Photography – Page 43 – a sibilant intake of breath

Far from entertaining

I was going to write something tonight about international law, but the present craziness of things has extinguished my desire to do so. An ongoing dispute with my college is especially sapping, as far as energy goes, and I need to conserve and enhance what fraction remains for the presentation and reading tomorrow. The porters, butler, and I have progressed into a weird realm of overlapping denials. I maintain that mine are entirely truthful, but we have reached the point where nobody can withdraw a claim without losing face. Hopefully, the whole thing will sink below the waves in a short while.

In exchange for not providing something interesting to read, perhaps I can provide something useful. As I explained earlier, as part of an extensive thesis-related analogy, the best way to photograph cats or human babies is to set up all your equipment, make all necessary adjustments, and then snap your fingers above the lens, a moment before you hit the shutter. Creatures of the sorts described will look at the source of the sound, intuitively. If only the attention of the rampaging beast that is my thesis topic could be focused so easily…

Wadham Queer Bop

The infamous Wadham College Queer Bop is coming up this Saturday. Tickets go on sale today, and cost £8. My experiences last time were mixed: it is certainly not the progressive and politically aware event that is has sometimes been misrepresented as. Rather, it is mostly a large group of drunk undergraduates, out in the cold (or in a big tent) while wearing unusual costumes. The weather forecast predicts a low of four degrees for Saturday: a possibility that people may want to take into account when selecting their attire.

My two entries about it from last year are here: early, late. Some of my photos from last year are on Facebook.

All that said, it is basically the event for which Wadham College is most famous. It doesn’t cost anything to me, and it offers some unique photographic opportunities. I will drop in for at least a little while.

[Update: 20 November 2006] My entries about the 2006 Queer bop are here: short Queer Bop 2006 entry / long Queer Bop 2006 entry.

Photo modification, and tasks ongoing

Modified photos of the day

What do people think of the modified photos I have been posting recently? (One, two, three, four, five.) In basically all cases, they have a single Photoshop filter applied, along with some contrast, levels, hue, and sharpness adjustments. I like them because they look good, and they provide a bit of variety. Unlike a film camera, where you can change the look of your photos enormously by using different stock, you are stuck with the characteristics of the digital sensor you have. Even as those become familiar, they begin to feel like constraints.

One thing that seems to be true about photos is that they often contain too much information; just as black and white can be a good way to force attention towards texture and composition, it seems like a lot of shots can be more interesting when elements of their geometry and colouration are highlighted.

That said, if people don’t like such modifications, I can certainly go back to showing straight versions all the time. Unmodified versions of all of these shots can be found on Facebook, as I do not take the time to adjust anything that goes online there.

Ongoing tasks

There is a great deal to be done at the moment:

I need to write two essays for the Developing World seminar, presumably before I go to Turkey with my father.
to prepare for that trip: finding out at least a tiny bit about the country and what to see in it.
to prepare a group debate for this coming Thursday, as well as do the normal readings for that class.
to push a batch of student loan paperwork through the bureaucratic edifices of the college.
read two thesis-related books, three long thesis-related articles, and a thesis related thesis: soon
pay a hefty chunk of backdated rent from this summer
prepare a fifteen minute thesis presentation for this Wednesday
come up with something to do for my birthday on or around the 28th of November (probably around, as there is OUSSG that night)
continue seeking a job for next year
write a first chapter for the thesis?

The collection is a daunting one; hence, the importance of developing and maintaining motivation. This is something that my flatmate Alex seems to have no trouble with – one of the reasons for which he often seems such a likable but incomprehensible creature.

Apple store geek fetishism

The Apple Store in London has given me a good chance to play with some brand new expensive hardware. There is no denying that the iMac with a 24″ screen and a 2.16 Core 2 Duo processor is excessive. It is likewise undeniable that it is excessive in a good way. Anyone who works seriously with photos can appreciate the virtues of a 1900×1200 native resolution, especially on a monitor that can be easily configured to use standardized white balance and colour settings. All Macs look so much nicer once you set them to D50, I don’t know why they don’t come out of the box that way.

The MacBook Pros are also very nice, though even the demo units are surprisingly warm – especially on the flat area to the left of the trackpad. I suspect the processor resides there, since the computer was sitting idly when I checked the temperature and would therefore not be likely to be conducting hard drive operations. Unfortunately, none of the machines have a Dashboard widget running that indicates temperatures. Along with battery life and the limits of photolithography, heat seems to be the major limiting factor in consumer computers at the moment.

One surprise: not a single one of the hundred of so Macs on display, including the absurdly expensive ones, is running a demo of Photoshop. Apparently, Adobe still hasn’t released a version compiled for Intel macs. As such, you will be running a PPC compiled version through the Rosetta emulator built into Tiger. That means that, even with brand new gear, you would be lucky to have it run any faster than on an older PPC-based system. I tried playing with Aperture a bit but, like Photoshop, it is impossible to judge the real functionality in the hands of a neophyte.

All that said, I have been here long enough. It is time to move on to my next London objective.

PS. The Mighty Mouse is very decent, but hardly worth the asking price. Horizontal scrolling is useful so rarely that having a bi-directional scrollwheel is a distraction, rather than an aid.

On mass leaching of images

Hotlinkers beware! Whenever you generate more than, say, 25,000 requests to my server, you will get the pancake face of doom. It may be a small fraction of my total bandwidth allotment, but when it begins happening at such a scale it transcends ‘annoying’ and becomes ‘rude.’

