Photography – Page 39 – a sibilant intake of breath

Paris photos II

With its inside-out appearance, the Pompidou Center reminds me of the Lloyds of London building.

One of the best things about Paris is how there always seem to be people out and about. This was taken at about 1:00am.

Mike on a big stone head.

The plaza containing the head. I almost broke my leg taking this photo, as I had to do it standing inside a fountain. The metal grates at the bottom that seemed firmly fixed actually shifted aside quite easily, plunging you into the shaft under them.

A man vaguely resembling Lenin stands on the Pont des Arts.

Paris photos I

One nice feature of the Louvre is how contemporary art is included in the middle of some of the galleries. Along with these statues, there was a huge polished silver mirror installation in one of the Egyptian galleries.

Brass and marble sculptures are my favourite form of visual art.

It is interesting to watch living artists working from the examples provided by dead and venerated ones.

Along with art and historical artifacts, the Louvre includes the apartments of Napoleon III. This adds something like a palace tour to the whole experience.

Even the graffiti near the Louvre is none too bad.

Your flash can’t light a cathedral

The scene is Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, during the middle of an evening service. You see a person standing to one side of the alter, in the transept, looking across at one of the massive rose windows. The digital camera comes up, the window is magnified as much as possible, and then there is a sudden flash that distracts every one of the hundreds of the people in the cathedral but doesn’t provide nearly enough light for a proper exposure. On the camera’s screen, a very underexposed version of the window appears.

Normally, this is the end of things. Some people go on from here to deactivate their flash and take a second photo. This one is both hopelessly grainy (because the camera has automatically chosen the highest possible ISO setting) and completely blurred (because hand-holding a 1/2 second shot of a distant magnified object inside a darkened cathedral doesn’t work).

Obviously, I am someone who appreciates the practice of photography. As such, it pains me triply to see people taking photos in a distracting way, poorly, and in a space where such touristic incursions aren’t polite or appropriate.

Moral of the story: your flash cannot illuminate Notre Dame Cathedral. It cannot illuminate the Super Bowl or the moon either. If you are photographing these things, have the kindness, intelligence, and courtesy to turn it off. Then, make sure to at least brace against a wall, to help deal with the long exposure.

Devon photos III

The 96 acres of the former Wadham estate contain a lot of nice plant life.

They also have a flock of decorative black sheep that wander in the valley that runs down to Branscombe and the sea.

The light on our last evening was especially lovely: warm sunset light, filtered through a translucent cloud that reduced the contrast.

More interesting looking plants.

With the support of the Wadham Foundation, we had tasty food throughout our week.

Devon photos II

This house, just across the back alley from the place where we were staying, looks exactly like the white rabbit’s house from Alice in Wonderland doesn’t it? We’ll smoke the monster out!

Braced against the wall, this photo shows John contemplating an interesting archway in the former home of Dorothy and Nicholas Wadham.

The former bedroom of Dorothy Wadham, though the bed is a recent reconstruction.

While I was concentrating on getting my thesis written, most other members of the trip were more concerned with reading. While much was academic, Harry Potter and crime-fighting monks were not wholly excluded.

In my hermitage, I worked to compile notes and thoughts into a thesis draft.

Devon photos I

For those who were confused, the photos appearing while I was in Devon were not, in fact, taken while I was there. I had set them up to appear at regular intervals in my absence, so as to have some kind of new content appearing on the site. These are the first images from Devon that I have posted on this page:

This is the main area of the converted barn in which we were staying. I was the only group member to sleep in the smaller, quieter, and much colder ‘annex.’ We visited the main house once, for dinner.

This OS map shows the countryside surrounding the Edge Barton estate, where we were staying. On our first full day in Devon, we walked down the valley to the coastline.

The path down to Branscombe was a muddy one.

Here is the south coast of England. If this picture had been taken in the opposite direction, a large grounded ship could be seen.

Pheasants are pretty fearless animals. The camera was about a foot away when I took this.

The virtue of stability

For several weeks now, I have been keeping the mini-tripod that I bought for my trip to Turkey attached to my point and shoot digital camera all the time. Doing so has proved useful in a very great many circumstances: primarily those in which low levels of ambient light have been available. Many of my best recent photos would have been impossible without it. Having it attached has also changed the way in which I approach photography, generally, and what sort of images I try to capture.

You can get a similar tripod on eBay for a couple of Pounds.

Serial numbers and used goods

One of the great things about the internet is the ability to deal with information that is far too diffuse and voluminous to be processed in other ways. Indeed, that is the principal way in which modern computing qualitatively changes that we are able to do, as opposed to altering the rate at which we can complete a particular task.

Given those characteristics, it surprises me that nobody has come up with a site that catalogs serial numbers for all the kinds of products that include them: from bicycles to cameras to mobile phones. Such a site would allow users to enter that information when they purchased a product. It would then be on hand for warranty claims and in the event of loss or theft. People purchasing such items online, or in used good shops, could check the database to ensure that the products they are buying are not listed as stolen. Like eBay, it is much more efficient to have all these numbers sorted in a single place than to have numerous separate databases. The chances of a person trawling through many sites are low, but one well organized one could get masses of traffic. (See: network effect)

You could even imagine a system where online retailers like eBay are integrated with such a site. The listing for a camera would thus include a serial number linked to an entry in the database. If you bought the item, then received one with a different serial number from the one listed, you would be entitled to lodge a complaint and the seller would get flagged as a potential fraudster. I have personally avoided buying photographic equipment from eBay because I fear that a lot of it may be stolen. Having some simple protections like these in place would make me feel a lot better about it.

PS. For an example of an existing but limited serial number listing, see the stolen equipment registry over at Photo.net. It is unlikely that someone buying a cheap digital camera online will look at that (I knew it existed and it took me some searching around to find the URL), but perhaps someone buying an expensive tilt-shift lens for a medium format camera system will.

Wales 2007 photos: fourth batch

Welsh landscape with sheep, taken on the third day of walking.

Small lake, halfway up a mountain.

Welsh valley, viewed from the highest point we reached on the third day.

Snowdonia does not suffer for lack of moss. I like the colours.

A gloomy view of Snowdon, as well as the two other peaks we climbed on the first day. This is the last photo from Snowdonia that I will be posting.

Wales 2007 photos: third batch

Bridge in the nature reserve we visited on the second day. Because of the low altitude and protected status, there was far more vegetation there than elsewhere in Snowdonia.

Pool at the base of a waterfall

Another group photo, this one with me in it

Creek flowing from the waterfall

View uphill to the ‘barn’ in which we stayed. Nearby was a small power plant, with turbines operated by water pressure. A long pipeline – resembling those for natural gas – ran down to it from a lake somewhere above us.