Monthly Archives: November 2025

Book Week 2025, Day 4: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday

Otherlands is unlike any other book I’ve encountered. Starting in the Pleistocene and roving back in time, for each epoch of the Cenozoic and each period of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic, Thomas Halliday takes us to a specific place and time, a particular biota, that illustrates both the global changes taking place at the level of the biosphere (and, frequently, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere), and the peculiarities of the ecosystem that serves as our temporal window. Each chapter has a narrative section, a sort of you-are-there story in the lives of the organisms concerned, a section of broader outlinks to the global patterns that shaped, and were shaped by, the specific environments and organisms under consideration, and a healthy dose of references to the scientific discoveries that wove the narratives at both scales, presented as detective story rather than homework or dry history lesson.

That’s what the book does, not what it is. What it is: a triumph.

In the foreword to Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, Robert McKee wrote,

As I looked beneath his seamless prose and sensed the depth of his research, of knowledge of human nature and society, of vividly imagined telling details, I was in awe of the work, the work, all the work that built the foundation of his riveting creations.

That quote starting ringing in my head like a bell by the time I’d left the hot, deep, dry Mediterranean basin. I am equally in awe of the volume and quality of Halliday’s scholarship, and of the deftness of his artistic execution. This seems like the kind of towering achievement that could only be possible after a half-century or more of dedicated study, but Halliday is a generation younger than I am. It would be easy to give myself over to profound professional jealousy, both as a paleobiologist and a writer, if I weren’t swept along by the vital strangeness that he conjures on this fascinating tour.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be a chrononaut. Otherlands is the closest I’ve come in book form. The Mammoth Steppe and the Rhynie Chert were terms I knew before, signposts pointing to vanished worlds — and ones that I don’t study — but now they are places to me, places that I feel like I’ve been to, and have memories of, like Minas Tirith or Sietch Tabr. What a rare gift, to have the past brought to life in both its fundamental reality and its unbridgeable alienness.

As I said: a triumph.

 

doi:10.59350/0y30g-h2w24

Book Week 2025, Day 3: Dungeon delvers delight in Dr Dhrohlin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs

This book is squarely at the intersection of being an objectively great thing to have in the world, and a subjectively great thing to have on my gaming shelf. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 16, and running Dungeons & Dragons for over a decade, including an elaborate “Dinosaur Island” campaign for my son when he was younger. Just this year my current party has had to deal with an Octyrannopus — one of my homebrew monsters:

— as well as a gigantic, very aquatic, possibly-somewhat-undead Spinosaurus. In game, that horror was summoned on the shore of the Sunless Sea by a gnoll necromancer. But I summoned it from the pages of Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs, which is packed with so much good stuff that it’s hard to know where to begin.

First off, as it says on the tin, the book has a bunch of dinosaurs, which go waaay beyond the standard half-dozen or so from the official D&D Monster Manual. It’s nice to see some love for some of the more recently-described, not-yet-famous taxa like the titanosaur Mnyamawamtuka.

But it’s not just dinosaurs sensu stricto — the book also has a healthy leavening of pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and non-dinosaurian critters to round out your random encounter tables and fictional ecosystems.

And speaking of ecosystems, the book covers four in some depth: the Yixian, Bahariya, and Crato Formations, and Hateg Island, including flora, landscape, climate, and so on, so dungeon masters can give their players some you-are-there verisimilitude, or use the covered ecosystems as guides for fleshing out their own homebrew worlds. I believe that every single organism in the book — dinosaur, pterosaur, fish, or plant — comes with optional magical rules, so dungeon masters can dial in the high-to-low magic level of their game worlds. There’s just so much in here, to use as written or mine for inspiration.

Note that each critter gets at least one two-page spread (a few prominent taxa get two or more spreads), and, crucially, all the game-relevant info is usually available on a single spread. Why is this important? I’ve heard it may be largely fixed for the new 2024 Monster Manual, which I’ve not yet acquired, but all three of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, and most of the official campaign books that followed, are UI disasters when it comes to consistently putting the info that people will need at the table (i.e., at speed) where it will be immediately accessible — which is the One Job that an RPG book really needs to do well. RPG books are sort of like a combo of emergency manual and cookbook in requiring good, reader-focused structure and graphic design for usability on the fly. If you can’t find what you need quickly, and ideally get all the info for a given thing without turning the page, the book has failed as a game reference, no matter how great the ideas and writing are. Why Wizards of the Coast can’t figure this out for most of the official D&D books is quite beyond me (possibly because they keep firing the whole D&D creative crew and then replacing them with newcomers, so neither institutional memory nor game-creation expertise accumulate as they should). But like a lot of 3rd-party products, Dr Dhrolin’s gets it right, and runs circles around WOTC books in terms of usability at the table.

