The giant in the field

Last September, I was in Chicagoland and the neighbourhood with the missus. We made a trip to the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park which is a collection of strange and beautiful esoterica. A few examples are below. The Park is part of the Governor's State Uni, a small 4 year school located a short drive south of Chicago. Most of the works are outdoor pieces which both confuse and impress.  worthwhile expedition, even if it was in the sweltering heat. We called ahead to ask for directions and the Park Director himself came out to meet us. He brought a couple of chilled water bottles for what was obviously a lunatic photographer and his long suffering wife.

Museum hopping in Austin

So we wanted to go to the Blanton Museum of Art. A long-ish while ago, mah sister drilled into me  the semi obsessive museum hopping while visiting new metro areas. Haven't really had any regrets about that. I would say that the Washington DC experience is somewhat special (in the continental US, that is). Europe and India is a whole other thing.

However, the Blanton was inconveniently closed - and we had an hour to kill. It was also sweltering outside, so we sought refuge in the Bullock Texas State History Museum. As we simply did not have the time(or energy) to explore the exhibits, I ended up trying to get a few shots of the beautiful mural on the lobby floor.

The Austin Art Wall

I took the missus up to Austin this last weekend (MemDay). One of the more interesting things we spent a lot of time looking at was the Baylor Street Art Wall. This is a patchwork of concrete walls and floors set into the hillside. Anyone with a can of spray paint and a moderate inclination to climb can spend a weekend Michaelangelo-ing their personal manifesto. Of course, since this is a public space, your contribution may be painted over the very next day. So it goes. Parking is iffy on Baylor Street, which is itself accessible only by a somewhat steep, though thankfully short ride. Austin roads are  full of surprises - crest a small hill and find yourself rollercoasting down a much nastier slope. But this ride was worth it. Here are some pictures.

Every monkey with an SLR

The muddied streams of the interwebs brought this demotivational up to the surface. And I was inclined to agree - yes, today every monkey with a few hundred bucks thinks he is a photographer. And surely, it isn't limited to just SLRs - these days, apps like Instagram can make wonderfully filtered and bokehed snaps out out whatever duckface you and your drunk mates posed with after the seventh round of tequila shots. All of which is utterly despicable.

Oh, wait, it isn't and I am being a colossally silly prat. Similarly uncomplimentary thoughts were undoubtedly aired by serious photographers who looked askance at the AsahiPentax's silly mirror-flippitty thingy way back in the fifties. I mean, serious photogs use 120 film and wonderfully machined Rolleiflex TLRs, or at the least your less exalted Mamiyas - built to take punishment like the battleship Yamato.

But the mirror- flipping shenanigans continued, and gasp - outsold every other respectable camera type almost into oblivion. Yeah, yeah, there continued to be a small group of enthusiasts (read middle aged rich white dudes with OCD) who clung to their Elmarits and Summicrons - but every photo that made it to the cover of Time came from a 35 mm SLR. And then digital happened.

The same noses were raised high in the air and angry proclamations were made that it would never, ever be the same. True enough, for a while semiconductors lagged behind film emulsions and serious magazines like Arizona Highways would accept only film (and prolly 120 film at that). Yet, times have a-changed, Kodak has gone belly up and Arizona Highways now has a Flickr photostream. Hah.

The latest wave of development is being driven by instant capture, instant processing and instant sharing. In the time it would take me to unlimber the pack and swap lenses, someone with a fancy Nokia 800 series has taken the picture and applied a Holga-ish filter on it and sent it winging off to Facebook where his three hundred pals have liked it. Yes, of course, much of what is being shot - prolly most of it will be crap. But crap to you and me - not to the person who snapped it - and her mates pulling duckfaces in it. And by that account - the click-n-share crowd has already got what it came here for - their memories. But in the midst of this giant digital trash heap - there are undoubtedly gems. You merely have to sift through it - and there are plenty of people and their fancy apps doing just that. So stop whining about how a beautiful medium has been plebianized.

Also remember the unending horror that came from sitting through your aunt's friend's family album? Yes - now picture that, magnified a millionfold. With duckfaces. Yes, the future does look somewhat rosier now. Perhaps even instagrammed.

