Author Archives: danijel

Lenses and formats

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I recently caught myself calculating 35mm lenses, fields of view and depth of field, in terms of the 4/3 format, which is weird because I usually think in terms of the 35mm format. I did, however, use 4/3 for quite a while, and with standard zoom lenses, the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 and m.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6, and I don’t tend to use walkaround zooms on 35mm, so when I wanted to know how something would look, I calculated it in 4/3 terms.

So, what’s the calculation? Let’s say I used the 14-54mm at the long end and wide open the most, that’s 54mm f/3.5. There are two ways you can translate this to 35mm terms. The first is the crop: if you take a 54mm lens at f/3.5 and crop the central part with the factor of 2, you’ll get the same picture. Or you can take a 108mm lens on 35mm and stop it down two stops, to f/7.1 if I’m not mistaken, and you’ll get the same pitcture.

But what happens if you use a 54mm? Or something in the general range; 50-55mm, and you stop it down to f/3.5. You will get picture that’s significantly wider, the equivalent of 25-27mm on the 4/3 format, but with the depth of field of 54mm on 4/3.

For the identical visual impression, something like the 24-105mm f/4 on 35mm would be the best approximation, only stopped down to f/5.6-7.1. That will cost you two stops of light to get the 4/3 image aesthetics. If you use the same f-stops, you get shallower depth of field.

If you’re using primes, let’s say the equivalent thing to Zuiko Digital 50mm f/2 macro would be 100mm f/4; you’d have to stop down the 35mm lens to f/8 to get the depth of field of 50mm Zuiko at f/4. You’d say this gives 4/3 the advantages in available light, but diffraction also hits you two stops sooner, so there really are no freebies.

What I was thinking is that I like the look of those high quality Zuiko lenses, crisp up close with creamy rolloff into bokeh, but often not so much background blur as to lose the definition of the background altogether. So I thought, what kind of a small and light, slow but crisp lens would I need on the Sony FE platform if I wanted to replicate that look. One obvious answer is the 90mm macro stopped down to f/7.1 or f/8, and that’s true; I really did get a similar look with that one:

That looks very much like the things I used to take with the E1 and 14-54mm, especially if I didn’t push for the extreme macro.

As you can see, that’s close enough, and it’s actually the look I normally prefer. The question, however, was how to get that with a small lens on the 35mm format. Both 90mm macro and 24-105mm zoom are chunky lenses, and I often prefer something the size of the Zuiko 50mm f/2 macro, which is quite pocketable, so the first thing I considered was the FE 50mm f/1.8, but this one has a completely different image look. Wide open and at the minimum focusing distance it’s hazy and blurry, nowhere near the crispness of modern designs such as the Zuiko. Its bokeh is lovely in those conditions, but the chromatic aberrations are nasty, and sharpness starts looking good from f/2.8 onwards. Also, it’s ergonomically quite bad, without the AF/MF switch, and with that terrible DC motor. And it doesn’t actually allow you to get all that close.

Then I considered the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 zoom, but its closeup performance is actually even worse. Hard pass.

The 50mm f/1.8 is not what everybody keeps repeating online. It’s not a beginner’s 50mm that’s not really good so you’ll want to upgrade as soon as money allows. In fact, it’s one of the best Planar designs that I tried. It’s mostly usable wide open, and becomes really good when you stop it down to f/2.8, and it’s so good it’s indistinguishable from much more expensive 50mm designs. When it works, it’s amazing.

Hazy, soft, romantic, low contrast.

That’s the look. If that’s what you want – amazing; that’s your lens. But I feel it’s not my cup of tea, really. I like the detail much crisper, and the image contrastier:

So it’s a frustrating lens for me, because when it works, I get amazing results with it, but when it doesn’t, it tends to ruin it for me. I didn’t actually replace it when I bought the 50mm f/1.2 GM, because that one is very heavy and it feels more like the wider 135mm f/1.8, than a replacement for the 50mm f/1.8. So, I went looking for something compact for the 35mm Sony that would have the aesthetics of the Zuiko Digital lenses – contrasty and clear, crisp detail, decent background blur that becomes quite good when you come close, and it needs to be crisp at minimum focusing distance, it needs to have the AF/MF switch on the lens, and hopefully the aperture ring. It also needs to be pocketable, because I’m aiming for micro four thirds dimensions here.

What I ended up considering were the Sony FE 50mm f/2.5 G, and Sigma 65mm f/2 DG DN. Sigma had better capacity for blurring things out, but it approaches the size of the 90mm macro, at which point it becomes moot. The Sony, however, is extremely pocketable, almost a pancake lens, and not only focuses close, but is very crisp up close. Its problem is the f/2.5 aperture, but it’s excellent wide open, and honestly, I used f/3.5 for years in these conditions and it was fine.

In the end, I ordered the Sony, mostly because the only copy of the Sigma available on MPB was sold while I was thinking about it, and the Sony was in a much cleaner condition.