When a critter gets more than one spread, it’s either for a splash page of art, or more options, or both. There are a handful of custom dinos chosen as high-level pledge rewards by backers when the book was crowdfunded. For example, You-Know-Who here, which struck me as a neat linkage between Mark Witton’s scientific thoughts on what a max-size tyrannosaur would have been like, as explored in his new book, King Tyrant, and a truly awesome challenge to throw at a D&D party. The big, weird spinosaur my party recently faced is another of these special purpose, beyond-the-ordinary, truly monstrous foes. As a dungeon master, it’s nice to have a selection of boss dinos locked and loaded.

For people new to dinosaurs and paleontology, there’s a really lovely, concise introduction that would not be out of place in almost any popular science book about dinosaurs. The book is built in two versions, for D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2E, but there’s such a wealth of good ideas and great art inside that I think it would be worth picking up for anyone interested, no matter what system they run (it’s an article of faith with me that dungeon masters should freely adapt or homebrew stats as needed).

I’m especially impressed by Dr Dhrolin’s as a sort of global and all-encompassing guide to bringing paleontology into tabletop games. It includes ideas on how this might happen at all — lost worlds, time travel, necromancy, and more — NPCs to hook parties into paleo-themed adventures, and new subclasses and other options, for newly-generated characters or pre-existing ones encountering dinosaurian realms for the first time.

Want to ride a dinosaur? The book has you covered, with taming and domestication rules.

Want to play a dinosaur, or a pterosaur? You can do that, too, with six new playable species, complete with notes on their societies.

Just like great paleoart? The visuals alone are worth the price of admission, with Mark Witton providing art for the critters and Jules Kiely on plants, items, and some of the new playable species and character options. The book is a shade over 300 pages long, illustrated in full color throughout, and with pretty pictures on almost every spread. It’s a staggering amount of art.

Finally, a word on professionalism. Considered broadly, RPG products tend to be very hit-and-miss. It’s a genre where new authors can sometimes bring new ideas to the table pretty quickly, and without having all the interesting bits sanded off by corporate focus groups, but also one where a certain level of amateurish production is almost endemic. Even the official WOTC books, pretty as they are, rarely seem to have been designed and assembled by anyone who actually plays D&D regularly, or understands how books get used mid-game. Dr Dhrolin’s is one of the most professionally — and considerately — produced products ever put out for 5E. The creative team — Drs. Nathan Barling and Michael O’Sullivan on writing, Mark Witton and Jules Kiely on art, and a host of others (nicely detailed and credited on page 8) — had the ambition to make it wide-ranging, the closest thing that’s ever existed to one-stop-shopping for dinosaurs in RPGs, while also understanding the brief to make it useable at speed at the gaming table, and while also delivering an attractive, high quality, solidly-constructed book that feels good in the hand and is a joy to just flip through. If you like dinosaurs and paleontology, it’s great — every critter even gets a small section of references! If you like D&D, it’s jam-packed with ideas, well-organized, and actually useful in prep and in play. If, like me, you’re into both things, it’s basically aersolized, weaponized crack, and you probably already own a copy.

If you need more convincing, professional dungeon master and RPG creator Ginny Di has a great video review.

Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs has been out for a year now, so this is yet again something I could have and should have covered a lot sooner. But this entry is still timely. Right now, and for about 59 hours after I hit the “publish” button (= until sometime on Dec. 1), PalaeoGames has big discounts on Dr Dhrolin’s and lots of other associated goodies, including tokens, battle maps, a fillable character sheet, and 3D-printable digital models (delivered as STLs), through their current crowdfunding campaign, Dr Dhrolin’s Festive Party 2025. You can also pre-order the follow-up volume, Professor Primula’s Portfolio of Palaeontology, which is being developed as I type. This is a hoard of good stuff, just in time for holiday shopping. Go do the right thing.

