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.

I had one instance of good fortune with the butterflies today and tried to take the best of it; almost came home empty handed, but then two butterflies started their dance above the road and…

I took those with the 135mm, because the 100-400mm was too much for me to carry, considering what kind of an astral shitstorm I have to deal with; hiking up hill is hard enough, and doing it with a big setup was too much for today.

The lesson from this as well as the previous hike is that all it takes is one. One scene, one butterfly, a few seconds of opportunity, and if you have the equipment with you, failure turns into success. Just a few seconds of a window of opportunity. If that didn’t intersect with me, I’d come home empty handed after carrying heavy gear up hill.

I wonder what lesson I would have learned had I climbed that hill twice with multiple kilos of equipment on me, and in both cases that one lucky opportunity didn’t arise. Would the lesson have been “fuck this, I’m not carrying this stuff here again”? I’ve seen this in business; occasionally, some people just get lucky and end up with money, and then they think they are competent and successful; they try again, and they fail, again and again, because they learned the wrong lesson. They didn’t understand how lucky they were, and how rare and improbable success was, and how little it depended on their own competence. People seem to learn wrong lessons from success, and, quite likely, also from failure. They might think there’s something wrong with them, but maybe they did everything right and those butterflies didn’t perform for them at just the right time when they walked that road, and they came home with an empty card. All those “spiritual teachers” in the 1990s talked about how this world is a school and we are here to learn lessons, but they don’t actually seem to be the good and useful lessons, when I think about it. We learn that certain things don’t work, and others do, but what we actually learn seems to be more degrading than helpful, because receiving spiritual feedback from a place designed by Satan and inhabited by morally flawed beings works exactly as you might expect it to. For instance, I learned early on that I will be beaten up, insulted, humiliated, ignored, ridiculed and degraded regardless of what I do. The feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever. It took me a while to un-learn that lesson, because I almost became human garbage and a criminal, resulting from my parents’ stellar upbringing. 🙂 My brother, on the other hand, learned that the path to getting what he wanted is to play victim and whine loudly, blaming me, and then I will be beaten up and he will get to play with my toys. Since he never actually practised yoga, he never unlearned that lesson, and he’s still thinking in terms of blaming me for his misery in order for the fundamental law of the Universe to be triggered, where I will be beaten up and he will get my toys.

Do you know how I un-learned that harmful lesson from my childhood? The one that I’m doomed regardless and feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever? I decided that the first part is indeed correct: the feedback I receive is probably always flawed and I can’t rely on it in order to correct my actions. However, I also decided that the second part, where I might as well do whatever, will result in utter doom. It would harm me terribly. So, I needed to think of a way of correcting my actions without taking human feedback into account. I learned to judge my actions against an ideal – good people that I know, good characters from literature or film, holy scriptures. Darshan of God, ultimately. I understood that my life is not a performance for others, because others will not be able to save me if I fail. There was no use in emotional signalling; just understanding what was wrong, and fixing it. Repeat ad nauseam. No audience. No use in whining, or feeling bad or depressed about mistakes. Just fix them, and align with the template of perfection, that is of course constantly updated. Fuck up, fix, repeat. No audience. No useful feedback. Just deception and false information from the outside, stuff that’s meant to discourage, harm and degrade, stuff that will praise me when I’m doing poorly and ridicule me when I’m doing everything right, with just enough randomness to make it completely useless. Do what God would do in my place, not what gets me praise from humans, because humans are sinful, deluded, ignorant, evil or just fucked up. They will criticise what they admire because it hurts them, or they will praise what they find pathetic, because it makes them feel good.

Being able to stand in the presence of God and feel like I belong there. That was the motivation.

Also, I assume that I’m probably doing everything right, and the lack of results is merely a normal thing if butterflies haven’t crossed my path by chance. Thinking that you’re doing something wrong just because there are no results is like thinking your camera choice or photographic skill need to be improved if you came home with an empty card that day. Were there any butterflies around? No? If so, how is the absence of butterfly pictures surprising? Correcting your course too often, and based on unreliable feedback, is not helpful. For instance, Biljana was with me today and she came home without any good pictures. Why? Because we were both very tired on the way down, under terrible astral pressure, and when those butterflies appeared I went after them, fiddled with autofocus modes until I found something that managed to lock and track, and kept them under rapid fire for half a minute or so. Biljana was just too tired to give a fuck about butterflies at that point and left them to me. 🙂 What conclusion should she draw from this? None at all. She did everything right. Doing everything right, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll have good results on any given day. Another day, she might have excellent pictures and I will have nothing. What conclusions should I draw from this? Absolutely none. Learning lessons from everything is highly overrated.