The Paleo diet has seen many variations since it exploded in popularity about 4 years ago after the release of Robb Wolf’s book “The Paleo Solution”. Paleo is a very balanced diet, resembling as closely as possible the “original” human diet that we evolved with, before Agriculture took hold of our lives and our bellies. Lately though, there have been increased reports of vegans and vegetarians trying to suit Paleo into their meat-free regimen. This article is about guiding these dieters to the closest possible diet that resembles both Paleo and some form of vegetarianism.

But, first things first: Paleo is not just about what foods you remove from the Western diet (namely: grains/gluten, vegetable oils, legumes, excess sugars). Paleo is also about what you add to it: bone marrow/broth, offal of all kind, seaweed, fermented foods, shellfish (especially oysters), enough sunlight, enough sleep, enough exercise etc. Paleo without these additions is not true Paleo. In fact, most meat-eater “Paleo” dieters are not hard-core Paleo dieters! But a muscle-eater still gets enough protein (and vitamins that are only found in specific forms in meat) to get him/her by. A vegetarian needs to try extra hard with the kinds of food he/she must consume in order to come closer to true health that Paleo can offer.

So these are my personal opinions about how an almost-vegetarian diet, or more accurately a reduced-meat diet, can achieve most of Paleo’s well-known health benefits. I present the information in steps, to help you decide to include a specific food or not. But basically it boils down to this: you can’t have the full health benefits that Paleo could potentially offer if you don’t include at least some of the suggested superfoods in your diet.

Meat and fish

1. Offal
Please hear me out for a second. Even if you don’t put muscle meat in your mouth, 200 gr of liver, twice a month, is probably enough to get you most of the needed vitamins that are only found in specific chemical forms in animal meat. This is a sacrifice you might have to do for your well-being. Think about it, it’s just twice a month! I’d suggest pastured lamb liver, because it has the least strong taste (compared to beef, goat), it’s way more nutritious than birds’ livers, and when it’s pastured, you know that the animal has had a good life (so you’re not collaborating with an abusive meat industry). If you decide to not eat offal, consider supplementing with CoQ10 (specifically the Ubiquinol form) and PQQ. These enzymes are not found anywhere else in large-enough quantities (not even in muscle meat).

2. Shellfish
In addition to offal, or if you’re not willing to eat any land-animal meat at all, you should seriously consider shellfish, particularly the superfood that is oysters (and mussels as a second option). That should be at least 200 gr of oysters, once a week (you can also have other kinds of shellfish throughout the week too if you like). From the vegan point of view, oysters/mussels are the most vegetarian-friendly animals to eat, because they don’t have a nervous system, so they don’t feel pain when we harvest/eat them.

3. Fish
In addition to shellfish, or if you can’t have shellfish because of allergies, then you should go hard on fish, particularly on wild salmon. You will need to eat fish almost daily, about 100 gr/day. Wild canned sardines, whole fried smelt (with heads/guts), cod, and any other fish with low mercury levels is good to eat. Overall, it’s better to have fish than not to have any because of fear of mercury (besides, enough selenium intake can clean up mercury from our system — all you need is a single Brazil nut a day to get enough selenium). Occasionally, go for sashimi (raw fish) too! If you’re eating out, just make sure you arrive at the sushi restaurant with your own, wheat-free, “Tamari”, non-GMO, soy sauce (no shame in that, most celiacs do it this way too).

4. Bone Marrow or Fish Bone Broth
You will need either a bone marrow broth (recipe), or at least, fish bone broth (recipe). You can’t find the gelatin required to rejuvenate and heal your insides (and your outsides) in any other kind of food. In fact, bone broth is among the top-line defenses of Paleo, and one of the reasons of why the diet was adopted so quickly (people got healed fast!). If you go for fish bone broth, prefer non-oily fish for slow cooking. Add oily fish towards the end of the cooking cycle (or it could go rancid). For fish bone broth, the fish heads are required to be cooked along the fish bones for full potency.

5. Cod Liver
I put this food at the end of this list, because it’s a bit of an acquired taste. It tastes like foie-gras, and it has a lot of vitamin A. It’s definitely one of the foods you should try if you can stomach it. I’d suggest you eat it out of the can and not fry it, because it will then smell strongly throughout your house for a week…

Notice how I started suggesting liver twice a month, oysters weekly, and fish daily. This is because they’re sorted by some loose, nutrient density.

Dairy

If you’re “mostly” vegetarian, dairy becomes more needed in your diet than for other Paleo dieters.

1. Eggs
Go for pastured duck eggs if you can (4-6 a week are enough — find them at your local farmer’s market), or pastured chicken eggs as a second option. This way, you still get eggs from animals that live a good, natural life for the most part.

2. Kefir, yogurt, and cheese
The original standard Paleo diet does not allow milk products, however, with time, this rule has relaxed under some very specific conditions. If possible, the milk has to be raw, which includes enzymes to digest it properly. If that’s not possible in your area, then the next best thing is this: fermented-only dairy (home-made goat kefir, European-style yogurt, real cheese), and only from A2 casein animals (goat, sheep, buffalo, camel). I would not recommend to anyone to drink pasteurized cow milk out of the carton. If you decide to only do one type of dairy for your calcium and B-vitamin needs, go for home-made goat kefir, which is the most potent of all (10x more potent than yogurt for healing). But it has to be home-made (store-bought is not potent), it has to be from an A2 casein animal, and it has to be fermented for 24 hours (add some RAW honey, nuts, and berries afterwards if you find it too bitter). Well-fermented goat kefir has the needed enzymes to properly digest it too (start slowly though).

3. Grass-fed butter & European-style, cultured, organic sour-cream
Don’t fear it, use it in your recipes! Definitely go for grass-fed butter btw, you will need the K2 vitamin in it.

More Info

1. Fermented foods
Sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented veggies should be eaten regularly.

2. Seaweed
A must-have for good thyroid function, especially if you’re eating the suggested Brazil nut above (there must be a balance of selenium and iodine in your system). I use seaweed in unpasteurized soy-based miso soup (the year-long fermentation of soy in miso makes it benign).

3. Lentils and other beans
This would probably be my least-popular suggestion among the meat-eater Paleo readers of this article. However, there are good reasons why I would suggest lentils (and other beans), 2-3 times a month or so, specifically for vegetarians and vegans. When properly fermented for 36 hours, lentils in particular become almost benign. Given the amount of protein, iron, manganese, B vitamins, and folate they have, beans become a must-have food for those who don’t eat meat. But again, it must be traditionally-prepared, not cooked as-is, or out of a can. Legumes are still legumes, and they contain harmful lectins when cooked without fermentation. But if you don’t do meat, they kind of become a “must”. However, still avoid processed soy products (e.g. soy milk, tofu, tempeh). Ferment your non-GMO soy, and learn to eat natto (which is the best source for protein if you’re 100% off meat).

4. Raw, unfiltered and local Honey
A vegetarian has already cut out the “hunting” part of “hunting and gathering”, so there’s no reason to reduce the “gathering” part too. When the honey is raw, it has significant anti-bacterial properties, and when it’s local, it strengthens the immune system against allergies. Raw honey should be the sweetener of choice for any Paleo dieter.

