Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

VERSeFest 2011

I went to a slam poetry event at Ottawa’s VERSeFest tonight, and it was extremely good. The speakers were very talented, and the crowd was duly appreciative.

For the most part, the poets were very critical of government policy and society in general. I suppose that is normal at these events, which have a certain idealistic revolutionary flavour. At the end, I wished I had a chance to respond to some of the speakers and say that, for the most part, problems persist because they are difficult to solve, not because people are malevolent. More often, they are just focused on other priorities, or blocked by structural constraints and the inherent difficulty of solving enduring problems. All that said, a lack of compassion is definitely one reason why problems like homelessness endure, and poetry is a medium that seems capable of encouraging greater compassion.

This is the first time this particular festival is being held, and it seems to involve a tonne of different events. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 13th) is the last day, with a bilingual poetry event at 1:30pm, Japanese form poetry at 3:00pm, a Dusty Owl Reading Series event at 5:00pm, and a closing ceremony at 7:00pm.

Passes for the day are $10, and available at Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue), The Manx (370 Elgin Street), and Collected Works (1242 Wellington Street).

I have about eight gigabytes of RAW image files from the event to process, but I will definitely put up a link to the Flickr set once I have dealt with them.

Photographing a hospital

On Tuesday, I was in the Ottawa Hospital for what turned out to be the final x-ray for my broken clavicle (there comes a point when checking on progress isn’t worth the time and radiation exposure). I brought along my camera to photograph the x-ray on screen. While I was going from station to station with paperwork, it occurred to me that photographing a hospital with official permission would be fascinating and would have artistic and historical importance.

People assume that there is no need to document how things are now, since they will always basically be this way. But that simply isn’t true. Photos of hospitals from the 1950s are interesting today, and they have historical importance. They show how we treated people who were injured, sick, or dying at that point in time – which is an important reflection on a society or civilization as a whole.

If you had official permission, you could get amazing access. Of course, you would also need to get releases from any patients, visitors, and staff you photographed. In the end, though, you would have some solid information on the state of Ontario’s medical system at this juncture in time.

I don’t have time for such a project at the moment, but it is something for my ‘someday/maybe’ to do list.

Beaver Barracks photos

Spacing Ottawa – a blog about Ottawa’s urban landscape – is using the photo I took of the Beaver Barracks complex as their photo of the day.

It was taken inside the eight-story tower at 464 Metcalfe, looking across the central space that will eventually contain a community garden. The four-story building you can see is the one I live in (160 Argyle). While I did everything I could to reduce the amount of inside lighting, you can still see some reflected in the windows (this being a 30″ exposure).

I have a whole set of Beaver Barracks photos on Flickr. Some of them are taken directly from the roof of 464 Metcalfe, so they don’t have the reflection issue I mentioned.

Core competencies

If you are primarily a content producer, running a website or a business inevitably seems to involve doing some work outside your area of core competency. You need to deal with clients, negotiate rates, file taxes, manage webservers, etc.

There is one line of thinking that says all such activities are a necessarily evil, at best, and that we should all stick to doing what we are most skilled at. The Ricardo theory of trade may be the purest expression of this idea. It says that if everybody focuses exclusively on what they are best at and sells the products of that skill to everyone else, they will be able to pay others to provide all the necessities of life.

We all do a fair bit of outsourcing. Consider the case of Thoreau, who built his own house and found some of his own food. Compared to him, we are pretty much all more specialized.

Of course, Thoreau’s philosophy is pretty much the opposite of Ricardo’s. Thoreau thought that you should do for yourself even what other people could do better: haul the lumber for your shack on your own back, rather than hiring a man with a cart.

The main question here seems to be how far you should specialize. There are definitely gains to be made in specialization. As Malcolm Gladwell argues, if you spend 10,000 hours practicing the activity you do best, you might become world class at it. At the same time, specialization produces vulnerability to change. A hummingbird with a beak that has evolved to fit only into a single kind of flower is in a lot of trouble if that flower becomes rare or goes extinct. This idea is well expressed in the anime film Ghost in the Shell: “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness; it’s slow death”.

Personally, I think it makes sense to cultivate at least a couple of sets of skills – something abstract and something practical, perhaps, or at least some sort of serious hobby outside of work. Also, even when something isn’t a core competency of yours, it can be worthwhile to know a bit about it. It would be useful for me to take a course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), for instance. Web design certainly isn’t a major activity of mine, but it would be nice to be able to customize sites a bit without having to spend heaps of time trawling through forums and plagiarizing the code of others.

