We just returned from Hvar town; I couldn’t resist taking the new lens for a spin.
My opinion? The lens did well, but I was at ISO 12800 too much for my taste. The f/1.2 GM would do a better job here, but I knew that already. This, however, was quite good, and not in anybody’s face.
And while we’re at that, I’m counting days until the season ends and we have peace and quiet back.
It crossed my mind that some people are wondering how come I’m reading fantasy novels where Demon is the main protagonist, every character and social role was intentionally written to subvert expectations and, in fact, reality, the central premise of the meta-series is the existence of a Multiverse which I am known for detesting as an idea, and where God obviously doesn’t exist in any way anyone who believes in God would recognize.
This will be sort of hard to explain, but not for the reasons one would suspect.
One of the reasons is that I have a good ability of abstract reasoning. I can, for instance, separate the literary form from the purport. I can read Harry Potter without thinking it’s about witchcraft and magic. Witchcraft and magic are literary instruments. The purport is the power of love to conquer even death, the purport is to attack white or even euro-centric purists as essentially Hitler and Satan by means of metaphor and literature. The purport is that J.K.Rowling doesn’t believe in God, but believes in good human qualities having cosmic consequences and is a raging leftist who got her comeuppance at the first thing she ever dared to disagree with the “tolerant” mob, which is now crucifying her for daring to state that being a woman is an actual thing and not something you can proclaim yourself to be if you feel like it, and there’s such a thing as actual biology which makes women have female genitals and give birth, and which makes “trans-women” just men with weird things in their heads, the way a “trans-black” would be merely a non-black crazy person. Basically, unlike that mob that’s so tolerant of all kinds of “minorities” that they instantly crucify anyone who’s clinging on to rationality and reality even slightly, I can actually accept that people are in all sorts of places and have all sorts of issues and ideas and I can work with anything for the sake of an argument; I can leave people be and sort themselves out. I don’t have to separate the world into people who are good because they agree with me in everything, and people who are evil because they have a different opinion on something. Even Gods will have different opinions on certain things. Different opinions are scary only to the dogmatic, ideological cultists, which is a description that fits the American left perfectly. They are completely fucking insane, and the only way to argue with them correctly is to reject absolutely everything they stand for without compromise.
One of those things that I absolutely reject is the concept of universal equality. It has no grounds in reality, it has evil outcomes and needs to be rejected outright. And, interestingly, despite the fact that the “Salvos” series and the “Deltaverse” in general are full of people with blue, green and pink hair, all kinds of good characters were intentionally made gay or trans for no good reason other than politics, and the worst hypocritical bastards were intentionally made to resemble Christian religious figures and clergy, there’s one interesting thing about that world. It’s meritocratic. There are quantifiable metrics of progress along different lines of possible evolution, there are Titles for special achievements, there are Classes that encapsulate specialization, and so on. You can’t just say you feel like being something and everybody is forced to pretend that it’s reality out of fear of a political mob destroying their lives. You can’t switch species, Class or just claim a Title or a Level. It needs to be real. You can fake things to a point with magic or artifacts, but there are people who can see through that and then you’re in trouble. So, basically, the world itself enforces objective, quantifiable metrics that oppose bullshit and fakery.
Also, unlike people who are afraid of reading books that don’t align perfectly with their ideology, lest they somehow lose their ideological purity, I read all kinds of stuff. That’s probably why I have a brain in good functioning order, and they are dumb cultists. I can separate layers of nuance and work with it until I see where it all leads, and whether I can find something useful there. I also don’t have to like the author in order to read the book and find it interesting or fascinating. I don’t feel the need to immediately draw conclusions and separate things and people along ideological lines. For all I know, Melas might be a raging leftist who got indoctrinated into the neomarxist cult while studying some social science stuff in America, and now he’s interweaving this ideology with whatever he touches, and he’s so socially interconnected with other such fanatics that it’s all completely evil and beyond sanity. Or maybe he’s trying to find his way through this by writing stuff that’s going to solve his problem. I can’t actually tell, and it’s his thing to deal with. However, unlike those leftist fanatics, I can let people be, and deal with their own shit as best they can. Also, I can read whatever the hell I feel like reading.
The FE 50mm f/2.5 G lens arrived this morning:
My set of small lenses is now complete; the Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, Sony FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 collapsible kit zoom, and Sony FE 50mm f/2.5 G.
You may ask what’s the point. Well, I do already have bigger and optically stellar lenses, but the thing with those is that they are occasionally too big for me to just carry around when I’m out for a walk without any particular photographic aim in mind, but I still want to have a good camera in order to catch something that caught my eye unexpectedly.
