Author Archives: danijel

Capability

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I was thinking about why I have no problem giving up hardware and technologies, surrendering them to the sands of time without sentimentality. I had all kinds of computers before and I don’t care for them one bit. The same goes for cameras, lenses, film processes and emulsions. But they helped me make my favourite work. Why is it that I can give them up so easily?

I did give it some thought, and I came up with a very simple answer. I care for capability. If new technology can give me the same or better capability, I’m fine. Let’s take 35mm photography for example. Initially I shot negative film, then mostly slides, then Canon 5d digital, then Sony A7II digital, and currently Sony A7RV and A7CR digital. As you can see, what I’m preserving is the 35mm format. That’s the capability. I also want colours, dynamic range and resolution. That part is either staying the same or improving over generations of hardware. Every following generation of technology includes and exceeds the capability of the previous ones.

The colours of now.

Yes, film looked great when it was in its prime. Digital looks at least as good, if not better. You just need to know what you’re doing. Digital has greater resolution, less noise, and greater dynamic range, especially in the shadows. One of the greatest advantages of digital is in the deep tones with low light, and that’s something I do a lot.

So, the reason why I let go of film without hesitation when digital became good enough is because digital included and exceeded the capabilities of film to do what I wanted it to do. There’s no nostalgia because I don’t feel I lost capability. Whenever I felt I missed the aesthetics of a certain lens I used to own, I just bought it cheaply on ebay; I can mount it on the new camera via adapter and get the same look. There are, however, digital cameras and lenses I used to own, that produced great image quality, but I don’t feel the need to own them now; the Olympus four thirds system, for instance, or Sony R1. Why? Because I own parallel gear from Sony that makes the image with the same look. Zuiko Digital 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5, for instance, makes images that look almost identical to what my Sony FE 24-105mm f/4 G makes. The modern Sony sensors produce magnificent colours. Getting older gear that would produce an inferior version of the same image style would merely waste money and increase clutter.

You can’t replace people. They are actually unique, and if someone was lost to you nostalgia is justified. Also, if technological capability was lost forever and you can’t get it again with modern gear, the feeling of loss and nostalgia are justified. But with computers and cameras? I certainly don’t miss computers being big, loud, slow and shit. I don’t miss the 1024×768 resolution, and I don’t miss having to burn CDs for video because hard drives were small. I don’t miss connecting to the BBS with a 14400 modem. I’m glad stuff got better. I don’t miss the car in which I had to hand-crank the windows down and manually lock all four doors, and I certainly don’t miss it having 54hp. Did I do important things with it? Yes. Was I very glad I had it at the time? Yes. But all my cars since have been better. I never lost capability. Even the fuel consumption, which was the strong side of my first car – 6.5 litres of diesel per 100 km – is exceeded by my current car; 6.2l of diesel per 100km. The new car, however, actually has an engine, and it has dual zone climate control, satnav, electric windows and door locks and so on. It’s also much safer. Literally zero capability was lost, therefore zero nostalgia. But if technology degraded and I could no longer get the capability I once had, that would be a shame and I would feel that.

Toxic waste

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Meta must tighten controls on children’s accounts and pay $567 million into a fund to remedy its role in a youth mental health crisis, a New Mexico judge ordered Thursday, in a ruling that dealt the social media giant another hefty penalty and compared it to polluting factories. (CNN)

A New Mexico judge has declared Meta a “public nuisance,” comparing the social media giant to a polluting factory. The ruling orders the company to establish an abatement fund and overhaul key features of its platforms over alleged harm to children. (RT)

It’s a case of “too little, too late”, considering the condition of the generations raised on tablets, smartphones and social media, I’d say. It’s also a case of “I told you so”, since I kept saying from the beginning that social media is the spiritual equivalent of toxic waste that is by design reducing people to their basest level, but nobody listens to me so yeah. Now they have the irreversible outcomes, and this verdict isn’t going to change anything.

But I don’t think it’s just social media; it’s broader than that. Any situation where people are constantly exposed to feedback from large groups of people will result in a very reductionist monoculture of thoughts and emotions. In essence, this reduces society to a collective idiot, because stupid consensus reigns supreme, and every truly smart idea will contradict that, and such will be violently attacked and ridiculed. In essence, this polices thought until everybody is obedient, retarded and vaccinated.

Also, this form of mental coherence on a very low baseline, essentially the consensus of the IQ 85-115 crowd, the ±1 standard deviations around the median, the monoculture of the Gaussian mean, is something that creates all the fanatical hatred of all dissenting thought, and extreme intolerance of “non-approved” ideas, and it’s not like that phenomenon is new in society, but social media brought it to a whole new level of bad.

So, it’s not that only Facebook, or only the social media, or the smartphones that enable permanent connectivity to the network, are the problem. I think it merely exposes pathology within human social structures, that was always there, but this escalated it to the level of caricature.

Apex predators

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I occasionally watch all kinds of videos on YouTube and I noticed a weird fascination with monsters; apex predators specifically. Whether it’s about polar bears or crocodiles, or extinct things such as T-Rex, the prevalent theme is that humans are defenceless against such monsters and yada yada.

Bitch, please. The Inuit used to hunt polar bears. Their fur was considered particularly good material for women’s footwear, because of the soft fur. They even prayed to a polar bear god to send polar bears their way to be killed.

Crocodiles? We make shoes out of them, too. All kinds of leather accessories as well. Nice texture.

