My photo essay from “The Times Of Bill Cunningham,” an exhibit at the South Street Seaport. Mark Bozek, a filmmaker, who curated the show, spent time with our group.

We just bought the iPhone 13 Pro. Jefferson Graham explains why the improvements in the camera are so powerful. All smartphone cameras should have these features in the future.

Why I want the iPhone 13 Pro. Photography must.

If you don’t care about the camera, skip it

jeffersongraham

I’m a pro photographer so of course I want the new iPhone 13 Pro. I’ve got three key reasons why I can’t wait for the new model.

Caveat: if you have an older iPhone 11 or last year’s iPhone 12 and you don’t shoot much video, you can skip the upgrade. But if you take even the occasional photo and wish you could get closer to the action, the iPhone 13 Pro is worth considering.  

The selling points for the new phones start with the improved camera features. There’s also the usual: more powerful processing chip, longer lasting battery and more liberal internal storage.

Here’s why I’m excited:

Cinematic Video. The marquee feature of the 13 series, from the entry-level $699 Mini and $799 iPhone 13, to the $999 13 Pro and $1,099 13 Pro Max, is a whole new look to iPhone video that removes the “everything in focus all the time,” flat cellphone video look.

You know that blurring of the background effect that’s so popular in Portrait Mode? Now it will be available on video, bringing more pro-level quality to iPhone recordings, which was already great. With Portrait mode like adjustable focus to iPhone videos, the clips will look like they do in the movies, with the lead subject in focus while the background is not. Best of all, the focus can be re-adjusted after the fact, like the blur effect in Portrait Mode. This is a big deal and something I can’t do on my big Sony.  

77 mm Zoom: The “Portrait” lens on the Pro models expands from 65mm in the 12 Pro to 77mm, giving us a much stronger telephoto, getting us closer to the action.  

Since, like many photographers, my go-to lens for my Sony A7III is 24-70mm, I’ve now got the holy grail of zooms on a little phone in my pocket. (Sidenote: I shoot most portraits on my 70-200mm zoom at the 100mm+ mark, so the phone lens still has a ways to go.) And granted, an iPhone 12-77mm will never be as sharp as my $2,100 Sony G master lens, but what a treat to have it on my walk around camera, which is the one that fits into my pocket. (Equal time: I heard from several photographers who welcome the extra zoom on the iPhone, but note that the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has a more longer zoom, with the equivalent of a 200mm+ throw.)Erik Kuna 🚀 @erikkuna@jeffersongraham Good to see they’re catching up to @SamsungMobile and their s21 ultra at 14-240mm optical. Still got a way to go though… @Apple getting to 200mm optical would be the game changer.September 14th 2021

Macro: Again, this feature is only on the Pro models, allowing us to get ultra ultra close, to capture objects as close as 2 centimeters from the phone. That’s a close-up!

Aside from that, the new phones look pretty identical. Except for a smaller notch on the front and a redesigned look to the camera lenses. That’s 2 on the entry level iPhone 13 and Mini editions, and 3 for the Pro and Max versions. And the 4 new models all start with a way more generous 128 GB of storage, which is important. You shoot a lot of high-resolution photos and videos, download a lot of apps and such, and you’ll need as much storage as you can get. Remember just a few years ago when new phones had just 16 GB? 

The Big Question?

So if you have an iPhone 12 Pro Max do you need to ditch it for the new models? I would for the video, telephoto and macro, but that’s me. I think it’s a pretty easy decision. I use the iPhone professionally, for shooting my Photowalks travel photography series, and believe me, the pro looking “Cinematic” focus will really be handy, as will the expanded telephoto and macro. 

(Of course, let’s see how it all works out when we get the phones for review.) 

PRICING

One of the great things about new iPhones is seeing older phones getting their prices lowered. The 12 is now $100 off at $699, while the geekier 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max models, the ones with better cameras, have been discontinued. So if you have an older phone and its upgrade time, you really have no choice but to go forward with a 13 Pro.

• iPhone 13 Mini: $699
• iPhone 13: $799
• iPhone 13 Pro: $999
• iPhone 13 Pro Max: $1,099

The older iPhone 12 at $699 is actually $749 once you upgrade the storage to 128 GB (which you’ll want) so at that rate, why not spend the extra $50 and get the newer iPhone 13 model?

Photography focused folks are looking at $1K for the Pro, others may be happy with 2 camera lenses instead of 3.

And if you don’t feel like upgrading at all, but want great new photo features for your iPhone, check out my recent post on what’s new for the iOS 15 operating system upgrade for photographers. These features are free to all. The software update will be available on 9/20.

