awholenother

Letterhead Fonts (www.letterheadfonts.com) makes some very nice period display typefaces. They all are based on a recognizable time, or place, or historic use of type and they provide a very strong base for a really nice logo or bold design.

Back in 2005 I bought Ballpark, a typeface inspired by the curvy logos found on old-time baseball uniforms, and still very much a part of the sport’s culture today. It came in handy when making things related to just about any sport, though. At some point over the last year, due to OS X’s crazy font management and file locations, two new PCs, and evidently some poor decisions in my backup scheme, I lost both the font file, and the archive that I originally downloaded.

When I purchased the font, I seem to remember the standard “make sure you save this, you won’t be able to re-download this file ever” spiel that came with most download-only purchases from small shops back then. Now along with that comes the fact that I’m really only buying a license for the font, not those actual bits and bytes that I downloaded on November 20, 2005. Even if LHF didn’t want to give me another copy of the file, they can’t say I lost my license, so, based solely on my general experience with DMCA and the likes, it would seem safe to say I could snag a copy from anywhere, and be within my rights to use it. Not that any of this was an issue for several years, as I had the font, and the backup, and really no use for either for quite a while when I wasn’t doing much design.

Recently I had an idea that I wanted to use Ballpark in, and lo and behold, I finally realized I had lost track of it. I headed over the LHF site to see if I could get another copy, and  their support page specifically address this issue under the heading “I’ve lost my fonts! Can you send them to me?” which says:

If you have placed an order after January 2007, you may login to your account and download your fonts again. Your fonts remain in your account so you can download them as needed. If the fonts you need replacing were ordered prior to 2007, please create a new account by making a new purchase. Additionally, there is a single $10 fee for adding more than 2 fonts to your account and you must have a receipt. Replacement requests without receipts will incur an additional $6 fee to research the old order(s).

It’s nice to see they’ve finally entered the 21st century and have a system in place to handle accounts. It’s also nice to see they are ready to help out those of us with old orders, even though back then the files were not available for “re-download”, EVER!. After I read the words a little more closely, I had one of those “Oh I see what you did there” moments; in order to get my old purchase back, I need an account, and they want me to think I need to buy something to set one up. Well I look around the site, and finally realize I don’t actually need to make a purchase to get an account. It’s also important to note here that there’s a $6 fee to research old orders. Keep that in mind: researching old orders is $6.

I think I’m all set to get this font back. I have my new account, and I tracked down the original receipt. I fill out their support form explaining the situation, and send it off. It happened to be the weekend, so it took about a day to get a response which simply asked for the purchase data, the order ID and the new account info. I sent that along, and then nothing. I figured, “ok it’s the weekend, no rush” Monday, Tuesday,  Wednesday come and still I don’t hear anything, so I resubmit the support form. Within an hour I get a response telling me

The order was placed before we began tracking accounts in 2007. This means that you would not have access to download the font again.

As the Support section states, we ask that you make a new purchase. You have only created an account. Making a new purchase compensates us for the time spent placing the old fonts into your account.

Wait, what? They’ve pretty much just said “we know you bought this font, but you can’t have it.” Chuck, the responder, also points out that the support section asks me to make a new purchase to get this back. I suppose if I read the support section knowing that fact beforehand, I can infer their policy from how it’s worded. But “If the fonts you need replacing were ordered prior to 2007, please create a new account by making a new purchase” really doesn’t make that very clear.

I email Chuck back pointing out that their support section on the matter is vague, and that I really don’t need any more fonts right now, so I’m not going to purchase one just to get back one I already own. Since it seems like there is a significant amount of effort involved in verifying my old purchase, I include PDFs of my original receipt, and my credit card statement from November 2005 showing the purchase.

The reply to that was:

Once you have an account, you will be able download your fonts whenever you like. But for fonts ordered before 2007, it requires about 20 minutes to track down your old order and then manually create a new order and place the old font into your account.

