Today I was reading a collection of tanka poems, translated into Finnish by Tuomas Anhava during 1960-1982. Even though the Japanese originals are impossible to fully translate, Anhava (who is a poet) has managed to make the translations into works of art.
Some tanka poems are such that they almost feel like photographs. Perhaps this type of poetry is the closest words can come to the art of photography?
We organized today a birthday party, and thus I was unable to go for a walk until it started to get dark. Here is a selection of nightly photographs, most are processed from RAW files.
While working with the RAW files I noticed that my standard preset for RAW conversion doesn't work too well with night-time photographs, so there is some experimentation (and learning) to be done.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Reading tanka poems and pondering darkness
Sunday, September 25, 2011
It ends with a recipe
Today we had sunshine, and it was a great opporturnity for a long walk: past the bog at Tremanskärr, across some rocky forests to Stavurkärr swamp, then climbing up a rocky hillside to a smaller and drier swamp, and then to Kurkijärvi lake.
By the way, I'm having trouble naming different swamp types in English. For example, the third swamp I mentioned above is "räme" in Finnish. This is an English translation: "boreal swamp type characterized by sparse growth of pine, thick layer of sphagnum on the ground and dense growth of woody shrubs".
I didn't even know the word sphagnum and had to look it up: "a genus of between 151 and 350 species of mosses commonly called peat moss, due to its prevalence in peat bogs and mires".
It is much simpler to say "räme" in Finnish...
Today I got disappointed with yet another book on photography. This time I had been reading David Taylor's Digital Black & White Photography (Ammonite Press, 2011). As so often, this book consists of short recipies, most of which were only one or two pages long. For example, the recipies about histograms and metering were well written, but all too short for my taste. I would like to know more.
A typical oversight in most books on photography is the handling of camera aperture. The f-stop range is given to the reader, often without any explanation where the numbers come from and how they are related to the amount of light passing through.
And the related topic of depth-of-field (DOF) is hardly described at all, except by saying that a small f-stop number means shallower DOF. But why? That is a question I hardly ever see answered, even though the answer is not complicated, just a little bit of elementary geometry.
Am I alone wanting to know the reason why something happens? Or is everyone just too busy to think about reasons these days?
I have started to think that giving recipies without going deeper is the prevalent trend today, whatever the topic: economy, politics, sports, entertainment, science, technology. Just recipies, with a lot of facts, but no explanation - and not even an attempt at questioning - why things work as they do.
... We live in a cookbook society.
This is the final stanza of The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
I have started to think that the essential content of that whimper may be recipe, so I might write "Not with a bang but with a recipe". I know, this is not as poetic as whimper, but I don't care.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Writing with light
I'm currently reading a book about b&w photography, where I was reminded of what photography means. It is put together from the Greek words photos (ϕοτοσ), meaning light, and graphos (γραοσ), meaning writing, delineation, or painting.
Sometimes I don't feel much interest in taking photographs, but I get going nevertheless. The weather forecast promised nice weather for today, but it rained most of the time while I was out walking.
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