Sometimes I find it difficult to get a good night’s sleep in a hotel. It has nothing to do with the bed or anything like that. My suspicion is that as I get older I just find any change in my circumstances affects my sleep patterns – this certainly wasn’t the case when I was a young man. Anyway it does give me chance to make some art.
nocturnus quidem.
Over the past few posts I may have given the impression that I am for Brexit. I am not. However, I not in favour of running down Britain which I feel has sometimes taken the over some of the Remainer approach to Brexit. Britain has many many faults, such as every country, but is a very rich and successful. It has a powerful military and a global spanning cultural reach. It will survive and no doubt thrive after Brexit I just feel that aligniating out largest market is not in the best long term interest of Britain. Neither is allowing the European Union go off in a Franco/Germany dominated direction either. However, that is so much water under the bridge and now I feel we just have to make the best of where we are whether that is with a withdrawal agreement or not.
Yesterday I received a book I have been wanting for sometime – The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381. Now for most people this is hardly on the top of their reading list but as this blog I believe has demonstrated time and again I not your normal ‘someone’. The book very much does what it says in the title and consolidates and reprints all the records for the three taxes from the late 14th century.
For me the most interesting one is the Poll Tax return for 1379. Here for the first time in a national register we get to see the people of England. In the area of my study, the coalfield of north west Leicestershire, we see the first miners appearing two John Coleman, William Collier and Roger Collier. Each had to pay 4d. However as interesting as this list is the one thing that is not recorded is perhaps the most significant of all. Some of the people listed had survived the first outbreak of the Black Death in the late 1340’s. They probably would have been young children who may well have seen their own family die in front of their them. By whatever means they had survived and were now recorded for posterity. Even the people recorded who were not alive when the Black Death hit for the first time would left lives scared by the memory of what had happened.
So the next time you might hear someone making exaggerated claims about the effects of Brexit then remember the people recorded in the 1379 poll tax return. They had seen what real horror looks like and might smile at how trivial Brexit is in comparison. This doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to be bumpy over the next 6 months or so or the Republic of Ireland is going to be truly screwed if things do wrong and we leave without a deal. Instead what it means is that things are not anything like as bad as John Coleman, William and Roger Collier had survived or their parents had told them about. We do need to take a chill pill every now and then when thinking about Brexit – and that includes me!
If we dismiss the recent comments by Donald Tusk as being at best unhelpful and certainly not the most diplomatic language ever used – perhaps it is something to do with the name Donald? What are we to make of the latest moves in the game of chess which is the Brexit leaving end game?
Well the first thing to say is that whilst some in the Republic of Ireland welcome the comment from European Commision press release (see title) they really should be a little more circumspect. The statement is clear and it means that should we have a no deal Brexit then the Republic’s border with Northern Ireland will have to become a hard border – otherwise the integrity of the European Union’s customs union, single market et al are compromised. This of course drives a coach and horses through the Good Friday agreement (Perhaps that should be a 38 tonne lorry) Equally it will also mean that goods being transhipped through a third country ie the UK when reaching the EU again ie Calais will be subject to the same checks as those of other vehicles entering the EU from any other third country. It would be a total nightmare for the Republic of Ireland and no matter how many warm words that come from Brussels about solidarity the interests of the European Union is to get along with one of their largest export markets as best they can.
I have said it before and I feel it worth repeating – at the moment European Union solidarity hasn’t cost any country a single Euro. If we, and I mean both the UK and the EU, part without a withdrawal agreement that will change very quickly. Forget all the smokescreens about big businesses, such as car makers having problems – they will but they are big enough to sort them out themselves or rather their logistic provider will have. No it is the fresh produce exports to the UK are where the problems will really occur. I am sure that there are tomato producers in southern Spain who are wondering whether they will have a market in Britain after the 29th March? Of course they will but it is much more of a problem to transport produces that has a sell by date than a gearbox. If there is a significant delay at the ports then this will very quickly become a problem for the national Governments of the producers and that is when solidarity could start to crumble.
For an example of this you only have to look at the EU’s relationship with that other large, geographically at least, third country Russia. This is a country that it is widely accepted to have interfered in all sorts of European matters for its own geopolitical goals. Yet the EU’s response has been confused and weak to say the least. The main reason is that the member states have their own interests to protect from Germany’s energy supplies to traditional Italian political relations with Russia. I suspect that the Baltic states are far more reassured by the support given by NATO than the EU. (The main NATO European country is Britain.) The long and short of this example is that solidarity is easy when there is nothing at stack but national interest will always come before the EU’s interest. It is one of the main reasons that the EU is bureaucratically strong, the ability to hand out large fines to Social Media companies as an example, but diplomatically weak – it doesn’t even have a permanent seat on the UN security council which, of course, Britain does.
