Somewhere in Soho

I leave this one with no comment. It doesn't need one. Eterna, Fuji X-E4 with 27mm pancake lens. 

Changing Film Simulations

If you thought guitarists were obsessed with "tone", let me introduce photographers. What do you think all that tweaking of RAWs in Lightroom is about? It's the photographic equivalent of tone-tweaking. And the reason that Lightroom lets us do it is because photo editors back in the day were doing it with black-and-white photos. Watch this short about that iconic James Dean Times Square photo with comments by the guy who did all the dark-room manipulations...



By comparison I'm a set-it-and-forget-it guy when it comes to cameras, but then, I do twiddle a bit in Photos. For the last year or so, I have been using the Astia film simulation, which is just a bit softer than the standard simulation. It over-reacts to shadows. A lot. This was taken with Astia...




and this was taken with Eterna...



(Both these were test shots and are not going to make it to any Greatest Hits folder. ) Notice how much we can see inside the cafe with Eterna, but not with Astia. The Astia feels more "summer-y" while the Eterna feels a little like "autumn". Sure I can adjust the Astia shot to bring out the details in the shade, but then it looks more like the Eterna shot, but slightly more saturated, and the adjustments involve whacking some sliders way over to the max.

I'm going to persevere with Eterna for a while - it gave me this

Anyone who says I should be selecting the film simulation, aperture, shutter speed and exposure correction for each photograph with the speed and certainty of Max Verstappen, will be reminded that the pros who do that take a freaking age to do the settings, unlike Max, who really is that fast. I want to spend time looking for pictures, and settings are a distraction. Kinda the reverse of the guitar.

Primrose Hill

Okay, it's catch-up time. 

I took my first photos for a good few months a couple of weeks ago, and as always when it's been a while since I took photos, I made a right hash of it the first time out. The check-exposure-aperture-shutter-speed-dials reflex had been forgotten (though I was relieved to hear that even one as prolific as Roman Fox has shot dozens of photos without checking he hadn't nudged the exposure. I had put in some adjustments over the winter that looked okay indoors, but outdoors produced colours that were way over-saturated. Like this...



Fortunately I have never claimed to be a pro. Anyway we can "fix in post", right? This one is the result of un-saturating the colours so that it looks like a slightly faded film photo from the 1970's.

It's also a fine example of the people-sitting-at-the-top-of-a-hill-looking-into-the-distance picture, and proves that my compositional chops were not entirely lost.

(PS: Yeah, I know, it's a big wide world out there and there's a lot happening. However, I am not going to spend any energy trying to make sense of it, because it makes no sense. I told you back in 2020 that British society had already collapsed, not that it was about to. Should you be in any doubt that the UK is now a joke, I give you the state of our Navy; a population claiming for imaginary disabilities in the millions; our borders, which are porous to anyone without a passport but with a dinghy; our politicians, who only took the job on the basis that all the real work would be done by "experts", judges and civil servants, and our civil servants, who only took their jobs on the basis that the real decisions would be made in Brussells. David Davis is much better at this stuff than I could ever be. Read him.)

James Popsys' Human Nature Photographs

James Popsys is a You Tube photographer - at least I can't remember him referring to wedding, portrait or product shoots, nor using the phrases "my gallery" or "my agent". I don't have half his camera technique, have no idea how to use Lightroom on RAW (he's a wizard), and I don't have a successful YT channel. I bought his book (Human Nature) recently, and am unlikely to publish one of my own so he can return the compliment. Just so we're establishing who the actual talent is here.

It took me a few passes through the book, and a comparison with Edgar Martins' Topologies (which I happened to have on my shelves because Foyles many years ago) to realise what my eye was baulking at.

There are often too many subjects in the photographs.

By the conventions of art photography and my dumb eyes.

Let me explain.

Ever noticed how dogs are really, really interested in other dogs to the exclusion of all other animals? People are the same. Put a person anywhere in a picture and they will become the centre of our attention. People are interested in people to the exclusion of everything except "cute" - people love "cute". Put one person in a picture, and we want to know who they are and what they are doing there. Put in two, three or four and we want to know what their relationship is - even if we decide they are strangers sitting on a wall. Five or more starts to be a crowd, which is a subject in itself. What is it a crowd of? Going where? To do what? It's for this reason one has to be careful about putting people in the shot. I do not want to remember how long I have stood waiting for the people to finish walking past so I can get a people-free shot of whatever it is I was looking at.

The single person in an otherwise people-free image, especially against buildings, is a feature of a certain kind of Internet photography. Here's my take on it, just to prove I can do it...

There's a classic of the genre on page 108 (of Human Nature) of a scene in Blackpool. A woman in an orange hooded coat walks from left to right, and since she's a person, my instincts assume she's the focus of attention. I missed the weird curved, multi-pronged streetlights at first glance. Now my attention oscillates between the streetlights and the person. Then I put my finger over the person, and instantly the image became an "art photo" about the streetlights. Who designed them? Who approved them? What do the locals think? Would I want streetlights like that where I live? Do I like them?

On page 126 is a photograph of a bridge at Kylesku in Scotland. It's over a narrow inlet and is tightly curved. Not your average bridge at all. And then there's a damn boat in the water, closer to the centre of the image and because it's a human thing, it draws my attention, and once again I'm oscillating between subjects. Put my finger over that damn boat, and it becomes a satisfying "art photo" of a bridge.

When James does have a picture without a person, as of the pylons at Ghabat al Ghuzlan on page 63, it's a well-composed art photograph. That abandoned car hidden behind the shed (also on the website home page), or the container trailer in the car park (also on the home page), are neat little classics that would grace any art portfolio. He knows what he's doing - it's the You Tube genre rules that lead him astray.

The idea behind the Human Nature book is the presence of people, literally or figuratively, in nature. Bridges and weird lamp-posts are exactly such presences on their own. We don't need a warm body to represent "human".

But like I said: "by the conventions of art photography and my dumb eyes". They are his photographs and his choices, and he's making a living out of them, which is more than you or I are doing. A lot of people share his judgements.

In the light of all this, I looked again at my own favourites that I printed a few years ago now. Yep, one subject, usually in the middle-ish of the frame, or spread all the way across the frame. Keep-it-simple art photography rules. Maybe I'm too old and slow multiple-subject images?

James Popsys' website is here The home page has some images from the book. I enjoy his YT channel, of which the latest episode is here

 

 

and features him talking about his photography in an honest and non-babble-y way (he never once refers to "my practice as a photographer").

Everything Feels Fake

“Fake” means “not what it is being presented as”, and a faker is a person or institution knowingly making the false representation.

A fake tenant is someone who is living in a flat, but at the request of the landlord and at a low rent, to make it look as though people who pay market rents live there. A fake political policy is one that cannot achieve what is being claimed for it. BBC period dramas with historically-inaccurate multi-ethnic casts are fake, because the BBC knows they are doing it for political reasons. AI images passed off as a photograph in a newspaper article are fake. A programme announced as a “documentary” that pushes a political or social agenda is a fake documentary, though it may be a really powerful polemic. (There is a place for polemics, as long as everyone knows that is what they are getting.)

We have fake borders in the UK, because we allow anyone from anywhere to enter the country as long as they do so illegally. But we will ban Dutch journalists whose opinions someone on X / Twitter didn’t like.

We have fake policing, which turns up mob-handed for a rude Tweet, but can’t be bothered to deal with shop-lifters. Policing involves more compromises than the public wishes it did, but even then there are limits.

String Theory was fake physics because for a couple of decades its publicists said it was the “only game in town”. MOND, Quantum Loop Gravity and others are just as speculative and untestable, but they don’t claim to be the only path to the truth.

Fusion power, quantum computing and General AI go through periods of fake-ness, whenever there’s a sudden outburst of “It’s five years away and will solve all our problems”. It’s been five years away all my long life, and it will be five years away during yours as well.

Heard of the ”Replication Crisis” in the social sciences? It has not passed. Most research in sociology, psychology and the variations thereof cannot be reproduced. And yet it is passed off as “peer-reviewed research”. Fake. And peer review doesn’t do what we think it should either.

Surgery is almost as good as they say it is, but the rest of medicine is nowhere near as effective as surgery. The list of incurable conditions is long, and the list of curable conditions is short. Usually, the doctors say so, so there's no faking. As for psychiatry and psychotherapy… almost as bad as the cold porridge of class-prejudice and old maids’ remedies that masquerades as “health advice”. The drugs (psychiatry) and the kale (health advice) are prescribed as if they are effective, when they mostly aren't. That's fakery.

The ONS functions as the authoritative source of statistical data on the economy and population, but its staff make mistakes like anyone else does. One example: it occurred to no-one at the ONS there that Eastern Europeans would enter the country by low-cost airlines via airports where the ONS had no coverage, and for years it understated migration by hundreds of thousands. The result is sometimes fake statistics: held out as authoritative, actually wrong.

The “fake-ness” of the news is the skewed choice of what is reported, and how it is interpreted. The editorial claim is that these are the important stories of the moment, but the mainstream media has long been taken over by PR companies leaking forthcoming speeches, policy proposals, and inside gossip. None of which are news. Most of the news is fake - real news is something someone does not want you to know. Media attacks on political figures are not news, but polemics.

The biggest fake of all was the farrago of ever-changing policies in the 2020-2022 Lockdown. The overall strategy, and many of the specific communications and measures, were dreamed up by “behavioural scientists” for the express purpose of scaring the public. They told us they were lying. Masks, social distancing, business closures, school closures, Track ‘N Trace, and the rest was could not achieve what the public were told it could. And by the end of 2022, even the most fervent curtain-twitcher knew they had been fooled by fakery, and in many cases, knew they had wanted to be fooled.

Remember Russia Russia Russia - the multi-year attempt by the Democrats and mainstream media to slur and depose Donald Trump with the false charge that he was in cahoots with Vladimir Putin? Nothing genuine about those claims either.

A certain level of error and omission is allowable in any complicated process, but only as long as it is admitted, its extent estimated, and steps taken to reduce it. If that cannot be done, the organisation should say they cannot afford to put the process right and stop doing it. The fakery begins when the organisation carries on with the process, denies that the errors and omissions are significant, says it does not have the budget to put the faults right, and asks everyone to sign a waiver, but then represents the process and its results as fit-for-purpose. That is where the NHS, the BBC, the ONS and all government policy-making are now.

A more subtle source comes from the fact that we expect our culture - fiction, history, philosophy, science, drama, movies, songs and so on - broadly to represent our values and the emotional realities of our lives. Shakespeare is about kings and princes and wealthy families, but as people they resonated with their audiences (perhaps less so now - the “modern audience” doesn’t match up to the Bard). Overly-fast social and economic change can create a dissonance between the world portrayed by recent cultural products and the contemporary reality. I find that films and TV series set even as late as 2010 seem to be set in a different world. Both the media and the world feel a little askew as a result.

Cost inflation unmatched by salary inflation creates fake money. In the 1970’s, trades unions in the UK were strong enough to keep pay rises in line, if lagging by a year, with the often double-figure inflation throughout the decade. During the 2010-2020 period in the UK the unions lacked the strength to win inflation-matching pay rises, with the result that many people were being paid up to a third less in real terms in 2020 than they were in 2010. Professionals that had been reasonably well-paid were now barely able to pay the rent on a shared flat. The perceptions of the economic status of those professions no longer matched the reality.

The more expensive it is to do something in the real world, the more time we spend in front of the television or scrolling social media. “Escapism” used to mean going to the cinema, the theatre, perhaps a fun park, or for some, reading a lurid novel. All of those now cost a serious chunk of change: streaming something at home, or playing a computer game, is way cheaper. Rising costs drive us away from the outside world, which starts to seem strange or irrelevant, unless it is where we work. Work is always real. So are the people who claim that “everything feels fake these days” just click-baiting or are they on to something? I think they are on to something. Too many of our institutions, that we pay for with our taxes, claim to be doing something we want doing, but actually are not. We look out at our culture and reporting, and do not see the world we experience. It’s not so much rotten, as distorted and askew.

18-29 Relationships: Same As It Ever Was

Recently a number of online mavens have been quoting this...

“In 2025, approximately 63% of men aged 18–29 in the U.S. were single, and 34% of women the same age range were single.”

... and depending on their intended audience, blame this on men (who are all scardy-cat Peter Pans) or women (who would rather be one of a top 10% man's harem than partner to a regular guy) or whatever else it is they think their audience will pay to hear.

Oh woe is us and the downfall of our society.

But wait. There’s a sleight-of-hand here. If I told you that 100% of men aged 14-17 were single, as were 100% of women, you would not bemoan the state of our society. You would remind me that 14-17 year olds are not supposed to be married.

Well, neither in this economy are 18-21 year olds. They are supposed to be in education or starting their careers. Some will be married, but not many, and to a first approximation, none. 18-21 year olds are (approximately) 33% of the 18-29 year-old cohort. So let’s take that 33% of shouldn’t-be-married out of the they-are-single figures.

Wow! 1% of women aged 22-29 are unmarried. That’s nonsense. Even if 100% of the 29 year olds were married, and women started marrying at 22, the average over the 22-29 range would be 50% (assuming a straight-line rate). So “single” does not mean married. It means “not in a relationship”.

“In a relationship” is a self-reporting variable (marriage is a Government statistic based on a legal document), and self-reporting variables are subject to delusions and mis-understandings. One person might report something as a relationship that another would regard as a weekly hook-up, while another might only regard the weekly hook-up as a perfectly acceptable "relationship". It would not be the first time women were caught...um...managing their answers to such questions. (Remember that old canard about "men being more promiscuous than women"? Went on for years until some researchers debunked it, and it turned out that women were exactly as promiscuous as men. Men were exaggerating a bit as well, but nowhere near as much as the women.)

But then 18-21 year olds can be “in a (flimsy as all heck) relationship”. So let’s assume that’s what it means, and run the numbers again.

The proportion of men under 30 in relationships (or “relationships” they would describe as such) with women 30 or over is not quite zero, but to keep things simple we will take it as such. However, the proportion of women under thirty dating (or married to) men 30 or over is significant. On average wives are two years younger than husbands. Let’s assume that applies across the age-group, though it may not at the younger end. Two year’s worth of a 12-year wide cohort (18-29) is 16%, women who are going out with men 30 and older.

So that 63% of single men 18-29 breaks down like this: 34% (single 18-29 year old women) + 16% (18-29 dating men 30 or over) + 13% (other reasons).

One of those “other reasons” could be that more that 16% of those 18-29 year old women are going out with older men. The rest is women thinking they are in a relationship with a man who doesn’t think of it as one, or just outright… um… response management. I’ll leave you to pick your weighting of these

In other words, 63% of men and 34% of women aged 18–29 in the U.S. being single is a feature, not a bug. It's the way it's always been.

But wait. Why are 34% of women 18-29 single? Isn’t that because of (enter clickbait reason here)?

Do the math. Suppose you’re in a relationship for two years / quarters / months and it takes a year / quarter / month to get over the break-up, find and establish a new one. You spend one-third of your time not in a relationship. Seems about how real life works to me.

None of this means that men and women today have the same attitudes towards each other and “relationships” as their parents, grandparents or “back in the day”. Some do, many do not. The quantity of their relationships is more or less unchanged, and for many the quality will not have changed much either. But let’s be clear about one thing: their parents and their grandparents are lying about how much better they were at relationships. And I have the divorce statistics to prove it.

Guitar+Amp Bedroom Tone Need Not Be DAW / Mix Tone

The Internet makes a moderate deal about the difference between bedroom or solo tone, and what is needed to mix in with a live band or in the studio. “Bedroom tone” is usually fuller, with more bass. “Mix tone” is alleged to be much lighter on the bass frequencies. The unspoken inference is that going for bedroom tone is for the newbies, and pros practice with a mix-friendly tone.