So, it’s not that you can’t get small and light configurations on 35mm. It’s just that I usually prefer setups that are optically so extreme, they end up being very big and heavy. My favourite lenses, normally, are the 90mm macro and the 135mm f/1.8. Their combination of crisp detail and blurry background is unparalleled.

But sometimes I just want a tiny 50mm that’s optically brilliant, and I don’t feel like dealing with FE 50mm f/1.8 and its stupid shit.

Of God

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There’s another important application of the principle of having to own it first in order to be able to give it to God. It’s the concept of karma.

Essentially, if parts of your karmic body were created by all sorts of godless actions, they are deformed, impure and, essentially, broken, because they contain in themselves something that is incongruent with God, your soul will retain this incongruence in everything you do, so in order to come in alignment with God, you have to iron that stuff up. The evil that is contained in that structure needs to be removed – usually by a combination of understanding, remorse and suffering. This is a process of giving a part of your soul back to God, by making it free from the warping and defiling influences of all things that are incompatible with God. The process of purifying your soul and freeing it from evil is the process of bringing it back under God’s sovereign rule, because if sin and evil own it, God doesn’t.

Purifying external karmic substance, after having purified your own, essentially means to bring it back to God, by owning it yourself, claiming all the impurities and sins contained therein for yourself, and then purifying it with understanding, remorse and suffering the way one does with parts of their soul, because once you’ve integrated it into yourself in the process of purification, you own it. It’s your impurity and sin now, and once you purify it, it’s your pure karmic substance, to grow your soul, one kalapa at a time.

So, as you can see, people talk about surrendering everything to God, but reality of it is both more simple and more complex than what they envision. They would usually think it means giving away your wealth to poor people, while in reality it’s more akin to doing things with it that God would do in your place, and the only good way of doing it is by purifying your soul first, so that it is aligned with God and contains no parts that belong to the world or, even worse, to the Evil One.

There’s also a misapprehension some Christians seem to be under, and that’s the belief that “helping the poor” can justify some highly questionable actions. Let’s imagine an example of a man whose son is a self-serving satanic narcissistic bastard, who spends all his money on expensive shit, on his fellow sodomites, and on other evil activities. Since he’s constantly in debt and out of money, he keeps asking his Christian father to give him some. Since the father can’t deal with this situation properly, he gives him the money and rationalises it to himself by saying that Christ wanted us to give to the needy.

That’s not at all what Christ meant. Christ didn’t mean giving money to a whoremonger who ran out of money for whores and drugs. Christ didn’t mean giving money to a guy who wants to buy a gun to shoot his wife with but he ran out of cash. No, Christ meant giving money to the guy whose house burned down in a fire and whose children are now on the street. That’s what he meant. Financing sin is claiming its fruits for yourself. Financing evil people in their evil and debauchery is not very different from partaking in them yourself. You’re supposed to finance people of God who do things of God, because this way you will live under the Throne of God and partake in God’s glory. You’re supposed to remedy the evils of Satan and this world. You’re not supposed to give money to the needy criminals who fight God. That’s what I have to say about that.

Win it first

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There’s something that’s on my mind at the moment; the concept that some religious people have of wanting to give things to God.

That’s a nice sentiment, but let’s see how that would actually work. You can’t actually give things to God if you’re getting them from God. Essentially, that just means closing the circle of being in God – you get love, wisdom and other things that are of God, and give them to God by some form of service.

In order to actually give something to God, something God doesn’t actually have already and give it to you so that you could play the lila of giving it back, you would actually have to win it from Satan. You would have to win a battle for some resource that God lost, defend it as yours, and only then you even get the option of giving it to God.

It doesn’t have to be something of cosmic importance, like conquering the lost astral subplane and bringing it back under the Throne of God. It can be something more basic, like your mind. If you don’t have control over it, if it’s not under your own sovereign rule, if all kinds of worldly or demonic energies are controlling it, it’s not yours to command, and if it’s not yours to command, how can you give it to God? A mind that’s not completely yours and under your command cannot be surrendered to God.

Also, some people get the idea that they’ll start a business, make money and then finance their guru or other high spiritual endeavours. Let’s see how that would work. First of all, you need to make a profitable business, which is hard, because you have to fight others who are attempting the same. Then you need to take care that you’re not doing more harm than good with your activities, because if you sell your girlfriends as online prostitutes, which is an obvious reference to a certain very public someone, you can’t ever claim to do more good than evil with the money you earned. If your methods are satanic, the results cannot be Divine.

Also, if you lose control of your company, by yielding it to employees or partners who try to wrestle it away from you, you become an employee in that company, if even that, and then you can’t control where the money goes because other people have a say, and you basically lost the ability to do what you initially planned.

So, obviously, this is another case of first having to win it from some aspect of the world, in order to claim it for yourself first, and only then can you even be in a position to surrender it to God. Everything else is a mere ego boost, self-serving and useless.