Jefferson Graham’s newsletter📸 Cool new photo features in iOS 15Read more16 days ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · jeffersongraham

The new iPhones begin pre-order Friday at 5 a.m. PT, and will be in stores on Sept. 24. 

Apple also introduced two new iPads. The entry-level $329 iPad has a more powerful chip and better camera, the iPad Mini gets a bigger screen and a $100 price boost to $499.

Congratulations to Musical Director Ron Abel who is one of the major talents bringing Broadway back. He and some of the most powerful Broadway voices performed last night at the Greenroom 42 at the Yotel. We were so thrilled to witness this performance.

I was amazed to read that Tuesday Weld actually bought a tiny condo in Montauk. We had a second home there for 10 years. We would drive by the Montauk Manor all the time. It’s beautiful to look at but it gave me the creeps because it always looked vacant. Now, I would love to go back, wait outside, and see if I could spot Ms. Weld. I would love to know why she picked that place. The price, the view, family nearby?

Dirt is a Real Estate newsletter

Tuesday Weld Scoops Up Compact Hamptons Condo

Early ‘60s Hollywood teen queen Tuesday Weld, who sold her longtime oceanfront property in Montauk in 2009, apparently misses the historic Hamptons town because she’s recently purchased a tiny condo there for $335,000. It was repped by Constance Tighe and John Taylor at Corcoran.

The native New Yorker actually sold two properties in 2009; the Montauk house, which traded for $6.75 million, and a prewar condo on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that went for just over a million. A few years earlier, in 2006, she bought a place in Colorado, just outside Aspen, for $950,000, and in 2018 she added house in Hollywood for $1.77 million.

Well maintained, the perfectly ordinary condo Weld bought this summer is in the historic Montauk Manor. At just 661 square feet, the one-bedroom unit does include two bathrooms, along with two separate entrances. Common charges are hefty at about $2,500 per month.

The Tudor-style Manor was built in 1926 by Carl G. Fisher, the developer of Miami Beach, who intended to make Montauk the “Miami Beach of the North.” Originally a hotel, the 140-unit condo building was designed by Schultze and Weaver, responsible for the Breakers in Palm Beach, the Biltmore in Los Angeles, and the Pierre, the Sherry-Netherland and the original Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Amenities include an on-site restaurant, indoor and outdoor pools, tennis, and shuttles to the beach.

The actress, whose career took her from teenage stardom to a 1978 Oscar nomination for “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” comes from the Boston Brahmin Weld family. Her father died when Tuesday (born Susan) was only four. She told Life magazine in 1971, “My father’s family came from Tuxedo Park, and they offered to take us kids and pay for our education, on the condition that Mama never see us again.”

Instead, the young Tuesday worked as a model to support the family and became a successful actress. She was a Golden Globe nominee for the lead role in the 1972 movie of Joan Didion’s novel “Play It as It Lays” and an Emmy nominee opposite Donald Sutherland in the 1983 TV movie “The Winter of Our Discontent.”

She did win a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960, when she was 17.

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Eliot and I visited Bridge Red Studios/Project Space in (Biscayne Park), North Miami, yesterday. We admire the work of Evelyn Politzer. Like many others, she is taking the traditions of quilting, sewing, crocheting, embroidery, knitting and beadwork and turning them into art. Photos by Eliot Hess.

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https://www.talktechdaily.com/list/

Please consult your physician before using any of the health products.

10 Perfect products for seniors

Strong WiFi coverage for large homes is now possible – Give your family the gift of strong WiFi coverage

Here’s how to stop WiFi coverage problems.This new device, RangeXTD, fits in the palm of your hand but packs a giant boost of power. RangeXTD increases the range of your WiFi and can boost speeds up to 300mbps. Remove WiFi deadspots at home and get the freedom to work, stream, and game in any room. An internal antenna boosts coverage throughout large homes, and can even provide strong coverage in your backyard. If you work from home or have a family that loves to game and stream, RangeXTD is a must!

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Australian-made device cleans your lungs and increases lung capacity (great for asthma & viruses)

If you have a lung condition, AirPhysio could be your new best friend. This specially designed device uses a unique method to loosen the phlegm in your chest – helping you breathe easier in just a few days. Even better, this doesn’t require a prescription, it’s completely drug-free and safe. Hospitals have used the same technology for years, but now it’s available for personal use. It’s great for athletes and relieving symptoms of viruses as well.