I do not feel that it is unfair to ask you to make a new purchase to compensate us for our time in replacing a font that was purchased 4 years ago. Since you do, I will be disabling your account.

Once I have an account? 20 minutes?!? Chuck, your last email to me told me I had an account… I tracked down my old order in about 20 seconds using Mail.app’s terrible search, and placing a new order on LHF’s website takes all of a minute or two. But I’ll give Chuck the benefit of the doubt, maybe he’s not a good searcher and it will take 20 minutes. According to Chuck, it’s completely reasonable to think that 20 minutes of customer service (i.e. clicking around a database) is actually equivalent to all the time and effort that goes into creating a typeface. Either that’s true, and I paid way too much for Ballpark in the first place, or this is starting to look like a pretty sleazy company policy to eke out an extra sale. The real kicker though is that LHF told us how much researching an old order costs, remember? Six dollars. And that was without a receipt, and certainly without a credit card statement. How did it suddenly come to cost $35.

And why exactly did you disable my account? I mean, come on, you’re really over there thinking that me not wanting to pay the full cost of a new font to get access to one I’ve already licensed is unreasonable to point where you literally never want me to come back or even have a sliver of chance of recommending you to someone else? I’ll admit that one purchase every 6 years doesn’t make me a VIP or anything, but that’s a lot more typefaces than your average person buys in their lifetime, and alienating someone who may just need an antiques shop font down the road seems silly.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to live without my Ballpark font, until someday when I do need that antique typeface, if they even let me in the door. Congratulations to Letterhead Fonts for doing so well as a small, highly specialized typeface shop in this economic downturn that literally shoeing away customers is business as usual.

(This post is a little bit all over the place. I wrote some of it a while ago, and some of it today. The original post was about the USATF in general, but I edited and added parts to focus on the website.)

Shameless plug: I am jobless, and I would be more than happy  to consult on fixing any of these issues. email: chris at farski dot com

For the USATF to survive, it needs to make a choice. It either needs to be an organization focused on it’s membership (i.e. the average runner who is a member for discounts, entry to sanctioned meets, etc) or it needs to become an entity that provides a channel to function and progress (as a runner). Right now it is doing neither at even an mediocre level; which is not surprising given how hard it would be to provide those two vastly different services at the same time (at least in the way the USATF is used to providing them). I don’t think it has the resources or the structure or the intuition to reach a happy medium for those two roles, so it’s essential that (soon) it picks one and strives to achieve an impressive and sustainable level with a good amount of recognition throughout the country (in terms of the general population).

If it were up to me, the obvious choice would be to take the route of creating a legitimate professional environment for athletics, and (at least for now) forget about the general membership side of things. In terms of the latter, there are several things to think about. First, (and I could be way off on this) I would think that most competitive athletes that aren’t professional to some degree are in high school or college, neither of which needs the USATF. Most HS runners have probably never heard of the USATF, and I don’t think most college runners put too much thought into it either, though they are probably more likely to currently be involved in some sanctioned events. Second, for that group of athletes who are competitive but don’t fall under the NCAA or NFHS, I think everyone needs to realize that they would still be finding ways to compete without any USATF involvement. Now I’m sure there would be some impact, given the insurance implications and sanctioning of distances or timing or whatever, but I just don’t see youth meets, club-hosted meets, developmental meets, summer league meets, etc disappearing because they no longer can look to the USATF. Such a small percentage of meets available to non-elites are dependent on the USATF at this point anyway, it really just wouldn’t make a difference. If the USATF is trying to convince itself otherwise, it’s just prolonging its inability to provide a meaningful service to the community.