I used to wonder about human babies; their tendency to cry loudly seemed like an extremely anti-survivalist strategy in leopard country. It would attract all the predators from miles away. And then it clicked – no, the leopards wouldn’t be attracted, because a crying baby means lots of adult humans with sharp sticks. Bad, very bad. Humans like leopard fur, it’s very soft.

There’s only one “apex predator” in the world today, and it awarded other, lesser predators a protected status, because we think they are cute and interesting to have around. If a Megalodon was found to still exist, it would not be an apex predator, but a protected, endangered species. If humans wanted to hunt it for shark fin soup or something, we could drive it to extinction by Tuesday.

If T-Rex happened to get resurrected, it would be instantly endangered from poachers who think its teeth are great for piano keys or something, and its testicles are an aphrodisiac. An African elephant isn’t that much smaller than a T-Rex, and it’s endangered, not from T-Rex or Allosaurus, but from dumbass poachers armed with AK-47s.

Think about that. T-Rex would be hunted to extinction by people who are interested in what steaks made of its meat taste like, and they’d like to have trinkets carved from its bones. Whales are huge and what not, and we entertain ourselves with stories about monster whales, and we almost drove them to extinction because their oil was considered extremely useful before petroleum industry was a thing.

Big things are just endangered species to us; no matter how big. We put them under protection and know each by name. It’s the small things that are a danger to us, paradoxically; mosquitos, ticks, viruses, bacteria, fungi.

The only big things that are stupid enough to hunt humans are those whose populations weren’t reduced to only those who ran in panic after hearing a human baby crying.

Detached

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I was thinking about why photography is a different thing for me than any other instance of buying things and then getting bored of them quickly and not feeling anything for them.

You see, with photography, there is indeed that brief rush of getting the new lens or a camera. However, I don’t actually start feeling anything for the gear until after I’ve made some really good pictures with it. And then, it’s something different – I love the gear, but that’s completely detached from physical possession. It becomes something else – not a physical object that I own, but part of the creative process that made something I love.

This, for instance, was made with 35mm negative film – Kodak Gold 100 or 200, I think. Minolta X-300, MD 35-70mm f/3.5 lens. I still remember the moment I took it; sometime in early 1999, I think, on Sljeme. I love it; it brings me back there instantly, and the colours turned out so good, I never really repeated anything as good with the primroses. But I no longer own that camera, or the scanner, and I no longer shoot film. It doesn’t matter. The equipment, the moment, the motive and everything are tied together in the picture in ways that transcend equipment ownership.

This was taken with the Olympus E-1 and ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5, my first proper digital camera, after the abortive attempt that was Fuji S602z. It had such wonderful colours, the first digital camera that produced colours that matched slide film in my perception. I love the results. I sold both the camera and the lens during hard times when I needed the money for the bills. By today’s standards, it’s completely obsolete. I have great memories with it, though, and great pictures. Would I buy it again? No. The feeling and the memories are detached from ownership; having the camera wouldn’t change them.

I made this with the Soligor SR-300md camera, MC 50mm f/1.4 Rokkor lens, on Fuji Sensia 100 slide film; scanned with Minolta Dimage IV film scanner. E6 slide film no longer exists as a technology; it is lost to time. I can remember pausing Romana, taking the picture, and then letting her eat it. It was in Dotrščina, I don’t remember the exact year, but during the time I owned that film scanner, and I sold it to finance buying Olympus E-1 in 2004. I love the picture, the atmosphere and the colours. The chemical process that allowed me to make it is lost to me and I can never retrieve it; and yet, I have no regrets, no nostalgia. The image and the achievement are divorced from the process that made it possible.

I took this one on one of the Medvednica peaks after we completed the hike to the top; Strmopeć, with Canon 5d and the EF 15mm f/2.8 diagonal fisheye, in 2010. The memory is very much alive, and that camera helped me not only make many great pictures, but also helped me learn completely new styles of photography, it completely pulled me out of my former habits. I let it go without regrets, because the achievement and the memories are detached from the actual physical camera that made them. There’s the idea of it, the feeling of it, but that feeling is me.

This was taken with my current camera, the Sony A7RV and the FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM lens. I love both the camera and the lens, but the idea about them is very different from the physical object on my desk. The idea about the camera are the moments when I took the pictures like this one, and I’m there, in that moment, in the golden part of the sunset at Plitvička Jezera, atop the mound overseeing the lake. Sure, I know I had the camera and the lens with me, but the idea about the camera in my mind is what it helped me make. It’s not the physical object, or connected to the ownership thereof. They are always with me, even if the physical object that made them was lost to the sands of time.

That’s what makes photography different – it’s not a gear acquisition thing, although acquisition of gear makes it possible. The good part doesn’t start when I click “buy” or when the courier delivers it, or when I unpack it. It starts when I make the first good photo with it, and it doesn’t fade when the novelty expires. It stays with me forever.

Storm

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We had a walk last night and I took the FE 14mm f/1.8 GM with me, mostly because scenes with lots of starry sky are the only ones I can use that lens to full advantage.

I use it rarely, but when it works, it really works.

The thunderstorm never actually reached us, I think it blew itself out somewhat to the south-east, so we got no reprieve from the heat. Also, the humidity is terrible.

The compositions are not great because we were positioned low, with powerlines above us and headlights from passing cars every few seconds ruining most shots, but considering the conditions I’m pretty happy with what I got. Biljana didn’t carry her camera because it was almost dark when we started – that’s the only way to have a long walk here and not die; start after the sunset – and we’re pretty much screwed from all the karmic processing that never seems to completely stop, so it’s hard to add yet another thing to do without feeling overwhelmed.