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Posts tagged with "photography"

More state-sponsored terror

Friday, 10. July 2009, 20:41:27

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On the same day (yesterday) that the UK's Metropolitan Police issued guidance to its officers that photography is not illegal (and it's shocking enough that they should even need to tell their officers this!), a man in Chatham was arrested, handcuffed, and generally terrorised for guess what, photographing his local fish & chip shop! Read it and weep. I hope the police officers and pseudo-police officers concerned get fried for this!

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Photoduck

Tuesday, 24. February 2009, 23:23:18

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I recently discovered a daily cartoon strip about photography, following the fledgling career of W.T.Duck. Yes, he's a duck who happens to be a photographer. Although not every strip hits the mark, it’s amusing enough to keep me reading it every day along with my usual dose of Dilbert. Here’s the text of one of the strips giving a comeback for that annoying "compliment" photographers often get:
Person: "Your camera takes really nice pictures."
WTD: "Your mouth makes really nice compliments."

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Photographers Rights Demo

Monday, 16. February 2009, 19:47:42

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As I suspected would happen, reports of the demonstration by photographers against new laws that could see them being treated as terrorists, also stopped & searched for no reason other than that they were taking a photo (see prev. entry) has quickly got buried by other news. However I managed to unearth two stories about it on the BBC website which reports that "hundreds of photographers" protested outside Scotland Yard (UK Police HQ) today (I didn't manage to make it there):
BBC News: Photographers angry at terror law
BBC News: Is it a crime to take pictures?
Daily Torygraph: Why can't we take pictures of policemen?

Meanwhile, here's an article from April last year giving some detailed examples of photographers last year who were harassed and prevented by police from photographing such things as: a town's Christmas lights being turned on by a celebrity; a shopping centre; and the scene of a road accident (despite the fact that the photographer — a professional who was covering it for a news organisation — was not obstructing emergency services).
Full story: BBC News Magazine: Innocent photographer or terrorist?.

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Are the British starting to fight back against the forces of fascism?

Saturday, 14. February 2009, 22:55:19

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Next week sees the enactment of a new law in the UK which can have you jailed as a terrorist simply for taking a photograph of a policeman (tourists please note!) What does this mean for situations where someone sees a policeman exceeding their authority and decides to take a picture as evidence? Now they could be arrested and jailed simply for trying to uphold the law, and the photos would probably be destroyed on the spot. (This has already happened several times in the last year alone, but in the past the police got told off for it. Perhaps this "inconvenience", that taking a photograph has not in itself been illegal, is why the new law is coming in?) Or what about someone who simply wants to photograph a tourist attraction which has police patrolling it?

But after a year in which photographers have been systematically harassed and assaulted by UK authorities (e.g. see this article) in events more normally associated with Soviet Russia or places like Turkey, Iran, or China, a fightback has finally started. A mass demonstration is being organised for Monday 16th Feb. to assert photographers' rights. Of course, not everyone is a photographer. But we all know what that means: "I wasn't a communist/trade unionist/Jew/Muslim so I didn't think it important to protest...." First they've come for the photographers. But next it could be the cyclists, the anglers, the atheists....

Anyhow here's some links to articles about the demo by organisations involved (or who are at least cheering the anti-fascists on):
Amateur Photographer magazine
British Journal of Photography
The Register (probably the most respected online technology news site).

Be there or be elsewhere!

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Civilisation over politics*

Saturday, 15. November 2008, 04:56:20

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A while ago I eulogised over a photograph from 1903, suggesting that it was more beautiful than the Mona Lisa. But recently I happened to compare it to a modern "straight" photograph (of a Japanese girl cosplaying Haruhi) and to my surprise the modern image won hands down, since it really draws your attention with its subtly rendered tones and sharp rendition of detail such as her hair etc.
On realising the total win of a pretty random modern portrait over something that I had extolled as being better than the Mona Lisa I agonised over what was going on. Although I don't deny that straight photography is a superior art form to painting or pictorialist photography, I had a gut feeling that something else was going on here.