The saga of my interactions with the MySpace hotlinkers began here. Here is one of the many offending sites. This one has generated 700 image requests during the last thirty days.

Adieu to Oxford PhotoSoc

Today, we had to choose whether to join the Photo Society and pay the money or stop attending the classes. I have decided to do the latter. With about forty people present, they are too big to get through any decent sample of the work in just an hour. Also, while some of the things being discussed are at a level that would be useful for me, a lot of really basic stuff gets talked about as well. I don’t need to spend an hour and pay £3 to learn something about Photoshop that Neal taught me in two minutes. If I was going to use the dark rooms, the £30 a year fee would be very reasonable, but the last thing I need is some other pursuit to draw me farther away from thesis and seminar reading. Indeed, I have a date with the latter for the rest of tonight that I expect to take a good chunk of it.

After my final PhotoSoc session, I had dinner at Lady Margaret Hall tonight with Richard Albert: a Canadian, formerly at Yale, doing the Bachelor of Civil Laws degree. Confusingly, it is a master’s level program, and it is entirely about common law. In any case, conversing with him was most interesting – an experience that will hopefully be repeated before our respective tenures in Oxford come to an end. Talking about Canadian constitutional law definitely tested my memory of classes with Gateman and Tennant. It is the sort of thing entirely too interesting to be devoted as little attention as can be spared for it.

No more attention can be spared for anything, at this moment, When your seminar is the next day, and the possibility of having to present fills you with dread, you know you are in for a long night of reading.

[Update: 1:00am] I think the page on the wiki for the Developing World option is starting to shape up nicely. It should be a good reference, in the end, for paper writing and exam preparation. Fellow members of the program, feel free to use it. Even better, sign up and add something to it.

[Update: 2:00am] Yes, I do realize that today’s photo is a perfect demonstration of why, instead of using the B&W mode built into my digicam, I should shoot in colour and then render into B&W using Photoshop’s channel mixer. I wish there was a mechanism by which I could compose with the LCD of my Canon A510 in B&W mode, but have it retain colour information for such purposes.

Oxford from above

As a recent comment proves, there is at least one thing Microsoft does better than Google: display aerial views of Oxford.

Compare Google Maps, centred on Wadham College, with the Windows Live equivalent: enormously superior.

Here, you can see:

The Department of Politics and International Relations
2 Church Walk, my present abode
Christ Church, main quad
Radcliffe Square

Those pointed out, I should return to the overly loud MCR freshers party, and stop worrying about my ongoing student loan appeal dialogue. People should feel encouraged to list more nice Oxford locations in the comments (with links to Live Local photos).

Clever way to protect cameras on planes

Blatantly stolen from Bruce Schneier’s blog (he stole it from Matt Brandon’s blog), this idea seems really clever. If you are travelling in the States with expensive camera gear, put a starter pistol in the locked box in which the camera equipment is to be transported, then register it as a weapon.

The airline safety people will then treat the luggage as though it contains a dangerous weapon, and you can be more certain they will not lose or blatantly mistreat it. A very neat way to make security procedures work for you. Of course, you can be quite sure they will x-ray it, so this doesn’t help with the problem of transporting film on ever-more-jittery airlines.

HD disparu

There is a short story by Orson Scott Card about a beleaguered group of photographers sinking into depression as film becomes completely unavailable in a digital age. While that is a distant prospect, if it is ever to come about, I am nonetheless feeling some sympathy towards those hapless fellows. It seems that Kodak has decided to discontinue my favourite colour film: their High Definition series, formerly called Royal Gold. Impossible to find in England or Ireland, it is now no longer stocked by any of the Vancouver photography stores that I have dropped into to talk shop with the employees.

After a period of time, a film becomes very familiar to you – even friendly. You know what conditions are likely to make the sky blow out; you know when a portrait really needs a bit warmer light; you know how complex patterns will be rendered on the film grain. While I certainly cannot claim to have mastery of any film, HD100 and HD400 were certainly the colour emulsions I understood best. All my colour photos from the trip to Europe with Meghan Mathieson and company were shot on it; likewise, all my colour shots from the Arizona Road Trip, Prague, Malta, and many other places.

The High Definition films were versatile, reliable, and attractive. Their passing will be lamented by me, among many others.

The photographic future

I had an odd philosophical post written, but it was far better to blast it to some obscure part of the RAM of this computer, to be utterly erased when I next reboot it, than to put it online somewhere. Instead, I should write about photography.

On the basis of some books I have read, it seems reasonable to conclude that photography did not emerge too long before the start of the 20th century. To begin with, it was an awkward, delicate sort of thing to do. You needed lots of black velvet cloth, heavy glass plates, finicky chemicals, and expertise. Over the next seventy or eighty years, photography went from something that a British Lord might do as a hobby to something that people all over the world did all the time. Where once the coronation of a Queen might be worth photographing, suddenly the first steps of every child were, if someone had a camera handy. I personally salute Alfred Stieglitz as perhaps the most important single person in the establishment of photography as an art form. Of course, if he hadn’t done so, it would have been someone else. I suspect they would not have done so as elegantly. At least a few of my photos are direct ripoffs of Stieglitz.

With the advent of digital sensors and – perhaps more importantly – the internet, further democratization has taken place. When the cost of photography is reduced to the bother involved in pushing a button or two, transferring a file to a computer, and then moving the same onto someone else’s website there is really very little reason not to do a great deal of it. Very soon, the biggest associated cost becomes time.

I hope I get a digital camera, eventually, which is comparable to my best film camera in terms of versatility, ease of use, and quality of output.