DIY followup and a bit of not-feminism

Let's do this! I don't have a lot of time!

Okay! Why do you need a remote shutter? Why can't you just take handheld selfies? Because it looks better if the camera is farther away! Pretty basic shit, really, but important!

It looks better because 1. Facial compression! In a zoomed out situation, like, 15mm, there's a lot of perspective. The field of view is large. That's no good for portraits! It means you get a big nose and your picture becomes all ewwy. There's too much perspective At 15mm, the camera is too close and it just looks unflattering. At 55mm though, you'll look so tight!

2. Background compression! If you're zooming in, you're going to see less background. This is a good thing! Cluttered backgrounds are very distracting. Zooming in also means more bokeh, and we all like that. My shitty kit lens doesn't do wide apertures, so no bokeh for me.

Here are two examples. Left 55mm - Right 15mm. For all you non-photographers, more millimetres means more zoom. I clearly look better in the left photo. In the picture on the right, the camera was all up in my face, and my sofa is in the picture. No bueno.

You can also do this sort of thing with a remote shutter! Long exposure photography! Taken from my window! This one is not great, the composition sucks, but it's fun to do and the results are always interesting! In this one, the shutter was open for 18 seconds. I was shooting in bulb-mode. And having a remote shutter when doing this is just so much easier! If I didn't have one, I'd have had to keep my finger on the shutter button for all that time, and that would have been shaky and tedious.

These are just some situations in which a remote shutter is handy!



Now for that bit about feminism. I'm going to make it short. I think.

I don't want to call myself a feminist anymore. Well, on one hand, I do. But not really.

See, nowadays, being not feminist is extremely controversial. Therefore, I don't want to be drawing all that attention to me by saying I'm not a feminist. I'm still all about those equal rights and whatnot.

But I don't want to be like those other feminist bloggers. You know, the ones with odd hairstyles and a million subscribers. They seem to live in this otherly world, and I don't want to be associated with that. They have feminist friends and partners, subscribe to feminist media, and have a huge feminist following on their blogs. They live it. And I think it sometimes makes them a bit crazy. A bit disconnected from reality. The amazing bias of their world makes it easy for them to just forget all scepticism and critical thinking, and just accept any supposed injustice as fact.

And you always hear about the patriarchy. I think the patriarchy is a hip word that's used by feminists who want to go viral on social media. I hate the word. This is Finland. It's 2015. This is not a patriarchy. Saudi Arabia is a patriarchy. Can we please stop throwing this word around?

Feminism is a hot mess. I wish it were called equalism, and wasn't filled with all this female-centric rhetoric. I'd call myself an equalist, but I've read too many bad blogs to call myself a feminist and feel any sort of pride in it. Men and women aren't equal, we're obviously different- but equalism would still be a better word than feminism in the cause of gender equality.

Just the other day, I was listening to the radio. That evening, the channel I was listening to had a "feminist-night". What this meant was that they only played music by women and female artists, and only talked about women artists. The programme was hosted by a lone woman. I thought to myself, is this what feminism is about?

I've written about feminism before, and these are the links to those entries.

Feminism?

Musings on modern feminism