By itself, the Kasebier photo is still a great work of art, and I still believe that it wins over Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. But the fact is that sharp photos have an ability to draw our attention over unsharp ones (hence, I think, the modern obsession with digitally sharpened photos). But the ability to draw our attention is not the same thing as being better. A train crash will always win out over a beauty contest, because the blood and guts makes the beauty contest seem irrelevant in comparison. But in the grand scheme of civilisation it is the eternally beautiful things that define our values, not transient carnage.

It occurred to me that this sheds light on something that had been puzzling me, that the people of my country would seemingly choose a police state (complete with Sir Ian Blair's death squads) over the values of civilisation that have evolved over the centuries. But just as the sharp photograph wins out when juxtaposed with the artistic one, so the sharply defined calamity can seduce the unwary into thinking that knee jerk facism is more "right" than woolilly defined virtues such as liberty and freedom of thought.

In the end I hope the sanity of civilised values will prevail over the current propensity for repressive facism being espoused by both the politicians and the media. In the meantime I will continue with my own struggle to reconcile the ideological purity of straight photography with more eternal aesthetic values.

(The great irony of this is that straight photography is currently the most persecuted medium of the new millennium, with photographers regularly being harassed and even assaulted by the police and government-approved vigilantes who have decided to brand all photographers as would-be terrorists etc, in Britain at least).

*The title of this post was inspired by the Japanese saying "Hana Yori Dango" - lit. Dumplings over Flowers, though perhaps Pearls Before Swine would be a more apt analogy here!

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Bee Happy

Sunday, 10. August 2008, 19:35:27

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I’ve been away for a while recently, and visited a place which is heaven for bees but hell if you suffer bee-phobia. Every plant in Harlow Carr Gardens in Yorkshire was covered in bees, making the most of the gaps between rain showers. I took my chances and got a few close ups, only centimetres from the flowers.
a copyright photograph by the author

This next one is my favourite shot though, these flowers are so strange, reminiscent of dandelion clocks. The scene also reminded me of what is said to have been the first Impressionist photograph, “The Onion Field” by George Davison.
a copyright photograph by the author

These flowers look like open mouths complete with teeth! They’re from the foxglove family I think, but would make good triffids.
a copyright photograph by the author


I also went on a mysterious woodland walk high above The Strid, a place where the River Wharfe (which is normally about 20 metres wide at that point) is funnelled into a rocky gorge narrow enough (about 1.5m) to stride across (hence the name). (However many people have drowned jumping The Strid, since the rocks tend to be slippy, and slope back towards the water, which is deep and fast as it courses through the narrows.)
a copyright photograph by the author

Well that’s all for now, I’ll do a few more later and try and catch up on the bloggysphere too.

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Camera thought

Monday, 31. March 2008, 23:46:37

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Watching the anime Windy Tales recently, one thing I noticed about the heroine Nao (who is president of the school Digicam club), was that she uses a compact camera mostly in eyelevel mode (although we see it also has an LCD screen in some shots). Digital compacts with viewfinders are not all that common, however I noticed that hers had two little circles intruding into the ring round the lens, which is the characteristic look of a Canon Ixus, which does indeed have an optical viewfinder.
But did any Canon Ixus exist in 2004 when the anime was made? I decided to find out. A little digging at the DPReview website revealed the one pictured here which came out in late 2004. By the model number I’m guessing there are probably earlier versions too, though given the capricious way camera models are often numbered you can never be too sure!

I wonder if any money changed hands for product placement in this series? Well anyhow, it's good to see someone being depicted using a camera with a proper viewfinder, personally I find these pretty much essential. I did try a compact that only had an LCD screen but found that for some into-the-light shots I was having to compose my shots by guesswork since I couldn't make out what was on the screen! A pretty crazy situation, though perhaps not as crazy as Nao falling off the school roof whilst trying to photograph a flying cat!

Actually come to think of it, it's not just good to see a story where someone uses a camera in a particular way, it’s good to see photographers being made the subject of a story at all! Curiously, there is another anime, Sola (2007), where the main protagonist is also a keen photographer of the sky.

