FOUL: Feline Of Unusual Length, obviously.
Two photos, five words
“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!” –Letterkenny
The other day I was having a conversation with a manager at work:
SHE: I have a passion for [activity that can actually be really lucrative], and I’m really good at it!
ME: Really?
SHE: Yes!
[She shows me photos of her work in said activity, and DAMN, she IS really good at it.]
ME: Wow, you could make really good money doing that instead of this!
SHE: Yeah, well, if I do it every day, I’d end up hating it.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
When exactly did we internalize the notion that what we love and what we do shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing? I know that sometimes “I want to” can suffer from too much “I have to”, but…it really does seem to me that we’ve gone way to far in normalizing a disconnect between what we do for a living and what we do while living.
Just something I’ve been kicking around a bit.
Share This Post
Let there be exposure, part III: Aperture? I hardly knew ‘er!
Continuing the adventures of photography!
Now that I have a camera where I can actually change pro-style photographic settings, I’m learning a lot about…stuff I never knew before. One of the biggest things I’m learning about is aperture control, and along with that, depth-of-field.
Put simply, depth-of-field refers to how much of the camera’s image is in focus at any particular time. Low depth-of-field means that only objects in a pretty narrow area will be in focus, while those in the background will be blurry; high depth-of-field means pretty much the opposite. Like any photographic effect, what degree of depth-of-field you want depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with the particular photo you’re taking, what kind of subject you have, and so on.
Before the FZ1000 II came along, I never had any real way of working with depth of field, and now I do. Huzzah!
But…the problem now is a simple one: I actually don’t know anything about depth-of-field and how to use it.
So I’ve done some experimenting here and there, and in all honesty, my initial efforts at adjusting depth of field and seeing the results were not helpful, because I simply didn’t understand what I was doing. This is where I picked on something from Simon d’Entremont’s videos (I mentioned him in my last photography post). He has a couple of little owl figurines, with fuzz and feathers, that he uses to demonstrate photographic effects in his videos. So I realized that I needed something similar: a test subject. In the case of depth-of-field, I figured what I needed to do was select a test subject and set it up in a spot where I could use the background to good effect.
Enter…Jerry!
Yes, that is a Funko-Pop figurine of Jerry Seinfeld, wearing the infamous “pirate shirt” from the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry, being polite to “the Low Talker”–a woman whose voice was so soft no one could hear her–inadvertently agreed to wear her newly-designed pirate shirt on a nationally-televised appearance on The Today Show. Look, the details don’t matter. What matters is that I set Jerry up in a spot where I could work my way through a series of aperture settings, called “F-stops”, noting the affect on depth-of-field.
It turns out that the higher the F-stop number, the smaller your aperture is, and the more depth of field you have, and vice versa. Thus, a high F-stop setting gives you a background that’s fairly clear, and a low one blurs the background.
Here is the sequence of six shots I took of Jerry. Note the progression of the background’s blur!
Now, if you’re wondering what those numbers mean specifically, I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest clue as yet. I imagine I’ll get that in my head at some point, but I’m still at the very newest part of this particular hobby, when my head is swimming with details and possibilities. But I can’t help seeing in this exercise how the numbers affect the look of each photo, and this shows why low depth of field is used to make a specific subject really pop.
And that’s what I’ve been learning about this week. Hooray for apertures!
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
Sinead
What a voice she had. What a musician she was. Too hard was her life.
On the musical collaboration above:
And back through the glen I rode again
And my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see more
But to and fro
In my dreams I go
And I kneel and pray for you
For slavery fled
Oh, glorious dead
When you fell in the foggy dew
It’s hard to describe what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived on the world stage. She came from seemingly nowhere. Her voice was eerie and transcendent. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Her head was shaved. She covered a Prince song. She arrived fully formed into a world that had no place for her. She created her own place. The second she arrived, you couldn’t imagine what it was like before she got there. That’s what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived.
It seems a particularly cruel curse of this world that often great art seems to require great pain to give it voice.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
Technically, this isn’t a tone poem; it’s right up-front about being a concerto. But what a concerto it is, and it’s a masterpiece of tone painting as well. It is also a programmatic work, intended to tell a story.
The work is the Butterfly Lovers Concerto for violin and orchestra, by He Zhanhou (who composed the main melody) and Chen Gang (who wrote the development sections). The work purports to tell the story of an old Chinese folktale:
The concerto illustrates the folktale of the star-crossed lovers Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo, known as the “Chinese Romeo and Juliet.” Yingtai, the only daughter in her family, breaks with the convention prohibiting women from studying and attends classes disguised as a man. At school she falls in love with another scholar, Shanbo, but is recalled home to be married to a wealthy merchant. Shanbo dies of heartbreak. On the way to her wedding, Yingtai passes Shanbo’s grave and begs for the ground to swallow her up. The grave splits open and Yingtai throws herself into it. Yingtai and Shanbo’s spirits transform into a pair of butterflies that fly away together.
The Butterfly Lovers Concerto is a deeply gorgeous work, with an East-meets-West flavor as eastern melodies are interpreted in the language of western instrumentations. It is infectiously melodic, and it is as crowd-pleasing a work as you’ll find in all of classical music. Maybe it’s not especially profound…but I’m not at all sure it needs to be.
Here is the Butterfly Lovers Concerto.
Share This Post
Serves them right for not being musical.
I have just watched tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! and looked on in horror as all three contestants combined to go 0-5 on a category about classical music works.
Yes, I’d have gone 5-5 had I been there.
One was a Daily Double: something like “Rachmaninoff wrote his ‘Rhapsody on a Theme’ of this violin virtuoso”. Our champion guessed Stradivarius, while I an inwardly screaming, “PAGANINI!!!”
Alas.
Share This Post
If you know, you know
Japanese STAR WARS art
Check this out:
I that poster for Star Wars on Twitter earlier today, and I wanted some more information: was this an actual poster used to advertise the movie in Japan, or was this one artist’s flight-of-fancy? Many artists create “unofficial” movie posters for favorite films, so I wondered if that’s what this was.
Artist Noriyoshi Ohrai made these three posters for Japanese dubbed versions of all three Original Trilogy movies, and they are glorious:
I wonder what made the artist opt for a more “minimalistic” approach for Return of the Jedi, only choosing to show C-3PO and R2-D2 in front of a wonderful cosmic background, with what are clearly the main lightsaber blades of the movie at the sides. Still, it’s a fascinating artistic choice, and I’m glad these posters came to my attention today.
More of Noriyushi’s artwork here. These posters weren’t the only time he had Star Wars as his subject! And much of his other work is breathtaking. I might need to see if there’s a book collecting his work available….