Some arguments against dropping these groups from USATF focus that I can think of would be things like: lack of promotion or a central place to find events, loss of insurance for sanctioned events as I mentioned, a lack of unified rules and officials, and a less streamlined qualification process for things like nationals/olympics/etc. Now, USATF.com is currently doing very little in terms of helping mid-level athletes find competitions; the regional sites like USATF NE are much more comprehensive and up to date (but evidently get no help from the national USATF and are generally terrible websites to begin with). I really don’t know how insurance works at this level, but there are plenty of meets that get by without it, so I don’t think that would be a huge loss, if any. As far as the rules go, this is track and field. Everyone knows the rules. If a meet is important enough to need a strict set of rules that should be up to the RD to work out. Qualifications are maybe the toughest thing to overcome, but for the small percentage or athletes who aren’t professional and still fall into the group that qualifies for major events, I think a new USATF system could easily handle the low number of athletes, even if on a one by one basis, who need to be able to compete in sanctioned events and who doesn’t meet ‘elite’ status.

A pro-specific USATF could do a lot more for the elite runners. But it needs to actually make decisions are proactively beneficial. If the USATF spent even $5 on the 2008 USA Marathon Trail Championships, that’s $5 that should be really be going to make the lives of professional track, field, or xc athletes better. If that means dropping Ultra-marathons and trail running and maybe even race walking from the scope of USATF then so be it. If those events are actually making more money than track meets, cross-country, marathons, etc, than someone’s simply doing something wrong. Runners, professional or aspiring, should be able to look at the USATF and see an opportunity to use their sport as a livelihood. No one looks at the MLB or NFL and thinks, if I were a part of that, I might not be able to actually afford to compete or stay healthy. That’s what the current system has done; it’s completely un-legitimized the potential within the sport. Even if the money and the support isn’t coming from the USATF itself, the fact that the USATF is there should be a big enough indicator of success within the sport to allow people to say “I feel safe making this sport my life.”

The major issue I have with the USATF is that it’s actions seem to consistently be answering the question, “What can we do related to running,” rather than “What can we do to make the sport of running better.” Even within the current all-runners system, from the largest national programs to the littlest details, it just doesn’t seem like anyone over there knows what would make the sport better. As an example: the visa championship series…what do those points even mean!? Half of the people in the top five are hardly shown on tv. It’s obviously not a meaningful metric within the sport since you can’t go anywhere and easily see the current standings (try and find the standings on usatf.com, I dare you…). And quite simply, no one cares. So why does it even exist? It’s just extra fluff that makes the sport even less legitimate. Another example: the false start rule. Outside of championship competition, why are we taking people out of races at all? If a major name gets DQed, it hurts the fans that came to see him or her race, if it’s not a major name then why not let them race? They’re either not going to win, so it won’t matter, or they’re going to be a huge upset, which gets people talking about the runner, the race, the meet, the sport, etc. Who actually sat down and thought “We have almost no fans, so let’s change the false start rule. Let’s make it EASIER for runners to not run, and fans to not see them run.” We have the rule that if someone falls in the first turn the race restarts with everyone, why not with a false start. Athletes and fans are out there to see who can win the race, not who can avoid false starts the best. There are countless other examples of decisions the USATF has made that have no benefit, from the commercials with Deena that don’t actually say what the USATF is or why someone should join, to having big name athletes show up to elementary schools and talk about god knows what instead of having them show up at a local  high school track practice a couple days before a big meet to run with the kids, do a 4×100 versus Wariner or something, and try to get some people (who can actually drive, and have money) to come pay and watch. This stuff’s not hard to figure out…

Basically the USATF (or some athletics entity) needs do whatever it takes be be recognized. Lacrosse a couple years ago was a nothing sports. Now MLL is on TV all the time, and people that watch sports recognize MLL as a brand. Even if they don’t know any players or teams, they’ve done enough for people to make that association. NO ONE knows USATF. People probably watch entire meets on TV and don’t realize what a USATF is. We’ll never have success if all we give the public is runners and meets and records. We need to provide a brand. We don’t have teams, so we need to do what the PGA and NASCAR have done; make the USATF a brand. If you look at how NASCAR is presented to the public, it’s always NASCAR first, specific event second. “Nascar on Fox, 4pm on Saturday.” The cable lists say “NASCAR racing” not “Stock car racing”. People watch it because it’s nascar, not because it’s the Whatever 6000 or because someone’s racing. But there should be an effort to make athletes their own brand also. Second tier golfers are more recognizable than the USATF and all it’s athletes combined, and it’s huge what Tiger Woods as a brand has done for golf and the PGA. If USATF can find and advertise a runner who people love, people will learn to love the sport.

