Comment: About My Photography

I would like to thank everyone for their feedback on the photographs I've intermittently posted. I have neither the time nor resources to pursue photography professionally (or even semi-professionally), but in a strange way this grants me the freedom to do things at a pace I can manage and maintain. Your comments are always appreciated.

A little (brief) history - my first camera was a Nikon 401-s. Great Nikkor 50mm lens, good auto/manual camera, especially for a beginner (I was all of 19 when I purchased it). It still looks sleek to this day:

However, the longer I used it, the more I realised that it was, contrary to its claim, more auto than manual. Whenever I tried to experiment with exposures it simply wouldn't let me. Which sucked. However, again, for an amateur it was a sweet camera to have.

Last year I decided that I wanted to take control - full control. No auto focus, auto metering, auto exposure, auto anything. I wanted no handicaps, figuring that if I was truly going to learn more I needed to start from absolute basics. At first I thought about a Pentax K1000, which is rightfully heralded as a brilliant manual camera. However, upon further searching, I came across former-Soviet Union (or "FSU") cameras. I've long known that FSU optics are particularly good, seeing as they raided the Zeiss laboratories during the Allied siege of Berlin in WWII - essentially, the Soviets took the equipment and some of the technicians back home with them. Soon after, they started churning out replicas of Leica cameras. Among them was the Zorki series. They're good, they're cheap, they're ugly, they're heavy (really, it's like having a brick in your bag), but the optics are great and they're generally reliable (in proportion to the person you're buying from in any case).

So, I bought a 1966 Zorki-4 on eBay:

Um...pretty, eh? The lens is a 50mm Jupiter-8 (again, modelled on a similar Leica design). It's a rangefinder camera, which means that it does not offer TTL (through-the-lens) focusing - basically you adjust the focus against a reflected image from the lens via an internal viewfinder. How's that for manual. Simultaneously, I started shooting almost exclusively on positive (slide) film, particularly AGFA-brand.

The long-and-short is that I enjoy photography much more than I used to, and managed to do so in a way that recycled an existing good camera without buying something new (and managed to roll back time to an age where batteries aren't necessary). More importantly, when I produce a good photograph now, I take greater pride due to the lack of auto-assistance.

All of the photographs you see on this blog (the ones tagged as "Photo: ... ") are taken with the "Russian brick".

A last note: I hate 'gear' sites, and I promise that this will not be a repeating theme - I'm not a prolific consumer. The reason I posted this is that the current market is flooded with a growing stream of plastic/electronic junk, and it's enlightening to find something built 40 years ago that still manages to meet the task.

(btw - if you run a gallery, I'm all ears)

Photo: 7b

Article/Review: The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart

I caught a great review on Slashdot for Charles (Fast Company magazine) Fishman's book The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart. Although it seems a little lame to link to someone else's review, I thought the review itself was very well written (kudos to Hemos). The subject matter itself is quite fascinating as it profiles a philosophy of doing business that seems...well...old-fashioned in the best possible way: doing what's best for everyone from a long-term perspective. When was the last time you encountered that?

Excerpt:

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Review - The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart

Charles Fishman, senior writer for Fast Company magazine has recently published a book entitled The Man Who Said No To Wal-mart. It's an excellent book (Yes, I've read it) that talks about the intersection of making good stuff, the commodization of products, and the changing world that we work in; not exactly high tech, but tech nonetheless.

Every year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world's biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper mowers.What struck Jim Wier first, as he entered the Wal-Mart vice president's office, was the seating area for visitors. "It was just some lawn chairs that some other peddler had left behind as samples." The vice president's office was furnished with a folding lawn chair and a chaise lounge.

And so Wier, the CEO of lawn-equipment maker Simplicity, dressed in a suit, took a seat on the chaise lounge. "I sat forward, of course, with my legs off to the side. If you've ever sat in a lawn chair, well, they are lower than regular chairs. And I was on the chaise. It was a bit intimidating. It was uncomfortable, and it was going to be an uncomfortable meeting."

