PHONES and PHOTOGRAPHY

Smart phones are increasingly equipped with cameras that in many ways encroach upon the domain of the compact digicam. While their lenses may be somewhat lacking in comparison, there is no contest when it comes to immediacy and connectivity.

A dedicated camera must be plugged into a computer to have the stored images available for manipulation or dissemination on the web. The smart phone, however, short-circuits this, enabling increasingly comprehensive post-processing and direct transfer to online mediums to occur on board: the digital documentation of life has never been easier.

I found out the hard way how the digital compact is no longer a viable proposition for the casual smart phone-owning photographer: I purchased a high-end compact (the well-respected Canon S95) earlier this winter, thinking it would be a good substitute for the times when I couldn’t carry my bulky Nikon D7000 DSLR.

However, despite boasting full manual controls, the ability to shoot in RAW and a host of other ‘pro’ features, I quickly realised that such cameras are merely the worst of both worlds rather than a handy stop-gap.

Fiddly to use, with the resulting images way below the quality of those from the DSLR, I found that I just couldn’t be bothered to put in the necessary work on the computer to get them into shape. Why bother when the iPhone can circumvent all of this?

Perhaps those who don’t own a DSLR might still feel the need for a compact, in which case the way to go would seem to be a so-called ‘bridge‘ camera, compact, but with interchangeable lenses enabling it to do what the tiny smart phone fixed lens cannot.

What has fuelled the smart phone’s usurpation of the compact camera is the sheer number of amazing apps available for immediate processing of one’s snaps. Software such as ‘PictureShow‘ can transform your pictures into black and white, faux retro or lofi with the ability to add noise, frames, and so on, producing stunning results and expanding the realms of creative possibility. ‘Hipstamatic‘ offers similar, but goes one step further in actually turning your iPhone into a retro camera for which an array of different virtual lenses and films can be installed. The twist here is that you can’t change the look after the fact, you have to decide before hand, thus perfectly recreating the old days of analogue photography.

Probably the most successful, however, is Instagram, ostensibly just another iPhone photography app, but to all intents and purposes a form of social networking.

Instagram, like others, enables you to take a picture (or upload a pre-existing one), then apply a themed filter, a frame and perhaps add a ’tilt shift’ effect to simulate depth of field.

The difference is that the resulting snap is then added to your ‘feed’ on Instagram as well as being saved to your iPhone. You can comment on the photos of others, ‘like‘ them, annotate your efforts with hash tags to allows others to find them, and ‘follow’ other photographers, much as you would follow people on Facebook.

I’ve recently been very enthusiastic about iPhone photography after realising that I didn’t need a dedicated camera to get good-looking snaps on the fly because of apps like Instagram, and because it makes me feel part of a community engaged in something constructive, rather than the vacuousness of Facebook.

I even started two tumblr blogs to house my iPhone efforts, the mock-philosophical ‘Souvenirs from the Surface of Last Scattering‘ and the insanely niche ‘The Cutout Kid.’

In fact, my iPhone snapping was starting to rival the enjoyment of ‘real’ DSLR photography: However, I think the initial two-month honeymoon period is over, and I’m beginning to see its drawbacks.

As much as the Instagram software itself is very good and transforms already well-composed shots into works of art (which admittedly when viewed at resolutions greater than that of a phone screen start to lose their good looks due to inherent low-quality graininess), it is the interactive part of Instagram that is starting to pale.

Just like other social networks, the natural desire to share your life (in this case through pictures) just seems to debilitate into an empty popularity contest where the ‘winners’ are those who can gather the most followers and get the most ‘likes.’ However gratifying popularity is (and us humans all seem to like it), as an end in itself it is utterly vacuous and detracts from the nobler pursuit of enjoying a cyber-stroll through a vast gallery of art which is what it should be at heart.

This mass pissing contest results in the bizarre: one man posts a picture of a cup of coffee, not even a particularly arty rendering of a cup of coffee, and it instantly gets over a thousand ‘likes‘ and a line of posters tripping over themselves in praising the author. The same kind of acclaim seems to follow those who are teenage, female and blonde, irrespective of the merits of their artwork, although in this case it is perhaps more easily explained. In either case it has absolutely nothing to do with photography.

Another form of debasement revolves around the fact that Instagram allows one to upload pictures from elsewhere: hence, many folk with amazing photos are actually just cropping their high-quality DSLR masterpieces into the square Instagram format, which seems to be a betrayal of the whole retro-Polaroid fun aspect of the enterprise which the developers envisaged.

As a joke I wrote a sentence using a string of hash tags to comment ironically on the way people follow their pictures with enormous amounts of these things in other to get views. I don’t think anyone got the joke, but it did actually slightly increase my usual number of ‘likes.’

I’m now coming back to the only position that makes any sense to me: photography is a form of artistic expression that to have any value must first and foremost be satisfying to the artist even if it exists within a vacuum. Any appreciation by others must be regarded as icing on the cake, else the pursuit becomes debased by the unhealthy psychological motives so in evidence on the various social networking platforms. This is true no matter if the capturing device is the smart phone or a professional DSLR.

To conclude: on the positive side, the iPhone has enabled us to dispense with dedicated compact cameras for our casual photographic inspiration and multiplied the potential for our artistic self-expression: inevitably the Facebook generation, eager for the approval of as many cyber-citizens as possible, will utilise such portals as Instagram for the dissemination of endless shots of food and self-portraits, but it is still likely that real artistic talent will shine through, even if the signal to noise ratio is likely to be rather low.

And, lest I be accused of hypocrisy, I’ll refrain from revealing my username on Instagram so you won’t be able to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ me…

Kindle? Not Enough Sparks…

I finally bought a Kindle the other day after finding that they were back in stock at Amazon.com after the Christmas rush.

I was ordering books for a forthcoming trip to Italy, and after putting a couple of high quality Blue Guides into the basket I realised I needed another, less cultured and more practical guide, so looked at the Lonely Planet.

As much as I dislike this series, they are useful for when you need to know about rail connections rather than obscure architectural trivia.

However, just as I was grimacing at the thought of having to lug this 1,000 page monster around when I’d only be checking it for details a few times, I noticed a Kindle version was being offered alongside the traditional book, and at a slightly reduced price.

A quick check revealed that the Kindle was in stock, and suddenly I envisioned the weighty tome being transformed into a small slim grey slab, which could also be stuffed with other documents, the ones I usually print out and staple together. A practical solution, even though I realised I would most likely never be reading novels from the electronic newcomer.

The Kindle arrived a few days later, and now, after a couple of weeks of use (or rather, non-use), I can say that its purchase was a mistake.

The moment I saw it I knew that this device was not going to be as revered and respected as my iPhone 4 or Nikon D7000.

The Kindle is just a very limited device in a medium which is clearly still in its infancy. Sure, its promise and premise are startling, and has potentially the same appeal as the iPod first had : you could have your entire collection with you at all times.

With the iPod, however, you still retain your earlier medium. Your entire CD collection gets processed and stuffed into the device, leaving you with both, the mobile lower quality version, and the full files on your CDs for blasting out on your fancy hifi.

The Kindle is different, and crucially so. That large book collection you’ve been building up over the last few decades isn’t going to appear on your eBook reader, not unless you’re prepared to buy them all again in digital form.

It’s rather like the shafting we all got in the vinyl to CD switchover back in the 80′s.

Perhaps some richer folk don’t mind that, and obviously it is they who are the main target for the device : kids brought up in the digital age wouldn’t be affected, but they don’t read books anyway.

Aside from that, which in itself is something of a deal-breaker, we come to the actual reading experience. The screen is fine, and easy on the eyes. The navigation, however, is horrendous. Clunky and unintuitive, all users of iPhones will constantly find themselves touching the screen, somehow hoping that it has suddenly become touch responsive in order to obviate the awful clickfest that ensues any time you want to locate something within your tome.

Maybe for novels this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but for reference materials it is annoying.

A few days ago I discovered that Kindle has an app for the iPhone which I dutifully installed and found I could download and read all of my purchased eBooks in style.

What a difference, even though the smaller screen is less pleasing to read: being able to navigate by touching headings, turning pages seamlessly by swiping the screen, having maps in colour and being able to activate links directly in a real web browser.

The iPhone will be coming to Italy, not the Kindle.

I only purchased one other book – a large compendium of poetry, which I thought might be nice to dip into. Unfortunately this was not to be – like most of the shoddy free stuff you can fill your Kindle with, this eBook came with no index or contents page, rendering navigation impossible. The illustrations too were missing, replaced by ugly placeholders.

My regard for the Kindle can be seen in the way I treat it – instead of buying a fancy case, it resides in a tatty yellow paper bag.

Obviously the Kindle has been a big hit in its latest incarnation, and sales of eBooks at Amazon have eclipsed those of paper, but for me the device is of little immediate use.

Perhaps it would be more appealing if, aside from the navigation woes, Amazon were to adopt the policy of throwing in a free electronic version with every real book purchase, just as the surprisingly large number of musicians releasing on vinyl include a free CD or MP3‘s. Then you could enjoy the best of both worlds.

 

TOO MUCH INFORMATION?

I was thinking about the Kindle book reader the other night, wondering whether or not it might be fun to get one seeing as how the price has dropped and it might be yet another nice little gadget to have around. Then I got to thinking that it represents yet another digitisation of the Old World, and I had to wonder whether that was a good thing or not. Previous changes have been in the fields of music and photography, and both transitions were not without their problems.

CDs – well, that wasn’t too difficult : sacrifice the large artwork for a dinky little booklet, but gain a far more durable and glitch-free artefact, and once we’d got past the initially lousy digital transfers there was no going back, really.

The second stage of the music revolution has been different, however. As an audio engineer of sorts I was always aware (and wary) of the sonic limitations of the MP3 format compared to the .wavs of the CD. This didn’t stop me from becoming an early adopter of the iPod, although I always drew the line at actually buying downloaded files, always preferring to have the hard copy CD beforehand. The rare occasions on which I have purchased songs on iTunes led me to realise not only the inferior quality of the files and the lack of artwork, but also the issue of ownership. Buy a CD and you have the music there in your hands forever (or at least until that shiny disk starts to corrode…). Download an MP3, and you are merely leasing it. Change computers more than three times and you’ll find that the song is no longer available to your ears. I lost a few in the migration from Windows to Mac, with no way to get them back save by re-buying.

So this last step I will not take, since for me the losses clearly outweigh the gains. Perhaps the young, brought up on this and not knowing any better, won’t care and will cheerily accept what is obviously a diminution of  both quality and consumer rights.

Next transition was photography. I wasn’t an early adopter here, and only went over to the digital side about five years ago, concerned again that the rendering of light into 0′s and 1′s would result in a reduction in quality. When I finally took the plunge and got my first Nikon DSLR, a D50, I realised that the crappy quality evident in most compact ‘point and shoot‘ digicams was not a concern on the big cameras. Once assured of the quality of the images, I embraced the vastly increased possibilities of digital photography to the full.

The fact of being able to see what you’ve just taken has transformed photography from an elitist esoteric pursuit full of arcane terminology into an egalitarian art form which can be enjoyed by everyone. Rule books can be thrown away, and free experimentation is enabled at no extra cost, a real emancipation.

And now Kindle, representing the digitisation of the book. Aside from my love of gadgets, I can’t say that I ever want to forgo the pleasures of holding a new book in my hands. I understand that the decline of the book is probably inevitable now, since young kids don’t read them anymore, and I find myself spending my commuting time peering into my iPhone‘s diminutive screen to read a whole range of things. I also get the undeniable relief our forests will feel when the book becomes a mere niche product like vinyl.

But still, I don’t think that the sheer convenience of having thousands of reads at one’s disposal can beat the feel and look of a real book. This is one transition I don’t think I can ever fully make.

And all this brings me to another consideration of these changes: is the ready access to vast amounts of music, books, information and images necessarily a good thing? The nerd in me loves the idea of being to carry my entire music library around with me, but after a certain stage was passed in the growth of my iTunes library I was reminded of the lyric to the Devo song ‘Freedom of Choice.’

‘In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.’

Sometimes of an evening, when I’m recumbent on the sofa and looking forward to an hour or so of sonic relaxation, I reach for the iPhone, open the iTunes remote app, and am then stymied by the vast amount of music available to me – around 21,000 songs. It freaks me out a bit. I don’t know what to listen to. Stick to a well-worn favourite, or try something a little less familiar, or even completely unheard? (Such is the amount of undigested material in my collection). Perhaps there are limits to what the human mind can deal with. I find I can handle a collection of 5,000 songs, but not one of 21,000. That I cannot conceive of comfortably.

