Category Archives: photography

Some thoughts

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We hiked up our local hill yesterday after the summer heat had cleared, and we got some nice sunset colours.

Most pictures ended up being the typical sunset shots, because that stuff seems to be irresistible, but I got some that are different; sunset merely illuminating the things and giving them a 3d glow. I ended up liking those the most.

Trump, being himself, let it slip that the West has for the most part no more than 4 weeks of oil reserves, which is unsurprising since they’ve been using them up foolishly in order to prevent the oil prices from going up too much, which would reflect poorly on the popularity of the politicians and their foolish wars. Since the current “agreement” between Iran and the USA is of such flimsy nature that the sides can’t even agree enough to publish the same version of what’s supposedly being agreed upon, there’s not much chance of any peace there taking root, at least until Israel gets its way, nukes Iran and gets wiped off the map in return.

I noticed one thing changing in my attitude towards the Apple ecosystem, and Apple Silicon in particular. I no longer see them as an experiment, a thing I’m testing to see if it’s long term viable, while maintaining a backup Intel based system that could take over in case it all fizzles out. It became my primary system, while everything else is essentially obsolete. I know exactly how that came to be. When I was writing the last book, and especially when I was proofreading it, I pretty much exhausted myself to the point of almost passing out, and I noticed that I removed that margin that I always maintain – if the computer breaks, dies, crashes or fubars the data, I am usually always ready to do something. This time, I was so tired that I relied on the computers – the 15″ M4 Air, and the Studio M2 Max – to do everything perfectly because I was simply too tired to do anything about it. And they did – they were both incredibly fast, reliable and good, and nothing went wrong in any way. One would think that after all the decades of IT progress that would be expected and unsurprising, but it isn’t. My Windows desktop, the Ryzen machine, is unreliable to the point of randomly bluescreening whenever I really push it. It probably means that the CPU is damaged and can’t handle the thermal load, or something; but since a machine bluescreening under load means loss of data, I simply stopped using it for anything other than games. I had to push the machines when I was finishing the book – not care how many things I left open, not care how big images I imported into Photoshop for the covers, not care how many layers I had; I just needed to get the job done, and I did the covers after proofreading for multiple days in a row, and had the machine crashed during that, I’d probably throw it out the window and make it a lawn ornament. But it didn’t crash. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t glitch, didn’t do any of the stupid shit I came to expect from both Windows and Linux, and I could rely on both the OS and the hardware to pull me through when I was half-conscious from work. As a result, something changed in my attitude; I now treat Apple Silicon machines as serious stuff I rely on, and I treat everything else as toys. I bought another laptop, the 13″ M5 Air, the 16/512GB model. It’s not that the 15″ did anything wrong; to the contrary, it’s the best laptop I ever had. I wrote almost the entire book on it, and it did everything flawlessly. It’s just that I like having 13″ laptops for some things, and all my other 13″ machines are either old and expected to fail sooner rather than later, or they are much, much worse than Apple Silicon in almost every way. For some things, such as making the covers or editing photos, I use the Studio with a 43″ screen. For some things I use the 15″ laptop, and for some things I use the small one. I think it’s similar to how guitar players have multiple guitars they use for playing different things.

Over the years, I experimented with different kinds of laptops, and I discovered that a very powerful desktop replacement machine is the least useful for me, because I rarely need that kind of power on a laptop. I need it where I need the big screen for editing pictures, and that’s a desktop. I need a laptop to have an excellent keyboard, touchpad, screen and battery, and to be fast enough for all the things I run on a laptop. This ends up being everything other than photo editing, so basically I have photo editing machines and “everything else” machines. This explains why I prefer the Macbook Air to the Pro – the pro models have active cooling and more power, but they are thicker, heavier and more expensive for the virtue of being great for the things I don’t actually use the laptop for. As a result, I managed to “cook” the 15″ Air only twice, and both cases took place in a hotel when I was importing a batch of 350 or so 61MP raw files into Lightroom. To its credit, it actually managed to hold its own and be as fast as my Studio for the first 100 or so pictures, but then it throttled itself to less than half its nominal speed and it was pegged at 100°C. Also to its credit, it managed to actually import everything just fine, and I proceeded to edit everything on the hot laptop and functionally speaking, I got the job done. Would I like doing it regularly, no. But also, would I like buying a 5000 EUR machine that is better at something I do twice a year, while also being so much bulkier and less practical for everything else I actually use it for? Hard pass.