 

doi:10.59350/w0cd0-28r84

Book Week 2025, Day 2: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte

This one starts with a personal note. I’ve never blogged much about the media whirlwind that accompanied the announcement of Sauroposeidon. Rich Cifelli and I did tons of interviews, separately and together, for local and national television news, newspapers, and magazines. Sauroposeidon got an 1/8th-page box in TIME magazine and a half-page news piece in the journal Science — the latter was especially satisfying, given that Science had rejected our manuscript without review, for having been deemed, ha ha, insufficiently newsworthy.

Of all the interviews I did about Sauroposeidon, by far the best was the one for Dinosaur World, a fanzine published by Allen and Diane Debus from 1997 to 2001. I did the interview over the phone, in the vert paleo library in the then-new OMNH building, now the Sam Noble Museum. I remember talking for close to two hours. In both process — quality, detail, and insight of questions asked — and product, that interview stood head and shoulders above all the others put together. It would have been a standout effort from any interviewer, at any level of professional training or achievement. In point of fact, the interviewer was a 15-year-old kid, who managed to smoke professional science writers with decades of experience.

As you’ve likely figured out, that 15-year-old kid was Steve Brusatte.

Although our circles haven’t intersected very frequently, I’ve watched Steve’s career with great interest, and enjoyed talking with him whenever the opportunities came around. He’s gone from strength to strength, and at each step I’ve thought, “Yep, that tracks.” The same qualities that he showed as a teenage dinosaur afficionado — passionate interest, broad reading, an eye for detail and another for the wider canvas, an adamantine work ethic, and, I think not coincidentally, generally being an agreeable human being — turn out to be a pretty good recipe for success in science.

Nowhere is that better displayed than in Steve’s book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. It was first published in 2018, and I read it during the COVID-19 lockdown, so this blog post is more than little belated. But the book holds up, in no small part because the higher-level picture of dinosaur evolution and biogeography that was emerging when it was published is still more or less intact, nudged here and there by the churn of new discoveries, but not overturned or changed beyond recognition. In the decade after I graduated with my PhD, I mostly had my head down, in the Morrison and in the human anatomy lab, and I’d fallen behind on the big picture of dinosaur paleobiology and evolution. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs helped me get caught up. I can’t think of a single other book that does such a good job of tying what was going on with the dinosaurs at any given time with what was going on with the planet. Steve grounds the global narrative by deftly interweaving his personal experiences in the field and the lab. He really captures the excitement of the hunt, and the occasional disappointments as well. I was especially impressed by his willingness to say “we don’t know yet” at several crucial junctures — hopefully this book inspires some kids to go hit the hills and badlands and find out.

When I was 12, I devoured John Noble Wilford’s The Riddle of the Dinosaur, which at the time was probably the definitive popular science book on dinosaurs and dinosaur paleontology. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is the heir apparent, three decades on, but it surpasses Wilford’s noble effort by dint of Steve’s first-hand experience in field and lab — the story of dinosaurs isn’t one he’s covering from the outside, but one that he’s helping to tell from the inside.

If someone asked me, perhaps a bit skeptically, “What’s interesting about dinosaurs? Why would anyone want or need to know about them?”, this is the book I would hand them. That’s about the highest praise I have to offer.

Closing confession: I also own Steve’s following book, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, but haven’t read it yet, mostly because, dinosaur supremacist that I am, I haven’t been able to summon the will to read a whole book about stinkin’ mammals. Watch this space.

 

doi:10.59350/ker8g-06r40

Book Week 2025, Day 1: Speed Thief Vol 1, by Sean Hennessy

I would like this book just for being funny.

I would like this book just for being well-illustrated.

I would like this book just for covering lots of different dinosaurs and other Mesozoic critters, some familiar and many others only recently described, from more dinosaur-bearing formations than I was previously familiar with.

The fact that Sean Hennessy manages all of this at once is pretty astounding. I can laugh at the animals’ sometimes very modern, sometimes Mesozoic-specific, and sometimes universal predicaments, while learning about new-to-me critters, while enjoying pretty darned great paleoart. Each comic is accompanied by a title, a list of featured genera, and the geologic unit, time, and country or continent. There’s even a taxonomic index in the back of the book!

