shadows

As you may have noticed, indoor lighting (especially industrial/corporate lighting) rarely makes things look good.  For a long time, I believed the marketing hype of the light bulb makers that this was due to the light’s color temperature – that if I used (more expensive) bulbs designed to simulate the Sun’s spectrum, I’d get better photos, and things would look better in general.

But now, I don’t see light temperature as the problem.  Instead, I think the problems with indoor lighting and photography mostly stem from a lack of shadows and contrast.  Lights designed to make sure everything is well lit prevent anything from being hidden or masked.  This makes photos inherently less interesting, because everything looks more bland.  Using a cooler light bulb won’t solve the fundamental problem!

gearhead and anti-gearhead

As I brace myself for shooting Fringe again (last year, I shot thousands of photos), I find myself surprisingly un-anxious about gear. I’ll be using the same Nikon D40 body I used last year. My primary lens this year will be a plain 50mm f/1.8 Nikon, which doesn’t autofocus on the D40 body. I don’t know if I’ll even use any other lenses. Since last year, I’ve invested in a split-prism focus screen, which makes using a manual lens much easer. I’ll also be bringing along a monopod for stability this time around. No flash, of course.

I’ve considered getting the new Nikon 55-200mm VR (although it’s awfully slow), but if I want some zoom it might make more sense to rent a pro lens. And I’ll bring along the stock kit lens for wider angles (it’s actually very nice). I feel slightly disadvantaged in that I won’t be able to use a long lens on a tripod like a “pro”, but getting in close is part of my technique. Go with your strengths, man.

I don’t really need more gear, or even much want it.  I’ve built my photography style around a sort of modernized Cartier-Bresson approach… small camera, “normal” lens, no flash, get in close and be unobtrusive.  As I’ve written before, I find long lenses for photos of humans make me uncomfortable, socially and politically.  I get good photos of people, especially non-portrait photos, but it requires me being close enough to the subject to get a feel for what they’re feeling.

Let the pros have their pro approach, I guess.  But it doesn’t work for me.

simple is hard!

I recently got my first bicycle in many years.  I started out looking for a road bike, but discovered single speed and fell in lust, then tried fixed gear and fell in love.  This isn’t terribly surprising, given my predilections in other areas.  Fixed gear has great immediacy.  You can’t just coast and stop thinking about what you’re doing – if the bike is moving, the pedals are moving.  And because of this, you need to plan ahead some – slowing for lights so you don’t need to stop completely, building up momentum for hills, etc.

Last night, I told one of my bandmates about my new bike, and the joys of fixed gear riding.  I said “Isn’t it just the kind of bike I’d get?”  And she said, “Yes – as hard as possible!”  To this, I replied “Simple is hard!”  And fixed gear is the simplest kind of bike there is.

mojo

Some instruments (or other tools) have “mojo”… there’s something magical about them that makes them play or feel or work better, compared to equivalent instruments.   Sometimes it’s general mojo that works for everyone; sometimes it’s mojo with just one individual.

Many people would argue that there’s nothing magic, that there’s no such thing as mojo, that there’s a scientific explanation for everything unique about an instrument.  Maybe there is.  But who cares?  “Mojo” makes a nice explanation for a real phenomenon – or at least as real as our flawed perceptions.  Those who argue vehemently against “mojo” aren’t arguing against the qualities of a given instrument… they’re arguing against a worldview that they feel is animistic, primitive, and otherwise wrong. 

And I suppose that’s important to them, too.  But once again, it gets back to fear… fear of being ruled by the irrational.

G.A.S.

One thing the music and photography hobbies have in common… Gear Acquisition Syndrome, aka G.A.S. (sometimes known as Guitar Acquisition Syndrome in music circles, but it means the same thing). It’s also a verb… for example, right now I’m GASing for a ribbon microphone. I don’t really NEED a ribbon mic. It’d be nice, but there are things I need more. But it’s G.A.S.  Meanwhile, I’m having minor GAS for a prism focusing screen with grid lines for my Nikon D40.  I’ll probably sate that with a $25 Chinese Ebay prism screen, rather than springing $95 for a custom one with grid lines.  It’d actually be useful to have 35mm-style manual focus support, considering the shortage of affordable AF lenses for the D40 and the many exciting used MF lenses for those of us who aren’t afraid to do our own metering.

The online communities for the photo and music hobbies are basically just big GAS parties, and the magazines are worse. It’s very seductive, the temptation to think that next lens or a new guitar will solve your artistic insecurity.

fighting your tools

Ig on the IG BLOG wrote about how you gotta fight your guitar a little.  I generally concur, but I think the idea extends to other tools as well… I like my cameras to fight me a little as well.  But it’s not just that I want my guitars/cameras to fight… I want them to fight me in useful ways, in ways that make me a better musician or a better photographer.  I don’t want just any old thing to be harder.  For example, if my Telecaster isn’t set up just right, it frets out on bends above the twelveth fret.  I HATE that.  It limits me, as opposed to fighting me.  On the other hand, I like using a manual focus lens on my autofocus camera.  It fights me, but it makes me more conscious of what I’m doing.