On the other hand, the Studio is a complete opposite. The Air has incredible speed and power, until it hits the thermal limit. The Studio M2 Max is actually somewhat weaker in that range. However, it never hits the thermal limit. It can keep going at 100% load, for hours, days, weeks or years, and it will never give a single fuck. The machine is under-specced for my new 61MP cameras because I bought it for processing 24MP files, so things that used to run instantaneously now take time. The thing is, I don’t necessarily care. I have it import the files while I take a shower, it gets stuff done, and I never have to think about overheating it, stressing it by having it work for too long on 100%, or anything like that. It’s like a rock crushing machine that just crushes rocks for years and doesn’t give a fuck. Also, unlike other powerful machines, it is always completely silent. And unlike my equally powerful Ryzen machine, it never bluescreens.

No wonder Apple ate everybody’s lunch. It’s the thing you need when you’re done with everybody else’s shit and you just need to rely on things to do their job because it’s important, and you don’t have the patience for drivers acting up or the OS update locking up the machine just when you need it, or something crashing and taking your files with it. When you need a rock crusher that works 24/7, and you really depend on it doing the job, maybe it’s not the time for solutions that require you to reserve a part of your mental capacity for fixing the mess after the machine inevitably shits itself.

So yeah.

Do I actually need a zillion computers? Does Mike Oldfield actually need a zillion guitars? Yes, in fact. It’s weird how that works, but this is no place for minimalism.

No news

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Not much to report on – I’m spending terrible karmic stuff in great quantities and I’m barely functioning. The summer is upon us, so it’s hot. I’ve taken some pictures of the butterflies on the lavender, because that’s still the best motive around. The difference is, I now used an ultrawide lens to do it, because I don’t want to become too repetitive with the telephoto/macro setup.

It’s getting too hot to take walks during the middle of the day. It was 34°C in the shade today, we went out to have lunch and we’re cooked. This means we’ll have to switch into summer mode, which means walks in the late evening. It is what it is. Also, I’m allergic to something that’s in the air currently, and I don’t know what because there are too many candidates – half the island is under flowers of some kind or another. Tiny annoyances in addition to the big problem.

 

Pause

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We had a slight pause with photography in the recent days, for several reasons. The most important one is that the amount of karmic mass for spending that we had to deal with has been consistently high, and then periodically it increases exponentially and ruins my day completely, because I need to focus only on that and can’t even pretend I’m doing something else. The second reason is that the weather has been very windy, and since the main subject matter now would be lavender blossom with insects on it, you can imagine how long thin stalks of lavender behave in the wind.

The stalks can move multiple centimeters per second in the wind. Dept of field is 2-3 centimeters max. So, we kind of have an excuse to not go out and take pictures.

Romana got more into photography lately and so I explained to her last night how I don’t just go out with a camera, see a butterfly on a flower and take a picture. Most of the picture is pre-planned before I leave home. I think about what I’d like to shoot, and then I visualise what I would like the picture to look like. The light needs to be like this, the scene needs to be lit like this, the composition needs to look like this, and then I come to the equipment – what lens do I need for such a picture, at what aperture. Then I wait for the time of day when the light will look right, and go to a place where the light will strike from the right direction, and I expect some subject matter to exist. So, before I even took out the camera, most of the picture elements have already been set up. Then I find the “background subject matter”, basically the kind of flowers and leaves that will look good in that light, and then I try to find cooperative insects to compose them into that as the motive that will carry the composition. So it’s not that I just happen to get lucky. Part of it is luck – if I’m hunting for butterflies, there’s no guarantee that I’ll find any, and especially that I’ll find cooperative ones that came to the flower bush to eat, and not just fly away across the path. I need it to stand there and eat, on the right flowers, in the right light, and I need to have the right lens on the right camera. So, basically, I need to have everything else pre-selected and hope I get lucky with the butterfly. Sometimes I come back empty handed, and you don’t hear about that. Sometimes I get lucky and the butterfly that’s just right lands on the flowers that are just right, and it looks easy.

What does it mean, that I don’t just spontaneously take those pictures because I happen to live on Hvar and I happen to have great equipment that does everything? 🙂 Oh shock, oh betrayal. 🙂

Of course it’s all planned and technical. It’s not that meditation turns into pictures by pointing the expensive camera in the general direction of the island.

A composition

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Biljana had an idea for a photographic composition; something very specific, a snail in the bush of brnistra plant. We’ve been looking around for quite a while, and the brnistra blooming season had almost finished, and we haven’t found a single snail on one, which is uncommon, since we were used to seeing them around.

