Author Archives: danijel

Reasons

Posted on by
7

One could rightfully ask why the hell am I buying almost 6000 € of photographic equipment, on top of 2000 € of stuff I’ve already bought recently, if I expect serious disasters that will end the world as we know it.

One could ask with equal right why I’m mowing my lawn, or brushing my teeth, or servicing the car. It all assumes the kind of continuity I don’t, in fact, believe in. However, I don’t know the timing, which means I have to behave as if the things are going to outlive me, and on the other hand be ready to leave today if God calls. This means that I function in a way that is both detached, and involved. I’m performing all kinds of duties on a daily basis, and yet I’m ready to leave every single second.

The reason why I ordered the equipment is actually detached from any expectation to use it; I merely decided to pay respect to my photographic art and skill. It is more of a sacrificial offering than anything else, because in this world one needs to support things that he sees as valuable, because what you don’t support dies of neglect by default. So, it’s a matter of philosophical consistency, rather than some investment in the future or what not. No; rather, it’s a respect to what is and was. Biljana got new stuff for the same reason. It is important to pay respect to that which is good and valuable, the same way it’s important to keep uprooting the weeds.

Warning

Posted on by
1

There has been an increase of seismic and volcanic activity around the world, including recent precursors that usually indicate strong earthquakes; magnitude of 8 on the momentum magnitude tensor scale in the Mediterranean basin is realistic within days. Prepare accordingly.

Also, the earthquake swarm near the Santorini volcano is increasing in magnitude, and something appears to be imminent.

There is a correlation between this increased seismicity and volcanism and the current solar maximum, but the correlation might not necessarily mean causation – for instance, both might have the common cause in the major planetary conjunction that’s going on, meaning that the same tidal force is squeezing the Sun, causing increasing activity, and the Earth, causing increasing tidal forces in the magma, resulting in increasing seismic and volcanic activity. There might, however, be a different explanation, where the planetary conjunction causes increased activity in the Sun, and some type of neutrino is increasingly produced, that causes some minor increase in the radioactive decay, which actually causes the interior of the Earth to remain molten, and even a minor increase can cause major events on the human scale of things. In any case, the whole thing is poorly explored.

In any case, I would avoid travel and have supplies sufficient for two weeks of autonomy in the entire mediterranean basin, just as a precaution. The recommended minimum of 3 days of food and water is probably sufficient if you’re not really close to the areas most likely to be afflicted – Greece, Turkey, Italy, and so on. I would treat this as a serious enough threat to act on it. Also, it’s not a distant threat, since electromagnetic precursors of strong earthquakes, usually indicating a big one within 96 hours, were detected 2-3 days ago.

Respect

Posted on by
Reply

I love the 16-35mm Zeiss. Since I bought it, I had a burst of creativity with it, making a deluge of wide-angle shots that look as if they were queued up somewhere for years. Its perfect image quality helps, since everything turns out as I envision it, as long as I keep the flare in check.

Which makes me think: why didn’t I get it before? I knew that I wanted it, since 2016 when I bought the Sony camera. It was kind of expensive, that’s true, and I already had the 17-40mm Canon which is very similar, and I used it with an adapter. But since Biljana used it so much with her Canon system, I very rarely shot anything with a wide-angle anymore, and it was not a good thing. I should have bought the Zeiss earlier, but I was putting all the money into gold, and I cut all the “unnecessary spending”, which included photography.

I think that was a mistake, however. To me, photography equipment is not just another gadget that essentially does nothing, like a fancy watch. It’s a creative instrument, something that allows me to produce and develop my photography. Similarly, a computer is not a gadget, it’s an extension of my mind. I was, however, smart enough not to skimp on computers – that’s something I use every day, and if there’s something wrong with how it works, I feel it. I think I put a pause on photographic spending quite a while ago, when I was broke and in debt, and I basically just used what I had, and this continued as things got better; I simply didn’t revisit the concept, and I had other things on my mind as well. But then, the reaction I had when I recently bought the 50mm f/1.8, and much more when I got the Zeiss, pretty much surprised me, because I didn’t expect that kind of a creative outburst connected with getting the equipment I needed, because I thought it would be like getting some gadget that does nothing and you get tired of it soon and don’t even notice that it’s there. No; this is not like getting a new car when you already had a decent car; it’s like getting a car when you didn’t have a car and you really needed it, but you kept arguing against it to yourself – cars are expensive, they are just another thing to worry about, you’re better off without it, the less things you have the better and so on, and then you finally get the car and the whole world of possibility opens up before you. Suddenly new places are in reach, and when you go to those places you find out whole new things that open up your mind to things you didn’t think of before. In this case, it’s things that were in my mind but I couldn’t create pictures from them because I didn’t have the adequate gear.