This post is doing multiple duties. Having followed his comics online, and loved them, I promised Sean that I’d buy his book and blog about it…back in 2024. Finally acquired my copy at DinoCon 2025, and got it personalized by the very personable author. So here’s your long overdue shout-out, Sean, and a visible reminder, to myself and to the world, that I still have more DinoCon stuff to blog.

Sean Hennessy’s contribution to the noble theme of sauropods stomping theropods.

New Speed Thief comics are going up regularly on Instagram, and you can get them early as a Patreon backer. You can get the book, prints of comics, t-shirts, pins, stickers, and more from Sean’s Etsy store. Go have fun! And stay tuned for the rest of Book Week 2025, in which I will continue belatedly singing the praises of books that aren’t necessarily new, but are fully awesome.

Finally, happy Thanksgiving! Go eat a dinosaur.

 

doi:10.59350/a7yfj-fdg92

Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit

I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want. All of this is YMMV — I’m not trying to predict what will work best for you, but to explain what has worked for me, and why. I’m reasonably happy with my current setup, but even after 28 years of museum visits, I’m still finding ways to improve it. Hence this post, which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for sharing tips and tricks.

A word about my program when I visit a collection, because not everyone needs or wants to do things my way. The closest museums with extensive sauropod collections are states away from where I live and work. If I’m in those collections at all, I’m traveling, and therefore on the clock. Time in collections is a zero-sum game: if I have the time to take 20 pages of notes, that could be 4 pages of notes of each of 5 specimens, 2 pages on 10, 1 page on 20, half a page on 40, etc. In practice, I usually make expansive notes early in the visit, one or two spreads per specimen with detailed sketches and exhaustive measurements of the most publication-worthy elements. I grade toward brevity over the course of the visit, and end with a mad desperate rush, throwing in crude sketches and rudimentary notes on as many newly-discovered (by me) specimens as possible. My collections visits are Discovery Time and Gathering Time, trying to get all the measurements and photographs I’ll want for the next year, or five, or forever. And, to the extent that I can suppress them, not Analysis Time or Graphing Time or Writing Time — I can do those things after hours and in my office back home, IF and only if I’ve spent my collections time efficiently gathering all the information I’ll need later.

The very first thing I do in any collection is a walking survey, to make sure I know roughly what specimens the collection contains and where to find them. For a sufficiently large collection — or even a single cabinet with 10 drawers of good stuff — I may draw a map in my notebook, on which I can note things I want to come back and document, and add new things as I find them.

Enough preamble, on to the gear. The first two or three entries here are in strict priority order, and after that things get very fuzzy and approximate.

1. Research Notebook

Seems obvious, right? Write stuff down, make sketches, capture the info that will be difficult or impossible to recapture later from photos. I have encountered people who don’t take a physical notebook, just a laptop or tablet, and take all their notes digitally. If that works for you, may a thousand gardens grow. For me, sketching is a fundamental activity — for fixing morphology in my mind, disciplining myself to see the whole object and its parts, creating a template on which to take further explanatory notes, and capturing the caveats, stray ideas, and odd connections that surround each specimen in a quantum fuzz in my mind (temporarily in my mind, hence the need for external capture). I also write priority lists in advance of specimens to document each day, and then cross them off, add new ones, and strike out duds with wild abandon in the heat of data collection.

I do a few specific things to increase the usefulness of my notebooks:

– Label the spines and covers with the notebook titles and years. These things live on the shelf directly over my desk, and I pull them down and rifle through them constantly. I also have notebooks for university service (committees, student advising, and so on), astronomical observations, and personal journaling, so “Research” is a useful tag for me.

– Number the pages, if they’re not already numbered, use the books chronologically from front to back, and create the table of contents retrospectively as I go — a tip I got from the Bullet Journal method.

– Paste a small envelope inside the back cover, if a pouch is not already built in, to hold all kinds of ephemera — index cards, scale bars, a bandage (just in case), stickers I acquire along the way, etc.

– Affix a section of measuring tape to the outer edge of the front or back cover. I got this tip from the naturalist John Muir Laws, whose Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is wonderfully useful and inspiring (UPDATE: that book is now covered in its own post, here). The scale-bar-permanently-affixed-to-research-notebook has been a game-changer for me. Do you know how many times I’ve accidentally left a scale bar on a museum shelf, and then gotten to my next stop and had to borrow or fabricate one? I myself lost count long ago. But never again. If I’m in a hurry, small specimens go straight onto the notebook to be photographed, like the baby apatosaurine tibia above, and the notebook itself goes into the frame with large specimens. (This comes up again — if possible, and it’s almost always possible, put the specimen label in the photo with the specimen. No reason not to, and sometimes a lifesaver later on.)