Given all this where are we on the Deal/No Deal spectrum? A few weeks ago I thought we were far more likely to leave with no deal however I’m no longer that sure. I suspect that we will get a deal, lets call it Backstop 2, through parliament probably by early March. There will will be an awful lot of fire and furry on both sides between now and then but when the real meaningful vote comes in March I think it is more likely that MPs will vote for Backstop 2 than against it. However, the one thing that you can say at the moment, if some says they know what is going to happen then you know they are lying, nobody knows. I just hope that the Republic of Ireland doesn’t come to regret the appearance of gloating at the UK’s difficulty – I suspect that Leo Varadkar was dismayed by Donald Tusk’s comments – they haven’t helped. If he wasn’t then things between the Republic and Britain could get very uneasy very quickly and that would be very unhelpful for everyone concerned.
I’ve just updated my website with some of the best of the photographs I made in 2018…it can be found at the address below
Another Sunday another session with the Canon FD Lenses and my Sony A6000. To recap I have set of small lightweight Canon FD lens circa late 1970s that I have decided to try and use with my Sony A6000. The reason for this is that they are small lenses which would be ideal for a travelling setup. The main problem I have encountered is that they are very difficult to accurately focus even with Peaking switched (A method on the Sony to show what areas are in focus.) This is very hit and miss and many times the Peaking shows that the lens is in focus when it later transpired it wasn’t. It would be useful if this problem was consistent but at the moment that doesn’t appear to be the case (I have to accept that there may well be significant amount of user error as well!) Nonetheless, it does call into question the notion of using this as a lightweight travel set up. I think the only thing I can do is to persevere and hope to get to understand the set up and reduce the focusing errors to a minimum. More street photography from Leicester methinks!
The future’s bright the future is a smartphone… As a now defunct phone company almost once said. In the grey nothing that is mid winter it does allow a certain amount of crystal ball gazing about the future of photography.
Photography as a whole has never been in a more robust shape. Every one who wants to can and probably does create 100’s of images a month for many many different purposes. However many people seem to assume that camera and lens production by established camera companies mean the same as photography – this clearly isn’t true. Given the number of iPhones that Apple produces I guess they are the leading camera manufacturer which somehow does not feel quite right. However the iPhone is the reason why there is so much turmoil within the traditional camera/photographic world. With total sales falling and everybody scrambling get a bigger slice of an shrinking pie. Some of the more traditional photographic companies may not survive at all.
So what will photography beyond the smartphone look like in the next 5 to 10 years? This is a truly impossible question to answer and if you doubt that just think back 10 years and who would have predicted that the iPhone would have destroyed so much of the camera industry. This being said I think there are some indicators that may well point to the way things are going to develop:
So given all these things what will the camera look like in 10 years time? (Even though I said just a few paragraphs before this was impossible!) I suspect something like the Zeiss ZX1 in form but with interchangeable lenses (I suspect that even the best computational computing may struggle to make one really good zoom cover every need – but we just don’t know.) I doubt that it will use a full frame sensor as this would make the lenses too bulky and be rendered pointless by the advances in computational photography. It will be a fully integrated part of the photographer’s virtual ecosystem and so can talk to their other wearable technology such as phone/watch and controlled by such. It will have a huge amount of flash memory built in (gone will be the debate about one SD card slots or two) as these cameras will be the ultimate hybrid camera with no card slots at all. There will be sufficient ports of whatever might be the flavour of the month to allow serious video rig building etc. (You will also be able to fit external storage if required just as you can with smartphones.) There may well be niche solutions of the ecosystem cameras aimed at specific needs such as sports photography.
Beyond this fully integrated ecosystem camera there will most likely be a legacy camera systems still available but their sales numbers will be rather small (Think of the Leica camera system – exclusive, expensive but loved by their devotees.) Although even these will be integrated in some form or another with the computational ecosystem camera systems described above. Beyond the computational world I also suspect that there will be a thriving retro DSLR market where reconditioned camera bodies will still be the choice of the most conservative photographers. You might even find that the camera manufacturers might continue to produce lenses for this market but this is much less likely. What is more likely is that the current crop of DSLR lenses will still be working just as good as they do today. (I have started to use Canon FD lenses which are over 40 years old and so far they seem to be holding up quite well.)
In short just as our homes are slowly becoming integrated with ‘Alexa’ or ‘SIRI’ so will all our wearable technology become integrated with the camera system . Whether the more conservative elements of the photographic community will embrace such a model is up for debate. It will, however, appeal to the current smartphone centric photographer where any new sales are most likely to come from. Where that leaves the likes of Canon and Nikon is another matter entirely. Kodak anyone? I hope not.
Day 2 of the great Canon experiment – which is something I’m definitely not calling my dailiance with my old Canon FD lenses – and I thought I would try things out on much more familiar ground. I’m not sure whether this was the reason or more probably I had had time to reflect on the lessons from yesterday’s walk around Abbey Park and change my approach slightly. Anyway, the images I made today seemed to be an improvement – certainly as far as the hit rate was concerned. The lenses are still wayward when you set them to any aperture smaller than F11 but I did manage to get some reasonable results from the 135mm which with the APS-C crop factor is nearer to 200mm. Still much to ponder but there is one trend that appears to be emerging – they do help make some cracking black and white photographs. Whether this is the lens or circumstance only time will tell.
It seemed like such a good idea – fit a Canon 24mm f2.8 FD lens I had to a Sony A6000 – what could possibly go wrong? Well the answer is nothing much apart from the lens isn’t anything like as sharp as its modern equivalent. The same could be said of the old fart who was operating the camera who had forgotten just how hard it is to use a fully manual camera. The result? Well I think the best that can be said is that they are a work in progress, both camera set up and the photographer!
As dawn broke this morning I found myself standing on top of a hill underneath the final approach to East Midlands Airport. It was a cold morning, not a middle of a Russian winter cold but cold enough for me. As a plane came into land I turned towards the airport and captured the shot above. Only I didn’t. This image has been altered by using the content aware function on Photoshop (the moon was lowered in the sky to make a more pleasing composition). Now this would immediately invalidate this image in the eyes of many photographers and I certainly wouldn’t be able to submit it to any number of photographic competitions (if I ever entered any).
Of course I understand such objections but it doesn’t seem to square with almost two centuries of fiddling and changing images. Before Photoshop there was the airbrush and before this the early photographers and their printers spent many hours in the darkroom changing the original image to meet what the photographer wanted. Is this a deception? Well I don’t believe it is any more than cropping an image is. The only time it becomes a deception is when you don’t acknowledge what you have done. As for whether such images should be accepted into photographic competitions that is very much down to the people that set the rules.
Away from the problems of content aware I visited Melbourne Pool, a location I haven’t visited in years. The pool has a special part in my family’s lore as it was here that a distant relative saw the ghost of the pool. However, by all accounts he was a notorious drunk so you pays your money and you take your pick!
Back to the freezing hill above Kegworth. The reason for my visit was that I wanted to capture the increasingly rare sight of Ratcliffe on Soar power station running at full power. Nowadays the monster sits forlornly next to the River Soar/River Trent confluence awaiting the call. It rarely comes. It is the last of its kind in this part of the Trent. In the past there were megawatt monster generating electricity virtually every 10 miles along a river that runs through some of the most productive coalfields in Britain. Whilst much of the coal is still there underground the demand has vanished to the newer cleaner renewable energy sources (just behind where this image was taken is a solar farm!). However, when the sun doesn’t shine and the temperature drops the old monster comes back to life and presents a wonderful photo opportunity. However, its days are numbered and probably within the next 10 years it too will be gone and so the last remnant of the once great coal industry in the East Midlands will be no more.
It is very easy to see Brexit as an abstract. EU good – Britain bad or vice versa. The same can be said about the debate over the Irish backstop – is this a cunning plan by the EU to keep Britain tied into the EU without Britain having any say about its future or not? All noise and fury. Then this morning I came across this simple memorial to one more person who died because of the problems associated with the Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland border. Now I am not saying that leaving the EU without a deal is going to lead to a resumption of the Troubles but it certainly won’t make it less likely. I am sure that the last thing that the DUP want is such an outcome but I am not so sure that some of the more voluble Tory MP’s understand that they are potentially playing with fire.
I hope for the best but sometimes I just wonder.
BTW Crossmaglen is only a couple of miles from the border.
Simon's Blog 