2320 on Feb 29th, and I’m still waiting for anything exciting/rare/unique. I had somebody make fun of my charming red shirt, but then that happens a lot…My lunchtime fortune cookie said ’someone close to you will come into a lot of money’. A friend had the same message - we’re hoping it’s reciprocal.

My blog’s been running for over four years, so I searched to see what I was doing last leap day. I didn’t blog, it seems, but was apparently spending too much money. No change there then.

It relates to nothing at all, but I’m impressed with the girl opposite me on the train, who managed to insert contact lenses and apply all her make-up while bumping along at 50mph. That’s some skill.

I headed to a local Ball last Saturday. It was a reasonably posh affair arranged by the Midland Amateur Dancers club, and in a large octagonal hall that I remember being daunting for beginners (right angles are the norm). I was on my own, and unfortunately didn’t know anybody other than my dance teachers. I was probably the youngest attendee - the average age was likely late 50s - which makes it slightly awkward to find a partner. Having said that, it wasn’t really the kind of night for asking strangers to dance anyway¹. I ended up having just the one cha-cha, with my teacher.

It wasn’t a total loss, though. When taken to my seat I immediately noticed two enormous Nikons on the table, and the guy next to me turned out to be official photographer for the World Championships(!). I introduced myself and we got chatting. I asked for advice on photographing dances, as I’ve been churning out mediocre results for years. His primary tip was to know the subject - he was a competitive dancer for 40 years, so could anticipate routines and their best photographic moments. He was photographing the night’s competition, and generously made a point of showing me how to handle the situation. It’s actually ok to physically move people into good positions - apparently people’s desire to look good in photos outweighs usual social norms (which sounds vain, but isn’t really).

It also helps if you have a stupidly powerful flash. Dance venues are often enormous and it can be tricky to balance light across the photo. Unfortunately this size offers few opportunities to soften light by bouncing it, so blasting across the floor is the only option. I don’t like direct flash much, and full-frontal light doesn’t do dancers any favours imho - I might work on some wireless off-camera setups, maybe work it into an appropriate uni project at some point.

I was then abruptly asked if I’d be stand-in photographer at a competition in May! Yikes. I agreed as it’ll be great experience, but I’m nervous already. I practiced a little on the night:

Most of my shots came out underexposed, which was deliberate - I’d rather have a sharp, darker image than a properly-exposed shot in which the dancers are blurred. I brought back much of the detail in Lightroom, and my newly-arrived copy of Photoshop got a workout too. Colours are a nightmare, however.

I hadn’t been looking forward to going alone, but it turned out to be a surprisingly interesting and productive evening. I learnt a lot, and I’m very grateful to the Proper Photographer for putting up with my annoying questions.

1. possibly a rationalisation, but my teachers are normally good at pointing out suitable candidates, and even they were at a loss [↩]

Flickr’s having issues at the moment, but the homepage raised a smile:

Either that was an earthquake, or something very violent and very quiet happened very close by…My first-floor flat rattled for a good few seconds.

IM indicates it was felt in Oxford too. Stratford to Oxford is, what, 50 miles? Must have been a pretty big one, in UK terms anyway.

Update: tracking this on Twitter. It was felt in Lincolnshire, Cambridge, London, Manchester…that’s amazingly widespread, isn’t it?

Twitter went nuts. BBC News had a breaking news marquee after about 10mins, News 24 took about 20mins. The second ‘most read’ page on the BBC site is about a 2007 Manchester earthquake - that was quick.

Update 2: “England earthquake God’s punishment for Richard Dawkins’, says random twitter

Update 3: Sky News wants to know how scared the children were. They’re very earnest about it. I’m going to bed.

I recently watched Serenity for the umpteenth time, and it’s still the equal of anything in the genre. It did a good job of ending the series storylines, but it’s obvious there’s far more to the universe. Thankfully there’s still plenty of interest in keeping the characters going, even if the chances of any more live-action shoots are pretty slim. A new comic will be out soon: Serenity: Better Days is written by Joss Whedon and will¹ be released on 12th March. There’s also a free, full-length fanfic novel by prolific sci-fi author Steven Brust, which I’m hoping will start a trend.