Now, as for USATF.org: there is so much potential for improving US running for athletes and fans, it’s almost unbelievable how long it has been wasted, and how fast and easy it would be to fix. From technical aspects, to design, to utilizing new technologies, to just what it seems like the site is designed to do, there’s almost nothing I can look at on the site (as a professional designer and developer, or a runner) and say “that’s helpful” or “wow that’s a great, original idea”.

Let’s take a little tour of the website. I just got to USATF.org, and what do I see? Well, the two biggest things I see are ads for backpacks and clothing. Now, the chances a majority of users are coming to the site a majority of their time to buy something are probably zero percent. But just by looking at this, I would have to believe whoever made the site thought that’s why people are coming here. What else do I see? Well I see a lot of design elements that don’t match. There are two or three different shades of blue background that makes this look like a complete amateur designed the site, I see some graphical elements have diagonal edges which is a pretty nice look, but oh wait, there are some new elements that are just regular rectangles and ruin the whole feel.

OK what else do I see. There’s the event box in the middle that’s telling me about some upcoming events. Aside from the fact that the labels below the boxes take me to a different webpage and don’t just show me the info I was looking for, and the playback control are TINY, all I’m being shown are the 2009 outdoor championships in two months and Relays Weekend. Isn’t the Boston Marathon in like 10 days? Aren’t two Americans actually going for the WIN this year? Maybe, but I guess the USATF doesn’t care too much about it.

Latest news, ok let’s catch up on what happened this week. Ok we have two ‘News and Notes Volume 9’s, two Athletes of the week (which don’t include first names…), a Clean kids program, and one other thing that is getting cut off because it’s too long to fit in the box. Ok well I certainly feel caught up on what went down this week in US running. Actually no I don’t. I wasn’t even interested enough by any of those headlines to click one. I’ll just go get my news from letsrun.com, since they actually cover real news.

Oh hey look at that, an tiny little icon to join the USATF! How could I have missed that? And here I was thinking one of the main functions of the USATF was to get people to join, but I guess the margins are better on those drawstrings bags and hats, so good thing most of the screen real estate is clothing ads.

Ah, a blog by Doug Logan, now for some real information. I guess I’m lucky I follow T+F news and I know who Doug Logan is, cause if my mom, who really loves watching track meets on TV, showed up here and saw that she’d have absolutely no clue who he is. Or even who the girl in the photo is, since I guess it’s too much trouble to put a caption like ‘Doug with teen phenom Jordan Hassay’ or a headline for what the blog post is about.

StretchStudy. Why does it have a flashing exclamation point? Ouch.

Let me find out a little more about Kara Goucher. Ok her she is in a very long list of T+F athletes that’s not even organized by Track or Field. Hmm, this doesn’t look at all like the box stats I’m used to when I look up athletes on any other sports website. “2005: bests of 4:12.31 and 15:17.55.” Wait I can’t even get a list of the meets she ran? How about her splits from that half-marathon a few weeks ago? Didn’t they invent databases for this type of thing? I bet there’s a video of her though, since every website in the world has videos these days, maybe some highlights from that time she medaled at worlds. Oh well, AT LEAST I KNOW WHO HER AGENT IS!