Turing test

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I was thinking about the difference between how I perceive technology, and how those gen-z and gen-alpha kids perceive technology. When I started with this, it was on Commodore 64. That thing gave you an empty screen and you had to figure out how to make it do anything, useful or not. If you wanted to write code, you needed to figure it out in your head and then go through the entire process of writing it in computer’s language. If you wanted it to count to ten, you had to FOR X=1 TO 10 PRINT X NEXT X. You couldn’t just turn the computer on, open the web browser and be flooded by an eternal deluge of inane crap that vies for your attention. Even later, as computers got better, you needed to really learn how to create a space in your mind where you’ll hold the pieces that need to interact and keep juggling lots of apples in the air simultaneously. It was easy to be stupid, but it wasn’t cool. If you wanted to be cool, you needed to work for it.

How do you get to be cool today? You need to know the latest meme. The one from last week makes you look slightly retarded. The one from last month means you’re a “boomer”. So, you essentially join a race where the timestamp means everything and content of the data chunk means nothing. I’m perfectly sure that knowing what Chimpanzini Bananini is won’t help you in any tangible way, but at some point it bought virtual coolness points in a peer-group of abject fools. Today, it’s likely boomer lore.

Of course, everybody with IQ above room temperature very quickly realised that they are trading their actual lives for unattainable approval in groups whose members figured out a wining stratagem: remain skeptical and unconvinced regardless of any arguments you provide in evidence of your worth. So, the only winning move in this game is not to play.

And how do you not play? Well, the kids don’t see the computer the way I do. To me, a computer is something that does things for me. I want to write text, I open the word processor, write, save, post on the blog. Or I want to do something else; the process is the same. But to them, a computer is something else. It’s a judgmental real world where people will laugh at you if you dared to spend time on “boomer activities” such as anything with any pertinence to the real world and actual people that live in it. Knowing what I actually think about the physical world, that is quite telling: they are in fact managing to live in such a profound illusion, that the physical world itself feels like reality in comparison. And so, lacking the mental discipline required not to alt-tab into some toxic online environment that seems to draw at them with the Sirens’ call of offering approval and self worth, and yet never providing it, they decide to do the only realistic thing left at their disposal – turn off the computer altogether and find completely analog ways of doing things that interest them. They buy a film camera, shoot Tri-X, develop it in Rodinal, print it on actual photo paper and hold the physical image in their hands, pleased that no computers with vitriolic mobs of eternally critical bastards were at any point involved in the process, and that the result exists exclusively in the physical world, invisible to anybody online.

I don’t have that problem – basically, I don’t give a shit about those online crowds, and I don’t see why a digital camera is a problem in any way. Things either stay on my computer, or are printed if I feel like it, or I send them online if I like it. I don’t get ego validation based on what other people do or how they react. Going analog, from my perspective, is merely a hassle without any useful elements. So, I pretend to be surprised at their fascination with analog things, and their fake nostalgia over things they never actually experienced; I do, however, know what their problem is.

People assume that kids spend days doomscrolling brainrot online because they find it entertaining. I sincerely doubt it. I think they are doing it in order to be able to impress their peers with new and fresh brainrot, which they think will get them coolness points within the peer group; they are basically mining online karma, where the intermediary goal is to avoid ridicule for not knowing the freshest brainrot, and the ultimate goal is to win acclaim for being cool.

How is being praised for knowing the buzzword for the freshest chunk of brainrot going to help you deal with any actual issue? If you run out of money, are those fuckwits online going to pay your rent? If you get sick, are they going to get groceries for you and make you tea? Are you even on the level of friendship with any of them where you actually do anything real together and enjoy it? No? So why the fuck do you waste your life on that inane nonsense? And so we get to why people read physical books, listen to vinyl records, take pictures with a film camera, drive a car without airbags and computers and so on. They are gradually deciding they are done with the perpetual circle of seeking validation online and learning how to live, instead. For my generation, it was the other way around. We learned to read physical books, listen to audio tapes, ride a bicycle and go pick mushrooms and hazelnuts in the forest first; then, later, came the Internet, and we learned that you can download books, music and movies, and that was cool. We also learned that fucktards exist online. We tried talking to them. It proved pointless, so we stopped. We wonder why it’s so hard for the younger people.

It’s hard because they don’t know how to do anything real. Internet is all they know. They learned to talk in increasingly cryptic and nonsensical abbreviations with their peers, until they have now reached the point where the AI can pass the Turing test, and they can’t. If I want to talk to someone who will make sense, the AI is a better choice than anyone born since 2000. That is, at least until the next generation of AI gets trained on gen-z outputs and loses all mental faculties altogether, at which point I expect to despair helplessly and experience actual nostalgia for the times when people talked in full, coherent sentences, and had the foundation of knowledge necessary to say something worth reading. I used to think that, as I grow older, the new generations that grew on the Internet will learn so much stuff that I’ll feel like a chimp among humans. Instead, I feel like a human among chimps.

At this point, we can tell that something was likely made by the AI if it’s good. If a text is coherent and longer than a sentence, it must be AI. If a photograph looks good, it must be AI. The way to tell if a human made something is to see if it’s shit.

Fuck my life.

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.