6. Don’t fear the carbs (too much)
Robb Wolf’s latest series on carbs is an eye-opener. Paleo is a diet first for health, and then for weight loss. Weight loss comes naturally with it as your health improves.

Vitamins

If you’re going for 100% meat/fish-free diet (I hope this article explained why this would not work as a Paleo framework though), then you will need to supplement with vitamins. Unfortunately, there’s not a single multi-vitamin company that gets it right regarding vitamins geared for a vegan diet. I’m not a doctor, so none of these are medical advices. But in my personal research, these are the nutrients that came up short on a vegan diet.

1. D3 (3000 IU, daily, in the morning)
Test your D3 levels via a blood test (do not supplement with high doses without knowing your levels, it can become toxic). Without adequate D3 levels your immune system can not function properly to heal you. In the Western world today, most people are deficient of it.

2. Magnesium (daily, 20 mins before bed)
In the Western world today, most people are deficient of it. Our soil and water are depleted of it.

3. DHA oil (daily)

4. B-Complex (if you’re not eating offal & shellfish, take it 2-3 times a week, the specific B-complex gets it more right than others)

5. Taurine (2-3 times a week)

6. Zinc (2-3 times a week — or just eat oysters)

7. Essential Amino Acids (daily, not a vegan product, but there’s none better than it — Alternatively, definitely go for L-Lysine, and L-Acetyl-Carnitine separately. Creatine and others might be useful too)

6. Protein (eat fermented beans, and natto, but not processed soy like tofu/soy-milk, try to avoid GMO too)

9. Vitamin A (1-2 times a week, before bed — if you’re not eating offal or oysters)

10. Calcium (2-3 times a week, if you’re not eating dairy)

11. K2 Mk4 (the specific form, 2-3 times a week, when you take Calcium or dairy)

12. Iron (1-2 times a week, ask your doctor first though, iron supplementation can be dangerous)

13. CoQ10 Ubiquinol (the specific form, 2-3 times a week)

14. PQQ (1-2 times a week, or eat a heart every week)

15. Finally, if you’re not drinking bone broth, you’ll need Collagen. There are Collagen Types I and III, and Collagen II (two different products). Take them at different days, 2-3 times a week each.

UPDATE: A more up-to-date article about veg*n supplementation.

I wasn’t going to write why I believe these atrocities like the school shooting today happen all the time, *primarily* in the USA, but after some friends asked me to go ahead, and after seeing this thread on Reddit, I realized that my opinion might be shared with others too, and not be so outlandish after all. So in danger of alienating some of my readers, here is my theory.

First off, it’s not guns to blame. Guns are simply a tool in such cases. Making guns illegal would be useless to combat the causes, because the people who would want to use guns, they’ll find ways to acquire them. With the huge gun industry in the USA, incriminating or controlling gun ownership would be like trying to cut people off corn and corn fields. Good luck with that. Sure, regulating them will help, but it won’t treat the cause.

In my opinion, there are two driving reasons why these individuals jump the shark and start killing others en mass:

1. Artificial Societal Rules and Capitalism

The Western world (and especially the ultra-capitalistic USA) is living a lie. We are not meant to live the kind of lives we do today. As this very nice documentary put it, we’re running modern software on 50,000 year old hardware designs (our bodies). We haven’t evolved yet to be living in these conditions. So both the pressure to succeed as an individual in things that don’t truly matter (e.g. “becoming a successful professional and make money”), and the constant bullying and critique from the surrounding society for those who don’t play with the rules, is taking its toll. Most of us are burrying these feelings, others become bullies, and others just go on rampage, shooting people to get back to the society at large. It’s not random that most of the time they go and kill randomly.

2. Inhuman Nutrition and Mental Illness

This second point is the one that most people do not consider as a real point, but in my opinion it’s almost as important as the first point. Research in the ’80s shown that tribes of hunter & gatherers had very little schizophrenia or other mental illnesses (I highly suggest you check out this book too, by distinguished schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey). In contrast, half the Western world (especially in the US) is in med drugs. Kids these days are starting getting prescription drugs at the age of 6. We are NOT stable, normal people. We do NOT function properly — almost none of us in the Western civilization is! Except the societal pressure as outlined above, the second aspect is the kind of food we’re eating. The Western diet is a POISON diet, that’s why we have so many “diseases of civilization” that don’t appear in hunter & gatherer communities. The diet in the US is the most industrialized in the world, hence the various incidents mostly happening there. Poison your body, and you will poison your brain. After cutting down all grains when I went Paleo 15 months ago (and especially after going Paleo-ketogenic for a few months), I saw a huge change in my mental psyche: no anxiety anymore, situational depression was lifted, ADD lifted. I became less argumentative, less “difficult”. Even my sexual behavior changed, to the better (and this proves that this was a deep change). My creativity found new heights (I could never put my brain together before to do the kind of collage I do today). I would highly suggest you read the articles on this blog, by psychiatrist Emily Deans, and possibly do a search about various mental illnesses (and how these were lifted by cutting down the poison that is all grains, excessive sugars, vegetable oils, and legumes) at Paleohacks.com. Nutrition plays a way bigger role to mental illness than you think it is. We all think of mental illnesses as “bad luck” or “bad genes”, or “just craziness”, but it’s more closely related to Neolithic nutrition (that we haven’t evolved with) than we thought it ever was. Especially if you’re missing enough D3, and omega-3 in your diet (ratio to Omega-6 should be 1:2 or 1:3), expect mental havoc. Add on top of that environmental toxins and urbanization, and boom! With enough mental instability, some jump the shark and go shoot people.

As long as AT LEAST #2 is not fixed somehow (#1 can only be fixed via societal maturation and rapid, natural or not, evolution — which will take a few more thousand years), expect more such rampage killings in the future. So don’t sound so surprised the next time it happens and you start tweeting “Oh, my God, blah blah blah”. It’s very sad indeed, it’s a truly terrible thing. But it IS going to happen. Again, and again, and again.

For many people with gut problems like mine (IBS/IBD), following some gluten-free, low carb diet usually alleviates most of their symptoms within a few weeks/months. But sometimes, for some people, it doesn’t. In that case, specialized diets, all similar, but also each more restrictive than the previous, must be followed. Elimination diets are not as effective in my opinion, because some foods can create irregularity as late as 1-3 weeks after they’re consumed, making it impossible to know which food was the offending one.

Please note that I’m not a doctor, but I read and I experiment a lot, and this is the guide I’d follow myself:

1. Start with a doctor’s visit
A stool, allergy and blood tests (and possibly a colonoscopy) can find out if the source of your problem is mechanical, food intolerance, auto-immunity, or an infection. If it’s an infection, e.g. C-Diff, some protozoa like B. Hominis, H. Pylori, listeria or gardia etc. then you need antibiotics or a fecal transplant. As bad antibiotics are, these bad organisms can’t always be eradicated with diet, because they are capable of eating everything you eat (while most “good” gut bacteria only feed on carbs). However, new research has shown that home-made kefir can help kill C. Diff (commercial kefir has less potency).