Ok moving on, let me find the next track meet in my area. I’d love to watch one or maybe even run in one since the weather’s getting nice. Events/calendar. Type: track meet. Dates: 4/10/2009 – 5/10/2009. State: Massachusetts. NO RESULTS?! Wow I can’t believe there are zero track meets in the state for an entire month. Especially since I know there’s a pretty big street meet in Boston on the 26th. Oh well, I guess it was cancelled. Maybe next year they’ll have one of those nice google maps and a slider so I can select a date and see exactly where on the map there will be races. It’d be great to see track meets with a 5000 and 5k road races on the same map.

Oh well, maybe I’ll make it to the Race Walk championships in El Salvador. The first event that comes up when I go to the calendar is a race WALK, in a different country, and there are only 11 athletes from the US in it.

I’m feeling a little nostalgic. I was a USATF member for a couple years, I wonder what I ran at the sanctioned meet that I paid for, and paid for a USATF membership so I could run there; I’m sure the results are somewhere on USATF.org. I can’t even find somewhere to log in, or look up results, or search, or do just about anything useful on this entire website. There are just pages and pages of stuff that doesn’t matter to anyone, that don’t look the same, or even look nice, and don’t make me want to run or follow running any more than I did when I got here.

The problem isn’t that this site is just not good, it’s that all these things were DECISIONS made by someone, who has no real idea of what US running needs and how this one simple website could vastly improve the whole situation. The entire sub-elite competitive running scene could be improved and automated by a web application that I could make in a week. Pay for your membership, find races, host races, promote races, register for meets, get results, find training partners and routes, keep a running log. I should be able to log in and do all of that on USATF.org. Attracting and retaining fans could at least be improved by providing a well designed, up to date, inclusive page for news, photos, videos and results. ESPN isn’t going to start covering running anytime soon so the USATF has to step up and do that itself. Once a little bit of time and money is spent on planning and building a pretty, useful website for this stuff, real effort can be spent on getting the professional sport some attention. And it is hugely important to remember that this process can’t just be ‘copy what the other sports are doing,’ because they make decisions based on the fact that people love those sports, and will put up with some annoyances. For instance, every time I go to MLB.com some highlight automatically starts playing. Regardless of how many times I tell it not to, it still auto-plays. But I can deal with that because after I hit pause for the millionth time, the rest of the page has scores, stats, summaries, and tons of other information I want to know. If I went to USATF.org and a dumb video started playing, I would not be sticking around for too long. It’s the same thing with ads, and sponsors, and charities, and anything that isn’t what I’m actually there for. ‘They’ can get away with that stuff, USATF can’t.

If you’re going to give an input field focus by default, you’d better be 100% sure I’m going to be typing before I do anything else on that page. Twitter.com (when you’re logged in) is by far the worst offender of this that I run into on a daily basis, but I’ve seen it happening more and more. Are most people really twittering every time they land there? I would say I scroll 90% of the time, and type 10%.
Maybe the space-to-scroll isn’t the smartest hotkey in the world, but I’m not ready to throw it in the pit with delete-to-go-back just yet. At least with ‘back’ I have another, more appropriate choice (two in the case of Safari, and probably other browsers). And no, page down is not a replacement for space; it’s inconvenient on full keyboards, and even worse on most notebooks. I would suggest command+space or something like that as an always-available backup, but I think it’s safe to say launchers have claimed those as their own.

Here’s my recipe:

I put this together using about 700 of the 1100 photos I took last Friday at the meet. I had put together a similar video from the previous week, but this time I shot the event basically with this as the final result in mind, so I put a few hours of work into it. I had to chose between shooting JPEG and not worrying about space on my cards, or going with RAW and having a better chance of offsetting the terrible lighting is post. I went with RAW and just barely got away with it; I walked out with 6 photos remaining on 13gig of cards.

2009 MIAA All-State Championships T+F Championships in 90 seconds from Chris Kalafarski on Vimeo.

After getting everything into Lightroom, I knew I wasn’t going to spend the time going stack by stack and getting the exposure and WB perfect (there was a pretty big variation from one side of the track to the other) so I made up a preset that was a good compromise in most cases. The first time through the photos I eliminated stacks that I knew weren’t going to make the final cut; either there were too few keepers to make a good motion picture of the race, even with more manual editing the colors weren’t going to be saved, or the shots were too similar to others (back to back heats from the same location) that would have just made the video boring.