Behold the thinness of the eminently pocketable IKEA paper tape. Folding instructions, because this seems to bedevil some folks: hold up one end, fold in half by grabbing the other end and bring it up in front, then do that three more times. Finished product is 65mm long, 25.4mm wide, and about 1mm thick when folded crisply and left under a heavy book overnight.

2. Measuring tapes

I find the flexible kind much more convenient and useful than retractable metal tape measures. I like the 1-2mm thick plastic type used by tailors and fabric sellers, because they have just enough inertia to stay where I put them, or drop in a predictable fashion when draped over something sufficiently large, as when measuring midshaft circumference of a long bone.

I LOVE the little plasticized paper tapes that hang on racks, free for the taking, near the entrances of IKEA stores. I tear them off by the dozen when I go to IKEA, cram them in my pockets, fold them flat when I get home, and stash them everywhere, including in my wallet. A few specific reasons they’re great:

– Folded flat, they’re about the thickness of a credit card, so there’s just no reason to be without one. I usually have one in my wallet, another in the envelope at the back of my research notebook, a couple more stashed in my luggage, a couple more stashed in my car, desk, tookbox, nightstand, etc.

– I can write on them. Especially handy if:

– I’ve torn off a section to serve as an impromptu scale bar. Which I never hesitate to do, because they’re free and I have dozens waiting in my toolbox and desk drawers at any one time. Torn off bits also make good bookmarks, classier, more cerebral, and less implicitly gross than the traditional folded square of toilet paper.

– I give them away to folks I’m traveling with, or that I meet in my travels, and they’re usually well-received.

I would NOT have figured out all these laminae if I hadn’t had a way to make them stand out.

3. Writing instruments in various colors

Up until about 2018 my notebooks were always monochrome pen or pencil. Then I realized that color is an extremely helpful differentiator for Future Matt, so now I highlight and color-annotate willy-nilly.

4. Calipers

I borrowed the digital calipers from Colin Boisvert to get the photo up top, having forgotten my own at home. As a sauropod worker, I don’t need sub-millimeter accuracy all the time. But digital calipers have three exceedingly useful functions: measuring the thickness of very thin laminae and bony septa; measuring the internal dimensions of small fossae and foramina; and measuring the depth of fossae and of concave articular surfaces. I also have a little titanium caliper on a lanyard that goes with me most places.

5. Small brush on a carabiner

This is the newest addition to the kit. I got the idea from Matthew Mossbrucker at the Morrison Museum in Morrison, Colorado. Colin and I visited him in September, immediately before our week-long stint in the collections at Dinosaur Journey. Matthew keeps a little brush carabinered to his belt at all times, and the utility was so instantly obvious that when Colin and I rolled into Fruita later that same day, I went to the hardware store and got my own. Cheap, weighs nothing, clips to anything, compact enough to cram in a pocket, good for lab and field alike. Genius!

6. Scale bar

Yes, I have my scale-bar-enhanced research notebook and my hoarder stash of IKEA paper tapes, but good old-fashioned scale bars are still useful, and I use them constantly. And lose them constantly, hence my multiple redundant backup mechanisms.

(Aside: I can’t explain why I hold onto some objects like grim death, but let others fall through my fingers like sand grains. I’ve only lost one notebook of any kind in my entire life — set it on top of the car while packing and then drove off [grrrr] — so I have no problem investing in nice notebooks and treating them like permanent fixtures. But I can’t hang onto pens and scale bars to save my life, hence my having gravitated to Bic sticks and IKEA paper tapes.)

7. Index cards

I try to get as much information into each photograph as possible. Ideally alongside the specimen I will have:

– a scale bar at the appropriate depth of field;

– the specimen tag with the number, locality, and other pertinent info;

– my notebook open to my sketch of the specimen, for easy correlation later (I don’t do this for every single view, just the ones that I think are particularly publication-worthy, or have info I’m likely to forget later);

– anything else I might want — serial position, anatomical directions, whether the photo is part of an anaglyph pair, and so on — written on an index card, which being a standard size will itself serve as an alternate/backup scale bar.

