Stories

I’ve seen photographic advice such as “your pictures need to tell a story”, and I’m thinking; nah, bro; I’m good. I mean, if I take a picture of a bee pollenating a rosemary bush, what story should that tell? I mean, other than the atmosphere of the moment, the light, the feeling frozen in time?

I’m freezing visual moments, you fit them into your own personal story any way you like. Sometimes there’s a story behind why I like to take pictures of a certain kind, but you will hardly see it in the picture itself. For instance, the horizontal light of the sunset taken through an innocuous object that just happens to be there:

The light is always out of focus, beyond reach and beyond resolution, and in a moment it’s gone, and magic is lost from the object that seemed to contain it. The story is the world itself – how it catches the light of God at specific moments, and then the light is gone and you see that it was never truly of this world, that there is nothing special here, and everything that makes it appear special is beyond it. Also, it’s the story about how I can’t go there yet, which is why those pictures always have a tinge of pain and nostalgia in them.

Sometimes there is no story – the reason why I like taking pictures of insects in flight is simply because it’s hard and I like the challenge, and when I make it, sometimes it looks magical and I like it because of that.

No particular story there, but feel free to insert your own. 🙂

Rainbow light on cobwebs started without any high aspirations of storytelling either – I just found it pretty.

One would think it’s chromatic aberration created by the lens, but nope, you can see it with the naked eye. It’s something about the cobweb breaking light like a string of tiny prisms. The lens just kept it there without interfering, which is why I love those optically perfect lenses.

Later, I understood that it actually fits a story of this world and its creator, who makes his cobwebs attractive with stolen light, so that he could devour his victims here. The real spiders of course prefer to keep their traps hidden and invisible, but that one prefers his traps to shine with the stolen light of God.

So, you can find stories there even if they were unintentional. Whenever I deliberately try to tell a story with photography, it feels pretentious and cringy, so I try to aviod it.

Cringe. 🙂

About matters and seriousness

When I mostly wrote about politics for a few years, some people understood it as me “not being interested in spirituality any more”. When I started writing about spirituality again, shocked Pikachu face, I guess. So, what’s the deal?

Well, it’s kind of obvious. When I saw Western propaganda accompanying the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I understood that such propaganda is something that would happen only if they had a long-term plan for a war with Russia. As I analysed the events from this perspective, it gave me such a good match that I started a political blog as a place where I can unload my thought processes as a form of a warning, because there’s no way for a war between West and Russia not to eventually go nuclear, and people should know about that well in advance in order to be able to prepare, and by prepare I mean be ready to absorb lesser impacts before the major one, and when the major one comes, be on good terms with God.

What do I mean by lesser impacts? Well, if you’re in Ukraine, you got to find out already. Likewise if you’re in Israel, or the region around Iran. It’s not particularly great in some parts of the West either; London, Paris etc. have turned into terrible shitholes that resemble Africa. America is also not a great place to be, and it’s getting worse.

I expected that, because the nuclear ultimate escalation isn’t something that just happens out of nowhere. You don’t attack Russia and China because you’re doing well. You’re doing it because your civilisation is at an impasse, and you’re looking for a desperate way out. Others react to your desperate measures in progressively more desperate ways, and it ends in mushroom clouds.

People have a silly idea about nuclear war – basically, both sides push a button and twenty minutes later there’s no world. I wanted to explain why this isn’t so, and why they will try everything else first, and why most people in the world won’t even know there was a nuclear war until much later. You need to understand the logic of those things.

So yeah, that was a priority. Also, the reason why I didn’t write about “spirituality” – God, I hate that word – is because I was thinking and meditating and figuring things out, and I don’t like talking just to hear myself talk. I basically needed a decade or two of processing to do, in order to get to the next level of understanding, and it’s not something you can copy-paste from somewhere, because, simply put, nobody has ever done it before. I did write bits and pieces as I was sure, and eventually “The Light Beyond” happened, as a culmination of all this. One of the more important reasons why I didn’t write much is because people who read it generate their own ideas that feed back into my perception, and then it makes it harder for me to figure things out and get a clear signal through all the interference. Then, as I got the pieces together, I could write it all down, since feedback loops no longer matter once I get it.