I ended up with about 80 “takes”, which I went through photo by photo and cropped and did any final developing. When cropping, I made sure each stack visualized a nice movement of the focused runner across the frame. This was tougher in head-on shots, so getting a progressive scale was more important there. I also dropped some unnecessary frames from the beginning and end of certain stacks. At this point all the frames that ended up in the video except for about 10 were finalized.

I exported to JPEG and brought all them into After Effects. I wish there were some sort of ‘export stacks to separate folders’ option, which would have saved a lot of time in the next step, but oh well. I dropped the whole bunch into a comp, sequenced them, and then when through stack by stack and pre-comped them, so it would easy to reorder things. For longer races where I had four or five takes, they all ended up in one comp. I overlooked the timecode at this point, and ended up with comps at 30fps and each image was three frames. It obviously made more sense just to have each image be one frame and drop the frame rate to match the image rate (I decided to be 7, maybe could have gone with 6 to slow some of the quicker shots down).

So after going back through and fixing that, I found a few races that had several heats, meaning I had a single athlete running the same thing, but from different angles. I spliced them together to make things more interesting, and also to decrease the number of times a few athletes/teams showed up, because it was somewhat out of balance. After mucking around with the order of clips for a while, I found something I liked, so I synced up the music, added a title and called it a wrap.

Total time was probably about four or five hours. If I were to do it again I could probably get the same quality in about three hours, but would probably do a little more work in Lightroom to get the colors and cropping a little more consistent.

The EN-EL3e battery that comes with D300 can only get the camera shuttering at six frames a second, and let’s be honest, that just isn’t fast enough. Dropping another few hundred dollars to get the EN-EL4a and charger to get up to nine fps is a little ridiculous, though.

Enter the Phottix Kosmo. Not only is it a battery on par with the EN-EL4a, getting you those last few precious fps, but it also does away with the need for the BL-3 battery chamber cover required to get the EL4 to fit properly in the MB-D10. The rest of the story gets pretty sketchy. The Kosmo’s main hangout is eBay, and they are shipped straight out of Hong Kong. Shipping takes a good while, and I wouldn’t expect too much tech support if something were to go wrong with this guy. 

The charger is pretty unusual for a camera battery. Instead of the standard cradle approach, it just have a little cover over a DC jack, so you plug an adapter right in. This sounds convenient, and considering you don’t need to carry around another bulky (in the case of a EL4, a very bulky) cradle since you’ll probably still be using an EL3, I guess in a way it is. But the thought of having a strange power cable plugged directly into a battery still in my camera doesn’t sit well, so I always end up taking the battery out to charge it. The included AC adapter has EU prongs, so you’ll need a travel adapter, and that’s been nothing but inconvenient. I found a US adapter of equal wattage and voltage in my box of cables, but the jack was too large for the plug on the Kosmo. The larger jack that I had seemed to be standard, so I don’t know where they found the adapter that was included. My last big gripe with the battery is that the little rubber cover protecting the DC jack doesn’t instill much confidence in the way of weatherproofing. I think that when it’s seated properly it will do a decent job of keeping out moisture, but it doesn’t really have the grippy feeling other rubber covers on electronics have, so I go out of my way to keep on a on it and make sure it’s where it should be.

I haven’t done much in the way of testing capacity, or compared it to the EL3 (and I don’t have a EL4). I would say it probably runs out a little more quickly over the same number of frames, and a lot more quickly over the same time period — those three extra fps add up.

Lastly, nine frames every second is silly. But fun.

