Michael’s grumpy world commentary weblog.
I attended day one of a seminar by David Williams, a well-known Australian (Melbourne-based) wedding photographer. At Storey Wilkins’ home in Toronto. Three days, and after day one I am already so pumped, I want to shoot a wedding today!
I also wrote a new site: http://www.michaelwillems.ca - go take a look.
Depth in images. The Egyptians were clueless. Everything they painted looked flat and two-dimensional.
Several thousand years later, most modern snapshot photographers are not much better, and they fail to take advantage of the tools at their disposal.
Imagine that you see an interesting scene. A cathedral, say, or just a bunch of people in front of you. You see the depth. You use your eyes, and the way the items in your view move relative to one another when you move. But see a photo, and you have neither of these benefits.
So now you need to help the viewer’s brain a little. One way to do this is to give the brain relative sizes to work with. If I shoot a room with a few people, it looks flat and boring, especially when I shoot them straight on. But use a wide-angle lens and get close to an object or person, and you see depth. This works in art, and it works in snapshots too. Imagine this shot without the camera close to us: it would look flat. And the difference in relative sizes tells my brain the camera is closer than the ladies.
Simple, eh? All you need to do for this technique is:
So if you photograph a row of people, some closer than others, with a telephoto lens, all their heads will look the same size. Your brain is as clueless as the Egyptians. But get close and use a wide lens, and the head of the closest person is now twice the size as the head of the farthest person. Aha: your brain is clued in and you are a renaissance-man or -woman.
…do. Ouch. My back.
This is my camera bag:
(Click for larger).
It contains:
Result: bad back, arthritic elbows and hands.
But at least with this and the 1Ds MkIII camera on my other shoulder (with 16-35 2.8L lens) I am prepared for pretty much any photographic situation. This is the meta bag: of course one should not -cannot- carry a bag like this when walking around.
The auto workers get a bailout. Forestry workers get aid. Billions. Other industries too. I think photographers should get aid too. Why auto workers and not photographers?
Forget these bailouts. Why not instead just allow investments to be written off in one year? That would encourage small enterprises to immediately spend. And then drastically lower taxes.
But no, we “bail out” inefficient industries instead, without even insisting on curbing union power or materially reforming management.
Get over it.
(click for larger)
So Barack Obama did lots of praying and God-mentioning and -invoking yesterday and today - now I am watching the morning service that he is attending: CNN has it live on TV.
I find it frankly distasteful to see these grown people constantly bow down to an imagined deity. Are they really that stupid or do none of them have the balls to come out and say “you go pray if you want to, but I have a world to run, thanks”?
Is there not supposed to be a separation of church and state? Not, it appears, in the US, a “nation of pious peasants”, as Bertrand Russell incomparably described it in the 1930s.
The audacity of hope. We must hope that Mr Obama will do a good job, but I am sure that many, like me, are watching all the adulation with mixed feelings.
First, Mr Obama will be the next US president, not spiritual advisor or father or führer or deity. A president is a civil servant with a job to do. And he has limited power (he can’t tell you how to spend this evening, for instance, or decide we should drive on the left, or double taxes).
Second, if we are to go by what Mr Obama says (and presumably if he’s that great we have to) then he has some peculiar and outdated economic ideas, unsurprisingly perhaps for an academic who has never has a real job. A Keynesian who wants to involve unions and “spend the wealth around” and “re-evaluate” NAFTA. Re-evaluate free trade? Is he out of his mind?
Third: Mr Obama is a politician. As Greek comic writer Aristophanes wrote: “under every stone there lurks a politician”. Any hope that he is different is likely to be as misguided as the expectation that all will be well now that The Deity Of Hope has been elected.
Mr Obama worries me. His amorphous and meaningless “Change” and “Hope” messages. What change, Mr Obama - is it too much to ask for you to be a tad more specific? I am happy he used a multisyllabic word before hope (Audacity, that’s four syllables) but I still do not know what the change is going to be.
And finally: Obama’s posters fill me with misgivings. Soviet- or Mao-style propaganda posters with The Leader looking away thoughfully, as though he is serious about protecting His People, and we can all be safe while he is worrying about how to protect us. Allowing that kind of worship imagery to be used is bad judgment on his part at the very least: as bad as Mr Bush’s using his “Homeland Security” imagery, which sounds like “Reichs Heimat Sicherheitsdienst”.
Under every stone… I hope I am wrong. But am not holding my breath.
Increasingly, I ask myself whether it is right that our media are distorting and self-censoring to the extent that we have to interpret the news.
More than most people know, our media never mention certain events. As I was travelling in the car earlier today I was listening to the news, and having to interpret that news roughly the way Soviet citizens used to interpret the news. “The party chairman has a cold” meant that he was almost dead. “The harvest is a shining compliment to Soviet abilities” meant “the harvest failed”.
Unfortunately, we do the same, if on a smaller scale. “The highway is closed due to police activity” means “a suicide is being cleaned up”; “the subway trains are temporarily stopped due to a problem on the tracks” means the same. If you see lots of police activity in your neighbourhood and your street is closed off with command centres, automatic rifles, and so on (as mine was recently) but you read nothing about it at all in the newspapers, then it probably involves mental illness. Pictures of car crashes never show any evidence of people. Wars are clean surgical affairs, or puffs of smoke in the distance. Domestic disputes are never mentioned either.
This is unfortunate. Our media should be reporting what is happening, not an excised, cleaned-up, or (self-) censored version of what is actually happening that needs subsequent Soviet-style interpretation. We need to be able to trust our media to tell us what is happening. Bad things happen. I do not like to think of these bad things, but if I pick up a newspaper, I want to hear about them. Of course that can be done sensitively. Names need not always be mentioned. Victims can be shown without identifying them. Blood can be shown without guts. But if it happens, report it.
If I have to guess what the news means, and what is being left out, and how I should interpret the phrases, that leaves me wondering what else is being held back.
I wonder how many people know how much is being held back? Newspapers will overdramatise news (every murder is “grisly”), they will talk incessantly about sex attacks, which happen very rarely indeed, but they talk little or not at all about some of the other events described above. The result is a warped sense of what is happening. It also constitutes a slippery slope: if it is OK to hold back these details, then why not other details, details the government does not want released?
I suppose that is already happening too - and that is the third problem, the fact that you cannot trust media that engage in these practices. It seems to me that a free and open press is more important than protecting all sorts of sensitivities.
Fuel consumption on yesterday’s drive, which was at an average speed of 100 km/h: 8.3 l/100km
Mileage I have driven since filling up (131.5 km):
Mileage remaining until tank empty:
Yeas, that is 1116km more.
That means if I drove carefully I could just make it to Montreal and back on one tank. How cool is that? And finally, premium Diesel is cheaper than premium gasoline. Nice.
Did you all see the “dramatic footage” of that “crash” in New York? With its “miracle survivors” who lived only due to the “amazing heroism” of the “heroic pilot” who was “led by angels” and was given the keys to the City of New York because of this incredible heroism?
NO. It was a ditching, not a “crash”.
Every pilot trains for a ditching like this: it is a well-established (if seldom practised) procedure, up to and including how to land with respect to the waves, how to set the valves, what speed and attitude to set down at, etc. I was taught this when fling Cessnas; every pilot knows how to do this.
Yes, the pilot did it well and by the numbers. Good job: excellent skills, calm demeanor, and a bit of luck. And I am assuming he did not turn off engine two after engine one was hit by presumed birds.
But no drama, heroism, incredible dramatic angel-led miracles, OK? I wish newspapers would stop writing headlines at the expense of the truth.
Perhaps we really do need a ministry of truth.