Today I decided to try our luck – there’s a place where there’s a lot of those bushes, and I chose early evening, when the light will go horizontally through the bushes; it was somewhat overcast, but not to the point where the light would suffer greatly.

We actually found a few snails on brnistra, so Biljana got busy, while I found some butterflies in the briars.

We both used macro lenses for this shoot, and they did great – the butterflies were calm and cooperative, and I could get very close, but I noticed one thing – unlike way before, I no longer try to get the tightest composition possible, and try to fill the frame with the butterfly. The fact that I could doesn’t mean it would be the best composition, or the one I wanted to get. Now, I prefer them wider, more atmospheric. I see that as an improvement – I’m not unconsciously trying to prove that I can technically do something, and instead I’m doing what I actually want.

I also took this abstract. It feels liberating, not caring about demonstrating what equipment can do, but instead doing my own thing with it. And yes, I also got a snail. 🙂

Decreasing benefits

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My wife and I were taking one of our usual photographic walks in the town of Hvar yesterday evening, after the rain.

The tourist season is starting, so it’s more crowded than we’d like, but there were some quite nice sunset scenes and we came back with quite a nice catch on the memory cards.

As a curiosity, Rimac brought quite a show of Nevera cars.

This, combined with the fact that quite a lot of superyachts were parked there, made me think – I’m probably surrounded by the greatest density of people with order of magnitude more money than me, and it’s incredible how little they can actually show for it. In the real world, if you encounter a God who’s an order of magnitude more powerful than you, they are actually scary powerful – they can snap a finger and cancel some event out of existence by modifying its origin in time, or they can assemble a particle cloud back into the destroyed object, or they can create/modify universes. Here, they can buy a bigger boat or a faster car you can’t actually legally drive faster.

I mean, it’s nice, but I can’t but feel it as damning with faint praise. Once you solve all your actual problems that are caused by the lack of money, there’s precious little you can actually do with money. Buy a faster car with more expensive upholstery. Buy a bigger boat. Buy a bigger house. Buy more houses in many different places. Hire people to maintain it all. Have a space programme, or a charity fund, or something to give you the impression that it makes sense and is worth while. But basically, you do the same things you always did, just with no financial constraints. You still drive a car, only better. If you liked boats, you can get a better one. If you were into computers, you can get the best one. If you were into photography, you can buy the best cameras and lenses. You can get the house you actually like, instead of the one you could afford. But you still have all the human limitations, constraints and issues. There’s very little one of those billionaires can do, that a middle class person can’t. I mean, actually do, not just take a ride on a boat or have ten houses that require staff and staff managers. It’s like HiFi – you get to 90% of what’s possible with a few thousand euros. After that, ten times the money will give you the next 9%. After that, you can pay infinite amounts of money for utterly insignificant or even fictitious progress; essentially, you get to delude yourself for a hundred thousand dollars.

Money is absolutely crucial up to a point, and the difference between what your life is as a broke student or a homeless person, and someone in the middle class, can feel like magic. You can just pull out the wallet and solve things that would seem insurmountable to the other person. You can cash out a piece of real estate. You can go to a car salon and buy a new fancy car, cash. If you need a medical intervention, you can just deal with it because money is no object. However, after this miraculous ascent in functionality you can purchase, you get a weird situation where people can have exponentially more money than you, and they have to literally invent bullshit that does barely anything more, but costs insane money, just so that they could show that they can actually get something for that difference in wealth.

But that’s not how things work “up there”, in the real world. There, wealth/power is real, and it’s measured in soul-stuff. There, orders of magnitude do much more than buy stuff that’s invented so that you could pretend to be able to do more. The power differential is real, the way a power differential between a fire cracker, a 1 ton bomb and a thermonuclear device is real. Here, if you’re more powerful you can smoke an expensive cigar on your superyacht while you wait for the delivery of your new Rimac Nevera to complement your fleet of Bugattis. Among the Gods, if you’re more powerful you can correct the timeline, selectively freeze time, spend twenty years doing something and then go back twenty years in time to use the results instantly, you can create a universe to test a hypothesis, and you are actually spiritually capable of functioning on the same level with the fellow Gods. Here, it’s a silly game of pretence, where you act as if your power actually matters. There, it actually matters.

And the thing is, the effort it takes to earn a billion dollars, if we disregard luck which is actually hugely important, is actually comparable to the effort one would have to make in order to attain actual spiritual advancement that would produce actual, non-bullshit power differential in the real world, and this world so successfully hides those results, that barely anyone bothers with it.