It was a Wal-Mart moment that couldn't be scripted, or perhaps even imagined. A vice president responsible for billions of dollars' worth of business in the largest company in history has his visitors sit in mismatched, cast-off lawn chairs that Wal-Mart quite likely never had to pay for.

The vice president had a bigger surprise for Wier, though. Wal-Mart not only wanted to keep selling his lawn mowers, it wanted to sell lots more of them. Wal-Mart wanted to sell mowers nose-to-nose against Home Depot and Lowe's.

"Usually," says Wier, "I don't perspire easily." But perched on the edge of his chaise, "I felt my arms getting drippy."

Wier took a breath and said, "Let me tell you why it doesn't work."

Read On...

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Not the usual Slashdot fare, but it's certainly nice to see.

Live in Toronto: The Z-Rays

If you live in Toronto (or are visiting) and happen to be itching for something to do on a Saturday afternoon, may I heartily recommend catching the Z-Rays. They are currently in-residence at the mighty Planet Kensington, smack dab in the middle of Kensington Market. The band is an instrumental 3-piece specialising in hard-edged surf-punk and rockabilly. A total no-brainer, considering it's backed by cheap beer and a total lack of pretention. Good times aplenty and a great way to spend a hangover, too. No, really - go.

(p.s. - they do pronounce it zee-rays)

(p.p.s - it's from 3pm -> 6pm...what the hell does anyone do on a Saturday during those times but drink?)

(p.p.p.s - their MySpace site is here)

Rest in Peace: Stanislaw Lem

From Reuters:
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Solaris author Stanislaw Lem dies at 84
Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:34 AM ET

KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters) - Polish author Stanislaw Lem, one of the world's leading science-fiction writers, died on Monday in his home city of Krakow at the age of 84 after a battle with heart disease.

Lem, whose books have sold more than 27 million copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages, won widespread acclaim for The Cyberiad, stories from a mechanical world ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974.

Solaris, published in 1961 and set on an isolated space stations, was made into a film epic 10 years later by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and into a 2002 Hollywood remake shot by Steven Sodebergh and starring George Clooney.

"Shortly after 3 p.m. (1300 GMT) Stanislaw Lem died in the heart clinic, where he had been treated over the past few weeks for circulatory problems," Andrzej Kulig, director of the Jagiellonian University hospital told Reuters.

Lem, born on September 12, 1921 in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, studied medicine before World War Two. After the war, communist censorship blocked the publication of his earliest writing.

After the fall of communism in 1989 Lem ceased writing science-fiction, instead devoting himself to reports on near-future predictions for governments and organizations.

He wrote essays on computer crime, as well as technological and ethical problems posed by the expansion of the Internet.

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As mentioned earlier this month, it is from an eponymous Lem book that I gave this blog the name Imaginary Magnitude.

I can only muster two thoughts:
1) Damn it.
2) Bless him.

The Best of Bird Flu

A montage of the latest TV network bird flu graphics:

I particularly like the middle image (courtesy of CTV Canada) of the sideways-glancing chicken with the fiery globe behind it. Nice and balanced - no fear mongering here.

Article: The Man Who Heard It All

I recently came across an article from The Nation that I'd bookmarked not too long ago. On the surface it seems like fanfare for the release of The Oxford History of Western Music (ISBN: 0195169794). However, as journalist Paul Griffiths talks to the man who put the canon together - Richard Taruskin - it quickly turns into a fascinating overview of how we encapsulate our historic understanding of Western musical culture. For example, the death of notation (ie original sheet music), the neglect of female composers, and racism. Fascinating stuff, particularly for those interested in music, history, and cultural anthropology.

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Link: The Man Who Heard It All

Excerpt:

This is an astounding achievement. The Oxford History of Western Music fills five stout volumes (discounting a sixth given over to the index, bibliography and other such matters), and yet Richard Taruskin can justifiably speak of it as a single book. To be sure, it travels far and wide in pursuing a millennium's ramshackle production of songs and dances, keyboard suites and operas, sacred chants and church cantatas, symphonies and chamber works, electronic compositions and virtuoso showpieces, a good number of them quoted in music type so that competent keyboard players can eavesdrop on this multicolored parade as it goes along. Meanwhile, however, the surrounding text keeps its steady voice of thoughtful inquiry, painstaking analysis, consistent generosity and courteous address to the reader. Nothing like this book has been attempted since the nineteenth century, and as the author ruefully remarks, nothing like it may be written again.

