Author Archives: danijel

Cringe

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I just watched a video from a famous photo YouTuber on how everything that resembles stuff that can be AI generated is now “cringe” – essentially, the highly polished, fancy stuff – and things that are lo-fi, such as film or photography that looks like it was taken with a phone, are “trending” now, and if you want to be “in”, you should do that now.

People who wanted to be “in” went to Epstein’s island to fuck children and worship Baal, or they waited in line to suck Weinstein’s cock. Makes you think that something might be inherently wrong with trying to fit in with the cool crowd, following trends and doing “whatever it takes” to succeed.

I hate fake people. I see them everywhere – in photography, politics, business, spirituality. They all know what you need to say and do to project a certain impression. Even “being authentic” is a thing that’s routinely faked.

So my answer to this newest trend of “avoiding cringe” and “being authentic” is “fuck you and the horse you rode in on”. Fuck everything about you. Go find a trendy cock to suck somewhere and shut the fuck up. There is nothing cringier than the vacuous trend followers trying to fake authenticity because it’s trending. Get fucked.

Tidbits and trinkets

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The Iran war is going as expected – every day more things are burning, while Trump is trying to short oil prices in order to keep up the pretence. There’s a reason why people traditionally didn’t do that – I mean, go into more debt in order to be able to sell valuable assets under the market price. Everybody who tried, got to go bankrupt and starve. For instance, you hear there’s going to be a bad winter. Instead of hoarding stuff in the basement, you sell everything under cost, because no reality is going to tell you what to do. The winter came, you died and became a cautionary tale. Something like America is about to. Yeah, reduce oil prices artificially. That will make people buy your oil because it’s cheaper, and you’re going to run out, and the low prices will make people not ration, so your supplies are going to run out even faster.

Instead of making popcorn, I’m playing with photography. Specifically, with the small and light setup that I ordered. The A7CR camera is still in the mail, but everything else arrived. I tested the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 lens; the small collapsible thing that comes in kit with A7C. It’s very good:

It also seems to work quite well on a macro extender, which is pocketable, so I can have both medium-range landscape setup and a closeup setup in very pocketable dimensions when I don’t feel like carrying the camera. Is it going to be as good as the A7RV? The sensor and the electronics in the A7CR are the same, and the FE 28-60mm, according to my test, is for the most part sharper than the FE 24-105mm f/4 G, except at 60mm, so yes, it’s going to be as good, at least on a sunny day when I work at f/8. Also, what can you do with some kit lens and extension tubes? Quite a lot, as it turns out:

Much more than I can do with an iPhone, that’s for sure. Those two were taken with Canon 5d, and EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 on macro extension tubes. I actually preferred that setup to EF 85mm f/1.8, because it was lighter, and the lens created a very nice glow wide open, which made the pictures look more magical.

So, that’s what I’m doing while waiting. Beats popcorn.

Countdown

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I found this on Telegram this morning:

Australia’s Energy Minister: “We only have enough gasoline for 18 days, diesel fuel for 16 days, and aviation fuel for 14 days. And a ship from the Persian Gulf takes 2 to 4 weeks to arrive.”

I went to check the sources, and I found this. Basically, the statement was from the beginning of March, and the Russians just did the math, and they are very good at math. It checks out.

I would assume that everybody who is dependent on Arab oil is in a similar situation. The Russians and everybody attached to them as a source are perfectly fine. The American colonies are fucked.

This means that, as of now, Russia is the most powerful economic force in the world. They determine who lives and who dies. Everybody else is living on strategic reserves that are being depleted quickly, because they are trying to bring down oil prices in order to pretend that, politically, this is nothing. This means they will all run out of strategic reserves within two to three weeks, after which there’ll be doomsday.

So, either everybody instantly takes measures to extend the duration of their strategic reserve, by raising oil prices and rationing supply, and take measures to secure Russian oil, because it’s not sure how much of a surge in supply the Russians will be able to create, regardless of intent. Those things have technological limits. Pipelines are designed for some projected demand and so on.

Israel and America seems to have run out of air defence. Everything Iran launches now, hits the target. Iran, on the other hand, seems to be doing fine. They are just incredibly pissed. America will be forced to either evacuate their forces from the region, or use nuclear weapons to neutralise Iran. This choice will have to be made within a week. Also, the shortages of oil will become a thing of immediate concern within 7 to 10 days, which is half the time to projected end of supply. This is also the point where everybody starts to panic in earnest, because at that point even if everything instantly restarts, which it won’t, the shortages are already in the pipeline, baked into the supply chain. Also, one third of the world’s production of artificial fertiliser production is in the Gulf, and it’s been disrupted. This will automatically cause disruptions in food production, and higher food prices. It’s already baked into the supply chain. The other third of fertilisers comes from Russia. This makes Russia both untouched by this, and in high demand.

America formally has lots of oil and gas, but it remains to be seen how much of that exists on paper alone. A country that has as much oil as they claim to have wouldn’t need to deplete their strategic oil reserves as much as they are doing, which makes me think most of the data is fake, like everything that comes from America. This is now going to be tested in earnest.

Israel is having a strategic problem at the moment and probability of them using nuclear weapons to solve it is pretty high, in my assessment. Since they are open to air attacks now, the time to decide is already ticking.

This puts my assessment of probability of nuclear use by either America or Israel within two weeks at very high. Trump and the people around him sound completely irrational, as if they were getting high on their own supply for too long and they lost all connection to reality. Israel feels pretty desperate, like it’s now or never, they are faced with complete annihilation and they have to act now. There was a 4.2 magnitude earthquake in Negev desert, near Dimona, mid January, which looks like a nuclear test that nobody talked about. If that is so, it would mean that they wanted to know whether their stuff actually works before they used it.