Back in October I ran across several articles, podcasts, and videos that all happened to be talking about how terrible conventional dog food is. Everything from lax and deceptive regulations on labeling, to what is actually getting into the food, to even the fact that the product, as advertised, is not a good option for dogs. Now of course no one is coming out and saying “product X by brand Y is made out of plastic bags,” so you always come away from these reports a little more paranoid but just as clueless as when you started. If they really want to help consumers make a decision and improve quality of life for dogs, they really should just be saying “here are the facts we have on these products, so as best we can tell avoid these and use these.” Even if they can’t say a single product is 100% reliable and a perfectly balanced diet, at least it would help polarize the endless options when you are standing in the middle the pet superstore.

So at the end of the day when you are actually filling your dog’s bowl, it can at best be with a food that someone you trust has said good things about, that a website as had some praise for (though mostly with no comparison to any other products), or that comes from a company you just have a good feeling about.

After all the googling I could stand, the two things that floated to the top for me where “kibble is hard to trust” and “raw is good”. Even the premium kibble that I had been using from Science Diet, in my mind, seemed “susceptible” to the inclusion of animal renderings and other strange byproducts that, while probably perfectly fine, didn’t do much to help the image of kibble in my eyes. Cow brain and the tendons of a goat may be organic and full or protein, but I didn’t run across a single bit of evidence that said “the major problem with dog foods of late is the lack of grey matter.” If it’s in there and they’re not advertising it on the bag next to oats and carrots, there’s probably a reason.

As far as raw goes, like most people I had the initial “well that makes sense” kind of reaction — dogs are animals, they should eat like the other animals. Then you start to think,  ”well, they’re domesticated so they probably have different needs, like humans” or, “maybe all the other animals would live longer and be better off if they ate kibble.” As far as I can tell there’s enough evidence for and against raw diets that it really just comes down to a personal decision. I’m sure there are dogs that ate kibble everyday for 18 years that were just as healthy as ones that were only fed raw squirrel and peanuts.

That being said, many many times, even in having a discussion with my dog’s very own vet, the biggest risk with a raw food diet wasn’t the food itself, it was simply not meeting the dog’s basic nutritional needs. It certainly would be a problem if you fed your dog a diet for 15 years that didn’t include some vital mineral, but it seems to me that it’s very easy to determine what a dog needs and how to provide that on a daily basis. Or I should say, it’s at least as easy as determining what’s going into your dog when you feed them the same kibble year after year. The dog food bags list a meager number of nutrients, so I would have to believe the vets that are saying, “don’t go raw because you’ll probably miss the vitamin K” have the inside scoop that all the dog foods out there are overflowing with vitamin K, right?

Since there’s clearly no right answer, I ended up going essentially with my gut and took the commercial-raw food path. This is a pretty tight range of products from a few manufacturers (it’s important to remember the food is still coming from a food processing plant) that are more inline with organic and sustainable people food than premium dog food. In general they are, in fact, largely organic, a complete list of ingredients is available, and the companies are much more accessible. Commercial raw foods also, theoretically, eliminate the worry of a non-balanced diet.

The forerunner in my own comparative research was The Honest Kitchen, out of California. The biggest thing that I didn’t like about their product matrix was how many options there were. I would actually prefer if they said “here are five diets, they’re all great they just taste different so Fluffy doesn’t get bored.” Instead there are seven seemingly very different products. Some do have very specific purposes, like sensitive stomachs, dogs that can’t do grains, and puppies, which I have no problem with.

Things got a little fuzzier once you start actually comparing the products. Force is grain free for sensitive stomachs; Embark is grain free but for everyone! Verve is “an excellent option for those who want a more wholesome and less processed meal for their pets”… But that doesn’t really differentiate it from any of their other products, now does it? And it’s great that you can see exactly what’s in each of these products, but I really wish they said why one has zucchini and the others don’t. Is it replaced with something else? What is it good for in the first place? I’m not saying they don’t have very good reasons for having it in there or not, but I think most people reading between the lines on dog food websites are like me and want more information than they can handle.