And then I decided: fuck it, I’m going to get the rest of the stuff I know I need, but I kept myself from getting because it’s expensive, and I was being rational with money. I’m getting the FE 100-400mm GM and the A7RV body. Something clicked – buying the gear you use for creative purposes isn’t excessive spending or buying gadgets you projected desires into, only for it to become empty and meaningless a week after you bought it. It’s more like respect being paid to important things in your life, and if you don’t, it’s going to die from neglect. It’s not just relationships with other people that need respect in order to flourish, it’s also parts of your own life – ability to write, create visual art, and so on. Also, there’s a difference between stupid ideas like “if I only had that lens/camera, I’d be taking better pictures”, and “if I only had a wide-angle lens, I could take the wide-angle composition that I have queued-up in my head”. The latter is actually a manifestation of a genuine creative impulse.

I’ve been thinking about the telephoto shots I took with borrowed equipment, and it’s not like I don’t want to take that kind of pictures. It’s just that I didn’t have the money for it, because telephoto photography is one of the most expensive technical parts of the craft, and even when I did have the money, I still blocked it off – nah, that’s a money pit, let’s just steer clear. At some point, this stopped being financially responsible and realistic thinking, and became a sign of disrespect to myself.

Truth

Posted on by
Reply

There’s been an interesting comment under one of the recent articles, and I think it needs to be addressed more thoroughly than the comment section format would allow.

The comment itself was this:

Buddhism is very interesting due to an unusual perspective—namely, I don’t believe that anyone, except perhaps populations originally surrounded by authentic Buddhist yogis (e.g., Tibet), can truly begin working with the qualities and characteristics of “their” deities.

This of course opens up the question whether some revealed deity is “true”, or whether something revealed in the NDE experiences is “true”.

The usual definition of truth is that it is a state of alignment between a statement and reality. Essentially, when I say that Earth has a breathable atmosphere, or that 2+2=4, those are truthful statements. However, it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes, it may appear that something is in alignment with reality, but only because our understanding of reality changes. For instance, “scientists” used to claim that margarine is healthier than butter, based on their understanding of cholesterol, however it quickly turned out that the trans fats in the margarine are much more harmful, while nutritional cholesterol might not be at all related to the elevated blood cholesterol that causes life threatening scenarios. So, you can say that a scientist recommending margarine lied, but what he said was actually what he thought was real. This is what is meant by the difference between lying and saying something that is untrue. Those are not synonyms, because in order to lie you must know that what you’re saying is not true. Also, having in mind how much our perception of reality might be flawed, the concept of truth as something that is based on reality might be completely out of reach.

The other definition of truth is something I derived from Vedanta: the absolute truth is Brahman, the transcendental Absolute. In the relative, “truth” is only that which leads consciousness away from illusion and toward self-realization of Brahman.

So, basically, truth is that which is useful for attaining liberation from maya, and that’s the meaning of one statement I heard being attributed to Lahiri Mahaśaya, that kriya is the truth, and everything else is illusory. More generally, that would define truth as yoga, as practice intended to result in kaivalya, deliverance from maya.

This understanding of truth is not intuitive to people who believe that they live in a real universe, or that mathematics can give them absolute truths, but it is very intuitive to the kind of person Tibetans would call a dubtop (don’t hold me to the transcription, I remembered it from a Serbian translation of a, likely, French translation of a Tibetan text), basically someone of above-average intelligence, where intelligence is defined as the ability to see through the illusion of the world. To a dubtop, it is intuitive that truth is only attainable in liberation from this illusion, and the best we can hope for while in illusion are things that are useful for liberation, and thus definable as pointers towards the truth, and truth is something that we can only directly experience by dereferencing such pointers.