Battleship New Jersey

This day is propitious. Or it was, almost six hundred years ago, for the British. For on the 25th of October, 1415, in a recently ploughed, rain muddied field in an entirely undistinguished place in France called Agincourt, the English won a battle. The English monarch, Henry V's inspired leadership and exhortations aside, this battle was won by the English commoner, in the form of the most effective European artillery of the time - the longbowman. And in turn, this battle was lost by the nobility of France, their knights in armour - the very flower of French society and the natural leaders of their state. The event lives in memory through the words of the bard himself. This is where the 'Band of Brothers' speech on St. Crispin's Day comes from. But that is not why we are here. The reason for this extremely complicated start to this discussion is because this battle heralded the end of the age of chivalry and the beginning of a process which I can only describe as the democratization of war itself. Armor would not show itself to be superior on almost any European battleground for more than 500 years, when these two former enemies would join hands at a place called the Somme. But for the moment, Agincourt had shown that heavily armoured knights were easy targets against the massed firepower of poorly paid common archers.

The naval parallel is almost too easy to make. Battleships are as the armoured nobility of the high seas. When these capital ships engage, the engage as did the knights of yore. They move in close and slug it out like heavyweight boxers magnified a billionfold and encased in unbelievably thick armour. Smaller ships, like minnows, get out of the way of these orcas. The art and science of battleship warfare came to its stunning climax off the coast of Jutland in midsummer 1916 where the two greatest fleets in modern history, the British Grand Fleet and the Imperial German High Seas Fleet met, and sought to annihilate each other.

With this engagement, the day of the battleship was over. Unfortunately, no one had mentioned this to many of the naval strategists of the world powers. What few doubts remained about the obsolescence of battleships were put to rest on a Sunday in December 1941 by the Japanese. The future belonged to carriers and now, as we know it to submarines. But battleships continued to be built, if only for the remaining years of WWII. And they continued to be marginally useful as giant gun platforms, but as smaller vessels increased their firepower, even this role was usurped from them. Still, the very word "battleship" evokes a very special feeling - that of awe. With that immense scale, that terrifying firepower, battleships were the last titans of the ocean - when they fought, the heavens stood still and watched.

In the days following the debacle at Pearl, the US Navy scrambled to replace the losses it had suffered. The Iowa class of capital ships formed part of that plan. The USS New Jersey was commissioned in 1943 and saw service throughout WWII in the Pacific. Later it was decommissioned, then recommissioned in time for Vietnam, the mothballed again, then brought back - well you get the picture. Suffce to say that this was one of the longest serving battleships ever and was probably the last such vessel to sail the seas. Today it lies moored quietly off a pier on the Camden waterfront, just across the river from Philly. This was where I spent my Sunday midday with my friend Rudra - and I have a few pictures to show for it. Here goes.

Which camera

Sometime this year, I will be flipping a lot of cash (presumably enough to buy a couple of kidneys on the black market) over for a camera and some associated paraphernalia. I have a few choices. But before that, let me talk about what the dream-wishlist.

1. The Leica M9. Just released. An astonishing 18 MPixels in a full frame 24X36 mm sensor. The legendary Leica M series construction. And of course, the ability to use any number of prime lenses from the Leica Summilux/Summicron/Elmarit series. All the way to the ultrabright 0.95 Noctilux 50 mm lens which goes for a cool 10 thou... This belongs to a type of camera called a rangefinder. The principle of operation is very different from an SLR. No swinging mirrors or anything like that. This leads to a much quieter machine which is discreet. Something that a master of street photography like Cartier Bresson apparently loved. Here is some of his work. One of his most famous photos, the man jumping over a puddle was taken with an M3. But the point remains that Leica's are quite insanely expensive. Not for me.
   

.. to be continued

Egg sketches and photos

Here. Enjoi

A beautiful example of time lapse photography

Time lapse is when you show a series of photos at a speed much faster than you took them. This can be done by simply "speeding up the reel" in old film video cameras, or by pasting photos taken with wait periods into a video. It is the opposite of high speed photography. Time lapse viddys of the night sky are particularly wonderful. Here, look at this one: tell mw what you think.