On first nuclear use, I expect things to escalate rapidly.

 

Clinical

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There’s a term I keep hearing on photographic forums, describing lenses: “too clinical”.

When I tried to establish what it meant, it turns out it means, basically, that it’s good. The flaws are corrected, sharpness is excellent, and so on. One would expect this to be a good thing, but then I understood what they meant: there are no optical artefacts to cover their arse. You can’t pretend you’re an artist because the lens creates an artificial sense of nostalgia caused by flawed optics of yesteryear. If you remove optical defects, and one’s “art” disappears because the underlying “too clinical” image is revealed as empty and pointless, it’s not a lens problem, it’s a photographer problem.

Taken with a very clinical lens on digital

I guess that’s the other side of the coin from people who think their pictures will stop being shit if they bought better lenses and cameras. There are people who make claims such as “double Gauss design is crap”, which shocked me immensely, as it is one of the best lens designs and some of the best work in the history of photography was produced by it. The reason why it’s “crap” is because the corner sharpness is quite poor wide open and remains weak until f/8 or so. There is also lots of chromatic aberration inherent to the design. Crap? Absolutely not. It’s a compromise that allows a 50mm lens to be small, light and cheap, which makes it one of the best optical designs in history. It leaves room for improvement if you make the lens big, heavy and expensive. Then you can have perfect corner sharpness at f/1.2.

People are exaggerating things greatly. In reality, yes, you can produce great work with flawed optics, and you can cover poor work under optical flaws and call it “character”. Sometimes, optical flaws can actually improve the image, for instance chromatic aberration can create “rainbows” on water droplets, and spherical aberration can introduce a “glow”. Sometimes, those effects can hit just right. I worked with flawed optics for decades, so I know how that works. Sometimes it’s wonderful, sometimes it ruins your image. In general, I prefer not to hide behind “character” of lenses. If you remove all of that and my photo is shit, then this is the truth of the situation: it’s just shit. Putting “character” on it just obscures the reality. I had that many times – tried to fix a photo in post, adding all kinds of effects, and it was still shit.

Sometimes, optical flaws actually help, but I wouldn’t make it a strategy.

Also, all the talk about colours is driving me crazy. I’ve seen a guy stating that default Sony colours are terrible, but with tweaking they can be made to look as great as Fuji colours, and then he shows some terrible crap with a greenish sky, that looks like a faded colour print that’s been kept near a stove since 1980s. I understand that those people in their 20s don’t actually know what film looked like when it was current; they know it only from the degraded, faded out stuff, and Fuji apparently panders to this illusion, creating jpeg profiles for their cameras that look like faded out or poorly processed film, because that’s what people think film is. If they processed film correctly, it would look “digital”. Also, I suspect lots of people making those claims about colours might be completely or partially colour blind. I shot film when it was actually good, and default Sony colour profiles are very film-like, and have been ever since R1, where the default profile looks very much like Kodak E100G, or, in amateur version, EB2 and EB3. The early profiles for A7II had very exaggerated greens, which in fact looked quite like Kodak EBX, or E100VS. The current profiles for A7RV look very film-like; the standard profile looks like E100G, and the vivid profile looks like Fuji Velvia, with its increased magenta tones. All in all, you can be sure that if I like the colours from it so much that I bought the second camera with the same sensor, there is very little room for improvement.

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

How can I be sure what film looks like? Because I made scans when it was current, and I checked them against the fresh slides on the lightbox. I know exactly what it looks like. Film looks “digital”, but when you would remove flaws from digital; make it sharper, less grainy and so on. It was very revealing when my son told me that, to him, 4×5” large format looks “digital”.

Today’s digital cameras are both very much film-like, and also much better than small-format film. I see it as a great thing. Also, the “clinical” lenses? Back in the day, those would have been called “dream lenses”. We did what we could with what we had, but this stuff we have today would have been seen as too good to be true, and if someone like Leica or Zeiss had made something like that, it would have cost a fortune. Only a few stellar designs from the past, such as the Zeiss APO Makro Planar, can compare with modern designs. Back in the day, we didn’t call them “clinical”, we called them dream lenses that everybody wanted, and only a few could afford.

Very clinical lens.

Offline

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I recently had too much on my plate to be able to write anything relevant; karmic processing isn’t fun, and both Biljana and I have been under it quite severely. We barely even managed to go out and take pictures, and that really says something.

But, some pictures do get taken:

Biljana got her new Canon R5 body, which would normally mean lots of photography, but, as I said, karmic processing is no joke.

We are taking things very slowly and carefully. My new A7CR body and compact lenses are in the mail, and will arrive eventually.

A mini tripod did arrive, and that’s something I will eventually be able to put in the backpack and do some mountaintop astrophotography, unless end of the world comes first.

As for the war that’s currently going on, it’s proceeding as expected: the American attractor is empty; I removed its power cells, and now America can no longer sell its bullshit and everybody hates them. Similar things are happening with Israel, with a distinction that I didn’t have to do anything. In fact, I was careful not to mess with it, lest I collapse an avalanche of karmic rubble upon myself, now that I’m already overextended. Fortunately, Biljana is now strong enough to be able to help, so I don’t have to do everything on my own. She probably doesn’t feel all that fortunate at the moment, but that’s how that works. 🙂

Just a heads up, really; we are struggling, but managing to stay afloat. We had much worse in the early years; having money helps. Hvar also helps, but only in the recovery phase, after the karmic processing; we can heal from the damage more quickly here, and in the Plitvice lakes, than anywhere else. But while this stuff is ongoing, nothing really helps, and many things can make it worse.