Here are a couple more of these large "frame" composites. Spring is my least favourite season, but you can't help but be influenced by the lengthening of the days and the brightening and heightening of the colours. Vernally speaking, hijjus lurid is the only way to go. Tastefully done, of course.
The quote in the first panel of today's strip comes from "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Ron Suskind's terrifying article in the NYT Magazine of October 17, 2004. Here's the full quote, which reveals just how delusional that administration was: "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" My guess is that the senior aide was Karl Rove, but who knows? They were all crazy.Scary, or what? It seems post-modernism has been driving the policies of the most powerful nation on earth. On the other hand, if you think about it, is post-modernism as a creed any more scary than fundamentalist or "End Times" Christianity? And, if you think about it a little further, Rove (or whoever it was) is pretty much stating a reality. Here is Hegel, that exemplar of clearly-expressed common sense, writing in 1820:
One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after actuality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.Basically, what Hegel is saying – trust me – is what everyone (except experts) knows to be true about complex social events: that experts always get them wrong, until they've become history. But lack of understanding never prevented a politician from acting, and acts, however stupid, always have consequences. What those consequences are, we only discover afterwards. Sometimes, long afterwards.
Preface to The Philosophy of Right
So I thought it would be worthwhile to look briefly at the primary objections raised by reviewers and early adopters of the Light L16 (this review is typical, and fair-minded), and give my responses, based on a few weeks of light use.
It's too expensive. True. It was far too expensive at around £2000, but it is no longer offered for sale new at all, and used examples can be had for much less. However, I am always shocked by how much even "affordable" cameras cost when new: the "sub $1000 camera" is a category equalling "cheap" on the review sites. And the latest and greatest smartphones cost even more.
The auto-focus is slow and erratic, and lacks image-stabilisation. True. I think the former was addressed to a certain extent in later software updates, but this is not a camera for sports fans, or anyone trying to record lively dogs or toddlers. But image-stabilisation? On sixteen different sensors simultaneously? Forget about it!
There is no aperture priority mode. True. This is because all sixteen of the phone-style camera units are at a fixed f/2.0 aperture. Which somehow becomes a default f/15 when ten of those images are loaded into the Lumen software and assembled into a single image. A claim I take with an enormous pinch of salt, as my experience of small-sensor cameras at even f/5.6 is that they produce photos that are sharp from front to back – the way I like it – whereas the L16's composited images rarely are. You have to wonder if the designers really understood what "f/15" actually means, in optical terms. There is, after all, a lot of misinformation on the subject of aperture out there.
The files are enormous. Not necessarily true. You can choose to export at 8 MP or 13 MP if you want, which is hardly enormous. OTOH a "full" DNG file at the widest zoom (equivalent to 28mm in 35mm terms [1]) is 80 MP, which is. Quality wise, I see no real difference between my preferred 13 MP exports and their "full" versions. In fact, to my eyes, the smaller files generally look better. If it's high resolution you're after, you need to look elsewhere.
The file size varies according to focal length. True. Why this is the case requires a complex explanation which gives me a headache: it just does, OK? The longest zoom is always 13 MP, even as a "full" file, whereas the widest is usually 80 MP, and the two optimal settings in between (the equivalents of 35mm and 75mm) are 52 MP. Which is weird, but a necessary consequence of the design, apparently. And as so far I have chosen to export everything as a 13 MP file anyway, who cares?
The workflow is clumsy. True. I've already described this in a previous post, so won't again. Other than to say it would be a bit less clumsy done on a single computer, but disk space and processing power mean I have to split the job between a desktop and a laptop. But any workflow adding extra time-consuming steps is not a good thing, unless it delivers superlative quality, unattainable by other means. Which it doesn't.
Lumen is not very good. Not true. It is terrible; truly AWFUL. A grim but necessary step on the road, like that one night in a really bad motel, or crossing some international border at a snail's pace in intense heat in a tiny car with no air-conditioning. This combinational phase of the workflow really did need to be done in-camera, even if it would have imposed a greater processing-power burden. Imagine if a proposed smartphone design offered great imaging capability, but only after uploading the files via a USB cable into some clunky proprietary software, still in beta... The sales team would be checking their calendars: is it April 1st?
The image-stitching is imperfect. True. The seemingly random areas of unsharpness are my main beef with this camera. Everything else can be worked around, but this is a serious flaw. Serious enough that, if I can't figure out a way to deal with it, I will probably write this whole thing off to experience, and stop wasting my time. Typical example:
The camera and software are now unsupported. True. Which is a shame if you paid full price for it not so long ago. I suppose that's what comes of buying into some bleeding-edge concept camera from an outfit with no track record: "buyer beware", and all that. I got mildly stung by a Kickstarter enterprise years ago that offered much but delivered little, and decided then to stay well away from tech-optimists flying kites. They rarely set out to defraud or sell anybody short, but when reality bites they tend to cut and run. Light won't even acknowledge the existence of their camera, now, and have since moved on to – yikes! – driverless car technology.
In the end I can't really disagree with or improve upon this review by Albert Lee: The Light L16: brilliant and braindead. His conclusion: "On the upshot, I do have a new found appreciation for how good the cameras I own really are. It’s like returning a terrible rental car and falling back in love with your car, all over again." Indeed. Hey, Fuji darlin', the weather's nice, fancy going for a walk?
