Author Archives: danijel

Brain rot

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In all seriousness, I don’t think the actual cause of fake nostalgia has anything to do with either nostalgia, or a belief that old technology was in any way better. I think those young people, and by young I mean that they grew up looking at computers, are completely saturated with fast Internet content that rots their brain and cooks their eyeballs, and they see analog technology as an escape from looking at the damn screen all day where it’s either looking at shorts and tiktoks or AI brainrot. In either case, they feel that continuation of the digital overload will doom them, and they are trying to figure out a way how to escape that and still retain a modicum of functionality. Essentially, film photography, as shitty as it is today, is a way of doing photography that doesn’t require looking at the screen that is just an alt-tab away from TikTok.

Which brings us to the next point: how is my generation able to retain self-control in the same environment that makes young people go insane?

I can only speak for myself here, but it’s probably because we learned to deal with people first, and with computers later. To me, people on the other side of the Internet chasm aren’t an abstract entity. I know how to deal with people. I know when to ignore them and when to take them seriously. If they are full of shit I can roll my eyes and alt-tab. I don’t have to keep up with the latest memes in order to maintain a good impression on some herd of dumbasses. Whatever they think doesn’t matter, because they are insecure babies who didn’t read a single book between the 50 of them. Why would I even care about their opinion? If they know what’s good for them, they would care for mine.

So I don’t think it’s about technology. I have the newest, most modern technology there is, and I kept that up since the times of Commodore 64. It’s also not like I haven’t talked to people online for a long time, so I don’t know what it’s like. I’m a pro at that shit. The difference is, my ways of dealing with things and people were well formed before I ever connected to the Internet. I don’t think I perceive it the way young people do. It doesn’t influence me the way it influences them. To them, “go touch grass” is some kind of a new insult, because the implication is that they never do. It took me a while to even understand what they mean by that, because they say it as if it’s something uncommon. And then I understood that for them, it actually might be, and the “analog” hysteria means that they actually need to learn how to interact with the physical world without computers.

Touching grass.

Fake nostalgia

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I’ve seen people expressing “analog nostalgia” for all kinds of pre-digital devices; film cameras, phones with rotary dials, audio tape, vinyl records and so on. That wouldn’t be all that weird. The weird part is that almost exclusively, people expressing such nostalgia were born after this tech went functionally extinct.

For instance, when I hear a young person in their twenties spewing such nonsense, I instantly get an allergy attack from their affectation. A person who is 26 years old was born in 2000. There were no rotary phones then. I had my first cellphone in 1999, and I was actually not an early adopter. By that point, we all had wired phones with multiple memories and nobody I know had a rotary dial on theirs. CD players were a thing for a while; audio tapes and vinyl did stick around, but by the 2000s, it was CD era. Film was at its peak in mid-1990s, in a crisis by 2004 and dead by 2008. An average gen-z person knows film only from faded-out prints that were kept in someone’s hot attic, and had degraded into a greenish-blue mess. They don’t actually know what film looked like when it was the current technology. So, when they say they are nostalgic about film and they buy cameras with greenish-blue presets that supposedly emulate film, I don’t actually know what the fuck they are about, because film didn’t look like that. I know, because I was there. I made scans of fresh prints and fresh slides when they were a current technology.

This is what a scanned fresh C41 print looks like:

That’s what “looking like film” actually means. And this is what E6 slide looks like:

Fuji Astia 100F, Canon EOS 3 and EF 85mm f/1.8

Fuji Velvia 100, Canon EOS 3 and EF 85mm f/1.8

Fuji Sensia 100, Soligor SR-300MD and MC 50mm f/1.4 Rokkor-PG

Yeah, it doesn’t look at all like what you’ve been told film is supposed to look like. It doesn’t have the greenish or bluish faded-out “nostalgic” tinge. It’s not all warped, fucked over and full of all sorts of artefacts. That’s because it wasn’t shot with a potato and developed in cat urine, and then left in a kitchen drawer by the stove for 30 years for you to find it there and think “oh, this looks like shit, it makes me so nostalgic, I wish everything looked like shit again”.

So, why shoot film if you don’t want to make it look like shit? No reason whatsoever, because the modern digital process can make things look as great, or better, than they used to look in film’s prime. The only reason why you’d want film today is affectation and a misplaced fake-nostalgia over believing that things used to be shit, and it would be great if they were shit again.

Olympus E-1 ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 early digital camera.

Canon 5d 35mm digital camera

Modern 35mm digital camera.

Sorry to ruin your fake nostalgia, but film actually looked good. Digital also looks good. Go fuck yourself with your fake faded-out greenish shit, you don’t know what you’re talking about. A vinyl record, if fresh and not scratched, sounded exactly like a CD. An audio tape sounded reasonably good but worse than a CD, which is why we stopped using it. I hear that people stopped using horse-drawn carriages because cars, unlike horses, don’t leave piles of shit on the streets. Also, rotary phones were shit and we replaced them with numbered dials in mid-1980s. Yes, old cars had great visibility because they had bigger window panes and less metal. You know why we moved away from that? Because more metal means better structural rigidity in a crash, which helps if you don’t want to die or sustain grave injuries.