Incidentally, Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse will start (I think) this autumn:

The idea is those with the money or connections can access this secret highly illegal facility where they can basically fulfill their greatest fantasies. Most people assume that means sex—and on an occasion it does, because that is a lot of people’s fantasies—but it’s basically scenarios. They can basically reenact scenarios of romance, adventure or anything perfectly, because they become the person that you want them to be—they become that person. They don’t act like that person, they are not a robot pretending, they become that person, and then they forget all about it. The problem is the character of Echo, Eliza Dushku’s character, stops forgetting. She doesn’t completely remember, but she does realize she is a person, and that she might have been a person before she did this, and she doesn’t know what that is.

Sounds interesting…I’ll watch anything written by Mr Whedon.

1. apparently, although Amazon doesn’t know about it [↩]

Photojojo just publicly launched their Time Capsule system, which emails you twice a month with your Flickr photos from a year ago. I had a sneak preview of this, and it’s a delightful little thing: very simple, infrequent enough to retain its charm, and oddly fascinating.

The Focus on Imaging photography fair was at the NEC on Sunday, so my friend Ben and I headed along. It was a bit nuts. Over a hundred vendors demonstrated cameras, tripods, lighting equipment, software, frame-making services etc., and everything was for sale. Happily, very very little came anything near my price range.

Photography is an inescapably expensive hobby, but it’s ripe for exploitation. Case in point: at one point we were grabbed by an ExpoDisc salesman. The ExpoDisc is a filter that approximates 18% grey, the point being to slip it over the lens and generate a custom white balance for the scene. It filters light with prisms and “some kind of white material”; no price was given. We politely moved on, then later discovered they cost £50. £50! The same effect is achievable with five seconds’ extra effort and a piece of card - this would also let you white balance for specific lights, rather than the entire scene.

There were plenty of such products on display. A large crowd gathered around a demonstration of software apparently designed to automatically airbrush the hell out of already beautiful women - I’m far from a no-editing purist, but flawless skin and glowing highlights look ridiculous imho. Nevertheless the software was undeniably powerful and probably easy to use, which counts for a lot if you (for some reason) desire the end result; indeed, there were a few Photoshop plugin packages that seemed to consist entirely of scripted actions.

It wasn’t all like that, though - there was plenty of Cool Stuff too. High-quality printers were churning out A1 prints in just a few minutes, with paper manufacturers close by. The Nikon stand¹ demonstrated 52-point autofocus systems, while Canon’s platform housed a bank of Serious Cameras with Serious Lenses, all bolted to the floor and usable by the general public. I slipped my memory card into an EOS 1-Ds Mark III with a 500mm lens, which cost £4500 and £3800 respectively:

The full JPEG is 20 megapixels. Quite nice. The camera weighs as much as a mature badger, however, so I don’t think I’ll get one.

I felt weirdly intimidated, walking around. We were surrounded by Proper Photographers, all of whom looked extremely knowledgeable, capable and tall (seriously, I was average height at school, what happened?) and at times I felt like a play-acting child. I was too intimidated to try out the Canon until Ben wisely talked me into it. Hopefully I’ll get better at that.

We drooled over macro lenses and the non-bonkers cameras for a while, but somehow managed not to buy anything, despite being tempted by reasonably priced (ish) monitor calibration tools and instant-camera-cred lens hoods. I found it very interesting to see all this equipment in person - it removed some of the product-shot mystique, at least.

1. Ben took a wrong turn at an early technological crossroads and as a result is a Nikon lad. I attempted to educate him in the Ways of Righteousness, but was sadly unsuccessful. I’ll keep trying [↩]

I’ve never watched Dancing With The Stars, the US version of Strictly, but I might have to start: the new series line-up includes rationalist-hero Penn Jillette. Wow. Via SCB.