2. Paleo/Primal
This is the least restrictive diet, the most balanced of all in terms of nutrients. It has to be 100% gluten-free to see health benefits. Go for up to 100 gr of “net” carbs per day (for net carbs, just don’t count the fiber). In addition to the Paleo diet, also add this list of superfoods (bone broth is super-important for gut health, for example). Reading online, I found that the vast majority of IBS, GERD, diverticulitis, and Celiac sufferers find relief with plain Paleo. Crohn’s and UC patients range from finding full relief, to partial, to not at all. So for some of these more difficult cases, they have to either add 24-hour fermented home-made goat or water kefir (while cutting down all other dairy for a while), or read next.

3. FODMAPs + Auto-immune Paleo
If Paleo (or the similar SCD & GAPS diets) don’t work, try to cut down FODMAPs and follow the auto-immune Paleo protocol additionally. Three diets in one. Please note, this is an extremely restrictive regiment.

The Auto-immune Paleo is the same as Paleo, but without any dairy (not even butter), nuts, seeds, fruits (except a few berries rarely), yeasts, eggs, shellfish, pepper spices, and no nightshades (no tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, white potatoes). It’s basically just fat (olive oil, tallow/lard/duck fat and coconut oil IF you can tolerate it), meat/fish/organs (preferably grass-fed/pastured/wild), and veggies/seaweed. This diet is best for people with strong auto-immune problems (e.g. Multiple Sclerosis), but sometimes it works for gut problems too.

FODMAPs include specific food groups (e.g. onions, brassicas, apples etc) that are allowed in all other diets, but you can’t consume in this diet. So for this, you need to follow both FODMAPs and Autoimmune Paleo, which removes most foods. DO NOT stay on this diet for more than 1-2 months. After your regularity has returned, add foods one by one, one every 4-5 days. This way, you will find out, if for example, nightshades are bad for you still, or if eggs are now more tolerable than before. Continue adding foods (unless you’re really intolerant to them) until you reach normal Paleo again, which you will have to sustain for life. Also, check your D3 & Mg levels with a blood test, and get a good digestive enzyme that can break down carbs and fats.

4. Fecal Transplant
If you’re among that 3%-5% of the IBS/IBD patients where none of the above works, then it’s possible that your problem is an infection of an unknown origin, that tests won’t identify. In that case, revert back to Paleo (plus home-made goat kefir), for life, and get a fecal transplant from a healthy donor. Until modern medicine catches up, this is your only hope.

Personally, I was lucky to be able to fix my IBS-D with a mix of Paleo and SCD. That is: Paleo + home-made goat kefir, up to 100 gr of “net” carbs per day (I also followed the Paleo-ketogenic diet for a few months, up to 50 gr “net” carbs per day), vitamin D3 3000 IU per day, and only few tubers/starches. Since almost all these IBS/IBD conditions eventually create malabsorption problems (I was very surprised to find out via a blood test that I was short on B12, since I eat a lot of meat/fish), I supplement a few times a week. I track what I eat via Cronometer, so if I seem short on a nutrient on a weekly basis, I supplement with it once. Put money aside to check your hsCRP (inflammation), B12, iron, calcium, folate and D3 levels via a blood test every year. It’s all about optimization, especially for us with a sensitive gut.

Good luck!

There’s no more tragic figure in the collage world than that of Karel Teige. After doing some research for the old masters of the collage medium, it’s my opinion that only Teige was ahead of his time. Most of the other surrealist or dada collage works have aged pretty badly (I can’t stand the visuals of Ernst’s work in this day and age, for example), but Teige’s works look like they were released just yesterday on TumblR.

And there’s a good reason for that. Other collage artists of his time had to practically scrap badly-shot pictures, or drawings from newspapers to find enough material for their collages. Back then, printing and pictures were expensive. But Teige actually shot the pictures he wanted to use for his collages himself. This coherent vision gave him a clear advantage, and high quality material to work on.

Sony’s Vegas Pro 12 was released a few weeks ago, and in my opinion, this is the most substantial update the application has seen between major releases in the last few years.

I’ve been using the application for a few weeks now, and aside from a few bumps that I expect to be ironed out in free updates, it delivered the goods as expected.

Here is a sum of the new features:
– The explorer view now supports back and froward and smart tags. Very handy for those who like to be tidy.
– Now you can change the properties of multiple files at once! That’s one of the things that was very painful for me back when I used to use Cineform AVIs, and Vegas used to get wrong their field order.
– Smart proxies. If you don’t own a fast CPU or an OpenCL graphics card, you can still edit fast using proxies. Vegas can automatically create them, you edit with them, and then it exports using the original, high quality version.
– Layer Dimensionality is a new plugin, similar to Photoshop’s Layer styles.
– There’s an A-B roll style editing now for those who need more precision over their frames, overlaps etc.
– New shortcuts to trim the beginning or the end of a clip in a single stroke (before, you had to press “S”, and then manually delete the event).
– A new plugin for color matching two different events/shots.
– LAB Adjust and L*a*b* Color Space Histogram, which works in conjunction to the Color matching plugin.
– Most of the audio plugins have now being ported to 64bit.
– You can send/receive project files from Avid, FCP7/X, DaVinci, Premiere and After Effects CS6. I tried this with Premiere, it worked wonderfully for simple projects.
– You can change the shape of a mask.

These are pretty much some of the features I always wanted from Vegas Pro, and there are here now. This is the most powerful release to date. The only three features missing for me are: a color plugin like the freeware (but buggy) AAV ColorLab, the ability to “re-light” a scene, and automatic tracking. Hopefully in Vegas Pro 13!

Finally, in addition to Vegas Pro 12, Sony release a package called “Visual Effects Suite 2”, which includes the very capable HitFilm 2.

Collage is the ultimate remix in the graphical arts. Interestingly, we’re living in the age of remix.

The following is most of the knowledge I acquired since I started doing collages in April 2012. Modern vintage collage is the most popular collage genre these days among younger crowds, so I’ll focus on that.

Regarding paper and digital collages: I prefer the look & feel of paper collages, but I find digital to be more versatile and flexible. For my collages I try to make them look as much as paper as possible. I don’t like adding effects that scream “digital”, because they look lame in my opinion (e.g. transparencies, vector lines, over-cleaned up elements, etc).

“Bay View” by Eugenia Loli

What you need

You will need a modern computer (preferably with a high resolution display), a Wacom Bamboo tablet (~$70 — avoid cheaper models, and there’s no need for more expensive models), and an image manipulation program. The best software is Photoshop for this job. If you use The Gimp or Photoshop Elements 10+, these will do too, but they’re both missing some features. The Gimp is missing adjustment layers and layer effects among others, that we will use a lot, while Elements has almost all the main features in place, but with less flexibility than that of Photoshop. Regardless, even The Gimp can do the job if you cut a few corners and go around its limitations. To follow this tutorial you need some basic experience with Photoshop.

On Photoshop’s user interface, you will need the following tools to be visible: main toolbox (ON by default), main toolbar (ON by default), layers, adjustment layers, and brush settings. The shortcuts I provide are for PCs, so for Mac you will have to improvise a bit (although they’re not that different).