FE 50mm f/1.8
The thing is, despite the fact that I love the effect they produce, I don’t always need the extreme optics. When I’m using the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM at f/8, and I do, there’s not much difference between that and a much lighter lens; they would both do excellently. Sometimes, I don’t need anything more extreme than my old Zuiko Digital 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 did for me, and that’s a Four Thirds sensor at f/3.5. It did many things brilliantly. It would be silly to get a whole different camera system just so that I could have a light walkaround setup, but it’s quite possible to have such a setup on 35mm Sony; you just have to sacrifice aperture. So, essentially, I have the smaller A7CR camera, three small lenses with brilliant but “slow” optics, and the whole system is not really pocketable, but the lenses are. The camera itself with one lens on it would probably fit in my winter jacket, but I haven’t tried it. 🙂
So, what can this new 50mm do in closeup photography? I did a quick test:
That’s wide open at minimum focusing distance. Bokeh is good in non-backlit conditions, and actually better than I feared it would be in harsh, backlit conditions. There is some spherochromatism but barely noticeable, and although the lens doesn’t render the background out of toffee the way GM lenses do, I am quite pleased with what it does, if I consider it from a Four Thirds perspective. Also, it can get quite close for a 50mm, which helps to blur out the background. The colours are modern, which means excellent and neutral. Contrast is great, sharpness is excellent, I haven’t had the opportunity to test it against flare yet, and CA seem to be minimal. We’ll see how it does when I actually take it for a spin. But so far, so good.
Edit: I did the first shoot.
The images are extremely detailed corner to corner. It outresolves the 61MP sensor and is probably designed for a 100MP sensor. The colours are excellent, as I expected. GM level of image quality.
Flare with sun in the frame. There isn’t any.
The ability to blur out the background for such shots is excellent. Also, notice spherochromatism on the blurred-out grass. It’s slight, but it’s there.
Extreme sharpness and nice separation of the planes wide open.
All in all, the image quality is stellar, from wide open to diffraction limit. I highly recommend the lens.
I just thought that this entire line of thought connects very nicely with my ideas about sin and error.
Now that I think of it, I think it’s even more complicated. It’s sin, error, flaw and lack of ability.
Sin is when you have fundamental misalignment between your soul and God. Sin is when God would do one thing, and it’s the thing you would hate and despise, and you would do differently, or even opposite. For instance, if we take the “Salvos” series, the horned demon is sinful. He’s more strategic about killing others and recruiting minions than the wild demons, who are like beasts that just attack everything that moves, but he’s on a path that would have resulted in him becoming a supervillain like Belzu, Jofis or Regnorex had Salvos not interfered and killed him. If you’re sinful, evil is normal and desirable, while goodness is contemptible. Evil is a spiritual orientation of the soul relative to God.
Error, on the other hand, is when you’re trying to do something, and it ends up being the opposite of what you wanted. Essentially, a good person in error will do bad things, and I guess an evil person in error will do good things. Error is a difference between a desired and actual outcome. Error is how you learn that your understanding, methods and practices need to be improved.
A flaw is something different; it’s a difference between what your soul, your mind, emotions, thoughts and actions should be based on your spiritual orientation and choices, and what they actually are in reality. A flaw is something you have, something you then recognize, understand and correct. A flaw is something you don’t tolerate, as a rule. It’s the difference between where you want to be and where you are.
Lack of ability is something that might be important, in which case you need to work on acquiring the desired ability, but it can also be irrelevant. For instance, if you have multiple major talents, but you suck at music, you can shrug it off and say it’s not your thing to do in this life. However, if you’re a musician, and you can’t do a particular thing related to music, this is a problem that needs to be handled the way flaws are handled in the context of spiritual growth: learn, correct, acquire, practice, get better. In the example of Salvos, her life depends on getting better at fighting enemies, so she practices tirelessly and grows stronger. Her social skills suck, it interferes with her ability to integrate into society and so she learns and gets better at it. She first looks like a demon, then like a brat, then like an eccentric adventurer, and then like an eccentric super-Mage. She always appears quirky, but her quirks are accepted as something typical for extremely talented people. Weird, but good weird. On the other hand, her handwriting is terrible, and remains terrible, because it never stood in her way enough for her to spend time practicing. She doesn’t just automatically get good at something. Also, she needs to prioritise. She only has so many hours in a day. Either she’ll practice alchemy, space magic, creation magic and combat skills, or she’ll practice shopping and handwriting. Something has to go, and often her friends and companions fill in the gaps for her; she’s only one person, she’s young, extremely busy and just can’t get to everything. So, that’s a good approach to the lack of ability. If it matters, you need to deal with it seriously. If it doesn’t matter, you need to make choices and prioritise; you’re always going to suck at most things. You just need to take care not to suck at things that matter to you in this life.
As a continuation of the previous article, that did make me think why I like some books and characters, while I absolutely detest others.
