I report to you from the road, where we have been traveling for eight days so far on our 21 day Photowalks trip.
Ruth and I are in idyllic New England (fall is prime time.) We’re on a semiquincentennial history Photowalk tour through five states and one territory that will culminate in a multi part series of episodes you’ll get to see starting in January on Scripps News and YouTube.
As I write this, we have just left beautiful, historic Providence, Rhode Island and are resting at a roadside Best Western in Manchester, CT. (Thanks again Best Western for supporting Photowalks!)
Let me give you a few non-semiquincentennial highlights so far:
Lost keys
We left Los Angeles at 5:15 a.m. and got picked up by a Lyft driver to get to LAX airport. When I went through the TSA gate—OH NO!—I couldn’t find my keys, which always live in my pocket. I was resigned to dealing with the fallout when I returned home. Yet when I got through the gate, I found a text from the Lyft driver asking if I had left my keys in the car. (Did they mysteriously slip out of my pocket?) He offered to bring them right over, but meeting at the airport wouldn’t have worked. So he very graciously agreed to return to our house and leave them in the mailbox, where we arranged for a neighbor to pick them up. Kudos to Lyft and our great driver. I LOVE LYFT!
Lost phone
As I was filming a timelapse video on the iPhone 17 Pro Max of Fanueil Hall in Boston, I got a text under Ruth’s name saying that her phone had been left behind. Ruth had gone shopping, put down her phone and forgot about it. (You’ll recall from the last Road Tales edition how she had left her phone in a shopping basket with the oranges at a Safeway in Cranbrook, British Columbia.) This time, she had neglected to turn the phone off, luckily, so the clerk at the store was able to dive in and text me. But how and why me? She had gone into the messages app, looked for the most recent conversation and found me. I don’t know if any of this is good or bad, but again, kudos to the clerk.
You Are out of Storage
Ruth has an iPhone 15 Pro Max with 1 TB of storage (she has declined using a newer model because she’s used to this one) and she got a nag message that she had run out of room and couldn’t take any more photos or videos.
“But I thought I had iCloud?” she said, referring to the weird* service from Apple that offers copies of everything you photograph, accessible on all your Apple devices.
Yes, that’s true, I said, but storage space isn’t infinite. My plan was to go back to the hotel room and move most of her stuff onto an external hard drive—*because if you delete photos on your phone to make room, Apple will kill them from iCloud as well. That’s a terrible position to put anyone into—what Apple wants to do is upgrade you from the $9.99 monthly plan to $29.99 monthly.
However, there is a way easier fix. Apple offers two ways of storing your photos on your phone. Either in full, high-resolution or as small, low-resolution copies, with the full version saved to iCloud. Once I clicked the tab for that, her storage went from 1 TB full to 500 GBs available. Problem solved. (You need to have the sync option checked to see this offer. It’s in Settings, iCloud, Photos and optimize iPhone storage.)
I still am not a fan of iCloud, because of the auto deletes, but for Ruth it’s a great way to get her photos *backed up. (And I still need to do the external hard drive thing for her, and upload her gallery to my SmugMug account.)
iCloud doesnt synch
One of the banes of my existence in hotel rooms while traveling is attempting backup, and being throttled by the hotel wifi system that doesn’t want me sending endless gigs of data all night long. So despite how I feel about it, I signed up for iCloud, to upload everything shot that day, without the throttle, while on the road.
But on this trip, that’s tripped me up too. It turns out that if Low Power Mode is turned on, the feature that saves battery usage, even if the phone is plugged into power, the iPhone will pause syncing. So if you’re like me and trying to send endless gigs while you snooze, be sure to turn off this feature.
(Settings, Battery, Power Mode)
Jimmies and Awful Awful’s
The history in New England is amazing, but it takes a back seat to the only in Rhode Island delicacy known as the Jimmy Roll from the regional chain Newport Creamery. Chocolate and Vanilla ice cream rolled into one, covered with oodles and oodles and oh-so-tasty Jimmies.
Speaking of Jimmies, when I first visited Boston years ago, I was stunned to hear the clerk at the ice cream parlor ask if I wanted “Jimmies” on top of my cone, because that’s what they called “Sprinkles,” back then at Bailey’s, Brigham’s and Friendly’’s.
Times have changed. A spot check of our cones in Boston had them listed now as available with sprinkles. We even bought some Jimmys to go at Newport Creamery, but alas, they were labeled as sprinkles.
However, guess what? After heading to NY this week, our next stop is Philly, where apparently they do still call them “Jimmys.”
So I’ll be able to reveal all in the next edition of the newsletter! (That’s me posing with the Awful Awful and grilled cheese from the Newport Creamery, one great way to spend an evening.)
ICYMI: Santa Barbara
And from the other side of the country, ICMYI, Photowalks episodes keep churning out! This week we go to the “American Riviera” home to former royals, talk show royalty, Hollywood gazillionaires and just plain folks who are lucky enough to live in one of the most photogenic areas in the world.
Join me for a historic Red Tile tour of Santa Barbara, a jaunt to the beach, a food tour with the folks from Eat This/Shoot That and tips on how to photograph your food.
Next week the show goes to Columbus, Ohio, the whistle factory of the world. Yes, you read that right!
Thanks as always for taking the time to spend time with the newsletter!
What have you lost on the road? Let me hear from you.
Jeff