Taruskin makes clear his reason for this proud pessimism. The coherence of Western "classical" music--the jumble of types only partly enumerated above--lies in notation (though due acknowledgment is given here to what never was notated and so has been lost). Just as we can observe the emergence of clearly legible notation in the eleventh century, so we seem in Taruskin's view to be witnessing its demise, as some of the composers he treats in his last chapter, from Charles Dodge to Laurie Anderson, go off into territories where notation is no longer of any use, and as the possibility arises with the spread of digital equipment that we may all compose, perform and even disseminate our own music without thought of staves, clefs and quarter notes.

In a sense, this book expresses the magnificence and melancholy of its age. Scholarship--some of it Taruskin's own, on composers as widely separated in time as Stravinsky and the fifteenth-century master Antoine Busnoys--has brought into view, and often into performance, a vast amount of music that was only dimly known half a century ago. But that expansion of knowledge and experience has been accompanied, unavoidably, by doubts about the universal validity of the central repertory, or canon, that built up around the works of perhaps just a dozen composers from Bach to Mahler, nearly all of them not only dead white males but dead white German-speaking males.

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There are many things I love about classical music. I love how, just like the best of our modern music, it can encapsulate history, life, and emotion. It is as if the composition itself is a biometric record of its day, its author.

However, music alone cannot tell us everything. When Solomon Volkov published Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (ISBN: 087910998X) in 1979 which for the first time exposed a completely different picture of Shostakovich than what was assumed at the time (ie not a compliant citizen under Stalin's reign), it drastically changed our view of both the composer and his music (the debate over this book is still raging today).

Music (classical or modern) paints a picture of lives and cultures past that deserve the painstaking (if admittedly imperfect) work that people such as Mr. Taruskin have committed to it, if only so that we can understand the context behind it.

Separated at Birth

Exhibit #1: The new Toronto tourism logo - Toronto Unlimited



Exhibit #2: The logo for Kubuntu, a Linux distribution

Photo: 4b

CopyWrong

I once watched a PBS-televised lecture featuring writer Clifford Stoll. He wrote one of the first true-life hacker books, called The Cookoo's Egg (ISBN: 0671-72688-9), about his efforts to track a "telnet" hacker who was using the Berkeley University server hub as a means to tap into the Department of Defense. A very, very good book.

In the lecture he was discussing copyright issues and how it is becoming harder and harder for people to express themselves due to large corporations buying-up the rights and then registering patents for everything from Mickey Mouse to mere phrases/ideas written on cocktail napkins. He said the following (note: I'm paraphrasing due to the fact that it was over 5 years ago that I watched it):

"If we had the same copyright protection rules historically that we have now, you know who the richest people on Earth would be? The League of Greek Mathematicians; because every time you used the Pythagorean Theorem you would have to pay a fee."

I cannot have chosen a better way to convey how utterly stupid and self-destructive the current copyright laws have become. I'm not arguing against someone protecting the fruits of their invention, however I neither support legally protecting a concept nor extending the patent protecting an invention for more than a reasonable fixed period of time. Historically the reason for patenting an invention was so that the originating inventor would have unabated means (in the marketplace) to collect the rewards of their work/investment - but it wasn't meant to last forever.

Strangely, this was thwarted by a man who will probably go down in history as "Cher's first husband", Sonny Bono. He involved himself in politics and fought (until his death) to extend copyrights indefinitely. One can only speculate that he was concerned "I Got You Babe" wouldn't net him any more proceeds. Details of this law (amended and passed) are here.

My reasoning is this: the evolution of an idea is often the result of a collaboration of thinkers over a long period of time. When the Principia Mathematica was published, Sir Isaac Newton - when asked about his breakthrough idea of gravity - said that he was only "standing on the shoulders of giants", namely the likes of Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus: those who had come before him and provided the necessary groundwork to provide Newton with the tools to complete the picture.