There’s another silly thing I found out recently; you see, I sensed that people ask Chat GPT and other LLM AI models about me. I asked Romana to try asking the questions I felt people are asking, and indeed, the answers came immediately, which means the system already had everything cached from recent inquiries. She copy-pasted some of it to me, and I found it incredibly silly. For instance, when you ask AI how competent I am, basically asking it to evaluate me because you trust a statistical evaluator of other people’s opinions more than you trust your own judgment, it tells you, essentially, that I’m quite competent at photography and programming, and less so at politics and religious philosophy – essentially, evaluating my deviation from the data pool that defines its primary neural networks as “being wrong”, while matches with consensus opinion are interpreted as “being right”. People who don’t know how that shitbox “thinks” will mistake it for actually having thought processes, which it doesn’t. The true interpretation of what it said is that my IT knowledge is generic enough that every competent IT person shares it, my photography knowledge is essentially what every competent photographer shares, and my pictures are composed along the lines of what is generally found aesthetically pleasing. My political opinions, however, are completely out of, what its western and leftist data pool of generally accepted propaganda defined by the CIA, defines as “normal”, so it’s “wrong” and “not substantiated by facts”, where facts are what the CIA tells the “journalists” to publish. Also, my opinions about spirituality are not the generally found copy-pasta; it’s actually the real thing, because I have my own independent access to the facts, which is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s. In fact, some of the facts I have are my own memories from long ago, which are accessible only to me, and nobody else (with the exception of a few who also happened to be there); in simple terms, nobody else knows what actually happened because they weren’t there as it happened. I was. If someone didn’t learn it from me, they don’t know. So, Chat GPT thinks I’m taking myself too seriously, because it can’t verify my sources, so it thinks they are questionable. They are not.

Let me put it this way. Only a few people have been on the Moon. A few more have been in orbit around it. They have a unique perspective on it, and others are not really in a position where they can verify it independently. If they tell Neil Armstrong that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously with his stories about walking on the Moon, my answer is that they, in fact, are the ones who are taking themselves too seriously and they shouldn’t, while he’s taking himself exactly as seriously as he should, as he has an independent source of experience that they can’t access, duplicate or independently verify, so they should shut the fuck up.

Puzzle

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and writing only some of it down, while the rest of it remains work in progress.

I also made some interesting pictures:

It’s just that I’m having trouble figuring out what’s going on. The wars seem to be escalating, but contained within a pattern – none of the actors wants to disturb the world that holds the foundations of their power, and yet as the predictable certainties slip away, they seem to be forced into actions that they don’t actually want to make, with consequences they don’t want to accept. America wants to remain in power, but its economy is inherently broken, their soft power is all but gone, and their military is a one trick pony. Europe would want to act based on principles, and yet this sounds so ridiculous when it comes out of the mouths of atheists whose principles are something they themselves made up and is worth less than the paper it’s written on. Based on those principles they act in ways that subvert the foundational architecture that defined them.

Russia and China would want to be powerful and prosperous, and yet they don’t want to pay the price of that, which is to fight America and win. America abuses everybody and says “so, what are you going to do about it?” So far, nobody came up with an answer.

People seem to have found another source of religion. First they followed prophets and revelations of God. Then they followed science. Then they invented social media to receive validation from other humans. Now, they seem to chat with LLM AI, trying to get it to clear their confusion, answer their questions, and be their God. Considering how LLM is merely re-hashing the ideas of their own making and giving them what it sees as normalised results, this newest exercise in navel gazing is as pathetic as it is desperate, and reminds me very much of coprophagy.

But people, stupid as they are, will sooner ask Chat GPT about me, than ask me about Chat GPT. The Great Oracle will tell them what to think. That can’t go wrong.

It’s already very hard to find sources that are not contaminated by AI. With enough iterations, it will become completely impossible, unless you already know what you’re looking for, which makes it moot because searching implies finding new stuff, beyond what you already know. Younger people are destined to ingest the excrement of AI, thinking it’s information. It’s not. It is to information what a turd is to a hamburger that someone else ate.

I’m not saying AI is completely useless. I use it to remove noise from my images, and also for large-object generative cloning. Also, my camera uses it to detect people, birds and insects, and to focus on the eyes. I just don’t ask it for opinions, especially considering how often it fails to identify insects.

