Yearly Archives: 2008

Coming closer to God

Photography

A voice from above.

It never does to discuss politics, religion or sport in a journal of this nature as doing so simply invites insults. In a nation seemingly half of whose residents are born again something-or-other you can bet that religion, especially, will attract the worst in language.

So rather than dwell on it, let me just say that when it comes to religion I am a death bed conversion type. When I’m checking out I propose to welcome God to my soul with open arms. After all, the odds make no sense to deny His existence. If you are right and there is no God, fine, but if you are wrong, watch out. The believer, on the other hand, has the same chance of being right – 50/50 – but if he is wrong it matters not one whit. Dust to dust. If, on the other hand, he is right, it places him in a far better spot than the fellow who dies denying God’s existence. Blaise Pascal got there before me.

Now during these summer months you will find me wandering across the upper driveway, vicious guard dog by my side, en route to the pump room. There I manually switch over a couple of water valves and push a button or two with the happy result that the zinfandel vines get their two gallons of goodness for the day. It’s an unyielding routine, based in the profit motive, and none too onerous at that.

But this morning was different. As Bert the Border Terrier and his master approached the pump room there was a massive rushing noise from the skies and a loud voice intoned ‘Good Morning’. Oh! Boy, I thought, I have finally bought it and a thousand thoughts of good Catholic guilt pulsed through my brain as I checked just how badly I had behaved before entering eternal life. The Border and I glanced skyward in supplication only to see:


Bertie and the balloon.

The balloon had descended to no more than twenty feet and the roar was from its flame as it sought to avoid an emergency landing on the old estate. Lucky they had fuel as the terrier was drooling at the mouth and generally displaying his normal killer guard dog style behavior. (Actually his tail nearly came off from excess wagging, but I live a fantasy life anyway). The pilot was so close we exchanged greetings – given that I was still in my jammies even a casual observer could not but comment approvingly on my general air of insouciance – and he reassured me how gorgeous the view was from above.

I breathed a sigh of relief and concluded my time here was not yet up on this best of worlds and that, hopefully, I would be enjoying the grape harvest in three months or so. And when you gaze on the beauty that is California, maybe there is a God after all?

Cataloging movies and books

Movies, Software

An important source of inspiration.

I believe it’s important for any photographer to manage his sources of inspiration, be they books, magazines or movies. As is clear from yesterday’s journal entry, movies are an important source of ideas for my photographs so it’s important that all those DVDs are properly cataloged for easy retrieval.

In my case each DVD is labelled on the spine with a sequential number and that number is recorded as the location in the database. Movies are filed in numerical order – to arrange by title is futile in a growing library, as you will be constantly rearranging things.

For the past few years I have been using Delicious Library to do the database work but have become increasingly disappointed with its poor export capabilities and general slowness. When the new iPhone software was announced the other day it was immediately obvious that DL’s creators had dropped the ball and failed to deliver a capable iPhone export. Add the fact that you cannot network your DL data unless all networked computers use OS Leopard and I was ready for a change. Networking is important in my setup as the database is maintained on the office MacBook and then shared with the old iMac in the bar, where movies are looked up. The old iMac, no speed demon with a 1 gHz G4 CPU, is perfect for this sort of thing.

Along comes DVDpedia which not only offers a host of export formats, it also permits dynamic syncing with your iPhone once you download the related application to your phone. And, best of all, it’s very fast, far easier to use than DL (it’s as fast as OS X’s Finder) and has an import function to bring in all your Delicious Library movies. The import works well. You really do not want to have to reenter everything manually if you have as many movies as I do – some 500 and counting.


‘Location’ refers to the movie’s number for easy retrieval


Apple’s superb Coverflow view is a built-in option if you use OS Leopard

You can see my library online in one of the many export formats by clicking the Link at the bottom of the page. Download is very fast.

A related product from the same vendor – Bookpedia – does the same thing for your book collection. In aggregate, the cost of these two applications is less than DL which integrates the movie and book cataloging functions. Click on my book Link below and you will see a Bookpedia version of the photography books in my library.

Here is my Bookpedia library Syncd to the iPhone:


Touch any thumbnail for a full screen view of the cover

Learning monochrome

Movies, Photography

Everything I ever needed was in the movies.

I ceased taking monochrome pictures in 1977, though every now and then you still can catch me hitting the monochrome button in Lightroom.

But that’s not monochrome photography.

While the simplicity of seeing imposed by a monochrome palette makes anyone a better color photographer, I no longer take pictures thinking in black and white. My black may be red, my white blue, but I simply do not take black and white pictures.

Color is more challenging and, done right, more satisfying. Black and white, in a way, is cheating. Take out enough variables and anyone can do it. Not that all modern color is good. Anyone can paint a late Rothko or Motherwell. Fine work, true, but the genius of seeing and the skill to convert the vision to canvas are hardly abundantly on display here.

But when it was all I did, I loved black and white. No serious work in color was being shown by anyone in 1960 and that changed little through 1977. The pioneers, as ever, were the great fashion magazines, but the establishment critics saw to it that their art was disregarded. Shame. You could miss an awful lot of Parkinson, Clarke or Penn that way.

While my love of black and white was doubtless furthered by all those great books in the Kensington Public Library on Hornton Street, what really flipped the switch for me happened a good deal earlier when I first saw Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ (1949) on our home TV which, of course, was black and white, like the movie. I was already familiar with those expressionist masterpieces ‘Metropolis’ and ‘M’ by Fritz Lang, but this was on a far more approachable plane. It did not need much imagination to grasp Graham Greene’s plot or to be awed by the acting of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. But what really gripped you was Robert Krasker’s photography, and rather than go on about it, I’m attaching nine favorite images from the movie. Krasker’s use of tilted perspective to convey an unwordly, wide angle look, is tremendous.

It’s not really clear on the small screen, but the next image shows the dying Harry Lime (Welles) poking his fingers up though the sewer grating as he tries to escape the good guys:

The camera cuts to his face. Sheer genius.

See what I mean? Krasker got the Oscar that year. There was no competition.

On a trip to Vienna in June, 2024, my son WInston searched out the original location and his photograph even replicates Krasker’s crazy tilt. Mercifully the ugly gratings have gone, but little else has changed 75 years later:

Reassuring myself

Hall of Shame

It just (mostly) works.

Much as I detest his products and will go out of my way to avoid them, I have tremendous admiration for Bill Gates and Microsoft. He is the greatest capitalist of our time and has created millions of jobs and thousands of millionaires.

What Gates realized was that it’s not a good product which sells well. Rather, it has to be a cheap product, no matter how poor. A related dictate in this marketing strategy is that first you have to wipe out the competition, much as Carnegie did with rival steel makers or Rockefeller accomplished with crude oil mining. All three were skilled monopolists. Carnegie and Rockefeller, though, made high quality products. Microsoft does not.

So astute was Gates in realizing where the path to riches lay that he didn’t even write the original DOS – it was purchased from a small company named Seatlle Computer for $50,000. The deal of the century. Why do it yourself when buying it is cheaper?

The mass consumer has, for decades, preferred cheap and execrable to good at a higher price. But he’s learning that lifetime ownership costs are far more important than the entry price. He twigged Detroit twenty years ago and started buying Japanese. He twigged Windows two years ago and started buying Macs. Why save a dollar or two when your most precious commodity – time – is wasted on the Microsoft product?

But, ironically, Gates has left behind the very seeds of Microsoft’s destruction. It’s called Vista and is so resounding a failure that Microsoft has felt it necessary to reneg on its promise to obsolete Windows XP and is now once more offering it as an option with PCs. Meanwhile Mac sales are up 39% year-on-year versus 12% for the industry as a whole. Apple can thank Vista for that.

It is still a mystery to me why any self-respecting photographer who values his time uses Microsoft computers. Given that the art of picture processing depends on uninterrupted focus on the image, not the technology, why would you use something perennially on the verge of failure?

With last week’s announcement that Beastmaster Bill has moved on, I reassure myself that I never got one of these when running my QC-challenged Apple hardware this past year:

Here it is updated for Vista:

And here is the Blue Screen Of Death in Coverflow – Apple makes it possible to scroll though your various BSODs:

So the greatest monopolist since J D Rockefeller has now moved on to fixing world hunger and disease. Now given that poverty is primarily a function of one thing – an absence of democratic institutions – you would think Bill Gates’s fortune would be better spent on overthrowing various and sundry African and Middle Eastern dictators, an effort which would cost a few $billion at most. But no. What does he do but try and fix world disease by buying medicines for the oppressed, when all they need is a vote? The fact that you were the best businessman of the last few decades does not confer intelligence in unrelated fields of endeavor.

On sad occasions I must admit to being a Windows XP user – on my MacBook with Parallels. I use XP – the least bad Microsoft operating system – which is required for certain investment management applications not available in native Mac form. Maybe one day Apple will realize there are many users of their Macs who actually have money to manage? Meanwhile, Parallels makes sure all those BSODs and nasty viruses remain locked up in their own little prison on my MacBook, never to pollute the happy world of my photographs. Like so, on my machine:

If you like Coverflow in Leopard, be assured it works great with 5D RAW originals too (it reads the JPG sidecar file so it is very fast). The CR2 files are from my Canon 5D:

Meanwhile, any photographer looking to shake the BSOD once and for all need only blow $1,100 on a bottom of the line MacBook, install his foul Windows garbage thereon, and gradually wean himself from a life of misery and dread.

What, you say, Vista is BSOD-proof? Watch and learn – appropriately this demo is on a Mac – it’s a remake of Gates’s rollout of Windows 95 years ago, right down to the words:

Meanwhile Microsoft pathetically tries to overpay for a broken Yahoo, seemingly forgetting the first rule of investment banking. “If you tie two rocks together, they still sink”. Too funny. Remain assured, Ballmer will cock-it up.

Microsoft – you are the prime and founding member of the Hall of Shame.

Disclosure: In Mac-land the BSOD is known as a kernel panic. Number of kernel panics suffered by this OS X user in the past five years: One. Four years ago. Also, variously long and short AAPL and MSFT over the years.