October 27, 2005
The Yosemite Refferal
"You ever read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'?" South asked me.
He never took his eyes of of the road. The sunlight flickered through the redwood trees above and fell into the car as we wound our way up of the valley.
The sun gets lazy in late october, tired from rising high every afternoon all summer. It slid around the horizon, barely getting high enough to crest our jagged, southern horizon over Sierra Nevadas. Julie was in the back seat now. I rolled down the window. We had just returned from a hike towards the Upper Yosemite Falls. The sweat on my back met the air and began to pull the heat away from me and out the window and replace it with the smell of cedar and granite. South kept both hands on the wheel like a sailor at sea. I kept both eyes up and out the window towards the sliding sun, shimmering in the redwood crowns.
Sheer physical magnitude on a scale seen in Yosemite National Park, completely contrived without any participation from human architects has always left imprints on my spirit. In the same action, i am pressed down, reminded of my finiteness, my tininess, my short term occupation here, and am also in some sort of way uplifted, with the feeling of self reliance, of natural processes of life and death and the eons that keep hewing the world.
As we moved through pillars of redwoods, they flickered in the sun like pages from Loren Eiseley's prose. i leaned back and tried to take closer look at the world.
Designer Karim Rashid once said he never liked to go outside as a child, because he couldn't change things in the natural world. I looked around and tried to see the world as imperfect. I tried to see Yosemite's half dome not as a beautiful natural landmark, but as a monolith of lava cooling from the Cretaceous period, eroded and half broken by water and gravity's relentless drag. I tried to see El Capitan not as 3593 ft. granite face, but rather as a crooked, cracked and broken statue, constantly being thrust upward by tectonic forces under the Sierran block, and crumbled by wind and water. I looked at the Yosemite valley like an gaudy and tacky apartment complex, out of date, out of style, and badly in need of being torn down or renovated with something more contemporary and polished. If the architects of man had their hand in these designs, they would be an embarrassment. They are broken, and they are imperfect in our world because they are not controlled and their physical appearance is unintentional.
But we did not make them. And we can not make them. And (thus,) they are beautiful.
But is half dome beautiful because we could never change it anyways? would our eyes see something better if half dome were "full dome"?
If our designs, our buildings, and our bodies looked like the natural world we would be appalled. If our teeth looked like El Captian, we would surely change them. If Capital Buildings caved in like half dome, the architects would be failures.
The icons of sheer untamed beauty embalmed by Ansel Adams are coveted as treasures of natural beauty. But nowhere in the man made world would we ever tolerate unmanageable evolution and destruction.
I looked back into the car and its smooth comfortable lines and cup-holders and climate control knobs. Perhaps, i thought, Yosemite is beautiful because it is of the remaining things we can not guarantee. it is of the remaining things we can not put our signature, serial numbers, or SKU numbers on.
"No, I haven't read that book" I replied to South. "What is it about?"
"Check it out." He said.
"Okay." I replied as we drove through pillars of redwoods flickering in the sun.
[- Also See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/troeth/57085759/ ]
October 18, 2005
The Birthday Girl (OR: Full Frame; 50mm)
A photographer let me borrow his Canon 5D today. And while the test would have been truer had i matched the exposure settings, these two images were taken of the same subject, with the same lens, at the same distance. One with the Canon 5D, the other, with a Canon 10D. Both are displayed here, straight from their camera's. Both are scaled down to %15 of their orignal capture size (click on image for accurate size comparison) :
| Canon EOS 10D | Canon EOS 5D |
| Jpeg Large Capture: 2048 x 3072 px 2005-10-18T15:22:21-07:00 Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec Exposure Program: Manual F-Stop: f/8.0 ISO Speed Ratings: 200 Focal Length: 50.0 mm Flash: Did not fire | Jpeg Large Capture: 2912 x 4368 px 2005-10-18T01:18:54-07:00 Shutter Speed: 1/6400 sec Exposure Program: Manual F-Stop: f/2.8 ISO Speed Ratings: 1600 Focal Length: 50.0 mm Flash: Did not fire |
Occasionally I ramble on about the inverse correlation between the quality of the medium and the convenience of the message. (Marshall Macluan, where are you now?) Voice, Music, Photography, even the printed word are all taking severe sacrifices in quality and trading it in for speed, accessibility, and feasibility.
"Have you ever read "Camera Lucida?" a student once asked me, (A: No I haven't. I'll download some else's synopsis of it and read it on my cell phone sometime.) as i explained how we will never again hear the sound of a dial tone; hear our family's voices on the phone not wrapped VoIP data packets, nor ever see real celluloid film- moving or still, see my memories made in family photo albums without jpg artifacting, or ever know what letterpress type feels like in on real paper made from wood pulp....
Since the inception of the digital SLR camera, photographers again have made a trade. We have traded in film and the camera bodies that house it for a relatively cheap (i.e. small) CMOS chip. The consequence: we don't see as much as we used to. The frame size of a digital SLR made image is cropped significantly.
Significantly, of course- until we get used to it.
Canon released a "full frame" (full frame compared to the traditional size of 35-mm film) camera, the 5D. I have been saving for a new mamiya medium format camera, I wanted to see more than I do out of a digital SLR. Once i saw the image produced from a 5D, I was awestruck. Digital cameras have only been around in earnest for 5 or 6 years, but already, I had forgotten the sacrifices in image size (let alone the image quality, digital noise, etc.) made so that i can see my image on the back of the camera right after i take it.
Standards are lowering, by some scales. And i don't they will ever tip back. Forget Medium format and the wonderfully deep and big images they yeild, I decided today. -It's old fashioned film anyways. I am happy enough just to get my 35-mm frame back. Remember the good old days of the 1990's? Those were the days: I was in high school. Gas cost $1.25. All the girls were pretty,.... Music was on CDs, and I could actually see something through a camera. How soon I forget.
Technology tries to make things better.
Technology tries to make things easier.
Technology tries to make things full framed.
Technology tries to make things as good as they are in real life, only easier.
-Happy Birthday Prada. My full framed friend.