The current environment is simply bad capitalism: dramatically limiting competition and the free evolution of ideas for short term profit. Sad.

Best Stephen Harper Editorial Cartoon Contest (pt.#1)

Context: cultural protectionism vs. indigenous identity

An interesting article on The Guardian today highlights an interesting question regarding cultural protectionism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1734778,00.html?gusrc=rss

Excerpt:

Ministry bans export of Spanish writer's manuscripts

Dale Fuchs in Madrid
Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian

Signed manuscripts by one of Spain's most influential novelists and philosophers of the 20th century, Miguel de Unamuno, have been declared "not for export" by the culture ministry, days before they were due to auctioned in Madrid.

The decision is part of a mounting effort to keep Spanish cultural treasures at home and follows a move earlier this month to get Interpol to prevent the sale of five 10th-century wooden beams from the historic Great Mosque of Cordoba.

On March 27, the Sala Durán auction house in Madrid plans to sell nine lots of letters and other documents by Unamuno, the author of Fog, Abel Sánchez and Teresa, some of them written during his exile from 1926 to 1930 in the Canary Islands and Paris, during the dictatorship of Primo Rivera. Other letters up for sale were written to his wife, children and other intellectuals and writers of his times, such as the poet Rubén Darío.

News of the sale, however, sounded the alarm at the culture ministry. It said it had declared the Unamuno manuscripts off limits to foreign buyers as "a cautionary measure" to "guarantee this assembly of extraordinary interest for Spain's documental heritage" remains in the country.

It is the first in what will be a series of legal measures to preserve Spain's cultural patrimony, the statement said. The Sala Durán told Spanish news agencies the auction would proceed as planned.

An interesting predicament (and I'd be curious to have people who live in Spain give more context to this). I suppose the chief conflict is whether cultural artifacts/icons should be freely subject to export or mandated to remain in-country. Although it isn't clear who would be bidding on the works of de Unamuno (private sale, museum, university, etc.), there is a strong argument that by allowing fragments of ones heritage to be exported you are also exporting articles of cultural identity which could arguably serve a greater good via public access in an international setting (again, assuming the auction tilts towards public institutions). The world would be allowed to understand aspects of Spain's culture that they wouldn't otherwise have access to when these elements are available to them.

One of the problems with cultural protectionism is that the benefits tend to be short-term; if you refuse to allow cultural artifacts to be exported then you deny your culture a necessary life. Culture can neither be created nor destroyed by man; it is an ecosystem unto itself. Logically then, if you close the free export of culture (and I understand there may be very persuasive arguments for holding back) you are effectively cutting off a vine which should necessarily thrive unheeded. I generally feel that the only cultures which require protection are extinct/demised cultures - the Aztecs, for example. There is no way for the remnants of their culture to thrive without artificial means, thus it makes sense to take a protectionist stance.

My question is thus: what is the state of Spanish culture? Is there a need for protectionism? Am I totally off-base (probably)? Has Spanish culture, like Egyptian, been raided by foreign interests?

Have your say below...

Photo: M5V Merged Condo

The Vagaries of Vagueness

I would hazard to say, standing in my media-saturated 21st century Western society, that being 'vague' is worse than being 'wrong'. Today, you can be concisely misleading yet never be taken to task by your peers, whereas if you are perceived (even falsely) of 'waffling', it is presumed that you are a lower life form and a drag on the sail of civilisation.

Ask John Kerry, the gentleman who ran against the incumbent president of the United States in 2004. Although a confident public speaker, arguably his great shortcoming was an inability to distill his ideas (and, as the campaign wound-down, his reactions) in a precise way. Although he performed well in the presidential debates, off-stage he was generally unable to articulate a clear message at crucial junctures to a large population, many of whom were shopping for a new president. It didn't help of course that his competitor's well-funded propaganda machine (abetted by a democratically impotent news media) raised as many distracting peripheral issues as they could. Arguably, by the time Kerry could get back to the task of getting elected, he'd wasted much of his steam as well as the hopes and patience of the US public.