Find your inspiration

First, you need to find some inspiration. Ideas don’t usually come down on artists without some serious influence from other artists. In the beginning, you’ll probably be copying others, and that’s ok. As your personal style pushes through with time and experimentation, originality will ensue. One of the reasons for writing this tutorial is so you can further the art of modern collage. If you stay stuck at copying others, no progress can be made for humanity. But if within some pastiche work there’s also some small innovation here and there, then that’s progress. And that’s the whole point of this.

So, spend a few hours studying these links, featuring collages from some of the best artists in the genre: Cur3es, Mesineto, Ben Giles, Jordan Clark, Jesse Treece, Bryan “GlassPlanet” Olson, Beth Hoeckel, Julien Pacaud, Sarah Eisenlohr, Djuno Tomsni, Cardboardcities, David Delruelle, Dessi Terzieva, Tareco, Caroline Alkire, Owlwise12, and many more. Here are my collages too. 😉

“The Sphinx” by Eugenia Loli

Find your pictures

Your sources for pictures will be old vintage magazines (particularly National Geographic from the ’50s through ’80s), and Creative Commons digital pictures. You can either scan images yourself from these old magazines, or search on FlickR or TumblR, or other sites that have digitally scanned old pictures (FlickR has many groups with old vintage scans, here’s my collection). There’s also some nice Public Domain pics here.

To find pictures you like in the Creative Commons domain, you can use these links to search on FlickR:
– Creative Commons “Attribution” images (BY): you can use commercially (least restrictive — that’s the one I use myself the most). There are 36 million CC-BY images on FlickR.
– Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike images (BY-SA): you can use commercially, but your collage’s license must have the same license as this.
– Creative Commons Attribution – No commercial (BY-NC): you can’t use commercially, no other restrictions.
– Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike – No Commercial (BY-SA-NC): You can not use commercially, and your collage’s license must have this license too (most restrictive).

ALL Creative Commons images above require crediting. Don’t forget to credit the name of the photographer and provide their image link on your collage’s FlickR page (when you finally post it).

A tip to select pictures: When it comes to humans, go for vintage imagery. When it comes to landscape or objects, go either way. Modern pictures of humans look really bad (their poses and clothes lack charisma somehow). Also, make sure your pictures are striking and top notch. You can not make a good non-abstract or semi-abstract collage out of uninteresting pictures. This is something I learned the hard way in the beginning.

Make sure your pictures are of some considerable resolution. If for example the picture of the human you’d like to use is only 500 pixels tall, and your digital document is 3000 pixels tall, you have a problem. After you resize it, it will look really pixelated and ugly (not good for printing). Sometimes, you can go around the problem by applying artistic filters on that specific layer (e.g. posterize, watercolor etc), but sometimes you just need higher resolution scans/pics.

Set your canvas

There are standard poster sizes in the US. On your software, create a new image, with the following attributes: RGB gamut, “Adobe sRGB” colorspace, 8 bit, at 180 dpi, with a transparent background. I’d avoid using 32bit color, since it’s too slow, and not much photo-manipulation is happening on collages, so the quality degradation is minimal. Here are the resolutions for standard poster sizes, set at 180dpi, RGB/sRGB:
24″x36″ = 4320×6480 (2:3)
24″x24″ = 4320×4320 (1:1 square)
18″x30″ = 3240×4320 (2:3) (and also, 18″x30″, so it fits on 24″x36″ frames exactly with 3″ border)
18″x18″ = 3240×3240 (1:1 square)
12″x18″ = 2160×3240 (2:3)
12″x12″ = 2160×2160 (1:1 square)
6″x8″ = 1080×1440 (2:3, a small size, if your pictures are small)

For each of these, you can save them with a different preset, so you don’t have to re-enter them on Photoshop each time you start a new collage. The one I’m using usually is the 12″x18″ one, because vintage scans that I find online are usually small in resolution, so they fit that size best.

Cut out your pictures

Inside your web browser, right click on the highest resolution available for the picture you want to use, and select “copy image”. Then, from the Photoshop menu, after you have created the document in one of the sizes mentioned above, select EDIT/PASTE. Your image is now inside Photoshop (PS). Use your tablet pen from now on, and save often.

On the layer panel, make sure you have selected the layer you want to cut out. If you have more than one images pasted into the PS document, make the rest invisible (click their little “eye” icons next to their layer). Then, for the layer you’re working on, enable STROKE from the layer effects menu (give it size 2 — default is 8). Layers effects can be reached for each layer from the second icon on the bottom of the layer panel, as shown in the screenshot.

Select the ERASER from the PS toolbox (“E” shortcut on the keyboard), and use the “brush” kind of eraser (from the toolbar). From the Brush properties window on the side, select the second brush kind (the one that’s hard). Set the brush size to 12.

For most of the cutting, use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (this can be activated by long pressing on the Lasso icon and selecting it from the pop-up menu). I find myself using it more and more these days. If you make a mistake with it (e.g. you selected too much to be deleted), undo the last anchor by hitting DEL. Double-click to close down an area to delete by again hitting DEL key on the keyboard.

Some of the most used tools mentioned in this tutorial

Learn the zoom shortcuts: CNTRL+1 for 1:1 zoom, CNTRL+0 to fit on screen, CNTRL++ to zoom in more, or CNTRL+- to zoom out. Zoom-in more than 1:1, and using the Eraser, precisely cutout the image. For the parts that you need more precision (e.g. an angle), change the brush size. Depending on which part of the image you work on, you will have to change brush sizes all the time. The stroke will help you see easier which parts needed cutting. If you make a mistake (e.g. you cut out too much), undo the last action by hitting CNTRL+ALT+Z.

When you’re done cutting out the picture, disable the stroke effect, and make the layer invisible. Move on to cut out the next image. Obviously, if you’re using a single background image, it needs no cut-out, since it’s going to take over the whole document.

Note: there are many ways to cut out objects in Photoshop. Some of these techniques (e.g. using masks) are much more precise than doing the cutting by hand, but since we’re trying to emulate paper cuts, these imprecisions can work in our favor stylistically.

Juxtapose

Create duplicates of all the “cleaned up” layers (you can do that by dragging and dropping each layer in the “Create new layer” icon in the layer panel, or from the right-click layer menu for each layer). Make the duplicates visible, and the originals invisible (so they don’t get in the way).

Download my guides, and import either the square one or the 3:2 one (depending what your document size is) as new layer (on top of all others). If it doesn’t fit perfectly in your document, resize it. Visual guides help you place objects on the image more precisely, in a way that the viewer’s brain can decode subconsciously. They help you apply some invisible visual order.

Now, play around with the images, to compose your collage. You can move an element above or below another element by dragging their respective layer up or down on the layer menu.

Clicking the little “move” icon (first icon in the PS main toolbox) will let you move the images around in the document.

Most of the time, you will need to change the size of some, or all of your images. CNTRL+T will open the transform action for the working layer. Press the SHIFT key while resizing your image from the side anchors, because you want to keep the right aspect ratio (otherwise you will end up with thin or fat heads of people). For pictures of landscape, you don’t have to keep the right aspect ration, it’s whatever works. From the same resize action, you can also rotate your pictures. There’s a little icon on the top toolbar to apply or cancel the resizing, and CNTRL+ALT+Z to undo.