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Self-washing bed sheets save time, money, and provide healthier sleep

Miracle has created the world’s first ever self-cleaning, hygienic, luxury sheets. These sheets are able to fight bacteria, regulate temperature, and prevent the growth of odor-generating bacteria. Its natural bacteria fighting silver is the key to providing a cool, comfortable, and healthy night of sleep. Miracle sheets are going to be as productive as you.

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Total relaxation in just 10 minutes

Sitting at the computer or texting with the wrong posture may be hurting your neck. NeckRelax works by relieving tension in your neck muscles by combining the powers of infrared heat, 6 distinctive massage modes, and electric frequencies, promoting pain relief and relaxation, which in turn can help reduce stress. All you need to do is wrap it around your neck and in minutes, your pain may begin melting away, giving you the energy you need to accomplish your goals.

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Say goodbye to dirty toothbrushes and holders

A toothbrush has about 100 million nasty germs crawling over it. To fix that, this device doubles as a germ-killer and toothbrush holder. It’s called Bril, and Bril is a registered class III medical device with the FDA. Bril is a portable toothbrush case that uses natural UV light to kill germs on the head of your toothbrush – protecting you and your family from germs, viruses and harmful bacteria.

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One simple “donut” stands up almost any device

GoDonut is the most universal and portable device stand ever built. It will work with your entire collection of mobile devices (with its case on or off), including your iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy, LG, Kindle Fire, and more! Monitor your phone, read recipes in the kitchen, and view your devices without having to hold them. It’s an award-winning CES product, received praise by celebrities at the Golden Globe Awards, it’s made in the USA, and has sold over 500,000 units.

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This gives you perfectly fitted bed sheets (they even stay perfect while you sleep)

Bed Scrunchie is USA-made and unlike any other bed tightening system. It uses a “360-degree” technique, which makes your sheets perfectly tight every time (with hardly any effort). This little tool stops your bed sheets from coming off the mattress corners too. It works on ANY bed type or size – and on any size of sheets! Yes, even if your sheets are too small or too large for your bed, Bed Scrunchie can fix it (and keep ’em on tight).

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Want to fall sleep 2.5 times faster? Get this

Struggling with racing thoughts at night? Here’s a technique to stop them, naturally. Get lulled into a deep peacful sleep with Dodow. It is a metronome-light scientifically designed to block out overactive thought patterns. It is essentially combining yoga, meditation, and behavioral therapy. This makes it the safe way to effortlessly fall asleep. Using Dodow is so effective, customers report… “falling asleep before the 8-minute mode ends” and after a few months “not needing Dodow to fall asleep anymore.”

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For those with stubborn knee pain, here’s what many do

According to the Institute Of Medicine (IOM), nearly 1 out of 3 people currently experience some form of knee pain. If you want to beat joint pain, you MUST keep moving. But when you’re suffering from aches, pains, and stiffness – movement is the last thing on your mind. So, what’s the solution? “You need to keep moving and staying active, as much as you don’t want to. I made these knee sleeves to provide an all-natural option to help ease the stubborn pain,” says Caresole’s founder, Thomas Blumel.

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Cuts your nails easily and smoothly

The company that developed CLIPPERPRO was founded by three orthopedic surgeons in San Diego. Thick, ingrown and tough nails are cut like butter and your hands are not injured.

I know Marilyn Peters from a Smartours trip to India. We keep in touch on Facebook. This was her most recent post.

This is what Covid looks like.

This is not a joke. Wired Magazine just did an expose on this topic. Talk to your local politicians about this. We can cure this together.

Q

WHENEVER A PLASTIC bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller pieces that work their way into nooks in the environment. When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow out to sea.

When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look, they’re finding microplastics—specks of synthetic material that measure less than 5 millimeters long. They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the deepest oceans.

They’re blowing vast distances in the wind to sully once pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the western US, the equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles are falling out of the sky each year.

And now, microplastics are coming out of babies. In a pilot study published today, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers and finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces.

They even found it in newborns’ first feces. PET is an extremely common polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is also used to make plastic bottles. The finding comes a year after another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in plastic bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies with several million microplastic particles a day, and perhaps nearly a billion a year.

Although adults are bigger, scientists think that in some ways infants have more exposure. In addition to drinking from bottles, babies could be ingesting microplastics in a dizzying number of ways. They have a habit of putting everything in their mouths—plastic toys of all kinds, but they’ll also chew on fabrics.

(Microplastics that shed from synthetic textiles are known more specifically as microfibers, but they’re plastic all the same.) Babies’ foods are wrapped in single-use plastics. Children drink from plastic sippy cups and eat off plastic plates. The carpets they crawl on are often made of polyester. Even hardwood floors are coated in polymers that shed microplastics. Any of this could generate tiny particles that children breathe or swallow.

Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of microplastic exposure, especially for infants. (In general, indoor air is absolutely lousy with them; each year you could be inhaling tens of thousands of particles.) Several studies of indoor spaces have shown that each day in a typical household, 10,000 microfibers might land on a single square meter of floor, having flown off of clothing, couches, and bed sheets. Infants spend a significant amount of their time crawling through the stuff, agitating the settled fibers and kicking them up into the air.

“Unfortunately, with the modern lifestyle, babies are exposed to so many different things for which we don’t know what kind of effect they can have later in their life,” says Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental health scientist at New York University School of Medicine and coauthor of the new paper, which appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. 

The researchers did their tally by collecting dirty diapers from six 1-year-olds and running the feces through a filter to collect the microplastics. They did the same with three samples of meconium—a newborn’s first feces—and stool samples from 10 adults. In addition to analyzing the samples for PET, they also looked for polycarbonate plastic, which is used as a lightweight alternative to glass, for instance in eyeglass lenses. To make sure that they only counted the microplastics that came from the infants’ guts, and not from their diapers, they ruled out the plastic that the diapers were made of: polypropylene, a polymer that’s distinct from polycarbonate and PET.The news of the future, now.

All told, PET concentrations were 10 times higher in infants than in adults, while polycarbonate levels were more even between the two groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in the meconium, suggesting that babies are born with plastics already in their systems. This echoes previous studies that have found microplastics in human placentas and meconium.

What this all means for human health—and, more urgently, for infant health—scientists are now racing to find out. Different varieties of plastic can contain any of at least 10,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which are of concern for people, according to a recent study from researchers at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. These additives serve all kinds of plastic-making purposes, like providing flexibility, extra strength, or protection from UV bombardment, which degrades the material. Microplastics may contain heavy metals like lead, but they also tend to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants as they tumble through the environment. They also readily grow a microbial community of viruses, bacteria, and fungi, many of which are human pathogens.

Of particular concern are a class of chemicals called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which disrupt hormones and have been connected to reproductive, neurological, and metabolic problems, for instance increased obesity. The infamous plastic ingredient bisphenol A, or BPA, is one such EDC that has been linked to various cancers. 

“We should be concerned because the EDCs in microplastics have been shown to be linked with several adverse outcomes in human and animal studies,” says Jodi Flaws, a reproductive toxicologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led a 2020 study from the Endocrine Society on plastics. (She wasn’t involved in this new research.) “Some of the microplastics contain chemicals that can interfere with the normal function of the endocrine system.” 

Infants are especially vulnerable to EDCs, since the development of their bodies depends on a healthy endocrine system. “I strongly believe that these chemicals do affect early life stages,” says Kannan. “That’s a vulnerable period.”

This new research adds to a growing body of evidence that babies are highly exposed to microplastic. “This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Deonie Allen, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We need to look at everything a child is exposed to, not just their bottles and toys.”ADVERTISEMENTnull

Since infants are passing microplastics in their feces, that means the gut could be absorbing some of the particles, like it would absorb nutrients from food. This is known as translocation: Particularly small particles might pass through the gut wall and end up in other organs, including the brain. Researchers have actually demonstrated this in carp by feeding them plastic particles, which translocated through the gut and worked their way to the head, where they caused brain damage that manifested as behavioral problems: Compared to control fish, the individuals with plastic particles in their brains were less active and ate more slowly.

But that was done with very high concentrations of particles, and in an entirely different species. While scientists know that EDCs are bad news, they don’t yet know what level of microplastic exposure it would take to cause problems in the human body. “We need many more studies to confirm the doses and types of chemicals in microplastics that lead to adverse outcomes,” says Flaws.

In the meantime, microplastics researchers say you can limit children’s contact with particles. Do not prepare infant formula with hot water in a plastic bottle—use a glass bottle and transfer it over to the plastic one once the liquid reaches room temperature. Vacuum and sweep to keep floors clear of microfibers. Avoid plastic wrappers and containers when possible. Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while you’ll never get rid of them, you can at least reduce your family’s exposure.

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Matt Simon is a science journalist at WIRED, where he covers biology, robotics, cannabis, and the environment. He’s also the author of Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World—And Ourselves, and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar, which won an Alex Award.