On the other side, the incumbent succeeded in spite of the fact that his administration was clearly contemptuous of journalists, artists, and anyone else who dared to posit difficult questions (being hallmarks of democracy the last time we checked). In other words, in spite of the fact that the administration treated the very people whose job it is to articulate the world around them like rubes, they won. They won a majority. But damn was he clear. Unlike his rival, George W. Bush was firm: cut-and-run, bait-and-switch, flip-flopper. These hyphenated accusations clearly, if inaccurately, conveyed moral and ethical failures within his opponent's character and ideals. Whether or not his policies were realistic, they were precisely worded: we will not abandon our cause. If you asked what the cause was - easy: democracy.

What I'm saying is that we increasingly reward firmly-stated obfuscations over less impermeable truths.

I often wonder why there is so little true debate in our society, outside of academia. I've found that it's because truth is neither precise, nor is it unyielding. Knowledge is inherently vague - and by knowledge, I don't mean the concept of knowledge, but rather its practical application in society. Truth is messy; it's neither red, nor blue, nor grey. Truth is moderated by the lack of absolute answers. The problem of course is that this doesn't make for nicely-packaged media clips, so what we end up with are endless volleys of increasingly intolerant hyperbole.

When foisted truths are painted in the absolute (some would say fascist) colours of rhetoric the middle-ground of debate is sufficiently suffocated; the public is the loser. And when society's moderators, the media, are complicit, debate is a moot point altogether. Even a cursory glance at the major news networks (in particular Fox and MSNBC) reveals this partisan implication. Not only is there a lack of interest in debate, but I would dare say that debate is increasingly synonymous with treason. For the last few years, treason has been the word often levelled at anyone questioning America's involvement in Iraq. Recently, in Canada, the Prime Minister's office has refused Parliamentary debate of our involvement in Afghanistan, citing 'security reasons'. We are given the Bush administration's long-standing argument: we will not cut-and-run. However, I can't recall anyone initially stating: "Hey, let's cut and run.".

There are people, however, who indeed ask necessary questions: the whys, the hows, the whats, etc.. Contrary to the muffling rhetoric from government spokespeople, these necessary questions are not preludes to surrender, nor are they indicative of moral 'waffling'. They are hallmarks of the very democracy our soldiers are trying (and dying) to instill. When questions that would necessarily draw out a less-than precise response are posited, they are either ignored or condemned. In doing so, our society continues to favour the impermanent solidity of rhetoric. The less solid but more applicable truths wait to be acknowledged, and I fear they will only be addressed in retrospect.

Photo: Charlotte Street Alley #1

Book Review: The Next Rainy Day, by Philip David Alexander

The Next Rainy Day is a meditation on anger and loss, set in small-town Southern Ontario. It primarily concerns two fathers: Bert Commerford, an ex-alcoholic auto mechanic playing catch-up with the ambivalence of reality, and Grant McRae, a reluctant policeman returning to the force after the accidental death of his son.

The book starts primarily from Commerford's first-person perspective; the reader discovers a man who is, for various reasons, sheltered from the changes happening around him - either by intent or ignorance. The town is planning to add a major detour that would cut-off access to his family-owned garage and, to make things worse, his wife has already agreed to the proposed buy-out from the city without his knowledge. His teenaged sons are like Abel and Cain: one is a focused and promising AAA hockey player, while the other is a loutish bruiser who intentionally dangles the blur of Bert's alcoholic past over his head for effect.

As events both tragic and human come to pass, the narrative slowly switches to Grant's story, told in traditional third-person. A husk of a man, unable to fill the empty hole left by his child's passing, his attempt to reintegrate into a new police division becomes a reckoning with the very events which caused his life to change so drastically. His wife has turned to God, and with it her emotional tangibility seems to have disappeared. His newly-assigned partner, Owen Crews - a wonderfully complex character - is a dark horse with a chip on his shoulder, ready to break bones at a moment's notice.