Sometimes you might want to also rotate an image horizontally, or even vertically for more drama. This can be done from the EDIT/TRANSFORM main menu.

Very important: DO NOT resize an image, and then resize it again. Each time you apply a different resizing session, you lose massive quality. If you found that your resizing wasn’t perfect the first time, either undo it and redo it, or duplicate a new layer from the original layer, and then redo the resizing. You can delete unwanted layers by selecting them and pressing the DEL key.

Sometimes you might need to tangle two images together, for example, parts of one image to be visible over the other, and other parts of the other picture to be on top of the other. To do that, set the transparency on the top image layer of the two to 50%, and “cut out” these parts using the eraser tool. Then, set transparency back to 100%.

NOTE: It’s impossible to know which pictures will go well before hand. The way I try many, many pictures until I find something that works, is to only cut them down grossly using the lasso tool, and resize them all the time. When I have the pictures that are surely going to be used in the collage, only then I go to precisely cut their originals (I delete the test layers).

NOTE 2: Don’t “load” your collages with countless objects. Keep them simple. Just because you have this nice picture of a vintage car, doesn’t mean you have to use it. If it doesn’t help the overall aesthetics and vision of the work, don’t use it. Less is more.

Fix the Colors

CNTRL+click on the layer’s little representative icon in the layer panel will SELECT the layer’s object in the document. Make sure your object and only that object is selected. Then, from the Adjustment Layer panel, click Curves. Then, click AUTO in the Curves panel. Select the BLUE curve from the drop-down menu there, and make it less blue (usually, Photoshop over-blues images in Auto mode).

CNTRL+click on the layer’s little representative icon in the layer panel will SELECT the layer’s object in the document. Make sure your object and only that object is selected. Then, from the Adjustment Layer panel, click the Brightness and Contrast icon. Play around with these until your layer looks good. Don’t overdo it with contrast, paper collages are low contrast (because film/paper was low contrast traditionally).

CNTRL+click the layer again to reselect it, and this time click the Hue/Saturation from the Adjustment Layer panel. There, you can play with the hue and saturation (usually, you’d need to reduce saturation, especially for modern, digital pictures). You can also turn images to black & white, or you can play around by pressing the Colorize to give a monochromatic hue to your object (I personally favor the 192 for hue, 8 for saturation in that mode).

Do the same for the rest of the layers.

Apply effects

From the same menu you had enabled stroking in the beginning, enable drop shadow and inner shadow. Change the drop shadow settings (distance, spread, size) to 0,0,8 and inner shadow to 0,0,2, although different designs might require different settings. Tinker with these settings until you get the images look good to your eyes. Don’t go for huge fluffy back shadows, because that’s a tell-tale sign of too much photoshoping. Paper collages have no shadow, we simply try to emulate the 3D-ness of glued paper. Do this for each image layer separately (except for adjustment layers).

Now, zoom in and look at the state of your resized objects. If some of them look pixelated or not clear-enough, select their correspondent layer, and from the main PS menu, select filters. I usually use cutout, posterize, watercolor, and from the last filter folder, the Craquelure. Sometimes, I stack up to 3 filters together (there’s a stacking area in the filter window).

Your objects will look different among them (since different filters were maybe used on them, or some objects might be in black and white), but that’s a style choice. You can also purchase third party artistic filters to get more “looks”.

Curves

This is the final collaging step. Just click the topmost layer in the layer panel, and then from the Adjustment Layers panel (you might have to hit the “back” icon in that window in order to go to the adjustments listing), click the Curves layer. A new layer will be created in your Layers panel, on top of all others, and with a mask that covers the entire document. Make it look like this for a vintage look (you can play around of course):

If you’re using Adobe Photoshop Elements instead, download and install this Curves plugin, because the Curves that come with Elements is a joke. The only two differences with the full Photoshop Curves is that this can only be applied on per-layer basis, instead of the entire document. So you will have to do the same Curves adjustment for each layer separately. Also, this plugin is working as a filter, and not as an “adjustment layer”, so your changes are “baked” into the layer for good. That’s why make sure you apply these changes in copies of your layers (so you have your originals intact in case you don’t like the changes after a while).

BUSINESS SIDE

EXIF Info

At FILE / File Info, enter the title, artist name, if any Creative Commons credits in the description (photographer name and FlickR URL), copyright-it, enter the name of the license (prefer the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial” license), and the URL to your main page. Say “ok” there, and save the document.

It’s important to include EXIF info on your jpegs because if people make a post using your art but never include your name or blog in the description, this can theoretically still be retrieved through the EXIF info.

Export

You will need to export 6 different images, apart from the original PSD document.

1. Save as JPEG, quality 10, Baseline OPTIMIZED. That’s the main exported image, for Society6 (or for FlickR, if you’re not selling your work). I save my collages using their title as their filename, for example for my “Bay View” collage, I save it as bay-view.psd and bay-view.jpg. But for the purposes of this tutorial, lets call it collage.jpg
2. Load the just-saved JPEG as a separate document, and from the IMAGE main menu, select IMAGE SIZE. Type 1024 for height, the width should automatically change. If your document was square or wide, type 1024 for width. “Save As” using your collage’s title plus the -web suffix, for example: collage-web.jpg (save using quality 10, Baseline Optimized). This image is for TumblR. CargoCollective, Facebook, etc. It’s basically the “advertisement” version of your collage, at lower (but high-enough) resolution that you will use for all web sites (except for society6, where you export the full sized version from #1).

If you’re selling on Society6, there are a few more exports to do:

3. Create a new, empty document at 4600×3000 pixels (save it as preset the first time). On your collage document, select SELECT ALL from the main select menu, and then “COPY MERGED” from the EDIT menu. Then go to the new document, and PASTE it. If your document is a 3:2 one, from the EDIT/TRANSFORM menu, select “ROTATE 90 CW” and resize it to fit the document. Hold SHIFT when resizing in order to keep the right aspect ratio (you don’t want to squash or stretch the picture unnaturally). Apply the resizing and save this document as collage-laptop.jpg This is for Society6’s iPad/laptop skins (I prefer to export for iPad vertically, instead for horizontal laptops, since I believe that more people are buying iPad skins than for laptops).
4. Create a new, empty document at 1300×2000 pixels (save it as preset the first time). On your collage document, select SELECT ALL from the main select menu, and then “COPY MERGED” from the EDIT menu. Then go to the new document, and PASTE it. From the EDIT/TRANSFORM menu, resize it to fit the document. Hold SHIFT when resizing in order to keep the right aspect ratio (you don’t want to squash or stretch the picture unnaturally). Apply the resizing, and save this document as collage-iphone.jpg
5. Create a new, empty document at 3300×5100 pixels (save it as preset the first time). On your collage document, select SELECT ALL from the main select menu, and then “COPY MERGED” from the EDIT menu. Then go to the new document, and PASTE it. Move the pasted image near the top of the document, and then select ALL from the main select menu, and then from the layer main menu select ALIGN LAYERS TO SELECTION / HORIZONTAL CENTERS. Do not resize up, no one wants a huge image of your collage on their t-shirt (if anything, maybe resize down, by keeping the right aspect ratio by pressing SHIFT when resizing). Save this document as collage-tshirt.png (note: save this as PNG, not JPEG). Sometimes, I remove the background completely for t-shirts, since depending on the design, it can look better that way.
6. Export at 3500×3500 (square) for pillows & tote bags (make sure you don’t change the aspect ratio though, I usually crop).
7. There are a few other new products to export as. Especially the Print All Over shirts that look great with collages. You will need to be creative to make a collage fit right on a t-shirt (e.g. you might need to reverse and duplicate parts of the collage to fit it right in the sleeves etc).