That’s the advantage of a guitar that “fights” you, I think… it keeps you focused and concentrating, and not just doing something too effortlessly.

protective camouflage

I do most of my web hosting at dreamhost.com, which has worked well for me.  I can install WordPress there (and have, for extraterrestrialhighway.net).  But for daily blogging purposes, I stay here.  Why? 

Well, here I get the benefit of a large community to protect me from “predators”… spammers and site hackers.  I don’t have to worry about the security stuff as much here, because the WordPress.com community has much more interest in keeping that stuff away than I do.  I could go for days without checking one of my other websites.  It could get defaced or used as a spambot and I’d never know it.  For that matter, I prefer hosting services over setting up a Linux box and running my websites from home, even though I could.  Paying someone $10/mo is worth it just for the backups and security patches!

Y’know, given where this idea is going, the title sucks.  But it’s a cool phrase, so I think I’ll keep it.

capability

My arts require tools.  And fussing over tools makes their users neurotic.  It’s almost amazing to me how photographers will nerd on about tiny differences in lenses, or guitarists will argue endlessly over which boutique copy of a Tube Screamer is best.  And to some extent, these tiny, almost unquantifiable details are important – I firmly believe that humans can often sense things they can’t measure (actually, the delusion that “If I can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” is one of my biggest pet peeves when dealing with the junction of technology and aesthetics).

But that’s not what I set out to talk about.  I wanted to talk about capability.  If our tools cannot do the minimum required for a given task, then we can’t do the task, period.  For example, I do a lot of low-light photography.  If I don’t have a lens of sufficiently large aperture and a camera/film of sufficiently high sensitivity, I simply cannot take the photos I want to take. 

For some time now, I’ve stuggled with a limitation in my recording studio.  I could only record two tracks at a time.  Now, through clever reuse of stuff I had combined with spending a bit of money I couldn’t really afford, I can record four tracks at a time.  That’s a new capability.  It means I can do more “live” recording of small groups with close miking, and balance instruments afterward in the mix.  It’s a nice improvement, and I hope to take advantage of it this week.

Changing our capabilities, as opposed to refining our existing tools, is something artists should consider more.

excuses

Earlier this year, I built a new computer for music recording and photo editing.  For audio, I installed my cheap-but-good old M-Audio 410 PCI card, not the greatest, but it’s kept me from needing to invest in another interface.  But audio performance was dreadful.  If I didn’t run it with a 2048 sample buffer (over 40ms of delay), dropouts were unacceptable and the driver often crashed. The computer itself is modern and very fast, so there was obviously some other sort of problem.  I went through all the usual suspects – driver updates, IRQ conflicts, etc - but couldn’t find it.  Ultimately, some surfing led me to doubts about the interaction of the modern PCI Express video interface with the PCI bus, and a belief that the video subsystem was stealing cycles and interrupts from PCI, and hence killing audio performance.  I decided I would invest in a PCI Express Firewire card and a new Firewire audio interface whenever I had the money – and that’s a fair bit of money.

So last night, I decided to take another look at it.  Turned out that the soundcard was on IRQ 16… a virtual IRQ assigned by ACPI in Windows.  That meant it could be conflicting with a sub-15 IRQ.  I disabled the serial and parallel ports to free up their IRQs, rebooted, and viola!  I was able to crank the card down to 256 samples, or about 5ms of delay, where it ought to be.  So it was an IRQ conflict after all… I just wasn’t enough of a studly nerd to spot the Windows ACPI hazard. Now I can put off getting a new audio interface until I really need more inputs/have money to buy something extra nice.

The lesson to be learned, though, isn’t technical.  Rather, the lesson is that when I see a problem, I should keep trying to resolve it, rather than making excuses and looking for something/someone to blame.  And this applies to non-technical problems as well.

the fine line

A while back, I made an off-the-cuff remark on a software development mailing list… I said that most software hovers near the line between barely works and almost works. I’d like to expand on that a bit.

Much has been made about the sorry state of software quality, and smart professionals wonder why so much software just plain sucks. This question is often answered by the idea that Technology X (whatever X is) will finally result in improved software quality – whether it’s object-oriented programming, agile development, Ruby on Rails, whatever. But honestly, I don’t think software will ever get significantly above that almost/barely line.

Why? Because advances in computing power and software development tools have allowed software to become more complex. And given more resources, developers (and their customers) will choose complexity over quality. They will choose more feature and new capabilities over stability and elegance. It’s easier to let a software project degenerate into a Big Ball of Mud and then rewrite it from scratch in a few years than it is to design quality from the start.

And the complexity of modern software is amazing by the standards of, say, ten or twenty years ago.  Imagine, say, convenient libraries for handling virtually any kind of graphics file over a standardized connection protocol.  That would have been wizardry in the 1980s, but it’s something kids can knock off in Javascript today.  And did I mention the native multithreading support?  A lot of complexity gets hidden.

Occasionally, a lucky bit of software will reach its complexity limits without being obsoleted by something cooler, and then can be refined for quality.   A lot of Unix shell tools are like that, and the Open Source versions are quite lovely.  But when do we reach that limit of functionality and start going for quality, finally?  And will it happen to really large systems, like operating systems, languages, or web browsers?

And will it matter?  Ultimately, most software is designed to solve relatively small, unique problems, and is subject to the whole quality limit.

Bah.  I need to finish this for now and rewrite later.