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Windy cherry blossom

Saturday, 15. March 2008, 20:56:18

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My new pocket pc seems to have revived my interest in watching anime, and I’ve been using it to watch the series Windy Tales (風人物語) which I downloaded a long time ago, but then never got past the first episode. Windy Tales is unusual as it doesn’t look like anime: it has a very simple graphic style, and the characters actually look Japanese! (No big round eyes or brightly coloured hair.)

Today I finally finished it. Although it started out being a supernatural tale of people who can manipulate the wind, this quickly becomes little more than a motif for what is reall a slice of life story consisting of a series of vignettes about growing up and the difficulties of being an adult. I thought that the final episode would bring the original tale of mysterious wind users back into focus but it didn't really. In fact I didn't really understand the ending at all! (I'll have to watch it a couple more times I think.) But right now I’m going to talk about episode 12, Cherry Blossom Time (櫻のころ) which I found struck a chord with me due to the time of year and the recent weather, and which had lots of inspirational quotes in it.

As I said in a previous post, the blossom is starting to appear on the trees here, but it's been hard to enjoy it because of the wind and rain. In Windy Tales it’s the same. It starts with the heroine Nao photographing the cherry blossom in the rain. She gets wet through and as a result catches a cold (hoary old cliché that anime stories love to trot out despite it being complete nonsense). Anyhow, this gives her an excuse to lie around in the school infirmary, which by now we know is a favourite hideout for some of the school's misfit teachers, who enjoy chatting up the school nurse.

Taiki-sensei, maths teacher and (secretly) master wind user, arrives to share some sakura mochi (桜餅 - pink rice cake wrapped in cherry leaves) with the nurse, and Nao (showing her photographer’s eye, perhaps) asks him if the colour of the cherry blossom changes every year. His response is, “The colour of the blossom reflects the heart of the observer.” When Nao says he should raise a wind to blow the rain away so they can enjoy the cherry blossom properly, he quotes a famous (so it says here) passage from Essays in Idleness by Kenko:

Should we only appreciate flowers at their peak,
and the Moon when it is full? Nay.
To yearn for the Moon through the rain,
or fail to observe the Spring’s passing from being shut indoors,
arouses even deeper feelings.
Budding boughs just before they burst into blossom,
and gardens strewn with wilted flowers,
are by far more worthy of notice.

Anyhow, inspired by another poem about the beauty of cherry blossom at dawn, Nao ends up getting up before sunrise (along with her long-suffering sidekick, Miki) to photograph the trees in the pink-purple light of dawn.

The best thing in Spring is the dawn.
The sky, dyed in the morning light, slowly brightens
and purple clouds stretch across the mountains.
(from the Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon).

Anyhow, even though it wasn’t the story I thought it was going to be, I’ve enjoyed watching Windy Tales (and especially being able to watch it whilst sat in the kitchen or lying in bed at night, thanks to my cute little pocket pc! There's something more intimate about having anime on a little screen in your hand or on your pillow.)

The quotes about viewing cherry blossom in less than ideal conditions inspired me to go out today to look for blossom on the trees despite the dull and threatening skies. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much where I live. I found one hawthorn tree with white blossom, but the setting was poor. Later I found a tree with pink cherry blossom in a supermarket carpark just as it started to rain. In the end I didn't manage to photograph anything, but will try again soon, I'm sure there will be blossom on the trees in one of the parks near here.

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Not quite Leonardo

Wednesday, 5. March 2008, 20:39:47

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In my post about my pocket PC yesterday I said that neither of the painting programs I’d tried could handle images even as large as 640x480, but it turns out I was wrong: I just discovered that one of them, Abisoft’s PaintWM5 (a Windows Paint clone—I know, it doesn’t sound promising does it?) can open & edit larger bitmap files just fine, even though it only creates bitmaps about 400 pixels across by itself. (The paid-for version can also handle JPEGs etc, so hopefully you can use it to edit images straight off a camera’s SD-card).

