Category Archives: photography

Right reasons

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I’d just like to make one thing clear.

When one is suffering from material adversity, and they think material solutions are going to improve their situation, for instance they are cold during winter because they can’t afford heating, they are eating bad quality food or starving because they don’t have money, or they don’t have a good housing solution because they are destitute, they are more-less completely justified in their thinking. Money would indeed improve their situation, because the problem is caused by the lack of money. Materialism, in a sense of desiring things for their material properties, such as desiring a warm blanket when you’re cold or a good meal when you’re starving, will indeed solve a material problem. I’m not saying you should not desire material things for their material properties. It’s only reasonable to do so.

What I’m saying is, don’t desire material things for their abstract, ideal or spiritual properties, because that’s bullshit and a trap. Associating spiritual conditions with material conditions is a form of projection and bondage of spirit to the material world, and it’s a terrible idea.

Basically, it’s perfectly fine to want a car that is comfortable, fast, safe and durable. That’s what a car should be, as a physical object, and you’re perfectly reasonable to want one. The problem is when you associate ownership of a certain brand or model of a car with some spiritual state or achievement, and you think owning it will mean that you made it, that you attained success.

In fact, it’s going to have only its physical properties, and its brand-related social-status properties are going to have some effect, but never what you hope for or expect, and sometimes the exact opposite. Illusions of that kind are notoriously fickle.

Buying for the physical properties is, for instance, how I buy lenses. It’s a matter of how sharp, what aperture, how free of optical defects, how heavy, how well built, and how expensive. I make a list of all those properties and the winner is usually the lens that has the best image quality, but not at the expense of twice the mass and twice the money. It needs to be a reasonable balance of properties. Also, brand name doesn’t actually mean much to me. I owned so many brands of gear that I don’t care, but I will prefer the original manufacturer of the camera because of the possible incompatibilities of the electronics, because they are a thing, to the point that I recently had to replace Biljana’s Sigma 105mm EX DG OS HSM macro lens for Canon because the electronics were so glitchy or outright malfunctioning on her Canon RF system, that no amount of optical perfection could make up for the issues. It is one of the optically most perfect lenses I’ve seen, and it was replaced because it’s unreliable and possibly electronically faulty.

I don’t give a shit about mythical brands and their mythical properties. I care about tangibles, about actual performance and what I personally perceive of image quality. I care about the brand being well adopted in the professional circles, because then it’s going to continue to exist and the system isn’t going to die and force me to change it. Also, if it’s popular, the manufacturer is going to earn lots of money, and that means new good lenses and cameras. That’s why I avoid small exotic brands. Give me something that the professionals use as their bread and butter system; if it’s good for them, it will be good for me. And the ultimate test is going to be image quality. If I’m not getting the image quality I want, I’m going to dump it. If it works for me, I’ll be as happy as a hog in a field of corn.

And what brand name is on what, I don’t give a single shit. I used to have a Sony camera, Soligor macro extenders, Viltrox adapter and Canon lens as a singular working system. As long as I’m getting the results, it might be literally anything. Within reason, of course; I won’t buy something that’s better than what I need. Some specialist professional piece of gear that’s super expensive and designed for specialists with needs different from mine will be shrugged at and ignored. I won’t buy it just because it’s great, if it’s not great for my needs. I certainly won’t aspirationally buy Leica or Hasselblad just to look “serious”.

So, materialism, in a sense of buying physical objects for their physical properties and function. I heartily recommend it. Idealism, in a sense of aspirationally buying exclusive branded items for their elusive spiritual properties… fuck that.

The world of small

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There’s a lens I bought about ten years ago, and it’s so good, I later ended up buying lots of other lenses with a demand that they be technically as good, because nothing is better.

It’s the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro.

No, this is not [The Great Agarus – Lvl. 225]; it’s a hermit crab. 🙂 I love that lens. I kind of overused it, having it glued to the camera for years and using it for everything, so I lately used everything else more, but boy, is it good.

 

Vulgar materialism

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I had a weird experience on a photographic forum in the recent months. Essentially, I was praising the optical qualities of a cheap lens, the Sony FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6, and someone reacted as if the very possibility of a cheap lens being as sharp as the top quality lenses was a personal insult to his pay-to-win worldview.

This is why people mischaracterise the FE 50mm f/1.8 as a “beginner lens”, something you “graduate from” to a more expensive, high quality lens. It just can’t be that a cheap lens can be good. It’s good if you don’t really have experience with the expensive stuff, but if you did, if you could afford the expensive glass, of course you would get it, right? Praising cheap lenses is certainly a coping mechanism for poor people.

FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6

I find this line of thinking extremely annoying. OK, I understand there are insecure people who are trying to turn everything into a status symbol, and it’s probably some aspect of aspirational buying characteristic for people of a materialistic worldview, who think possession of things gives them value. It’s also why sharpness became so overused in assessing picture quality; it’s measurable, and it’s also highly dependent on equipment, and as such, you can make it into a pay-to-win proposition; he who has sharpest pictures wins, and he who has the most money will be able to buy equipment that makes the sharpest pictures. So, obviously, my proposition that a 200 EUR lens can be as sharp at f/8-11 apertures as any expensive GM lens is something that is seen as so incredibly offensive to the materialistic worldview, that it needs to be rejected as outright preposterous and clearly a coping mechanism of someone who can’t afford the GM glass.

Only, I can. I have a pretty extensive collection of high grade lenses, and I do actually know what I’m talking about. As far as sharpness and resistance to flare are concerned, the cheap 28-60mm zoom really does hold its own against glass of the highest grade. This makes it ideal for some use cases. People should be happy about it – after all, if a cheap lens can do the job, they don’t have to waste money on an expensive one, right?

You would think, but that’s hardly the case. It’s as if being inexpensive automatically makes a lens suspect. Even if people are happy with the lens itself, they will “upgrade” from it as soon as possible, simply because it’s cheap and they don’t wish to be associated with cheap equipment. It’s for the beginners, for people who don’t really know.

FE 50mm f/1.8

Do you know what I did after I bought the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM lens? The best, sharpest, brightest 50mm prime? The replacement for my FE 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty”? I kept using the cheap f/1.8 whenever I needed a light, inconspicuous, versatile lens. As for the f/1.2 GM, it’s absolutely great. Completely free of the optical flaws the cheap lens manifests wide open and against the light. Autofocus is instantaneous and incredibly accurate, unlike the cheap lens, whose AF is its worst aspect. But the secret is, from f/2.8 onwards the two lenses are mostly indistinguishable. The cheap lens is optically extremely good when you use it the way you should for most things. Of course I kept using the 50mm f/1.8 for things where it’s actually better; things like keeping it light and not looking like a professional.

So, I didn’t “graduate” from a cheap 50mm lens to a professional one. I didn’t replace the cheap lens. I merely added a new high-quality tool to my arsenal. The cheap lens is still excellent and I use it when the advantages of the more expensive lens are irrelevant. For instance, if I am shooting landscapes in good light, both lenses are going to be used at f/8. Autofocus is going to lock instantly on both in this use case. Sharpness is going to be the same. However, one is going to be lighter to carry. As for the image quality, I already had situations where I looked back at the pictures and thought “ah, the f/1.2 GM is so incredibly sharp here”, only to look at the EXIF and find out that the picture was taken with the cheap 50mm f/1.8. So yes, I will have to disappoint the crowd that sees this as a pay-to-win competition where most money gets you the sharpest pictures. Sharpness is in fact one of the easiest things to achieve inexpensively. You do, however, have to know what you’re doing, which is a different matter entirely.

But if you can get sharpness at high resolution with inexpensive lenses, why did I even get all those expensive GM lenses? Because there’s sharpness, and there’s sharpness of that one single crisp detail in a sea of blurred-out colour.

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

FE 50mm f/1.2 GM

Because I hate chromatic aberrations messing up my shots at contrasty details against the light. Because I like shooting in low light, when the colours are particularly “meaty”, and I like shooting wide open, at extreme apertures, while still retaining critical resolution in landscape shots. My photographic style is such that I can actually use those extreme optics for what they are made. I want things blurry, and yet clear and crisp at the same time.

FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM

That’s the part that’s hard to get, and I had to pay through the nose for it. It’s just what it is. If I could get away with a cheap lens, be completely sure that I would have used one. In fact, I do have a few cheap lenses that I use regularly, because they are what works the best in some cases. They are not inferior lenses – merely inexpensive because there’s a compromise that doesn’t matter for my intended use case. For instance, I have a Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, which I bought very inexpensively, but its picture quality is stellar, build quality is incredible, and it’s very small and light.

Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN

The compromise? It’s a f/3.5 lens, so aperture is limited compared to the more expensive lenses. I don’t care, because I shoot it mostly at f/8-11. It’s a wide angle lens; I don’t care to have extreme aperture on it, and I also already have one extreme aperture wideangle for the situations where I want to use it hand held with the stars visible in the sky. I need this one to be crisp, resistant to flare and light, which it is. It’s just not a bokeh monster. However, if you want optical quality, it’s absolutely top notch. It’s the lens I use when I want pictures to look as if they were taken with a smartphone, only without the stupid artefacts.

Being inexpensive, however, seems to be an unforgivable crime for some people. If a piece of gear is guilty of that crime, no amount of stellar performance can absolve it, and it needs to be avoided so that people wouldn’t suspect you of not having enough money to afford the “really good stuff”.