Those were really the only problems I could find with THK. The advantages were many: 100% human grade ingredients, processed in a FDA human grade facility in the USA, very helpful customer service, and the format, if I can call it that, was more appealing than some other options. A few other raw food diets were based on wet products that needed to be refrigerated, purchased much more frequently, or cooked. THK food is dehydrated, comes in 10lb bags that last a while, and is prepared just by mixing with water.

My dog actually sits and waits for the oatmeal-like mixture while it absorbs the water for about 10 minutes. Not once in the two years she was on kibble did she ever get excited about eating it, to the point where I could put as much of in her dish as I wanted and she would never eat more than she needed. I very much doubt I could do that with THK food.

Here’s some of the math I’ve done, specifically regarding Verve. I got my last 10lb bag for $52 shipped. Those 10 pounds equate to 33.35 cups of dry food. That means each cup of dry food costs about $1.56. My dog is on a bit of a diet, and it’s the winter, so I feed her half a cup a day (two servings of 1/4 cup). At that amount I get about 66 days of food from a single 10lb bag, at a cost of 77 cents a day. Those numbers will change obviously when the diet ends and during the summer when she’s more active.

In terms of calories, Verve contains 428kcal/cup. The latest energy requirement guidelines for a dog on par with mine to sustain weight are 580 for an inactive dog and 790 for a very active dog. When my dog is not on a diet I’m usually doing some sort of treat training, so a cup of Verve will get pretty close to the low end for calories, but take care of almost all the other required nutrients (vitamins and minerals), and then relatively cheap home made treats, or good quality commercial treats will fill in the caloric gap.

I actually just found some good dietary guidelines for dogs, so I’m going to compare the numbers with Verve and the other THK recipes to see how they stack up. Regardless of those results, I do feel confident in my decision to switch, and will stick with the commercial-raw diet for the time being. I would be tempted to go true-raw, but it’s tough just finding organic food for myself right now, so trying to manage proper nutrition for my dog, like the vet suggested, would be difficult without the help of packaged, dehydrated food like THK. I think it would be very easy to go true raw with conventional meats, veggies and grains, but organic by itself has a good deal of value to me.

Links

The Honest Kitchen
Science Diet Nature’s Best
Nutritional requirements for dogs

Pros:

• Carrying the camera over your should is a lot better for two reasons. First, it is free to rotate so you can stick it behind your back which makes getting into tight spaces and through crowds a lot less of a hassle. Also, since the camera is hanging upside down, if you’ve got a flash on the hotshoe it isn’t awkwardly under your arm getting knocked around; it’s conveniently hanging down by your pocket.
• Using it in the intended x-chest manner is definitely as nice as advertised. The grip is right where you’d want it to quickly reach down and grab it, and as soon as you’re done shooting the camera gets out of your way.
• I now much prefer having the strap mounted to a long lens, so that when I switch to a short one the 70-200 or whatever stays right where I need it, rather than having the strap on the camera and trying to juggle two loose lenses and a bag.
• The padding makes a nice ad-hoc knee pad when you’re going to be in the same spot for a few minutes

Cons:

• My biggest complaint is how difficult getting the clasp onto the provided L bracket is. At first I figured this was just a good way of making sure things didn’t start falling off, but (unless I’m doing something wrong) it could be just as secure and be a little easier to get on. Granted, I’m not doing this all the time, but every time I do it takes three or for tries to get things lined up. Certainly wouldn’t be an issue with a tripod QR.
• I find that the should pad tends to creep down my chest pretty quickly. Maybe after bringing the camera up to shooting position 10 times I’ll have to reset the pad. It doesn’t really get in the way until it’s like all the way down and when you try to bring the camera up instead of having the flexible nylon mesh just moving out of the way, you’re contending with a pretty solid shoulder pad and things get kind of awkward. I think maybe if the pad were a bit contoured this would be less of an issue, so maybe it will go down with use.

All-in-all, very happy.