The Next Rainy Day is the first novel by author Philip David Alexander, and as such feels confident; the characters seem real and truly entrenched in their surroundings, the conflicts are natural without feeling imposed. There are also poetic subtleties in the form of Bert Commerford's helpless fascination with daytime talk-shows; what starts as dismissive curiosity becomes a means to redeem himself. There is a respect in Alexander's novel for the life of everyday people: the concerns of making a junior league hockey game, the evaporation of a family business into history. It is in Bert Commerford's perspective that we feel the heart of the book - the inability to make things work, to turn things around no matter how hard we try. Reality is at times a cruel, indifferent stage, but while The Next Rainy Day throws it's punches confidently, it's never done in a misanthropic spirit.

Although there are points in the middle of the book that could stand to be tightened (editorially and otherwise) to keep the narrative moving, The Next Rainy Day earnestly succeeds in telling it's bittersweet tale of redemption.

Available for sale at a fine independent bookstore near you, as well as...Powell's, Amazon, Barnes & Noble.

Published by Dundurn Press (ISBN: 1550025937)

The Problem With HD (part 1)

Pity the fools who shot on video before the advent of HD. If they were shooting on video, they probably couldn't afford a stills photographer. Without good quality photographs, there was no way any of the footage could be used for print-publicity because standard-definition video only has a resolution of 72 dpi. Any print graphics designer knows that if it isn't 300dpi, it'll never make the cover of a magazine or be used prominently within an article. At 72dpi, it will look like crap.

Fast forward...2006.

Pity the fools who are shooting on HD, which looks to claim the place of both film *and* standard-definition video production. I hope to god they can afford a stills photographer because, somehow in the development of HD technology, no one ever asked the question: "What's the print resolution?". Guess what: it's still 72dpi. And yes, it looks like crap in print.

What blows me away is that, unlike film, a director will no longer be able to send a neg-clip (a single 35mm negative from the shoot) for publicity purposes. HD has conveniently done away with this...and in doing so it is slowly eroding the ability of filmmakers to publicise their films with good quality, print-ready images.

I don't imagine this will worry feature filmmakers who can budget for a stills photographer, but for those downtrodden documentary/low-budget feature filmmakers who were used to shooting on Super16 (and have now converted to HD), the prospects are particularly dim. Their budgets are slim and often enough it's simply not feasible to have someone shadowing you with a 35mm or good-quality digital still camera.

This isn't an academic concern: I've heard from documentary producers who missed out on front-page articles in magazines because all they had to rely on for PR were screen-grabs from an HD tape, artificially boosted to 300dpi.

It's one thing to finish your film - it's another thing to sell it, and beyond the hallowed cache of HD technology, the resolution bottleneck could become a crippling setback.

The Problem with Kludges

[imported/adapted from Slashdot journal]

kludge or kluge (klj)
n. Slang

1. A system, especially a computer system, that is constituted of poorly matched elements or of elements originally intended for other applications.
2. A clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.

[Context: taken from the reply The Sky is not Falling , from the Slashdot article What If Dark Matter Really Doesn't Exist? ]

There's nothing wrong with a kludge, aesthetics aside. Every evolving line of discovery needs it's necessarily flimsy connectors of reason. It's only when we allow our pride/ignorance/greed etc. to deny that a kludge is just a kludge: this is where mistakes are made, and thus we fail to evolve.

The fact that the universe may not boil down to 3 categories of matter is not earth-shattering. If we discover something to the contrary we must look at it plainly.

The problem with kludges is that it's only a kludge when it's a theory that is revealed to be inherently flawed. Before this realisation, it's just the best theory we have at our disposal. Just because something is revealed to be inelegant doesn't mean it wasn't serviceable, or simply the limit of our reason at the time it was presented.

Intro

"Imaginary Magnitude" comes from the title of a very good book, written by Stanislaw Lem. The book is a collection of introductions, forwards, and prefaces to works which don't actually exist. It’s brilliant.

It is with the same spirit that I started this 'blog' - the willingness to say something important/engaging/of-note (when in fact anything I have to say could very well be irrelevant). Oh well.

With that said, enjoy...

First Post

Hello, world.