heroes provided familiar evening comfort, the reliable patterns of sitcom plotting and character dynamics. Not every evening needs intellectual challenge or aesthetic ambition. Sometimes you just want familiar entertainment that requires minimal engagement.

Before sleep, I've been listening to the collected short stories of Arthur C. Clarke—his voice (or rather, the narrator's interpretation of his work) accompanying the transition from wakefulness to unconsciousness. Clarke was incredibly prolific, covering an amazing array of themes and plotlines across his career. I'd read a few of his novels before, but the short stories reveal a different dimension of his talent—incredibly rich explorations that don't require the sustained commitment of novel-length work. Perfect for the liminal space before sleep, when the mind is ready to drift but still capable of following narrative threads.

Slept well last night—the kind of deep rest that comes from physical activity (walking jetties and headlands) combined with mental engagement (photography, conversation, podcast processing). The body and mind both tired in productive ways, earning unconsciousness through genuine use rather than mere exhaustion.

Days like this accumulate meaning through variety rather than singular focus—democracy theory and pork ragu, pelican photography and painter insights, expert confidence and redstone logistics. No grand theme ties it together except the simple fact of moving through experiences with attention, taking what each offers, letting the day be whatever it becomes rather than forcing it into predetermined shape.