I’m a relativist when it comes to the arts. I’ll argue artistic merits based on my personal preferences, and I think it’s reasonable to logically analyse people’s likes and dislikes, but at base it’s all subjective. I’ve had heated disagreements with friends on this topic, but in my opinion all counterpoints eventually boil down to arguments from authority. These supposed authorities are regular targets of my ire, mainly those who set themselves up as ‘official’ critics, as I think they demean people for no good reason. However, my arty degree means I’ve been reading plenty of critical analyses over the last few months, and it’s interesting to get into the details of how these people approach their subject. I think there’s a lot of snobbery and building upon dodgy foundations, but occasionally somebody tries to justify the entire endeavour.

I’ve recently read a few essays by art critic Clive Bell, and found his writing refreshingly clear and direct. He meets the issue of subjectivity and the nature of ‘art’ head-on with his ‘aesthetic hypothesis’ - essentially an attempt to quantify artistic appreciation. Here’s the rough idea as I understand it: he posits an ‘aesthetic’ emotion. This emotion is felt by capable people¹ when looking at ‘good’ art, and is distinct from intellectual appreciation. Clive Bell doesn’t claim this emotion is the same in everybody, but thinks it’s invoked by a particular concept: significant form; this is essentially the arrangement of shapes on a surface. He uses this as a basis for differentiating between standards of art, as well as art and non-art.

I haven’t read around this topic yet, but I’m not immediately convinced.

1. I don’t think it’s scientifically plausible. What use is an aesthetic emotion? Obviously there are evolutionary by-products - we didn’t need to play the piano on the savannah - but emotions have well-understood, evolutionarily-necessary purposes. An aesthetic emotion would seem to have a different nature than love, fear etc.. Sure, the brain has plenty of matter devoted to processing shapes and lines - face-recognition is a massive brain module - but this is universal, and it’s dubious that only some people would have this ‘leak over’ into some kind of aesthetic response.
2. I think modern psychology would have plenty of explanations for Mr Bell’s emotions in front of a work of art. Analysing your own emotions is ridiculously difficult as we’re all subject to massive psychological pressures. The power of suggestion, for example. Ever tried to make yourself feel something you don’t? Weird things happen. I’m obviously not denying that people find particular arrangements of shapes pleasing, but to elevate this above an individual’s neural network of associations seems dubious. I’m not sure how ’significant form’ relates to non-visual arts, either.
3. It’s a conveniently untestable hypothesis, and reminds me of the religious tactic of ‘I just feel God’s presence’, as if this is meant to be convincing.
4. It’s a bit magical. You can link it to science, or you can link it to some Artistic Otherworld where objective standards exist. Bit spiritual for me.
5. Even if you grant the premise, the supposed artistic merits are a non sequitur. That some people feel an emotion when looking at certain things means nothing at all. Why should it? It’s a naturalistic fallacy, as if ‘the emotions’ override the intellect, or indeed anything else. The person who feels nothing while looking at Cézanne is no less qualified to judge ‘quality’² than the aesthetically capable critic.

All of which could have been addressed and/or straw men - as I said, I’m just starting with this topic. I wanted to get my thoughts in order, though. I very much appreciate that this guy writes so clearly - I might disagree, but at least there’s a Clive Bell-shaped hole in the wall.

1. if you don’t feel it there’s nothing you can do - you’re just a philistine [↩]
2. which I don’t think is possible outside of arbitrary frameworks [↩]

I had a happy lighting accident this evening:

T-Rex is standing on a mirror, in front of a white background. I fired a flash with red “gel” (actually a silk handkerchief from my old magic gear) into the mirror at 40ish degrees to my left. I expected the red filter to give a bloody, macabre feel, and the resulting pink/purple gradient took me by surprise. I love the effect, but I’m puzzled - surely it should go from bright red –> dark red –> black? I’m wondering whether it’s a white balance thing, although I can’t see how that makes sense…

I hope to read this post in a few months and think “that’s so obvious”.

Update: Ben Goldacre points out that a) there is no suicide chain - the numbers are pretty much average, and the local journalist suggests it’s more to do with the death of a pretty young girl attracting media attention and b) some cretin is claiming it’s caused by mobile phone radiation.

—

The spate of teenage suicides around Bridgend is pretty horrific, and has the media speculating about cults. The police have found no links, though, and they suggest the blame lies with the media coverage. This topic comes up in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point:

One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you’ll be convinced that behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can.