Local environmentalism

Perhaps it is unwise for me to criticize environmental groups at the moment, given that we are all trying to push a difficult issue forward at a time of considerable political hostility. Reagan’s 11th Commandment is a major reason why the Republicans are so strong in the United States. At the same time, it is disheartening to see people expending their useful energy on the wrong thing, when there is something they would care about a lot more available. Also, given that the environmental movement makes choices based on things that are still at the edge of scientific knowledge, there is a benefit in having public discussions, and making the strongest possible cases to one another. We should not assume ourselves to be infallible, but rather to be in a dialogue with an ever-emerging collection of complex information on how the climate operates.

All that said, I must confess that I am perplexed by how many environmental groups seem to focus their time. It might be a terrible thing that some ugly new development will replace a nice bit of woodland, but I think people need to consider the scale on which humanity is smashing nature. That little plot of forest is threatened along with a whole lot of other forests if catastrophic or runaway climate change occurs.

It reminds me of a person wandering in the middle of a battlefield, looking for their glasses. They realize one problem – that their glasses have been dropped – and they are working diligently at solving it by scrutinizing the ground. At the same time, bullets are flying all around them. They see the small problem, miss the big one, and focus their efforts in the wrong way as a consequence.

Climate change really is the over-riding environmental priority right now. If we warm up the planet five or six ˚C, it will ruin all conservation efforts that have been undertaken in the meanwhile. We need to solve climate change first – taking advantages of co-benefits where possible.

In any case, I think I can see the appeal of being a part of a group dedicated to saving the local bog. It has locavore chic. Also, the area might have a special importance to you personally. Finally, it has the benefit that even if your quest fails, the outcome isn’t so bad. Being part of something friendly and local is a lot more pleasant than confronting a terrifying spectre of global destruction. And yet, that seems to be what we are facing.

Fewer photos to Facebook

Because of how they get their money, it seems to me that Facebook has a business model that is fundamentally opposed to the interests of its users. Since they don’t pay monthly fees, they aren’t Facebook’s customers. Instead, they are Facebook’s product, which is then sold to advertisers in the form of eyeballs and (more worrisomely) databases of personal information.

Because of that, Facebook is never going to be proactively involved in protecting privacy. Instead, it will always be pushing the boundary and doing as much as users are willing to accept. Bit by bit – visibly and invisibly – it seems that privacy protections will be eaten away and more and more data will be available to Facebook’s real clients, the advertisers.

In response to this, I have been gradually stripping down my profile. That’s not all that possible, however. For one thing, Facebook never forgets information you entered, even if you delete it. For another, it can guess all sorts of things about you based on your friends. It can guess what sort of products you are likely to buy, or even if you are gay.

Some people may not be bothered by this, but I am. As such, I am going to shift away from posting photography on Facebook. Instead, I will mostly rely on Flickr Pro, which is a paid and user-focused service.

[Update: 6:39pm] Fear not, photo appreciators! There will still be photos uploaded, and they are likely to be in smaller batches of higher quality work. These are from today: Rideau Canal Skating 2011.

Crediting friends for photos

I put a lot of photography online. I try to put a photo per day up on this site, and I have heaps of photos on Facebook and Flickr. It’s a hobby I enjoy and people seem to enjoy seeing my photos, including ones of themselves.

As photo and computer gear have made it easier and easier to store large numbers of digital images, my library is ballooning. I use iPhoto to store ‘digital negatives’ and currently have an album of 36,109 photos. Most of those photos (over 2/3) have been taken since I came to Ottawa.

While lugging around a giant SLR, it is fun to let other people try taking a few shots. One person brought the gear, but that doesn’t mean people with different perspectives shouldn’t be allowed to make use of it.

I do try to memorize which shots are mine and which ones were taken by others, but I deal with a daunting number of photographs overall. Once in a while, I may accidentally mis-attribute a photo taken by someone else as my own. It is never my intention to do so, and I ask you not to be offended if I haven’t remembered which shots you took. I would always be pleased if you would let me know, so that I can provide an appropriate caption or hover-over text.

Does that seem like a sensible approach to people?

A bit overstretched

Between work, the job search, running this site (and BuryCoal), and photography, I am finding myself rather busy these days.

That is the context in which I have been receiving a number of requests to do commercial photographic work. That is exciting and an opportunity to learn new skills. At the same time, it is a possible distraction from activities that are ultimately more important, such as making my own small contribution to the fight against climate change.

As such, I am going to be pretty picky about the projects I undertake. If the work is interesting or serves a group or cause that is worthy of approval, I will consider a potential project more favourably. Otherwise, I will be demanding a rate of pay that corresponds to the scarcity of my free hours.