Society6 (optional)

After you have setup your account at Society6, to post a collage there, select “post/sell” and click the checkbox. Enter the title, upload the full quality collage.jpg file, select 3-4 categories, and enter the pricing at the bottom (if you don’t enter the pricing, you will make $0 for each item sold). In the next screen, upload the laptop, iphone, and t-shirt files. That’s it, your item is now live and ready to be sold.

Society6 has a two-tier store, your personal store, where everything becomes available for sale immediately, and the Society6 main store, where your work becomes available for sale only after it gets enough “promotes” from other artists. The number of promotes required is not set (they have a secret algorithm to determine this), it can be as low as 10, and as high as 25 promotes.

To get promotes on Society6, you need followers. You get followers by promoting or following the artists you like. Some artists there never promote anything, some do. Some artists only promote things they actually like, but you shouldn’t be like that if you want to acquire followers. You should also be promoting artists that you have noticed that they promote a lot in general. Society6 should not be seen as your “likes” repository, it’s business. As such, your promotes must be strategically placed. It’s your job to spend a bit of time each week on Society6 to enlarge your circle of contacts there and hopefully acquire promotes. Don’t overdo it with promotes though, you don’t want to end up with many thousands of promotes. Maybe 100-120 promotes a week are a good number to go by.

Finally, don’t upload more than one collage per day on Society6, because then they will be fighting for promoting votes. You want to maximize their chances for more votes, to maybe even make the front page one day! Remember, items reach the front page in their first 24 hours. Past that time, it’s useless to have people keep promoting your old artworks, won’t change a thing.

Make sure you have an ABOUT page on Society6, that’s where you put the rest of your links, and an email address (so you can get commissions).

Printing

Having said all that about Society6, much more money comes from selling prints yourself, since Society6 takes a huge cut out of the profit. There are a few rules if you’re also going the printing route:
– Your printer technology must be pigment-based. If it’s not, then prints will fadeout within a year’s time on *matte* paper, and you will have a customer problem on your hands.
– You must print on matte, art-quality paper. Glossy paper is useless for high art, it’s only used for photography. Glossy doesn’t fade out, but since you need matte, you must go for the right printer.
– You should get a printer that supports rolls if possible (cheaper, better types of paper available, convenient).
– Always select the right paper on the printer’s configuration dialog that opens up via Photoshop, otherwise the colors can go all crazy when printed.
– For Canon printers, I had to configure the brightness to +10 and contrast to -10 to get the image right. I didn’t have to do that on HP printers. Not sure about Epson printers.

So, there are two ways to go about printing:
1. Buying an 18″ or 24″ photo Canon or Epson printer. These printers start at $2000 as of this writing (2013). They’re good, but expensive. Unfortunately, as of this writing, HP doesn’t have pigment printers, they’re behind the curve regarding this technology.
2. Buying a 13″ printer (which is good for 13″x19″ sheet prints with 1″ or 2″ border). There are 1-2 Epson models ($170) and 1 Canon ($150) that are both at that size AND they feature pigmented ink (so the prints won’t go bad for 200 years).

After you print, you sign it on the low left corner. Then, you put tissue paper on it to protect it, you roll both, and then you ship it using mailing tubes. Always buy 2″ more of mailing tubes length than what your print is (e.g. for a 13″x18″ print you’d need a ~15″ tube), and you go for 3″ width. 2″ width is too small to roll more than 1 print in it. I use Paypal to automatically do US postage, and I print a customs form from the USPS web site for international ones. The domestic Paypal rolls are ready for drop-off (they’re paid), but the international rolls must be paid on the USPS counter (however, it’s super fast, since the customs info is already printed and attached to the roll).

For smaller collages (e.g. 6″x8″), I send them out using plain “Do Not Bend” hard envelopes, paid via Paypal (both domestic and international — Paypal can’t do international rolls only).

Check my own shop page to see how I have structured that page to direct customers both to Society6 and on my own printing business.

Making Money

Every time Society6 has a promotion (e.g. free shipping, or free shipping using a special URL code) you must make a TumblR or Facebook post (depending where you have more followers at). Sometimes, you take screenshots of your various products on Society6 to show to your followers how your art looks like when it’s printed on various products. Without frequent such posts (once a week or so), people don’t bother buying.

A few things I’ve noticed:
– People mostly buy art on weekends, when they have time. Especially on Sundays. In that case, it’s best to do such a promotional blog post on Fridays and then leave the post up until Sunday. DELETE these posts after these promotions have expired, don’t let them clutter your Tumblr or Facebook page.
– I sell 40% of prints on Society6, 40% iPhone cases, and 20% of everything else (e.g. tshirts, tote bags etc), so make sure you export for most products, as mentioned above. Some people don’t want to export for iPhone cases and such out of purist’s ideology, however, there is something to be said about modern times: these days, the young people are showing off their art on their iPhone case, not on their wall. Older, or established people usually buy prints to frame and put on their walls, but young people mostly buy tshirts and iOS cases. This doesn’t mean that you are cheapening your art by putting it on an iPhone case. You simply go with the times, and times have changed. People see and utilize art differently today than they did in the time of Picasso. Embrace change, don’t stay behind. If you want to express your unhappiness about the uber-commercialization of art these days, simply make a collage about it! But don’t restrict younger viewers from enjoying your art the only way they know how!

Instagram
That’s where you can get the most attention for art these days (in the 2000s it was Flickr, in 2010-2013 it was Tumblr, now it’s Instagram). Use up to 25 tags ONLY.

TumblR

TumblR is not optional. It’s the heartbeat of contemporary art. That’s how you become known these days, there’s no “Rolling Stone” equivalent magazine to shoot you big. The public decides instead. If you already have a TumblR account, create a new blog for your collages, you want to keep it separate from everything else. Make sure you have links to your FlickR, CargoCollective, Facebook, Twitter/Instagram (optional), and Society6 pages, along with a way to contact you. You don’t want to have gallery professionals or magazine artist directors not being able to find you! Give out an email address, don’t be shy!

Create a new “photo” post, “set a click-through link” to your tumblr page, and upload the collage-web.jpg file. For caption enter the collage’s title (linking to your Society6 or FlickR page of that artwork), and your name (linking to your tumblr page again). Here’s an example on how a post of mine looks like. On TumblR is important on acquiring followers, so this posting method, maximizes that.

Under the title/name, include your information, on every single post (I usually copy/paste it from a previous post). Here’s how my HTML “signature” looks like:

<small><a href=”http://cargocollective.com/eugenialoli”>Gallery</a> | <a href=”http://eugenialoli.tumblr.com/shop”>Shop</a> | <a href=”http://eugenialoli.tumblr.com/”>Tumblr</a> | <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/eugenia_loli/”>Flickr</a> | <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/EugeniasCollages”>Facebook</a></small>

Change the URLs to your links, leave the rest the same. Watch out for HTML bugs!