I’ve been thinking about this mentality a lot lately, since I keep encountering it. It’s as if some people have a desperate need of showing everybody that they have money. One would expect it to be something poor people do in order to hide their desperate financial situation, and they do. It is also, however, something very rich people do if they happened to have a really shitty financial situation earlier in life, like Andrew Tate. When he goes to a restaurant, he orders the most expensive steak. When a waiter asks him for his exact preference, it turns out that “most expensive” is his preference. One would expect a rich person to just order what he wants to eat that day, and not care about prices at all, and I am certain that most do. Some, however, always need to have the most expensive thing, so that people wouldn’t suspect them of being poor, because they were so traumatised by being poor, they started acting in the most ridiculously ostentatious manner once they got into money. I find such behaviour distasteful. If you can’t wear an excellent Seiko because of what people would think, or you can’t drive a normal car because of what people would think, you can’t have furniture from Ikea because of what people would think, and you can’t be seen with an excellent “kit zoom” on your camera because of what people would think, trust me, you have bigger problems than what people would think.

Busy

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I was kind of preoccupied last week or so, and it wasn’t just one thing. I did, however, get some nice pictures this evening.

A7CR with the Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN kicks serious ass for such walks; mostly because the combination is very small and light.

I was thinking about many things.

For instance, how people routinely misunderstand everything I say about spending karma, because it’s such an uncommon thing that almost nobody has any experience with it, and they misinterpret it as some kind of rationalization for depression and so on. It’s absolutely nothing of the kind. People have no experience with it because they are mostly busy creating sinful actions and rationalising them; if they actually ever feel remorse for their actions, it’s usually a rare, almost once in a lifetime event. Spending other people’s karma… that’s exceedingly rare, and most people don’t even understand the mechanism, or the possibility of such a thing. People are afraid of this kind of a spiritual pain to the point that they wrap its potential causes under all kinds of insulation, and when that fails, they tend to completely break down. That one would willingly endure that, and to no fault of one’s own, is beyond their comprehension. So, they invent interpretations, which are of course as wrong as they are silly.

The same goes for darshan. No, it’s not something I can pull out of my arse when I’m feeling bad. I wish. It’s not something you can remember, invoke, reconstruct or imagine. When it’s not there, it’s not there and there’s nothing you can do about it. When it’s there, it’s like the light being suddenly turned on in the dark – and human experience in general is a very dark thing, compared to that. This is the true light, something you can’t even imagine until it’s there, and it’s so much not under my control that I had literal decades without such experiences, and I couldn’t do anything about it either. You can’t remember it, because a memory is merely a shadow, something of a lower dimension of existence, like a faded photograph compared to the actual person. You can’t cause it when it’s absent, the way you can’t cause someone dead to appear merely because you miss them. When people think it’s something I imagined in order to comfort myself, I find it incredibly silly, because if that were so, I wouldn’t have to endure decades without it then. No, it’s an absolutely genuine phenomenon: a person of God stopping by to say “hi”. If you haven’t experienced it, you certainly can’t imagine what it’s like.

There’s a good reason why those two things – spending of karma, and darshan of God – are such opposite experiences. Sin by definition binds you to darkness that is the opposite of the light of God. When Christians talk about sin being something that removes you from God, they do actually know what they are talking about, because that’s exactly how it works. So, when you’re processing sin, it’s the least desirable experience possible for someone who loves God. It’s a combination of pain and spiritual darkness, low energy and all kinds of energetic, physical and emotional damage. It is, however, an extremely effective way of growing your soul and increasing your spiritual powers. It doesn’t feel like it when It’s ongoing; in fact, it feels like being immersed in a spiritual equivalent of raw sewage. But in pauses, when you can feel your purity, power and all sorts of new good stuff that wasn’t there before, it feels very much worth it. But when it starts again, you think: if I ever say anything is worth this, beat me with a spiked club please. 🙂

It’s a vastly unpleasant cure for a terrible thing, but its ultimate fruits are incredible.

Can anyone do it? Well, start with your own, I guess. Everybody has abundance of sin to purify with remorse, and if they don’t think they do, it just means they are so totally immersed in darkness, they lack even the concept of God’s light. There’s a reason why saints talk about their sins, and sinners talk about how much they love and accept themselves. The reason is, when God’s light turns on, you see yourself in true perspective, and you can finally admit what you truly are, in an absolute sense. When you are in complete darkness, you feel the need to comfort yourself, convince yourself you’re fine. None of that exists in the presence of God. If there are impurities, they hurt. You feel a strong need to do something about them. The true perspective is so great that it makes it possible for you to admit things you had to hide from earlier. It’s a strange thing – in a sense, both sinners and saints lie. The sinners lie that they are good, and the saints lie that they are bad.

As I said, I’m thinking about many things.