Unlike VSPainter, PaintWM5 doesn’t halve the resolution on opening a file, as you can see here where I’ve added an A.Oryzae to a screenshot from Moyashimon. It can also add text to an image but the free version doesn’t give any control over the font, just the colour. Unfortunately—and here’s the killer drawback—it doesn’t anti-alias its lines or brush-strokes (just like the justifiably-scorned Windows Paint). The only way to smooth out the resultant jagged edges is with the smudge tool, which is a rather crude implement.

Anyhow, encouraged by the discovery that I could open bigger files, I tried my hand at editing a 1152x770 pixel photograph to test the viability of editing photographs on location when there’s no desktop machine around. Here’s a half-size version of the image I was working on: first the before image (this is a photo I took in Orkney BTW):

Now the after image: I’ve removed the barbed wire from the foreground (which seemed like a plausible edit I’d want to do) and added a bird to the sky (just for the hell of it). Since there’s no clone tool, I used the eyedropper to precisely set the colour of a one pixel wide line tool which I used to cover the barbed wire a segment at a time.

Here’s some 100% crops of the barbed wire removal:


So anyway, photo-editing on this machine is certainly possible. In practice the small window size is not much of a handicap for detailed work since I’d only be looking at a small area at a time with this kind of edit. The main problem is navigating around the image when zoomed in to a small portion, there’s no navigation thumbnail and I kept having to zoom out to orient myself. Using a pixel-fine pencil and 4x zoom precise editing is pretty easy, however the lack of anti-aliasing remains a big drawback. Also the type of edit that can be done is very limited: unlike the other program I tried (VS-Painter), there’s no dodging or burning-in tools nor any levels of transparency, so you’re basically limited to simple pixel painting or adding text.

I don’t yet know how big a bitmap the program can cope with as I only had cut-down images on the memory card. If it can cope with 10Mpixel images from my Ricoh I’ll be impressed!

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Train journey

Friday, 25. January 2008, 01:27:31

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I didn’t have my camera with me today so instead I will describe what I saw (which to be honest was not unlike many a day). After days of semi-darkness and rain it was nice to see the sun again, however weak. As we left the station I gazed towards the sun, and noticed low in the sky a line of three small fluffy clouds of almost identical shape. Pale grey clouds picked out by their silvery edges against a pale grey sky. As the clouds were the same colour as the sky, my first thought was that they might almost have been shapes embossed on a grey background. But as I continued to look at them, or perhaps as the weak sun beyond them strengthened slightly, I realised that the background sky was not really uniform grey but a blurry graduated tone like you can make in a image editor, running from light grey to a subtley darker grey. The clouds meanwhile had a very slight modelling which made them look almost, but not quite, three dimensional.

Just above the horizon, the outlines of more distant clouds were also like embossed shapes that became more and more indistinct as they approached the horizon, fading into the bluish atmospheric haze, like shapes that had been partly rubbed out by an indecisive artist.

But the train was moving on. A large dark building whizzed by in a couple of seconds and was gone. But from those few seconds I was left with an impression of charcoal-grey walls filled with rows of matching grey-tinted windows through which I caught a glimpse of dimly lit office interiors alternating with closed curtains. Had the windows not had bright red frames they would have been indistinguishable from the dark walls, like the clouds against the sky.

Presently the city skyline was replaced by high tree-filled embankments, denuded silver birch trees alternating with anonymous ivy-wrapped trees whose leafless forms might have been either dead or alive, it was hard to tell in winter.

And then my journey was over at a deceptively rustic suburban station with wooden canopies and bare patches on the grassy embankments awaiting the spring flowers; it had only taken ten minutes but as usual I was late for work.

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my writings

  • On Haibane Renmei

    discussing the deeper meanings of Yoshitoshi Abe’s anime series Haibane Renmei (AshenWings Union)

  • Lain—Net or Alive?

    My paranoic-critical analysis of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, discussing: Existence, Chisa, The Sound of Lain, and God

  • The Girl Who Slept Through Time

    Crossover doujinshi of Lucky☆Star and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo)