Mile End Park - Glare vs No Glare

This is a little corner of Mile End Park. The weather was overcast, and the light was diffuse. The X-E4 saw this...

... but my camera was tricked. Deceived. As were my eyes. We didn't see what was there, we saw what was there behind the glare-y, diffuse light. The photograph below is a lot closer to what was really there. What we would have seen if the light was clear.

The light in this photograph seems to be coming from the left-hand side of the photograph. Probably half-a-dozen of those big movie lights.

Across Blackheath Redux

The image a modern digital camera takes is not what the eye sees, and it's not "what's there", it's what the camera takes given the parameters you've told it to work to. In this photograph, it shot to get good detail and light int he sky, and the land and buildings followed on behind. Play around with the light variables in Photos, and the sky remains remarkably stable, while the buildings and grass get more or less clear and visible. On the day, the light was diffuse, but the Heath and the buildings weren't dim.

Within a dull-looking photo there may be a really neat one hidden by cookie-cutter development and printing. Ansel Adams said that the photograph is the script and the print is the performance. A chunk of the work of photography is taking the photograph, but another chunk is making the print. What makes the snap-shot aesthetic is its refusal to use the printing process to bring out the image. I've been a snap-shot guy for a long time. (Maybe all those hours trying to find a guitar tone is changing the way I think.)

Anyway, here's a re-print of one of the photos I took about nine months ago (it feels like at least two years) and thought was a bit dull.

Much more interesting.

Joy-Rides at Epping Forest

A recent trip to Epping Forest found us passing by a collection of joy-rides. The sky was half-overcast and the light was diffused. I took some shots anyway because... "this sure is a bizarre sight in the middle of this s**t" as the movies says.

Both shots are cropped. There is a lot more sky in the original, and the camera weighted accordingly, so that the land is darker than one would want.

I twiddled around with the light settings in Photos. Cranking the Exposure up brought everything up, but turned the sky grey. Instead I cranked the Brilliance and Brightness up, which gave much the same effect but kept the sky blue. Then I took a little Saturation out and cranked up the Vibrancy for the colours.

The trees have stopped being a lumpy dark green mass and now have shape and texture. So does the grass. The colours are slightly lighter. The overall effect is a little bit post-card-y. But it's a useable image. The original is just Meh.

Man Up and Use Photoshop

I like taking photographs when there's a clear blue sky.

Partly because clear-blue-skies are nice, but also because the light is good.

When the sky is lightly covered with clouds, there's a lot of glare.

Light coming from all directions, indistinct shadows, watered-down contrast, washed-out colours.

A haze over every pixel.

Makes a photograph of anything look dreary, in the same way that clear blue skies make a photograph of anything look attractive.

I'm sure that the old-school film pros had a trick or two for making a decent print out of such photographs.

We can do it way more easily with even something as simple as Photos.

I have been (braces for honesty) too darn lazy to do so. I've disguised that laziness behind a theory of photography-as-realism, aka "Photoshop is cheating". Painters have been cheating since the moment they put colour to canvas. So it's time to get some decent photos out of what I've been doing this year.

Starting with this.

Yes, I know. Vignettes are supposed to be really naff.

But this looks really good.

And I used Photos.

Garageband Hesitancy

There's a school of thought that says we should record everything we play. And listen to it afterwards.

After all, we write down everything we write, right?

We paint or draw everything we... um, paint or draw.

It's only music that gets treated like that Eric Dolphy quote: When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again. That was true about jazz improvisation in the 1950's and early 1960's, but by the 1980's everyone was recording everything through the mixing desk. If you don't have a mixing desk, just plug your phone into some power, and record.

So I need to pick up my guitar, plug something in to something, hit record and play.

And from what I read, the way to go is via iOS, not from the laptop. Laptops are for mixing, not recording, so it seems.

Simple, yes?

There's a reason I'm watching so much YT.

Right now, I will do anything... pull weeds from between the stones, clean my bathroom tiles, read the Telegraph Online...

I've even been through my photos for this year and and tweaked them.

Anything... to avoid having to get to grips with setting up Garageband, and step up to recording what I play.

Any ideas why?

I mean, aside from being old and not wanting to learn yet another darn piece of software with accompanying skills.

And yes, I know Garageband is for starters, and that's the point.

I haven't even started. So no Ableton Live for me just yet.

Let Us Now Give Thanks For Small Things

Apple have updated iOS 16.5 to 16.5.1 so that camera adapters work again. This means I can stream from my iPad over USB, as God (or Steve Jobs) intended.

Fujifilm have produced an improved app to communicate with their cameras. It's still miles off what they really need to do, but it's a start. It's called the Fujifilm XApp. They have also updated the firmware on the X-E4 to 2.01 so that the two can work together. I don't get screen freezes on the phone anymore.

(But why do I still have to re-flash the camera from a data card? This is 2023 Yo.)

I found somewhere that sharpens rotary mower blades.

And a cleaner that does repairs.

Teenage girls seem to be just as good at winding-up the weak teachers as they were when I was a lad. I'm pretty sure teenage girls used to identify as cats when I was sixteen. Just to see what your reaction would be.

Would "Someone" Breaks The Undersea Internet Cables?

Not that they would, of course. Any more than they would blow up their own gas pipeline, or break a dam that mostly supplied water to parts of a country it is occupying, but I digress...

Should "someone" start breaking up the undersea cables that carry all those cat pics and Tik Toks we all love so much, what happens?

Your online banking will still work. That runs over Openreach's UK domestic network.

The retail banks have their own private networks. So do the railways and the armed forces. The NHS has a small flock of under-fed carrier pigeons.

All the big companies have copies of their websites disbursed to servers over the world. Amazon will still be up and running. Some services may not work, but we will still be able to buy Chinese junk from it, as long as that junk is physically in the UK.

Your fixed-line calls to domestic numbers either go over Openreach or Virgin's network. Your mobile calls to domestic numbers go over your carrier's mobile domestic network. So you can still send messages saying you have to cancel.

Anyone who really needs international comms will have satellite capacity on standby, as well as redundant undersea capacity in all directions.

So I think that business carries on as usual, but they will use it as an excuse for even poorer service, even if they are not affected.

You can find a detailed map of the world's undersea cables here. It's not a secret. Take a look and it becomes obvious that there are a handful of landing points in each country. Send a special ops team out to blow those up. Or you could follow the land lines back to one of a smaller number of data centres / telehouses, and blow those up. You could always hi-jack an airliner and fly it into one. If that's too extravagant, hire a trawler and sail it past those landing-points trailing a great big net behind you. That's worked any number of times in the Mediterranean over the years. Breaking the cables in the open sea needs submarines and trained divers, so that cuts the suspects down to a short list.

Still. Breaking some ocean internet cables. Sounds bad.

Maybe even as recently as fifteen years ago it would have been. The capacity and the number of cables available today is beyond any projection anyone would have made in 2008. To make a noticeable difference a saboteur would need to break a dozen or so cables on several different coasts within a week of each other. Undersea cables are easier and cheaper to repair than a gas pipe.

More importantly, there's no cyber warfare if there's no cyber-connection to the enemy.