Except there’s a reason mixing desks and DAWs have a gajillion controls. Because it is extremely unlikely that the guitarist (or anyone else) will get the sound the producer wants, using only a guitar, pedals and an amp. Close, sure, but not the final sound. That final tweak is why producers and recording engineers have jobs. It’s cheaper and faster for the mixing engineer to do it from the recordings, than to do take after take to tweak tone. In one approach, the band plays with a sound they liked in rehearsal, and the engineers change it as needed for records and venues. In another, everyone plays with no effects straight into the board and all the effects are added in the mix.

So recording at home, we may as well play with a sound that pleases and even inspires us, and then use the DAW to jiggle it around to make a hi-fi / head-fi / radio / phone friendly mix.

The McCarty 594’s humbuckers can sound dull. Listening a bit more and trying out some other descriptions, I got to “lacked bite and clarity”. And I was always tempted to add more treble, because treble helps with clarity. Then I wondered what would happen if I turned everything on the Princeton up to 10. Which is forbidden. Or terminally newbie. Or eye-rollingly crass.

But it was a lot closer to what I was looking for. So I went in search of explanations of how the Princeton’s tone and volume controls work. A question that is usually answered by blog posts that mostly consist of circuit diagrams. I can read a circuit diagram as slowly as I can read music.

Tone control on the Fender Princeton is subtractive: 10 is no change, and 1 is turned-right-down. Same as a volume knob on an amplifier: it doesn’t increase the volume, it decreases the attenuation. The tone dials on the amp at 10 are in the neutral position, and turning them down reduces the treble or the bass part of the signal from the guitar.

The same logic applies to the guitar, where the tone control (pot) is also subtractive: 10 “leaves the signal alone” and 3 “takes a lot of treble out”. There’s a point on all guitar tone pots below the signal gets wrapped in cotton wool, and the notes have no attack and are blurred all the way through. It’s horrible.

The “natural sound” of the guitar is everything everywhere at 10 - just like Clapton said all those years ago. However, while acoustic guitars are “tuned”, electrics chuck out a signal and leave it to us to do what we will with it. I can set the dials one way for a tone I like, and you can set them another for a tone you like.

Letting the treble rip is close to ice-pick territory or produces overtones some people might find distracting. 10 on the amplifier bass may be felt to be too boomy (especially on the low E string), or smudge the notes too much.

Bass has to be handled on the amp, since the guitar tone control only does treble. Treble can be handled either on the amp or on the guitar. Everyone’s answer will differ. I’ve left the amp treble at 10 (or 5-ish for the single coils) and control the treble on the guitar.

Turning the amp volume up to 10 and the guitar volume up to 10 will be WAY TOO LOUD at home. Anything below 2 on the amp volume and the sound won’t come out to play. I find that amp=2, guitar = 10 gives a nice crispy tone, and guitar=7, amp=3 (or so) is also acceptable and leaves some headroom on the guitar to handle coil-splitting (which drops the volume some). This gives me the definition in the notes that I want. Others may prefer less clarity.

Having the amp tone controls at 10 means the amp sound is closer to what comes out of the Helix and into an interface. Not identical, because amps have a sound of their own. Which is why we record into a DAW with amp models available.

In the Helix I have an EQ that drops 8kHz and 16kHz by 15dB to deal with ice-picky single coils. And the Deluxe Compressor with a threshold of -15dB and compression of 20:1 to take the top off any loud notes. The result puts some spine into the McCarty 594's "vintage-sounding" humbuckers. On the Paranormal, everything sounds fine because single coils are far less fussy than humbuckers, and their lower output doesn’t engage the compressor to the same extent.

This, through the Princeton, is close enough to the sound I want to hear from an amp. What sounds good from a DAW into a WAV file and in a mix, is another thing altogether, and that’s what DAWs and mixes are for.

I cannot emphasise enough that the sounds you are trying to get may involve having one or more of the controls or pedal settings at an extreme. The "put everything in the middle and tweak it" approach can have you tweaking a bit of this and a bit of that, whereas you may need to swing something WAY OVER to a limit to get what you want.