Peculiar

My ‘old’ 400D still brings me a lot of joy. It’s so easy to use. It’s nice and small and easy to take everywhere, and somehow the built-in flash gives me better results than the built-in one on my 50D or the expensive external one, at least for parties and wide shots. I rarely use the full automatic mode (the green rectangle) but whenever I use it the results are excellent.

This particular shot, though, is as manual as it gets. It’s a combination of three exposures using an infrared filter on the 400D using a 50mm prime at f/2.8. I photoshopped the result a bit to return the colors to something resembling real life and to add a bit of sharpness. Exposures were 2 seconds, 6 seconds and 25 seconds at ISO400. It feels like cheating when you mess with the channels in PS, but I guess it can’t be helped for infrared shots. Note: at very long exposures a considerable amount is leaking in through the eyepiece. Be sure to cover it when doing infrared in daylight!

Order

Order is important. Without order there would be chaos. Duh.

In a more spacy sense, order is the fight against entropy. The universe always seems to want to return to chaos. Buildings get dusty and crumble, bodies die and decay, suns explode and disappear. Oh, and software always stops working after a while unless you fix it, reinstall it or download a patch. Things have to be kept in proper working order in order to be in order.

Daily life rhythms. Wake up at 8AM. Take a shower, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, go to work at 9AM sharp. Some people love this (live this, actually). I hate it. Sometimes, unconsciously, a pattern appears in my daily life. Can’t avoid the lunch break at noon, of course. But weekly patterns, like always eating sushi on Friday, or always having curry on Monday, that I try to avoid. When I notice the pattern I immediately feel an urge to change it. I wonder if that’s just me or if other people do this. I know for a fact that my father loves his daily life patterns. Sometimes he pretends to complain but I know he’s really quite proud of his regular life. On the contrary, I feel quite proud of my irregular life. Must be some freudian thing, I suppose.

Letters arranged in the right order form a novel. Machine code instructions in the right order are a piece of software. Thoughts arranged in the right order are a scientific theory or a brilliant idea (or instructions to the hand for writing that novel). People arranged in the right order are a profitable company. Musical notes played in the right order are a product of the ordered thoughts of people like Beethoven and Bach.

Can there be too much order? If a computer program plays Beethoven, a true knower of music might argue that it’s played too ‘mechanically’, or too cold. If a real person played it there would be more feeling in it. But isn’t that feeling created from the disorder in the person playing it? If he could play it perfectly (that is, exactly according to the musis sheet) then he would sound exactly like the computer. And isn’t the idea for the music itself a result of the random thoughts of its creator? Perhaps we need the right amount of chaos to create the right amount of order. Too few order, and no coherent idea will appear. Too much order, and we might as well be computers, running our little machine instructions one by one, not comprehending or understanding why we do what it is we do best: creative thinking.

Freeflow

For weeks or months now I have been operating in freeflow mode. That is: whenever I feel like doing something, I do it. Or, whenever I don’t feel like doing something, I don’t do it. That sounds like something that could go horribly wrong, but strangely enough things are going quite alright. I can’t keep it up 100% of course. There’s work, and there’s meetings I need to schedule and prepare for that I don’t want to do, but all in all the percentage of things in my life that I don’t like is at an all-time low.

Example. I was cycling to somewhere. Suddenly I thought: I want to eat strawberries! So I turned around and cycled to the supermarket.

Ok, stupid example. And the supermarket didn’t have strawberries either. But you see my point, I hope. If the thought enters your mind, it must be for a reason. So why not follow up on it. I could have thought: but I’m going home right now, I MUST go home. In a freeflow state there is no fixed ‘mode’ that your brain operates in. It can change instantly to something else. Kind of like ADD, which is now called ADHD. Apparently ADD also stands for Asian Drinking Disorder. Brilliant. Call it voluntary ADHD then. It’s rather relaxing except for when I’m surfing wikipedia. I always seem to want to click on one more link before going to bed…

SUPER TURTLES

Did you know that the Samurai Pizza Cats show is so hilarious because the translators did actually never receive a translation from the Japanese original? They had to make up the whole story just based on the video!

Yoron!

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Summer

The sound of the Cicadas in the trees is deafening! There must be hundreds of them.