What? Oh, the title of this post? It's just a feeble play on Minor White's first collection for Aperture, published in 1968, with the title Light⁷.
1. 35mm focal lengths have become a photographic lingua franca for lenses, which is odd, really, given how few people in 2021 will have ever used a 35mm film camera, or even a so-called "full-frame" digital camera. You'd have thought the actual angle of view would be a more useful way to compare lenses, "75°", say, instead of endlessly repeating "the equivalent of a 28mm lens".
I have nothing much to say about this little gallery, other than to point out that, once a pleasing array of elements has been assembled, the variations that can be "played" on it are infinite: the art lies in picking the ones that work.
So, just out of curiosity, I started removing some of the photos from their frames – the photo is just a layer within a multi-layered image, easily toggled in and out of visibility – just to see what the resulting "empty" image would look like. In some cases, I found I was looking at something that was, in its way, a more exciting picture. It was as if the photo had acted as an interior scaffolding, suggesting colours, shapes, and textures, which could then be taken away to reveal the finished construction.
Or perhaps it's more like seeing the reverse side of a frame flipped to take the place of the picture? Anyone who has rummaged through the racks and stacks of old pictures in a junk shop will be familiar with the sensation that the unseen, secret side of most framed pictures can be more interesting to look at than the front. The purposeful, layered assembly of nails, string, tape, backing paper, wood, card, and old labels can make an unintentional collage much more attractive to the eye than some faded watercolour or fly-spotted print imprisoned behind glass [1].
"Empty frames" does feel like an appropriate metaphor for these strange days of absence and immobility, like wandering the deserted rooms of a gallery whose exhibits have been stolen or stored away, leaving just marks on the wall. Which thought prompted another experiment: what about placing a "ghost" image within the frame, like the offset of an old illustrative plate onto its protective leaf of tissue? One thing leads to another...
Modern LoveIt seems “Modern Love” was first published in 1848 in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, edited by Richard Monckton Milnes, and is an unpublished fragment. I don't have a scholarly annotated complete Keats to hand (this is one of those times when I miss spending my working day deep inside a university library), so can't confirm in which drawer or behind whose fridge it was found. Lacking a rhyme scheme, it's also hard to say whether it's complete or not. It does have some nice touches (I love "Cleopatra lives at number seven"), and there are a couple of things about this poem I thought worth commenting on. No need to take notes, though.
And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.
First, those boots. I think this is a classic case of some poetic language which it has become impossible to read with its original sense intact; not least, in this instance, because our modern reading is both better and more appropriate to the poet's original intention. Having died in 1821, Keats had no way of knowing that "wellingtons" would, one day, come to have the primary sense of a utilitarian knee- or calf-length work-boot made of rubber, with a certain sure-fire hilarity factor. In his day (I'm leaning heavily on Wikipedia here) "Wellingtons" as pioneered by the fashion-forward Iron Duke were, apparently, a trendy item – dandyish, even, as worn by the likes of Beau Brummel – but made of leather, though, and suitable for evening dress, and most emphatically not green or polka-dotted [1]. "Romeo boots", too, have subsequently become an actual Thing, although I confess I'd never heard of them before. But the central idea that the alchemical eye of love can transmute the lead of the everyday into the gold of romance is surely enhanced, and given an appropriately wry twist, by our contemporary reading.
But then there is that final line: "That ye may love in spite of beaver hats". I have to admit, despite decades of reading and interpreting poetry, that I have no idea what that means, or is meant to mean. This seems to be an example lying at the very opposite end of the symbolic spectrum to those wellies: that is, a reference whose living significance and resonance has been irretrievably lost, at least to the "common reader". Setting aside any smirking about subsequent meanings of "beaver" – settle down at the back – I do know what a "beaver hat" is. Felted beaver fur was prized as a suitable material for hats for centuries, in many shapes and styles, and the demand for it is what exterminated the European beaver, and probably goes a long way to explain all that North American unpleasantness in 1776 and 1812.
The lead up to the final line makes perfect sense: Pliny's tale of Cleopatra's pearl cocktail is well-enough known. The idea of setting foolish lovers an impossible challenge – to reconstitute an object of enormous value frivolously consumed in the name of love, an act which was itself the result of an extravagant wager – fits nicely with the rest of the poem: an imaginary pearl tiara conjured from a plain comb, Cleopatra living at number seven, and so on. In which case "I'll say / That ye may love..." must mean something along the lines of, "do that – yeah, right, as if! – and I'm, like, go for it then, you loved-up saps". But why "in spite of beaver hats"? Something to do with exaggerated military headgear or martial vanity? Some kind of "know your place" put-down? Did the wearing of a beaver hat – presumably fairly common in Keats's day – have some significance lost to us now, just as the "MAGA hat" will one day require an extensive scholarly footnote? Or maybe it's really just a temporary placeholder, like McCartney's "scrambled eggs"? A "soft misnomer", perhaps, that will wait, forever now, for substitution? The thing is, after all, an unpublished fragment.
But I still find it as baffling as Browning at his brownest, and I cannot fathom it; can you?
Friends! Explain to me that beaver hat
That Keats invokes, and I will surely say
I love thee more than Paul loves scrambled eggs...