How then, do the young folk brought up with the internet deal with this overabundance of material? Do they develop a good filtering system that helps them cope with the vast possibilities? And is the easy availability of everything causing it to be devalued? Do the teenagers of today love and cherish the tunes on their MP3s as much as I did the 7″ singles I used to buy once a month or so with my savings?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions, but I understand the importance of not becoming another tedious old git complaining about how things were better in the old days (I don’t necessarily think they were).

However, I do know how amazingly adaptable human beings are, and how the universe itself is built on change, and how it is futile to fight it. The digital revolution will proceed no matter what we think of it: the trick will be to embrace only that which seems to truly enhance life and reject that which does not, although it is often difficult to make this important distinction.

FAN OF THE iFAN

Has this virtual world of technological wonderment gone too far? Listen to my preposterous tale and draw your own conclusions.

See, I don’t sleep well. The slightest noise wakes me up: an earthquake in Mongolia, a spider coughing, or the susurrations of a distant water pipe, and I’m bolt upright, in confused panic mode, groggy ‘n’ grumpy.

Now for a good part of the year the window is closed, which is very good news for a light sleeper, helping to keep at bay the clack and clatter of the obscenely early newspaper delivery motorbike or the hacking coughs of octogenarian neighbours.

However, now comes the tricky season of summer, in Japan a particularly humid and sweltering affair.

There are two options: crank up the aircon or open the window and use an electric fan.

Well, the first option provides the best defence against the dripping sub-tropical heat, but it’s costly and anyway, my particular unit is kaput right now. So, that leaves us with the fan.

After a few days using it I found that I could sleep rather well. For while the gaping balcony window admits a wide range of potentially disrupting sonic events, these are effectively masked by the whirring of the fan blades.

Excellent! But then came the quandary: a few nights of reduced temperatures, and it was mild enough to render the fan unnecessary, but still requiring an open window to permit a semblance of airflow. But hell, that would also mean a night of cacophonous disturbance without the cancelling effect of the fan!!

‘Twas then that I remembered ‘Ambiance‘, one of the many small ‘apps‘ available for the iPhone which I had installed a few months back. Now this little device, for a few measly pennies, provides one with hundreds of looped sounds that can be used to create backgrounds conducive to a variety of purposes, including sleep. From the predictable bird noises and gurgling brooks through to new age binaural beats, various urban soundcapes and even folks snoring.

Could it be that they had what I required? Yes! A quick search through the sound files brought up no less than five types of fan, ranging from the industrial to the broken domestic.

Choosing a fine recording of a ceiling fan, I started to play it, set the timer, and was soon sleeping like a babe.
For you see, the looped field recording from the ‘Ambiance‘ app provided the perfect sonic replacement for the sounds of my real fan, thus blocking out the extraneous noise and enabling me to sleep, all without the real fan being on!

A marvellous application of technology, or an indication of the imminent collapse of human civilisation into a heap of petty nonsense?

While it’s hard to I imagine Julius Caesar using ‘Ambiance‘ in his tent during the campaign against the Gauls, I think the insomnolent Bonaparte could have improved his Waterloo performance immeasurably by a good nights’ kip courtesy of the iPhone, don’t you?

ZEN AND THE ART OF FINDING GOODNESS IN SHITE

Well, that was 2008 and good riddance to it, I say. Frankly, Mr.Shankley, it stank. One of the worst in blogging memory, or as Her Royal Dummy Highness Queen Elizabeth II might say, an annus horriblis, translated by many an uneducated oik to mean a bum year.

Her Dummy Royal Highness

A year that was filled with a multitude of sicknesses both mental and physical, real and imagined, afflicting both myself, various family and friends and even the poor old cats didn’t come off unscathed, either. From athlete’s elbow to elephantiasis via knobrot and arse-rash, they’ve all put in a cheery little appearance.

Add to that a flurry of financial nightmares, Kafka-like situations involving non-compliant offshore banks, disappearing debtors, massively increased taxation, dwindling income and threats of redundancy, and that was mostly all before the Big Crash of October, which of course, was just around the time I decided to finally get some investments sorted out to cover my theoretical dotage. Nice timing, sir!