I will again invoke St. Augustine, who is, at least to my knowledge, the first one in the West who understood scripture in such a way, basically stating that God put all kinds of “breadcrumbs” in the world that will lead us to Him, in the eternity beyond space and time, if we properly understand and accept them. In essence, trying to find solid truths in this world is something he himself understood as the Manichean arrogance, when the Christians humbly admitted that the truth itself is squarely beyond their reach, and the best we can hope for are the pointers that dereference to some aspect of the transcendental, eventually leading to God in eternity. Here, again, it is stated that the best we can hope for in this world is a process, a yoga, that allows us to be transformed in ways that lead to God.

So, this lengthy introduction is necessary in order for me to explain how I perceive visions of deities and experiences of afterlife. They are true if they are manifestation of transcendence that transforms your consciousness in order to lead you to greater transcendence. They are false if they are manifestation of some narcissistic aspect of human psyche that wants to create “objective” reasons for self-importance. Which is the case, only the fruits will show, as Jesus rightly pointed out. Anyone can claim to have any kind of experience. I am quite sure that schizophrenics have all kinds of experiences, but I hope we can agree that those are not of the kind spiritual people should aspire to have. 🙂 If something is “true” in the Vedantic/Augustinian sense, it will lead the soul to God. If it is “false” in the same sense, it will lead the soul to greater delusion and, possibly, to ruin.

Diversity

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been going through my library of old photos and thinking.

Before 2006, I’ve been using standard zoom lenses by default, and when you ask people why those lenses are good, they will tell you it’s because they are universal, and allow you to take all kinds of pictures – from landscapes to portraits and details and so on. However, when I look at my photos taken with Olympus E-1 and the ZD 14-54mm standard zoom, over 90% of them conform to the pattern of “extend to 54mm, aperture wide open”. I was not a “diverse” photographer at all, and in fact I could have used the ZD 50mm f/2 macro instead of the standard zoom, without any adverse effects. Even then, I was very specialised for isolation-based closeups, and from what I can tell, I produced very “mature” work in that area. I knew what I was doing and the results turned out the way I wanted them:

However, there was a reason why I used the lens almost exclusively at 54mm: I didn’t know anything about shooting landscapes, or wide angle anything in general. It’s not that I didn’t try, but the results were crap, in a sense that I couldn’t control the scene in such a way that would capture the feeling of calm stillness that I learned to capture with closeups. When I think of it, I tried to follow a formulaic approach for shooting landscapes, and the images sucked. Also, when I would use wide angle, the scene felt cluttered and full of distractions that created something that was the exact opposite of what I did with closeups. Also, the 5MP camera lacked the level of detail that would be required for a wide angle landscape shot in which everything is supposed to be sharp.

And then I decided I’m going to learn landscape. It certainly was a learning curve; my early attempts were crap, until the point I was reviewing the Olympus ultra-wideangle, the ZD 7-14mm f/4, and at some point it clicked: I stopped trying to remove things from the scene in order to simplify it. I embraced the chaos in the scene and just arranged it into a flow. When I think about it now, it’s not that I learned to use wide angle; rather, I changed my attitude towards Chaos as a principle, by no longer trying to eliminate everything chaotic and thus create order, and instead felt the wild spin of the Chaos in a scene and freeze a moment that feels right.

It took me years to get comfortable with the concept of infinite depth of field, chaos, suggested motion, people in the frame, random things in the frame, non-obvious composition, and, sometimes, intentional motion blur. But, how else do you take a portrait with a fisheye lens in dense woods? 🙂

I must admit that the technique required me to pretty much abandon my usual style and methodology, and initially the equipment more-less dictated what I did; essentially, the camera took the pictures it wanted to take. It took me a while to first control the process, then get comfortable with it, and eventually extend my style through it. At some point, wide angle shots I took started looking as just my normal stuff, and that’s when I became happy with it. Even if it’s not nature, and if it’s black and white.