Fuck old technology.

Indefensible

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That’s all fine and well, but what if you desire something that can’t be justified as an instrument of work or creativity? What if the thing you want to buy is indefensible?

By that I mean trinkets and jewellery such as expensive mechanical watches, or fancy cars. If you’re really rich it can be yachts or jet planes, but you get the picture; it’s something that makes no sense in proportion to your wealth and income.

The answer to that is very simple.

No.

You need to control yourself and learn to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than just follow such stupid and financially destructive impulses. Money is precious. It should be seen as a blessing, as something that saves you from terrible things in this world, and who knows what price had to be paid in order for you to get it. I’m not saying you should feel guilty for having money and give it all to poor people, but you should see it as a blessing from God that was given to you in order for you to do something constructive with it. I don’t know what that would be, because I’m not you; it’s always specific. Insulate yourself from harm; be able to actually do what you’re meant to do, since money is fuel for everything else. I also don’t see anything wrong in spending some pre-defined discretionary spending sum on some trinkets that you actually like, as long as you’re not actually depleting the money that’s supposed to be used for constructive things.

Discipline needs to be learned. It’s fine to indulge yourself to a point. Go buy yourself ice cream. It’s not fine to act like a fucking idiot and spend all your money on a car or some other toy. You need to learn to say no to yourself and not act like a petulant child that throws tantrums when it desires some trinket. Your inner child can eat shit.

You need to say no, and you need to obey.

Justifications

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It’s easy for me to justify buying gear in hindsight: I just look at the things I did with it and it’s obvious why buying it was a good idea. Conversely, if it just sits there and I don’t use it because, for instance, the lens in question produces poor image quality, or it’s a computer that’s crashing randomly and I can’t risk my work, or a camera that’s so impractical to use that I feel PTSD at the very idea of taking it with me, it’s obvious that buying it was a mistake.

The problem, however, is in justifying equipment purchases proactively. I usually tend to think that my current equipment is fine. If it can’t do something, I can just find my way around it. Autofocus on the camera is slow, so I’ll just take pictures of static subjects. The lens is poor wide open, so I’ll just use it stopped down. I don’t have wide apertures so I’ll use a tripod. Basically, adapt in order to make due with what I have. Also, it’s hard to anticipate if something will be useful in advance, and so it’s especially hard for me to justify buying something very expensive that’s of merely hypothetical usefulness.

At some point, I had to stop my thrifty habits and come to an understanding: had I treated another person the way I treated my photography, it would have been extreme abuse and neglect. Need new shoes? Make due with the old ones, the holes aren’t that big yet. Need a new shirt? The old one is still fine. Need winter clothes? Just walk more quickly, you’ll get warm. Need food? No you don’t, you ate yesterday. Need pen and paper? Why do you need those, you don’t know how to write and you never wrote anything before, so you obviously don’t need it now.

Also, a reason why I didn’t want to buy new gear was because I needed a telephoto lens, and I knew it had to be a good one, and I also needed a camera with fast and smart autofocus to go with it, because my old camera couldn’t track insects. So, it wasn’t just a lens; it was a top tier telephoto lens and a top tier camera, all at once. It’s almost car money. So, after months of considering, I decided to buy both, and use it as an experiment that will determine the value of my purchasing justifications for future reference. If the camera and lens turn out to be rarely used, it will mean I just wasted money and my old thinking was good.

But the opposite happened – both camera and lens turned out to be exceedingly useful, and they allowed me to create lots of pictures I would never have made otherwise. Before, I had like three bees in flight in 20 years of photography. Now, I took five by noon. It was a serious, tangible improvement. Also, I could take pictures of landscape details that were out of reach before, also producing new things that used to be beyond my technical capabilities. So, what else do I want to do that’s presently beyond my equipment?

I realised that we go for walks in the evening and we don’t bring cameras along because we don’t have low light capability, or we try and fail with smartphones. So, I got lenses that are great for what we wanted to do, and again, we ended up with loads of photos that would have never been taken before, simply because we lacked the means.

So, now, in hindsight, it’s easy to say that I need a certain lens. I can show the results that would have never existed without it. I can justify a camera in similar ways. But where does one draw the line from this, because it’s easy to justify anything by saying it might be useful. A second car might be useful. A second house might be useful. Sure. But you need to see the downsides. A second car is a serious financial drain. It also introduces additional maintenance overhead, and wastes both money, time and energy. But what if my car suddenly breaks down and I am left stranded? Well, that’s a legitimate concern, but let’s see how it can be addressed. For instance, you can have an emergency fund deep enough to buy a cheap used car in an emergency. It can also be designed to fit all kinds of other emergencies, because having potential energy in form of money is better than betting on what kind of a dark horse might appear and break your plans. So, have an emergency fund, and have most of it in form of gold coins, because inflation is a thing, and also because fiat currency going to shit is a thing, and that’s one of the possible legitimate emergencies – currency collapse and/or hyperinflation.