K contemplates the fate of his futures portfolio

Now I’m not essentially a gloomy soul, and indeed my recovery rate from setbacks can be amazingly fast. Zen-like focusing on the moment, I wake up each day, putting the bad memories of the past to one side, and consider only the goodness in the world as I skip merrily down the road in my flat cap, radiating working-class cheeky scamp bonhommie to all around me as yet another bucket of rotten fish offal is dumped onto my poor noggin.

Mr.Grimsdale! Mr.Grimsdale!

And so, in the interests of balance, and to counteract the lake of maudlin collecting around our feet, I will now list all of the nice things that happened in 2008, for it was not all bleak Dickensian squalor and consumption.

• iMac – last December’s change over from PC to Apple was a great move, and I’m still marvelling at that sleek sexy trouble-free machine residing regally upon my desk.
• iPhone – it costs a bloody fortune to run, but hey, it’s been a boon, what with it’s internet abilities and numerous pointless but fun applications to kill commuting time.
• Logic Pro – Apple’s music production software has recently served to totally re-energise my creativity in this field, and the last few days have seen a veritable outpouring of new sonic fare from this wonderful device.

Kajagoogoo's "Too Shy" seen in wave form in Logic Pro

• Single Malt Whiskey - the hard times have been enlivened no end by my recent obsession with collecting and sampling these delightful alcoholic concoctions, and what better thing to do than drink when recession looms?
• Cosmology & Quantum Physics – never thought I’d be reading science books, but these subjects are fascinating and awe inspiring, containing all the weirdness and mystery one needs to replace the quackery and nonsense pedalled by the paranormal believers.
• The Roman Republic – still captivating, I continue to plough through original source accounts as well as university lectures and TV documentaries on this incredible period in history.

Where's Anthony Hopkins?

• YouTube – my videos of Joy Division basslines have surprisingly garnered a lot of 5-star reviews together with appreciative and supportive comments, which has warmed the very cockles of my heart. Who says the internet is just populated by pimply abrasive adolescents who can’t spell?
• Paris – just there for 4 nights in September, and it cost me a fortune, but it was as magical as ever.
• Domestic Travel - Osaka, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Matsumoto, Nagano, Nagoya – all very enjoyable and reminds me that there is still much to like about Japan.

Kanazawa - Geishas oot for the lads!

• British Comedy – my sanity has been maintained by nightly dips into the insanity of The Mighty Boosh, Black Books, Spaced, League of Gentlemen, Monty Python, Snuff Box, The Office and Red Dwarf. Thank the Deity for DVDs and Amazon!
• Starbucks – yes, it’s expensive, and those of you out in the civilised world may not think it anything special, but my frequent jaunts to my favourite branches have provided me with oases of warm tranquility in an otherwise hostile and smelly universe.

iBLOG

Blog looks different, huh? I changed it last night from blogsome to wordpress, not because there was anything wrong with the old one, but because wordpress have released a little application that allows blog integration with the marvellous iPhone. Yes, you heard right, buddy, this cat went out and grabbed himself one o’ them 3G wonders the day it was released here in Japan, and now I’ll be able to productively utilise my comatose Starbucks sessions to wax lyrical more frequently thanks to my tiny-keyboarded electronic bundle of over-priced joy! Huzzah!

However, as I type this it suddenly occurs to me that what with the iPhone‘s full web browsing capabilities I could have just gone and blogged on the old one as usual, buy hey! a change is a good as a rest and there’s nothing like a new gadget for doing a whole load of pointless and time-consuming things that didn’t really need to be done…

Still, the new blog layout is rather fetching, isn’t it, what with the exciting colour scheme and that cool banner shot of some bimbos in Nagasaki chirping to an audience of umbrellas (one of my all-time classic photos, methinks, oh so modestly).

And don’t worry, I will of course be porting over all of the old posts in yet another gargantuan task of time-wasting analness. If that is not a real word, that how about ‘anality‘?

However, all has not been well with some other of Mr.Job’s products. On July 6th my iMac winked out of existence before my very eyes, and was shortly carted off by some men in white coats and dark glasses. More than a fortnight elapsed before the machine mysteriously reappeared with a terse note to the effect that some unspecified bits had been changed. Luckily not the hard drive as I had feared, and thus my enormous collection of men’s relaxational cinematic renderings were saved, albeit probably sullied by the gaze of some grinning Mac grease-monkey at the depot.