Then, on the tags box on the right sidebar, enter the following three tags (comma separated):
collage, art, artists on tumblr
TumblR only takes into account FIVE tags, so don’t enter more than five. The first three tags are important, because they’re mostly curated. If your collage is selected, then your work will be shown to thousands of artistic-minded people. These tags are also browsed by TumblR Staff, who run the TumblR Radar, which is a daily image selection shown to ALL tumblr users. If you ever get on TumblR Radar, you can achieve a million views and get thousands of followers in a single day! But your way to the Tumblr Radar usually goes through the curated tags, so get these right!

The fourth & fifth tags can be related to your collage. For example, if your collage has pyramids in it, enter the the words: pyramid, Egypt Then, create the post.

FlickR

There are two reasons why FlickR is important:
1. Through its various Groups, you get exposure to not only new fans, but also magazines and galleries. Galleries are still using FlickR instead of the more modern Tumblr.
2. Through the “share” function, people can share to their Tumblr (the main goal is always Tumblr).

Upload collage-web.jpg on FlickR (or the main collage.jpg image, if you’re not selling anywhere). Don’t forget to type in the credits (if any), if you haven’t already entered these in the EXIF DATA as mentioned above.

For tags, comma separated, enter:
collage, art, “your name” [in double quotes], [and one more tag word that describes your collage]
TumblR bloggers are using FlickR’s automatic tumblr blog-posting abilities, so these tags will automatically get carried over. By entering your name on FlickR as a tag, you can then track that tag on TumblR. This way you will know, 80% of the times, if someone has blogged your work or not (few bloggers delete these tags).

I’d suggest you offer your work under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, and not the default “all rights reserved” one. Let blogs be allowed to post your work without permission, it’s no commercial usage anyway! Join the cultural revolution. Heck, this very document exists for you exactly because this mindset drives me to write it. Give something back too! You’re not losing your copyright, you only allow non-commercial usage of it (e.g. posting on blogs, a school or non-profit using your image etc). And since it’s also “Attribution”, the people who will use your image, must also include your name and a link to your original work. So basically, if you play your cards right, Creative Commons can be free advertisement for you, rather than a burden.

Finally, subscribe to the 30 biggest collage Groups on FlickR, and post your work there too (to find them, check the ones I have posted my collages into, and follow them). Many TumblR bloggers are browsing these FlickR groups, trying to find new, original artwork to post.

Update your profile on FlickR with info, and include the rest of your links. Always be easy to find and be contacted. DO NOT include links for Society6 or your personal shop on Flickr, it’s against their rules.

Facebook, Twitter, CargoCollective

If you have Twitter, do a tweet about your new collage, with a link to its FlickR or Tumblr page. Don’t upload images on Twitter, just link instead. Your goal would be to have the biggest fanbase primarily on Tumblr, since that’s where the young people are (ages 18-35), which are usually the ones who appreciate mostly that type of art.

After you have acquired a bit of a fanbase, create a Facebook fan page, and invite your TumblR friends in it. On Facebook, you can upload the collage-web.jpg file. Include a link to your shop or society6 page for each collage posted. Also, subscribe to a few collage groups there, like Not A Paper and Collage of the World and upload there too.

Eventually, get yourself a CargoCollective account (it’s invitation-only, but you can ask for an invitation). There, upload your collage-web.jpg versions of your files, but *only* the ones you really like. That’s your gallery page, you see, many professionals use it, so make sure that only your best stuff are there. Make sure you have an ABOUT page with info about you, links, email address, and a link to your shop. The free version of Cargocollective allows up to 12 projects and 120 MBs of data to be uploaded. 12 projects is enough for most, but 120 MB of data is tight, so you might want to export at 750 pixels height (instead of 1024px) which will generate a smaller file size.

Pinterest, WeHeartIt

I also use these two services. Pinterest connects me to an older fanbase, while WeHeartIt gets reblogged a lot on Tumblr. I always use the collage, art, my-name, and two more tags on WeHeartIt, so when some of these are getting reblogged, they’re carried over to Tumblr.

So, for WeHeartIt, I share it via Tumblr’s individual collage page (after I have installed its browser extension). And for Pinterest, I share either via my Flickr’s “share” function, or via Pinterest’s own browser extension, again, on the collage’s individual Tumblr page.

Regarding Behance, I don’t use it, although I might do so in the future.

Overall, uploading for all these sites that way every time you release a new collage should take you an additional half an hour, maximum.

Conclusion

Please email me if you have questions, or if something is not clear in this text. Also, I’d love to see what you’re done with my instructions, so please send me your FlickR links! Good luck!

The main reason why we’re so sick today in my opinion is because of “food staples”. I don’t believe in food staples, no matter what the staple is. It could be wheat, rice, corn, taro, whatever. The point is, when a large percentage of your food comes from the exact same food, you got a nutritional problem. It’s not possible to get all the nutrition necessary from the exact same food.

If you’re not willing to cut down wheat completely, at least have 2-3 slices of bread per week (preferably fermented sourdough), and that should be all the wheat that you need. You see, if you’re eating bread today, pasta tomorrow, and pizza the day after that, then all you have eaten is wheat. And given how wheat disables the body from absorbing nutrients from the rest of the foods you eat, you can end up malnourished (like in my case, even if I was as fat as a cow). In fact, researchers say that the problem with wheat sensitivity (that 2/3s of all people have, even if they don’t know it — and the rest will get it onset anyway) is because of too much wheat, not necessarily because wheat is evil. It has an accumulative effect in the immune system, just like GMOs and pesticides.

Having said that about grains and tubers, the same can be said about protein and fats. Humans need a variety of good fats (saturated or not), and a variety of protein. If all you eat is beef steak (as many Paleo people do), then you’ve done nothing to progress your health. You need to eat offal from various animals, different kinds of fish, different kinds of shellfish, and as importantly, different kinds of game (e.g. deer, pheasant, ostrich, peacock, duck, goose, antelope, bison, horse, etc etc etc). Yes, it’s almost impossible to get good game anymore, but variety on meat is as important as variety on plants. If all meat and fish and shellfish were the same, then they would all TASTE the same. But they don’t taste the same, because they’re comprised from different nutrients and elements.

Food staples be gone. But that can only happen if both the market demands it, and if we reduce our human population significantly, because the Earth can’t feed 7 billion people in this manner.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a few years now, you KNOW how I had been a Canon fan girl for their consumer digicams in terms of video. Their previous digicam non-DSLR cameras were steadily getting better and better video controls, and that was something to cheer for. They were outperforming all other manufacturers by getting the *basics* of video right: exposure compensation, exposure lock, custom low colors, good frame rates at good bitrates, and some models even had manual focus and focus lock.

I was even, unfairly, called biased by certain people, for pushing these Canon digicams. But I’m not biased about hardware, I’m a hard realist. There were definite, true, and important reasons why I’d suggest Canon in the past (if your goal was artistic videography).