So, that’s one way of doing it – have money reserves you can use to solve unpredictable failures and disasters. However, when it’s about things that actually help you do work and be creative, that method is useless, and you need to not just be ready to purchase equipment in case of need; you need to have equipment ready in case you want to use it.

It’s a balance between treating yourself and your work with neglect and contempt, and wasting money on stupid toys you got tricked into buying by watching ads that pretend to be reviews. There needs to be a reasonable balance, but where that exact line sits is a matter that needs to be decided by allowing yourself to occasionally fail and go overboard.

Made with the lens I thought I didn’t need.

Photographic advice

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There’s some photographic advice on the Internet that I would like to address.

The first one is that one should take a look at the focal length statistics for his pictures in Lightroom, for the last year or so, and see what focal lengths they are using the most, and then consider buying a prime lens in that focal length. So, essentially, if you see that you’re shooting your 24-105mm lens mostly at 35mm, getting a good 35mm prime might be a thing to do.

The corollary is that you should focus more on what you’re doing the most, and eventually sell the lenses you’re using the least.

I understand the logic behind the advice, but it’s somewhat akin to a minimalist advice that says you should get rid of your winter clothes because you haven’t been using them for almost nine months. Not the greatest idea ever. The fact that you’re using something rarely doesn’t mean you don’t need it. I made some of my best work with a fisheye and an ultrawide, and yet I barely used them at all in the last few years. Sure, if you look at the stats of my pictures in the last three years, almost none are made with a fisheye. Then again, if you look at the prints on the walls of my home, of five pictures in total, two were made with a diagonal fisheye. That’s 40%. It’s a huge percentage for something I use so sparingly. Obviously, it has a place in my kit; I use it rarely, but when I use it, I make a disproportional number of winners. Some lenses are of the kind that really require special circumstances, and if you overdo it, it becomes counterproductive. Not everything lends itself to fisheye or wide angle, or to macro, for that matter. I didn’t use the macro lens much in the recent years, because I overdid it before; however, when I used it, I made a disproportional number of good pictures with it.

Once-a-year lens.

Statistically, I use certain focal lengths infrequently, but I do want to have an excellent lens in that focal length for when I do want to use it. So, frequency of use or a number of pictures made with a certain lens doesn’t really say much. It can even lie. For instance, when I take pictures of insects, I need to use rapid shutter in order to catch them in motion properly. I also do that with a telephoto. As a result, there will be a disproportional number of telephoto shots with long focal lengths, which will overwhelm the stats, which don’t know it’s all one or two motives. What I know and Lightroom doesn’t, is that I actually use a telephoto rarely, but when I do, I use it in rapid fire mode and create a deluge of similar transitional shots.

So, my logic is that if I use a certain lens once in five years, but when I do it will be to make a unique shot on top of the island or a mountain, that is a lens I simply must have in my arsenal. Frequency of use doesn’t mean anything.

Also, the logic of “if you’re not using a certain lens much, why get the best lens of that type?” It’s because when I do use it, it needs to shine. I might not use the 50mm frequently, but when I do, I want to fall on my arse when I see the results in Lightroom.

The second thing I keep seeing is whether one should use zooms or primes. Personally, I have more primes than zooms and I use them more, but I think one should use the best lens for the job at hand. For instance, when I’m visiting Plitvička Jezera, I shoot zooms exclusively; mostly 24-105mm f/4, but also prominently the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6. I actually don’t use the 24-105mm that much otherwise, but there, I wouldn’t be caught dead without it, because it’s so useful and appropriate for the location. I use it basically twice a year, but I would have to re-purchase it immediately if it were lost or broken. So, basically, I shoot mostly with primes but I find zooms to be essential. You need to be reasonable and practical about those things. If a pin hole in a sheet of paper worked best as a lens for some specific task, I’d have it in my arsenal.

Zoom zoom!

The third thing, and that one is really annoying, is that “real” or “serious” photographers use X, where X is either film, medium format, large format, Leica, rangefinder, Hasselblad or something else. Honestly, the easiest way to know a poseur and a wannabe is to check for such statements, because if their work spoke for itself, they wouldn’t have to augment it with statements about the technology they made it with. I’ve seen very good photographers use literally every kind of equipment under the sun, and I’ve seen incompetent people with more money than brains spew bullshit about special magical equipment more times than I care to remember. Just shut the fuck up with that bullshit. If you think a Leica or medium format will make you a “true photographer”, go ahead. I just don’t want to listen to that crap. Mystical properties of camera brands don’t have the power to make pictures good, unless the camera happens to be in the hands of a skilled artist. You’re not “serious” because you use a Nikon. Using Nikon makes you a Nikon user, not a serious photographer. Developing your style and art over years and decades makes you a serious photographer.

Taken with absolute shite.

Also, perspective is important. People have filled art galleries over decades with pictures taken with cameras and lenses that would be routinely called crap on dpreview and YouTube. You can take excellent pictures with lenses that are objectively not that great, if you know what you’re doing. Also, to quote Adams, there’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept. Let’s end at that.