Some new pictures from California

Photographs taken with a Canon Rebel XTi. Lenses: Canon 28-135 IS, 70-300 and 18-55. Postprocessing on Gimp. Thanks to Krishnan for loaning me the camera.

Insane lenses, cameras which bleed awesomeness and cost as much as the National Debt

I thought since it has been a while and then some, since I have written anything about photography, I should be back. There have been elections back home and people dying just south of the border. With any such event or conflict come the reporters. Some call them the vultures of war. But it is true that in many cases they do a job that is difficult, under the most extreme conditions. And many of them never make it back. So, what about the tools they use?

Lets start off with the age old Leica rangefinder series. This has been the darling of serious (read well funded) news agencies in the early postwar years. Built like a phookin' tank, the M series brought a revolution to the 35 mm wurlde. The M pedigree continues in the sleek M8.2. Ragefinders are different from SLRs in that there is no mirror. Focussing is achieved by optimizing path length through a beam splitter. In practice, you turn a knob until two images coincide. There are fewer moving parts and hence rangefinders are quiter and more compact than SLRs. But SLRs are more versatille. Here, read this comparison.

Leica also had an SLR lineup, (which they developed with Minolta, the company that gave the wurlde the first SLR with an integrated autofocus and lens drive) the R series. But being Leica, they decided that they were too awesome for autofocus, which everyone and his grandmother has had for about 25 years. Then, they went in for a collaboration of sorts with Olympus, Panasonic and Sigma in the Four-thirds system. Except, they built one DSLR and essentially went to sleep. Oh, and they did promise a 14-150 mm ultrazoom which is not very easy to find.

Now, it seems, after much soul searching, Leica has come up with a new SLR series, the flagship being the S2. This promises to be close to medium format quality. Which will give the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III (yeah, a mouthful) quite a headache, and maybe Mamiya heartburn for its ZD medium format cameras. Medium format means larger film size, or larger sensors and is only for you if you have lots of cash to drop, maybe work for a fashion magazine or a high end porn studio and are as serious about resolution as an erection problem.

Now a leetil aside on Leica being all icky with the Four-thirds gang. Come on, Olympus is the only plucky guy putting out great cameras out there with this standard. I use an E-500 myself, which is simply lovely. They have a pro grade E3, a semipro E-30 and many, many prosumer models. Much better bang for the buck than any APS model SLR. And they have such wonderful lenses!

But lets step aside from this discussion of camera bodies and talk about a couple of lenses which have caught my attenshun. I have mentioned the Leica ultrazoom already. You would use the ultrazoom for daily "street" photography. This would be a walkabout lens with a zoom range of 10-12x. Nikons 18-200 mm antivibration lens is a runaway success. Ken Rockwell loves it. You probably will as well. This is awesome for news photography. Canon had no equivalent for a long time. But that is about to change. With this lens and an EOS 50D, I imagine you could goo up against a D300 and win, especially in static frames. But the ultrazoom lens market will have changed forever with the introduction of Tamron's 18-270 mm. This is available in EOS and Nikon mounts (typical!) and goes for less than 590$ on Amazon (not a plug). In your face Nikon/Canon! Bear in mind that point and shoots these days have 22x zoom and sell for half that of an SLR body. A good photographer with a decent P&S can get better results than a newbie with a pricey DSLR.

But more on lenses. The brightest Canon EOS lens is the 50 mm f1.2. Pricey and awesome. Nikon's brightest is a f1.4. Still awesome. Leica has an f 0.95 Noctilux lens for its M series. Yeah, breathe in and out slowly while your heart rate comes back to something decent. You can probably shoot handheld in candlelight with that piece of glass. Which means, its time to wrap up with the story of one of the fastest lenses ever made used by Stanley Kubrick.

Alison, by Jack

A person's life in photographs.

Gimme a drink now!!

Sweet and wonderful pikchures of animals drinking. Water.

2008: a year of my life in pictures

Thank you for looking at these pictures. For those of you, who may find yourself somewhere here, a special note of thanks. For those of you who should be here, but somehow, aren't; it is probably my fault that I did not capture a moment that I should have. But then again, some of those moments cannot be captured, can they? They can only be lived and relived in memory. Hope to see you in 2009. Have a nice New Year.