Well, the newer Canon cameras, starting last year, weaned off such abilities! FEATURES WERE REMOVED one by one, model by model. We are now at the point where the expensive, high end P&S digicam S110 does not even have exposure compensation/lock. This is obviously done so their more expensive dSLRs sell better, and their camcorder department doesn’t die. It’s an ARTIFICIAL way of keeping business afloat. That’s not what the market wants, it’s what Canon wants. Consider that the video section on the S110 manual WAS REMOVED too. Yup, removed. Where there used to be a whole chapter on video usage in the manual (in EVERY ONE of their P&S models), now there’s *none*.

For all that is worth, I can not suggest Canon to anyone anymore, when it comes to video mode in P&S digicams. What makes it even worse is that the other digicam manufacturers haven’t step up to the challenge to take over what Canon left behind. Most of the cameras from the other manufacturers also miss exposure compensation & lock, or they use fucked up frame rates. When it comes to semi-serious videography with these pocket cameras, they ALL SUCK, even if that was NOT the case 2 years ago!

I mean, they got to the point where they offered 1080/24p and 720/30p at good bitrates last year. What they should have done this year is to keep the old features and push their frame rates to 1080/30p/25p/24p and 720/50p/60p (just like in their dSLR range). I’m not asking for other crazy features here, neither I’m asking for full manual control. But when they go out on purpose and they remove the most basic of controls, exposure compensation and exposure lock, something that has been there since early 2000s, there’s something sinister at work there.

So, what to do? Get a dSLR or micro-thirds camera that happens to have the whole nine yards when it comes to video. Or if you prefer a camcorder, get the ones that cost over $1000 that also come with the whole nine yards. Since you can’t go for a good-enough $200 P&S digicam for video, shell the cash and get something appropriate for over $1000. At least you won’t be ripped off by buying a P&S digicam for $500 and not even get the video features that were present in a $100 Canon digicam just 2 years ago! So my suggestion is, either go all in, or try to find older models, second hand.

I personally still use my older, SX230, which is the BEST small camera for live shows, amazing mic quality on loud shows, and it still has all the other needed video features too. But it’s not the best in terms of other things (e.g. it has a slow lens). The S100 from last year is also good video feature-wise (if you ignore its hardware faults), the last of its range to support all the basic video stuff that are needed to make a video look professional, and not like a piece of shit cellphone video.

And let’s not forget that Canon only announced the full HDMI-out for the 5D MkIII recently after a third party firmware group said that they hacked in that feature. So basically, someone has to squeeze Canon’s balls before they actually offer what their hardware CAN do, but they refuse to put the software behind it to support it. Even if HDMI support might have engineering costs, this is not a case of “software costs” to the video features mentioned above, because the software for the specific features WAS ALREADY THERE. Instead, they’ve been CONSCIOUSLY removing them PROGRESSIVELY. As in, a strategy.

So, fuck you Canon, you are corporate shills and you suck donkey balls.

Update: The S110 manual I had access at the time of the writing did not mention video, but the updated manuals did, and they do mention exposure compensation and locking for the S110. The issues do remain for most of their newest P&S models though.

Recently, Dr Mercola’s web site was updated with new information about his nutritional plan. He’s a popular doctor, and people listen to him. I agree with his plan for 95% of what he suggests, except a few points, where he fails to see the bigger picture.

1. Honey

He suggests stevia instead of honey. A sweetener over one we actually evolved with eating. Some tribes would put their lives in danger to get their hands on some honey! Raw, unfiltered, and local honey has major anti-microbial and anti-allergen powers — we don’t consume it just because it’s sweet. Sure, if you’re trying to lose weight, avoid it. But from the moment you’re healthy, a few teaspoons per week will actually be beneficial. Nobody suggests to go nuts on it. Regarding stevia: speaking for me personally, it gives me bad stomach ache. Raw honey never does. Erythritol is a better alternative for me.

2. Juicing vegetables

Unless you eat the pulp with it, then this is a bad idea. Mercola suggests this in order to eat more raw veggies, and that’s commendable (40%-50% of our food should be raw). However, if you’re juicing too much without the pulp, that’s going to leave behind other good stuff we need. For eating raw veggies, I’d suggest a gluten-free vegan book. I’m not a vegan, but for that specific purpose (raw veggies), it’s got good recipe ideas without pushing for juicing.

3. Raw milk

Maybe it’s just me, but I simply can’t trust raw milk. I had a cousin almost dying from fever after consuming raw milk from his sheep. And that was 20 years ago, in rural Greece, away from civilization, drugs and GMO feedlots, with healthy sheep that’d go up in the mountain every day to freely eat, with only 3 dogs as a companion. These were clean, healthy sheep. After that family scare, I simply don’t trust raw dairy products from no farmer in the world.

On a recent video, Mercola also asks people to not eat commercial kefir and yogurt, which I think it’s a bit overreacting. Obviously, home-made goat kefir is the ultimate dairy food, and it’s gotta be home-made to get the full benefits. But while commercial products might be 10x less effective, they’re probably still not as bad as none at all. I’m only against dairy if the product is not fermented (e.g. milk out of the carton), if it’s not coming from an A2 casein animal (e.g. US cows), and if the animals it comes from lived a sick, drugged life. I’m personally transitioning away from all dairy, except grass-fed butter, daily home-made goat kefir (which I consider one of the most potent super-foods), and very rarely, some cream or a thin slice of (goat/sheep/buffalo) cheese if my husband insists.

4. Avoid pork

I’d say that this might have some truth in it, but I don’t think it’s as black and white as he thinks. I mean, our ancestors would even eat snakes, so eating pork sounds like gourmet in comparison. So for this point, I’d say that the truth is somewhere in between.

For all his other points, I agree with him. Too bad he forgot to suggest strict abstaining from grains, and eating more shellfish though. I have personally transitioned to Dr Jack Kruse’s version of Paleo, dubbed Epi-Paleo, which has more emphasis on seafood instead of meat.

I haven’t updated this blog for some time now. In the meantime, I had surgery, removing a benign tumor. That type of tumor (fibroid) is supposed to be found only in the uterus, but in my case it was glued on the cervix and bladder. Four surgeons refused to operate on me because of the bladder proximity. I was lucky to be sent to a Stanford professor, who happens to be an uro-gynecologist and who graciously accepted me as a patient. The doc said that he was thinking about my case for weeks, because there’s no bibliography or other documented cases like mine, so he had to improvise. My guess is that 10 years of IBS had fucked me up so much on the inside, that my body couldn’t even get… a tumor right.

The surgery went well, and I’m currently in bed, recuperating. Docs said that I can still have children. I have four incisions, two of them large. The biggest pain is the catheter that I have to live with until the end of the month. I had my ups and downs in the last 5 days since the surgery: low blood pressure, high pulse, headache, pain in my kidney (because of a ureteral stent used during the operation), high and low temperatures. I’m currently feeling better, but I still can’t get up for long time from the bed, and I feel nausea when I eat. On top of all that, I’m suspecting a C-Diff infection, since I was given antibiotics, and my gut flora is a very sensitive place because of previous C-Diff infections and IBS for 10 years.

My husband, JBQ, was a champion throughout this whole ordeal, and he has been taking care of me so much. He really is an amazing human being. I made this for him: