La bêtise de la FNAC dépasse les bornes…

Cela fait déjà bien longtemps qu’à mes yeux, comme à ceux de nombre de ses anciens clients, la FNAC a perdu son attrait, que ce soit en termes de produits disponibles ou de prix… pour ne rien dire du service après-vente et de la relation-client en général, domaines dans lesquels elle est depuis belle lurette supplantée et dépassée de nombreuses longueurs par Amazon.

Quant au fameux “vendeur FNAC”, dont on vantait jadis la compétence et la courtoisie, il y a longtemps qu'il a été lui aussi brocardé par de multiples clients; les enquêtes qui ont révélé qu'il orientait davantage le choix du client en fonction des marges réalisées sur tel ou tel produit, qu'en fonction de l'adéquation dudit produit aux besoins du client, n’ont pas non plus fait de bien à l’enseigne.

Tout cela, la FNAC le sait tellement bien que, pour espérer rester encore un peu dans le jeu concurrentiel et demeurer un tant soit peu attractive, elle s’est trouvée contrainte de faire appel à des vendeurs tiers afin de créer une “marketplace”, ici encore pour tenter d’émuler Amazon, à la traîne de laquelle peinent la plupart des détaillants de nos jours.

 

En dépit de cette position peu flatteuse, il s’avère que j’effectue parfois un achat sur le site de la FNAC. Pas auprès de la FNAC elle-même, non, pour les raisons déjà évoquées, mais auprès de l’un des susdits vendeurs tiers, dont il peut se trouver occasionnellement qu’ils ont en stock ce que je cherche à un prix concurrentiel. Rare can be found, comme le disait, je crois, une ancienne pub pour le whisky J & B.

C’est ainsi que j’ai récemment passé commande sur cette “marketplace” d’une batterie supplémentaire pour mon Nikon Z7.

Dans la foulée, je reçois un mail qui me dit que ma commande a été enregistrée. Jusque là, rien que de très normal.

Mais voilà-t-y pas que, quelques minutes plus tard, j’en reçois un deuxième pour me dire que ma commande A ÉTÉ ACCEPTÉE…! Si, si! Victoire!

On croit rêver ! Non, sérieusement, ma commande a été acceptée ? Quel coup de bol! C’est vrai, quoi, elle avait toutes les chances (ou plutôt: tous les risques) d’être refusée, au départ… On en voit tous les jours, des marchands qui refusent de prendre l’argent des clients et disent : “Ah, ben non, désolé ! Je ne veux pas de votre commande !” J’ai vraiment eu de la chance de passer au travers.

Franchement, on s’interroge sur le niveau de bêtise crasse de l’imbécile qui a pondu un mail-type comme ça… pour ne rien dire de la neuneuserie affligeante de ses supérieurs qui ont approuvé (en novlangue: “validé”) cette idée.

 

Tiens, au fait, j’ai une bonne nouvelle pour vous : si vous avez pu lire cet article sur mon blog, c’est parce que vous avez été accepté en tant que lecteur. Sympa de ma part, non? Ben oui, j’aurais pu facilement ne pas vouloir de vous, après tout, non ?

Comme je le dis souvent (et, hélas ! de plus en plus souvent…), par moments, je me demande comment on a réussi un jour à sortir des cavernes…

How to get more views on Flickr

Hello everyone,

I haven’t posted here in quite a while, I know and I apologize about this. Going into “retirement from active duty” is a big change, and many adjustments had to be made; others still need to be. Additionally, we have had the painters at the house for weeks to undertake major redecoration works which will only (and finally!) be finished by the end of this week.

Also, those who give me the pleasure of following what I post on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/d_robert/) know that I have been away on photo trips, first to Sardinia for three weeks in March and April, then to Scotland for ten days around the end of April. The selection and processing of photos also take up quite a bit of time, as I like to do things with care whenever I can. And now, I can afford this supreme luxury: have and take TIME, and yet sometimes there hardly seems to be enough of that…!

Anyway, I was on the subject of Flickr, which is the only “social” thing I do online, as I do not appreciate the so-called “social media” and do not wish to be present there —the sole exception being, possibly, Instagram because it is predominantly photo-related (or so they tell me), but then it seems so complicated uploading things to their platform from a desktop computer that I have given up. Would you believe a “social medium” centered on photography, that would only accept uploads from the worst cameras that exist nowadays (i.e., cell phones), and not from the best cameras, unless you find a way to make Instagram believe that the desktop computer on which you have carefully processed your photos, with its high quality, calibrated monitor and its suite of sophisticated and powerful retouching software… is actually a cell phone?

Me, I cannot believe nor understand it. But such is life. When Instagram come to their senses one day (maybe) and accept uploads from computers, I will reconsider, but I don’t wish to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to cheat my way into uploading nice photographs instead of the crappy smartphone snapshots they willingly accept.

What was I saying? Ah! yes, Flickr. My main concern there is to post good quality photos —well, the kind I regard as being good quality, based on my “National Geographic-like” standards. Do I get many views? A fair amount, yes. Would I undertake efforts to increase those views using “popularity schemes”? Certainly not. I belong to the groups I like (and know) on Flickr, I’m sure I’m missing quite a few that would be of interest, but I don’t intend to do anything else or more than post to those groups I belong to, and which I update from time to time, in particular when I discover that a group had a sole admin who has suddenly lost interest and left their group to turn into an uncurated photo dump, which is frankly stupid and disrespectful for the loyal contributors to that group.

So, basically I follow my own chosen path, welcoming those who are happy to tread along with me for a while, but not making any efforts to gather followers.

Now, recently, several of my photos have been selected to go into this thing that is called “Explore”. I have no clue how a photo gets there, but so many people talk about it like the Holy Grail of Flickr that I went and had a look. It appears to be a special gallery made up of recently uploaded photos selected by some mysterious algorithm, and quite a few of those are really excellent indeed (some are also pretty bad, but popular). Photos that are selected for the Explore gallery immediately get thousands of views, and that’s how I spot that one of mine has been so chosen. Plus, people tell you in comments and invite the photo to “In Explore” groups.

Anyway, this morning one of mine was selected, and among the people who “faved” it, I noticed a strange user name (people are not mandated to use their actual names on Flickr) that included a phrase about thanking people for x million views. This is a new ploy on Flickr, and I have seen several cheesy types use it: if their user name is, say, “Charlie”, they will change it into something like “Charlie thanks for 10 million views”. Of course, it’s not really about thanking people, as you have guessed: it is solely about bragging about their 10 million views.

This is cheap and mediocre, but so is most of the human race, unfortunately. Panem et circenses. Along the same lines, the verb “share”, which expresses a wonderful concept, is one of the most corrupted nowadays: most people do not want to actually “share” their photos with you, they want to use them to show off and hope that you will admire them. That’s what “sharing” truly means to most people nowadays.

And so, there was this guy “faving” my Explored photo this morning, with a phrase thanking people for x million views in his user name, and since the number of views he boasted about was quite high, I went to have a look at all the wonders he certainly had in his Flickr gallery… Well, he only had about 200 pictures, most of them ugly snapshots, quite a few of them politically oriented against terror and condemning terror attacks —nothing wrong with that, of course, but the photographic quality simply wasn’t there.

I was puzzled. How could someone with such a meager and mediocre portfolio have attracted so many views? I quickly understood: the guy is following 18,700 other people on Flickr, and as most people return the favor when someone follows them (I don’t necessarily), he also has 18,400 followers…!

That’s the trick! When you have thousands and thousands of followers (which you have induced into following you simply because you have followed them first, doesn’t matter if you never go again to look at their photos!), statistically it will snowball into millions of views, just because SOME of them will occasionally click on one of your photos…

So, now you know: you want millions of views on Flickr, doesn’t matter if your portfolio is shitty, just stoop to following everyone in sight, watch most of them follow you in return, and behold the counter of views going up…

Life is great, decidedly!

The ugly fashion of thick female eyebrows

Fashion is a concept I’ve always found difficult to understand. As a human being, you’d think you would and should want to be yourself, and not too much like the others; particularly where being attractive to the other sex is concerned, you’d think one should and would want to be unique, to differentiate themselves from the next person, instead of doing whatever possible to look as much alike as possible...

Apparently, though, good common sense is not relevant where fashion is concerned. Have some garment industry moguls decided, via the “inspired” voices of some fashion gurus, that skinny jeans were the thing to be seen in now? Let’s all of us buy and wear them, so we can all look alike. Tomorrow, it’ll be mini-skirts, or platform shoes, or the Devil only knows whatever else.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the masses see fit to follow those fashions, as the said masses are not particularly remarkable for their intelligence. Most of the genus homo erectus are indeed quite dumb, not to mention quite lacking in self-assurance and good taste, and those character traits combine to make them very likely to simply imitate what they see the next person doing —which, as already pointed out, is baffling to me: not only do they wear the same things as their neighbors, without regard for whether their silhouette benefits from it, but they readily endorse, without even thinking (but do they ever?), practices that are even much more radical, such as piercings (ah, those rings in the nose that makes women look so much like the cows of my childhood —how utterly ridiculous!), and more recently tattoos. How ugly and decaying will those tattoos look when the concerned ladies reach their mid-thirties and their skin becomes less taut and starts to wrinkle? And by then, they will still have the major part of their lives to live together with those Dorian Gray avatars “adorning” their bodies...

Being into photography, I obviously have dozens of photos staring me in the face every single day, unless I myself am out shooting. Among them, and particularly in my Flickr groups, are female portraits. And since maybe a year or so, I have begun to notice the emergence of a sad and ugly new fashion, which is that of THICK EYEBROWS.

Now, eyebrows on a woman can be a very attractive feature; they contribute to giving a face its singularity, its character. If one main role had to be attributed to them, it would be to showcase the most important component of the face: the eyes. For a very long time, it was well understood that eyebrows were not supposed to steal the show, and had to be kept under control. For once, good common sense was at work there, and women diligently plucked their eyebrows to shape them the way they liked.

However, recently, some dumber-than-usual concept came out that female eyebrows needed to be thick and heavy, in order to look fashionable. Now, I have heard it many times when I was young and honesty had not yet given precedence to political correctness (and therefore I will repeat it for historical reasons), that the world of fashion was ruled by homosexual males who had no vested interest in making females look genuinely beautiful and attractive. I have no idea regarding the accuracy of the latter phrase, but it is true that whoever came up with this idea that female eyebrows had to be thick and bushy has not done them a favor, as I have rarely seen anything uglier.

The women who diligently follow that diktät (and there are very many of them!), not only let them eyebrows grow as thick and bushy as they can, but also actually augment them in thickness and bushiness if they think they don’t look big and thick enough by themselves...! Yuck.

The thing is, while they grow and exhibit overgrown bushes on their brows, they still pluck, shave and/or was away any sign of hair almost everywhere else... So, is body hair attractive, or is it not?

Let us all pray that a modicum of good taste will soon prevail over sheer stupidity, and that otherwise charming ladies will cease to emulate Martin Scorsese Andy Rooney, because it does nothing to make them more attractive to most men.

Me and my five (so far!) Nikon Z7

The Nikon Z7 is a great camera, with the upcoming firmware update(s) it’s going to be even greater, and I won’t sing its praises here, others on the Internet are and have been doing it much better than I could hope to.

There is one thing, though, that bothers me: supported languages. And this is what this article is about, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes as I.

So, I bought my first Z7 mid-November 2018, just in time for my December photo trip to Brittany. Now, what is the first thing you do when you receive a new digital camera these days, after charging the battery, that is? You open the menus and start configuring it to make it more your own, and make it work the way you want.

And as soon as I started doing that, I discovered that the menus on my Z7 were in English and Chinese. Only.

Now, that doesn’t really bother me personally, as I’m used to configuring all my cameras in English, which is like a second native tongue to me, and which makes it a lot easier as most of the camera-related content found on the Web is in English anyway, so having the camera set up in English already makes it easier to try out the various tips I may stumble upon, but... but... when the day to resell it comes, what do I do, in France, surrounded by French-speaking, Italian-speaking, German-speaking, Spanish-speaking potential customers?

Obviously, it is going to be a problem.

So, I think “OK, my bad, I should have checked/asked, I’m not going to return it now as with scarce inventories, there won’t be time to obtain another one before I go to Brittany, I will procure another one later and resell this one with English only, hoping to take advantage of the fact that it will still be a very new camera to find a buyer that will be OK with English only...”

With a couple of weeks to spare before my trip, I chanced and ordered a second Z7 from the FNAC marketplace vendor Infinity Pro, which claimed to have the camera in stock... but finally decided to reimburse my3,431 euros as they could not procure the Z7...! The claim was false, obviously.

Not daunted (how stupid can one be?), I ordered a third Z7 from the E-global Central Belgium online vendor. I waited days and days, no one answering my emails, no one giving me any news (in spite of having promptly debited my VISA card!), and suddenly I was informed that my 3,018 euros were going to be reimbursed!

Considering the obvious difficulties to obtain this camera, I decided to wait until after Christmas, and so on January 7, I ordered my fourth Z7 from UK online vendor Progadgets KCS. UK vendors have very good prices because they source their products from Hong Kong, and there must be some special customs arrangement between the UK and their former colony, so that goods may enter the European Union without paying VAT, or something like that... Better hurry if one wants to take advantage of this, because after the Brexit, it will be too late...

Anyway, this time I had done my homework and asked about supported languages. That vendor had been very reactive and had listed five or six languages in their email, so I thought I was safe, but when I received the camera and began to configure it, I discovered that, in fact, what I had mistaken for the beginning of a long list of languages, was in fact the full list. And so, there was, in addition to English and Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese, which was already an improvement, but no German, no Italian, no Spanish, etc.

In other words, I was not really better off. I had to send it back, and I am expecting reimbursement (this time, of 3,031 euros) as I write this.

I have now sworn that the Progadgets KCS thing was going to be my last mistake, and therefore I have sent emails all over the place, asking vendors for an EXHAUSTIVE list of the supported language, and this allowed me to find out that Nikon have implemented really strange policies regarding the languages supported in the menus of the Z cameras: the reduced cost copies that come into Europe via Hong Kong are usually only in English and Chinese, and some also have Dutch, Portuguese and some strange languages that look like Hindu or Burmese...

Of course, I can always go to a “legitimate” Nikon dealership in France. Only today, I received an answer from Objectif Bastille, a well-known retailer in Paris (where I bought, in fact, my Z-mount 35mm f/1.8 S lens), detailing the supported languages, and they’re all there: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, English, French, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serb, Finnish, etc. In other words, all the languages I have, for example, on my D850. But then, the price of the Z7 plus an FTX adapter is 3,850 euros, which is quite a different deal...

At this point, my last hope is some obscure retailer in the Canary Islands, but they seem to keep strange business hours and I am still waiting for them to answer my query about the supported languages. If that fails, I will have no choice but to pay full price.

So, in conclusion, if you see some great buying opportunities on the Internet, make sure you ask the right questions and obtain the right answers in writing before you let them take your money...!

EDIT: After Progadgets KCS, I was once more taken in by inaccurate representations from an online vendor, this time Duke Fotografia in Las Palmas, Canary Island (Spain) as, in spite of my having asked (repeatedly!) the very specific question about languages supported in the menus), I was still sent a Z7 which only had English, French, Spanish and Portuguese...! I had to send it back once again, and then I decided to go to a very official Nikon authorized reseller in the city of Lyons, and actually look at the “Languages” item in the Setup menu: sure enough, dozens of European languages were listed, just as on my D850. I bought that Z7, which is going to be THE ONE for me —at last!