8. Pencil case

To hold all the smaller fiddly bits you see in the photo up top. I can’t now fathom why, but I resisted getting one of these for a loooong time. I was young and foolish then. Pretty useful all the time, absolutely clutch when it’s 4:58 pm and I’m throwing stuff in bags, caught between the Scylla of working as late as possible and the Charybdis of wanting to be polite to whatever kind, patient person is facilitating my visit. That is also when the pocket in the back of the notebook comes in especially handy.

Headlamp in action, casting low-angle light on a pneumatic fossa on the tuberculum of this sauropod rib. Note also the scale bar, elevated on a specimen box to be the same depth of field, and the notebook open to my sketch of the specimen.

9. Artificial lighting

This was another very late discovery for me — I don’t think I was regularly bringing my own lights prior to 2018. For me, portable, rechargeable lighting is useful in many circumstances and absolutely critical in two: casting low-angle light to pick out subtle pneumatic features, as in the photo above, and lighting up big specimens that I don’t have the time, energy, or space to pull off the shelves, as in the photo below.

I’m particularly taken with the big orange fan/light combo. It charges using a USB-C cable, has four settings for fan speed (handy when it’s hot, humid, or just oppressively still) and three for light intensity, a rotating hook that folds flat, and a USB power-out socket for charging phones, headlamps, fitness trackers, and what have you. I use it practically every day whether I’m on the road or not.

Magnetic flashlight hanging from steel shelving to illuminate Camarasaurus cervical vertebrae in the Utah Field House collections.

Whether it’s a hook or a magnet, some kind of mechanism for suspending a light at odd heights and angles is super useful. I usually have a strong flashlight with an integral seat-belt cutter and window-smasher in the door pocket of my car, and its magnetic base makes it omnidirectionally functional in collections spaces, which are usually liberally supplied with steel in the form of shelving and cabinets.

Haplocanthosaurus CM 879 caudal 2 in left lateral view, with rolled-up paper neural canal visualizer and scale-bar-stuck-to-flashlight.

Sometimes I use a bit of blue tack to stick a scale bar to a flashlight, to create a free-standing, truly vertical scale bar that I can rapidly place at different distances from the camera. Beats leaning the scale bar against a stack of empty specimen boxes or a block of ethofoam (which in turn beats nothing at all).

What else?

USUALLY — Laptop

Not for recording notes or measurements — all of that goes into the notebook, which I scan and upload new stuff from every evening. Mostly for displaying PDFs of descriptive monographs, and hugely useful in that regard.

MAYBE — Monographs

When I have the freedom (= baggage allowance) to do so, I find it handy to bring hardcopies of descriptive monographs, both for quick reference and so I can photograph specimens alongside the illustrations. Doesn’t even have to be the same specimens, just comparable elements. In the photo above, MWC 7257, a partial sacral centrum of Allosaurus from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, is sitting next to a plate from Madsen (1976), illustrating the same vertebra in a specimen from Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. Thanks to Colin Boisvert for bringing the specimen to my attention — I’ve got a longstanding thing for sacrals — and for loaning me his copy of Madsen (1976) for this photo.

OUT — Camera and tripod

I suspect that some folks will shake their heads in mute horror, but after a couple of decades of lugging dedicated cameras and tripods everywhere, I stopped. For the past few years I’ve been rolling with just my phone, which is objectively better than any dedicated camera I owned for the first half of my career. Sometimes I brace it in an ad hoc fashion against a chair or shelf or cabinet, but mostly I just shoot freehand. For my purposes, it does fine, and any minor improvements in field curvature or whatever that I’d get from a dedicated camera don’t outweigh the logistical hassle. Again: YMMV!

Over to you

So, that’s what I roll with right now. It was different six months ago, and will almost certainly be a little different six months hence, hopefully as a result of people responding to this post. With all that said: what’s in your kit?

P.S. Many thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker and Julia McHugh for their hospitality and assistance in their collections, and to Colin Boisvert for being such a great travel companion, research sounding board, and generous loaner-of-things-I’d-forgotten. The Wedel-Boisvert Morrisonpocalypse 2025 deserves more blogging.

 

doi:10.59350/c21vr-f8727