If a character doesn’t function in a way that makes sense, if they don’t act realistically in their circumstances, if they don’t act realistically for their intelligence, level of knowledge and so on, I just can’t abide them. For instance, Amelia is one such character. She is incredibly obstinate and stupid, and simply refuses to draw the most reasonable and logical conclusions from her circumstances and the situation she’s in, and deliberately acts in the most inappropriate and unreasonable manner, refusing to learn and understand what the reality is telling her. It’s absolutely jarring. Edward Cullen, in the “Twilight” series, is another such character that’s getting on my nerves, because he obstinately refuses to learn what reality is telling him, refuses to listen to smart people, tries to control other people’s destiny in ways that make everybody miserable, and for what – he has a fixed set of ideas about selfishness and refuses to revise them despite quite obvious lessons that present themselves. Basically, it’s a character that refuses to accept God’s providence and his own feeling of rightness because he’s overriding it with his own intellectual concepts as if they were God. As a result, he almost gets everybody killed and creates an incredible amount of suffering. As I said, I absolutely revile the character.
Martin Riggs from “Lethal Weapon” is the opposite. I love that character. He’s incredibly fucked up when we first encounter him. His wife died in a car accident and she was all he had. He’s suicidal, in permanent emotional anguish, and he’s stumbling through that and trying to do his job as a policeman, hoping to die a hero fighting armed criminals, but somehow always manages to survive and defeat them, because he’s both lucky and good at his job. He’s great at killing people, and yet he only wishes he could have his wife back, and he can’t, so killing himself to be with her is the only thing he can think of. Gradually, as he helps his partner save his family, he finds purpose and comes out on the other side of his terrible grief. It’s an incredibly realistic portrait of a virtuous person experiencing terrible tragedy and trying to pick up the pieces of their life, sort themselves out and find new purpose, while life doesn’t wait for them and instead showers them with an avalanche of rocks.
I love characters that are normally preoccupied with their own stuff, but when a crisis happens, they rise up to the occasion and do whatever the situation requires to resolve things. I find the fumbling, insecure, weak people who get confused and do pathetic or evil things to cover up their failings jarring and abhorrent. I just can’t identify with that; also, all the people I hold in contempt are like that. Weak, no responsibility, no accountability, projection, justification of failings, failure to learn and improve. Yuck.
I can identify with Salvos who woke up completely ignorant in a strange world and is trying to create more of the good stuff that she can comprehend, and fight the bad stuff she encounters. She figures things out as she goes, she never has it easy, almost everything is against her, but she’s inherently virtuous, and she’s virtuous by choice. She could choose evil, but she didn’t, and it’s not an accident that she didn’t. She just abhors certain things as a matter of principle. She theoretically could level by killing as many people as she can find, especially if nobody would know. However, she never does. Her moral core is so strong, that a monster can put her to shame by stating that she came to its home and is trying to kill it in order to harvest its body parts, and for no good reason other than her selfish ones. She really stops to think about it, and changes her opinion and actions. This is a realistic way a virtuous person would act. They don’t automatically know things because they are virtuous. Their idea of virtue needs to evolve; you can’t just put a label of “monster” on a category of beings and then treat them like non-entities, especially when they think, feel and offer good points, they didn’t attack you to justify your response, and you invaded their home in order to murder them. She does the “oh wait, that’s not actually a good thing to do, is it?”, and then she acts upon this realisation. She does what a smart, good person would do.
Edithe is also a very believable character. At one point she tells Salvos to ignore what people think because people are idiots, to which Salvos responds “but you did something like that, too”. Edithe replies “Yes, and by people being idiots I mean myself in particular. I was an idiot and you showed me that I was wrong. That’s just how it is”. I like that – no self-justification, no holding on to past mistakes. You fix it, and you realise it was wrong and you were an idiot. You don’t keep being an idiot just to keep pretence that you were born smart.
So, in essence, the characters I love aren’t those who were born smart and omnipotent and can solve all problems with a flick of the wrist. It’s not a situation I can identify with. I can, however, identify with people who are forced to figure it out as they go, they have strong principles about what’s wrong, and keep revising ideas about what’s good and right as they evolve. Also, I love characters who focus under pressure, and can’t stand those who fall apart under it. I can’t stand “comedies” where everybody is confused, virtueless and fumbles and acts sinfully under pressure. I’d rather have my nails pulled than watch those. Things where someone experiences difficulty and tragedy, but gets their shit together and rises up to the occasion, those are my cup of tea.
I love characters that just get shit done. A good example is Eric Northman from “True Blood”. He sees a problem, he sees that he should do something about it, and then his actions look like a mathematical tree-balancing solution. He takes what he needs, does what needs to be done, tries to get maximum good with the least amount of bad side effects, and then just goes on with business as usual. His actions are determined by the needs of a situation, not his own egotistical considerations. In that, he’s the polar opposite of Edward Cullen, who’s trying to be good so hard, he ends up causing disaster after disaster.
Obviously, I identify with characters who embody things I can personally identify with. I can identify with being in all kinds of disasters and ignorance and trying to figure things out from scratch. I can identify with fucking things up and then learning from it and trying better next time. Basically, it’s the characters that are similar to myself, or at least how I want to be, and how I want to react in difficult situations. If I can’t see myself in a character, if I can’t see myself making their choices, I nope the fuck out.