There’s obviously a difference in time periods and area size, but Gladwell had more subtle examples¹:

In his study of motor fatalities, Phillips found a clear pattern. [Media stories] about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people.

What do you do about this? Media blackouts would seem to be an unreasonable request (although any hint of glamorisation should obviously be nuked from orbit), but still…

1. my copy of the book has gone walkabout - this is reproduced from here [↩]

My university’s library has a huge photography section, and I’m allowed to keep books indefinitely providing nobody else requests them. I checked out Martin Evening’s guide to Adobe Lightroom in late November, and quickly glanced at some issues that were confusing me at the time. The book has been in the ‘I should really read that properly’ pile ever since, until yesterday when guilt got the better of me. I moved it to the ‘take back to uni’ pile, then just before midnight started flicking through it. I was still going at 0200.

Adobe Lightroom is my favourite image processing program, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how to use it. I really didn’t. The Lightroom manual detailed a huge variety of tips and tricks, as well as a few features I’d somehow missed. It also took me step by step through a digital workflow, explaining when it’s best to make each adjustment, giving basic primers in tonal range and broadly indicating what I should be trying to achieve. For example, I now understand how Lightroom tells me about overblown highlights, know a quick way to temporarily view only these pure-white areas of an image, and can judge which to leave intact. I also now see that Lightroom’s tone curves are much more powerful than I realised, and are in fact superior to Photoshop’s. I’d only scraped the surface of their functionality before.

I wish I’d read this book months ago! I re-edited a batch of photos using the book’s workflow suggestions this morning, and they all looked much better. Embarrassingly so - I replaced their Flickr versions immediately. 

I should have known better. I’m reasonably proficient in Dreamweaver, and that’s entirely down to working through a huge manual when I bought the full version. Such complex software is fun to play around with, but playing can’t pick up design rationales and subtleties. Lesson re-learned.

The government is considering dropping oral tests from language GCSEs as they are ‘too stressful’, according to the BBC. The idea has been slammed by Ex-Ofsted-chief Chris Woodhead, but then Chris Woodhead’s disdain is traditionally a litmus test for good ideas, so that counts as a plus.

Is it a good idea? I don’t know enough about child psychology and the goals of the education system to make an informed decision, but I will say this: my German GCSE oral was by far the most terrifying experience in my school career. I was in the top set for German, with a great, non-scary teacher who prepared us for literally months before the exam, and I worked hard to get ready, yet I still remember the abject terror of waiting for that half-hour session. It’s on a par with my driving test as the most nervous I’ve been, and its memory affected my A-level exam: I wasn’t going to put myself through all that again, and I forced myself not to care. It was one of the few times I ever completely flunked an exam¹.

For this reason I certainly don’t think the idea is ’stupid’, as Chris Woodhead says. Other reactions on the page include ‘life is stressful’, which is pathetic: in my experience life is very rarely that stressful, and when it is we hate it. Or someone else claims the point of learning a language is to speak it, so what use is a GCSE without a spoken test? In reply I’d question whether such a stressful situation can possibly give an accurate account of a student’s ability - wouldn’t it be testing their ability to deal with (unrealistic) pressure as much as their language skills? Plus, they only want to scrap the exam itself - teachers would still assess oral language skills in other ways. The reactions overall suggest a fair amount of ‘I went through it, why shouldn’t they?’, which I despise.

The report suggests that teacher assessments could adequately replace the oral exam. Sounds reasonable to me. The more I think about it, the more I’m in favour.

1. past tense as there are no exams in my degree - ra! [↩]

Not only does the tongue not have different taste buds in different places, there’s also no such thing as a sugar high. There goes that excuse.

Ate some squid today. Yum. I plan to eat lots more squid.

Also, some 11-year-old kids ran up my train carriage shouting “let’s go for a walk and cause as much havoc as possible.” This was swiftly followed by “wait, some people are trying to sleep here, let’s go somewhere else.” Ahhh.

Also also, the tongue doesn’t really have different taste buds in different places. My science teachers lied to me.