Posts tagged "photography":

Standards

Journal

Diary

In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi'in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

When D came home, she arrived with the negatives scanner I had ordered from China a couple of months ago. I was sure it was lost in the mail, and couldn't do much about it because I had accidentally indicated that I'd received it. So that was a big surprise. With these orders from China, you never know whether it will arrive in a matter of weeks, or of months, or who will deliver it, or to where. The scanner is mainly for the archival work on old film at the office, but it can be useful for scanning personal film as well. I already tried it, and am quite happy with the results: the challenge is to keep dust away from the negatives, because the slightest speck of dust creates a white spot on the negative.

In the afternoon we visited our neighbours, where we said bye to R who is going back to the UK, where she and her husband are spending a year. In our neighbours' yard, I found a good specimen of Lantana, a flower I've been wanting to photograph (above).

I was telling our neighbour about the interesting novel, "A Life of Holes", which was narrated to Paul Bowles by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, a poor and illiterate Moroccan, if Bowles can be believed. I think B would like it.

Journal

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I'm getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn't enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).

Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn't make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta's book, through which I'm still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.

It's almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.

That won't help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I'm not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.

Back from America

Back from the US to the turmoil of this Jewish-Israeli intifada, which is only getting worse. With this people and government it's like the cliché about when an irresistable force meets an immovable object. So far neither are giving way though the government is showing more signs of stress than the people on the streets are showing signs of despair.

I'm jetlagged - should be asleep now. Besides the change in time zones, there have been two daylight saving time switches: first in the US and now here.

I went for a walk with my new old camera on Thursday to learn more about it. I've posted a few photos. Spring is about at its peak here now and the greenery is lush, with more rain predicted for the weekend.

Journal

I am in the US for the last ten days. I came over because my brother was in hospital. He drove himself there just in time, in the middle of a heart attack; collapsing on the hospital floor. They gave him CPR and snapped him back, and, in the following days performed catheterization and angioplasty. However, he suffered another three cardiac arrests afterwards at the hospital, where he also needed CPR. I arrived just before they installed a device called an Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which is considered necessary in order resolve a problem known as arrhthmia, where the heart is not able to maintain its normal rhythms.

After this last operation, he has been all right. He was released a few days later with mainly bruises to show following the various procedures they administered. They sent him home with about 16 medicines, some of which he is supposed to take temporarily for a few days afterwards. He must change lifestyle habits that contributed to his medical emergency. The question, as always, is whether he will succeed.

In the early few days of my stay I stayed at a motel, then at an Air B&B within walking distance of the hospital. Afterwards I came to stay with my brother at his one bedroom basement apartment. We've been having long conversations. I think that a person that came so close to death but survived must have a reason to go on living. To place this in a spiritual frame, if someone almost died but has returned, there must be further karma that they need to work out in this life. My suggestion to him is that he will try to discover what more he needs, or desires, to further accomplish.

His life-long interest has been photography, and he has given me an old camera, which I have been trying to study, with the help of YouTube and other sources. It's a Fujifilm X10.

Anyway, he assures me that this is the kind of camera that I have been looking for. Despite being released several years ago, it still gets excellent reviews. People recommend it for the type of photos I like to take: nature, travel, streets, self-documentation. It's small and tough enough to take anywhere, which is basically what I want - so I'm hopeful and eager to get out with it. The camera I've been using, a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS45, developed a problem of dust within the lens or sensor, which leaves artifacts on the photos. Fixing it will be expensive, so there is a question of whether it's worthwhile. But I never really liked the results that that camera gave me. I like mainly its size and tiltable screen. Anyway, I'm glad I'm not buying another new camera, fresh from some factory in China.

Various approaches to photography

Photography influences our propensity to experience reality visually. Professional photographers are more likely to identify subjects of interest because they are actively looking for them. Lately I have been pondering this in the context of awareness and consciousness. The cultivation of seeing can help us change the way that we view reality. But the heightened awareness can also be inimical to our mental state or spiritual purposes. For example, an instagrammer who loves to publish viral photos will always be on the look out for them. The eye and center of consciousness shifts in accordance with one's intention. If I have a prior conception of the unity of all beings, I might look for expressions of that; if I have an ideology of compassion, I will be seeking a compassionate vision. In every case, this is about finding ways to support established opinions or conditioning: My prior opinion determines the way I see reality. I look at and photograph the world from a certain viewpoint.

A slightly different result emerges from observing reality, deciding what is essential to it, and then finding a way to express this understanding in a photograph. In Let us Now Praise Famous Men, the photography deliberately shows the humanity and stature of people who the world thought of as being simply poor and downtrodden. If the vision comes from a genuine perception, rather than simply illustrating an earlier held belief, then the photography becomes an authentic record. Or does it?

A person who inhabits a post-industrial society has an everyday experience of a plain, utilitarian and modern urban space. When such a person visits places that are quite different, such as small European towns that have scarcely changed since the Middle Ages, what is remarkable to him are the ways that this reality differs from what he's used to. He is likely to look for charming ways that express the otherness of this reality. The result is a clichéd superabundance of images of stone arches, cobbled streets, colourful window boxes, etc. It becomes almost obligatory to take a certain kind of picture; one resembling the paintings and postcards sold in the tourists' shops. But such photography reflects a selective vision that does not necessarily express the reality lived by the local inhabitants.