 

Chasing butterflies

I took a very weird setup for a walk yesterday – A7CR and the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM; the light camera and the heaviest 50mm. I expected to get pictures of poppies, so I took something that’s neither too narrow nor too wide, and can slice through the chaos of the brush. Unfortunately, we found no poppies, but lots of butterflies, for which 50mm is way too short.

The thing with butterflies, however, is that sometimes you get lucky and one just rests there and you can get as close as you want.

When you manage to get close, the 50mm f/1.2 absolutely rules. It’s completely sharp wide open, and that means very short exposure at base ISO, which means super clean image. I even had enough time to compose a branch between the lens and the butterfly, giving it a green haze for atmosphere.

It’s a bit weird to use this lens for that, but I did get it for something similar – cutting through chaos of the brush, while still retaining enough of a wide angle. That I managed to get the butterfly with a short portrait lens was sheer dumb luck.

About gear and light

I had very good luck with the early evening light and the late spring motives lately:

The wideangles are taken with the FE 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss, and the closeups with the FE 50mm f/1.8. Both on A7CR.

Which makes me think. Yesterday, Sony released the new A7RVI camera, the upgraded version of my A7RV, and it left me completely cold. Sure, improvements are always possible and welcome, but considering how I barely convinced myself to upgrade from the decade old A7II, those improvements would have to be something I really care about, and in this case I don’t see much of those. It’s similar to the A1II now; faster readout, more usable electronic shutter, but if I really cared about those features I’d have gotten the A1II. I actually find the A7CR more usable, because it’s smaller and lighter which allows me to take a very compact setup with me when I’m not in the mood for carrying heavy gear, like for instance in two recent walks when I wanted to walk faster and not stop every now and then to take pictures. Also, better gear isn’t always better. I used the 50mm f/1.8 instead of the optically far superior 50mm f/1.2 GM, simply because it’s small and light, the image quality is still very good, and the prospect of carrying the f/1.2 lens for a long fast walk is unappealing, especially since I don’t know if there will be any pictures worth taking. There’s nothing wrong with carrying heavy gear if I know exactly what I’m after, but that’s not always the case. What I want in those cases is something that will be light enough and work well enough for me to catch the light if it does its thing in the vineyards and the poppy fields. Sometimes, the gear is crucial and I need it to be as good as possible. At other times, the gear just needs to be good enough, and the issue is whether the light and the motive will intersect in just the right way.

It’s this way for other things, as well. A car doesn’t have to be the best one possible – just good enough to do what you need it to do. Your mind doesn’t have the be the best in the world, just good enough for what you need to do. Your character doesn’t have to be the purest possible; just pure enough to avoid the traps of Satan and desire God.

I recently had a situation where I had to revise some ideas from my childhood, and I had some new revelations. One would expect me to have been forced to go through those things much earlier, before initiation into vajra, for instance, but obviously not. One doesn’t have to have complete understanding of everything in order to attain initiation. For instance, if you live in a society with primitive natural science, you can believe in impetus and phlogiston and alchemy, and that won’t be a problem for you spiritually. You can believe your uncle to have been a good person while in fact he turned out not to be, and you’ll have to revise your ideas about him, but it exists on a completely different level – that of understanding, rather than purity. For initiation, purity is essential, and understanding is optional. It needs to be good enough not to get in the way. Likewise, my understanding of my childhood didn’t get in the way, but it turned out to be incomplete and flawed. Things I considered to be my own errors turned to be, in tennis terminology, forced ones. That’s the difference between an error that happens when the other player hits the ball particularly well and forces you into a position where an error is expected, rather than fumbling things yourself and losing a point.

In photography, there’s a difference between a photo failing because your composition sucked, the light sucked or you shook the camera, missed focus, miscalculated depth of field or something similar, or failing because the lens had strong and ugly flare when pointed at the sun, or being critically unsharp at a certain aperture, focusing distance and so on. Basically, the light and the motives can suck, a photographer can suck and gear can suck. There’s only so much you can do with gear – at some point, it is no longer a limiting factor for what you’re doing. At that point, upgrading gear is pointless and won’t produce better results. Upgrading your skills, going places that look good in a photo, recognising good light and motives, and composing everything well, that’s what’s far more likely to give you improved results.