I wonder how many times I have tried in my travel photos to exclude cars and other modern elements because they look incongrous in the reality I would like to capture. This reminds me of the famous Starbucks coffee cup that was spotted in a Game of Thrones episode.

Then there are photographic attempts to juxtapose the ancient with the modern, such as photos from India of robed monks speaking on cell phones. These are contrived with a certain purpose in mind.

It is a truism of the modern world and of the ubiquity of cameras that our desire to record, post and share what we see frequently interferes with our ability to truly be present in our experiences.

When I first embarked on a trip outside of the European and North American reality I was used to, I decided not to take pictures at all. At the time I was thinking that photos are only poor shadows of the reality experienced, and one should rely upon memory instead. To photograph reality is to change it; there's the quantum mechanics law, according to which it is impossible to observe reality without interfering in it. Lao Tzu, my inspiration of the time, had said, “one who excels in traveling leaves no wheel tracks”.

But maybe another approach is deliberately to make photography a participatory experience and, rather than attempt to capture reality or a version of it, to make images that are themselves objects of creation. Instead of taking a photo of a street, one may take a certain detail and then enhance it or superimpose it upon another image. This may be done to reflect an inspiration felt at the time, with no attempt to stay close to the perceived reality. This kind of photography well expresses the knowledge that every attempt to capture reality is doomed from the beginning; that viewing is always interpretation. As one could expect, there are many cringe-worthy web sites devoted to the subject of art photography.

It is almost inevitable that whatever we do has been done previously and probably better. This is, after all, an era in which several hundred people climb Everest every year, millions of people descend upon the world's cultural capitals and every aspect of human endeavour becomes hackeneyed and trivialized.

In the end, I find that, social media and messaging services not withstanding, I take or make pictures mainly for myself: either as an aide-mémoire, or because in some other way it pleases me. Nobody - not even family members - is interested to scroll through a whole album of travel photos. Maybe our grown children will look back occasionally on the photos taken of them when they were young.

Photography is not just about the product; it can also be an exercise in seeing. Engaging in it gets us in the habit of opening our eyes and trains our visual acuity. There is no guarantee that what we capture digitally will express anything of value, but it is certain that if our eyes are half shut, we are less aware and less alive to our surroundings.

2022-06-05-Wordpress

I spent most of the day improving a WordPress website that I manage voluntarily. For that site and another, I use the flexible theme Weaver. The theme developer tries his best to keep up with WordPress's changes, but maybe it's a losing battle. It seems to me that at a certain stage Autommatic lost the plot. In the attempt to make everything simpler, they keep making it harder. I've tried a few times to adopt their block editor but each time gave up and went back to the classic editor, which itself is sufficiently cumbersome and unfriendly. I try to do some of the editing in html but Wordpress usually messes it up.

Today I tried to include a simple html accordion (the details, summary css solution), but Wordpress wouldn't let me use it properly, due also to RTL-LTR issues. I looked online for a solution, but the only one offered is with plugins - either the old or the new kind that take advantage of the block editor. The writer recommended the latter, and, in particular the Kadence block plugin. So I installed that, and re-initialized the block editor. The result was a horrible mess. Besides Wordpress's native block editor, I now had a button for Kadence blocks, in addition to another unusable button fo Extendify blocks. The latter is a form of malware. It somehow insinuated its way into the system without my asking for it, and provides options that don't work unless you purchase the plugin. In any case, I was unable to get the accordion working properly.

After more search engine research and failed attempts to get rid of Extendify and after disabling Kadence, I went back to the classic editor, where I soon discovered I already had a working system for accordions and had simply forgotten about it. That's another thing that happens with WP - it encourages you to download loads of ridulous plugins that you later forget about, so they just sit there slowing down the site. This was also my experience after initializing the block editor: Slowness happened after I'd initialized the block editor: the editing slowed to a snail's pace (in Vivaldi: it won't work at all in SeaMonkey - you just get a blank page).

But those problems were only the beginning. The majority of my time was spent in WP's customize module, where I tried, and eventually succeeded. to move and resize the site logo and adjust various spacing issues. Weaver has, besides the "customizer" module, an older classic theme editor, and I have often used these together. But this time I discovered that the classic theme editor will sometimes undermine the changes made with the customizer module, so it can no longer be trusted.

The attempt to put html editing into a GUI is understandable in modern web development because the underlying infrastructure grows ever more complex.

But for my limited needs, it is usually quicker and more satisfying to edit html and CSS directly. Moving the earlier mentioned site logo in the Customizer was a nightmare in WP's customizer, and there's a feeling of surrending control to the whims of a system that seems to "have its own mind," or at least its own quirks.

The further you get away from the code, the greater the feeling of helplessness. Coding can be exasperating too, but the frustration is more honest - I don't find myself screaming at the screen and cursing the developers - there's only myself to blame when something doesn't work out right.