ITERATION THE NINTH: My Name Is Jon And I Am A Racist

There. I’ve said it. It’s out at last. It’s one of those things, your own personal racism, that you hope will stay hidden. In the same way that revealed members of BNP have understandably shown themselves to be ashamed of their affiliation, I am certainly ashamed to be revealed as a bigot, as a Mosley, an Irving , a Griffin. What surprised me most was not that my shame was revealed when the list of BNP members came to light - I am not and never have been a member of that organisation and Satan will ski to work before I join – but when I read of it in a Sunday paper. And do you know what else came to light? It turns out that you, my friend and neighbour, are also a racist. Look here:

...outside London and the more evolved large cities, the traditional view is that

black or brown people are all very well in their known place – driving a bus, cleaning a lavatory, being good at maths, medicine or singing. But a brown or black person who earns much more than you? Whose employee you might be? Whose house is much bigger and whose lifestyle you envy? That’s too much; that can’t be borne.

Now just who can Ms India Knight, for it is she, in the Sunday Times, ( November 9, page 22 should you care to check) be talking about? Shall we ask ourselves just where is the smallest city in the United Queendom? Could it be, with a population of 10,406, according to the census of 2001, our own small but perfectly formed City of Wells?

By Ms Knight’s lights, only in the larger conurbations can people be evolved and sophisticated enough to eschew racism and Wells can’t qualify on those grounds. And as for those of us living in tiny villages found at the end of muddy, crumbling roads... well, we must certainly inhabit some hell-hole to the right of disgraced TalkSport presenters.

Ms Knight is being, to use her own phrase, thoughtless rather than wicked. The thrust of her thesis is that, as someone who is –her words again – cafe au lait, she still endures the casual racism of certain people: in the case she cites in her article, her hostess passes a remark about a ‘dirty Paki’. Where she demonstrates her own thoughtlessness is in her suggestion that this sort of thing is only to be expected in certain places. Newcastle, say, where her example took place (Newcastle has no BNP councillors), but not presumably in enlightened London (which has a disgusting number of the creatures. More than none, that is).

It’s a depressingly common attitude, is India’s. She is rightly horrified by her thoughtless hostess and then goes on to demonstrate an incontrovertible and equivalent thoughtlessness of her very own.

I honestly believe racism to be on the way out. Not this week or even this century will the last bigot finally rot away like the excrement of dinosaurs, but it’s un-evolved adherents are now more inclined to remain in the stinking holes which they inhabit. The reaction to the publication of the BNP membership list proves this. And was I the only person to laugh out loud when the ridiculous Nick Griffin squealed that this exposure was in violation of the European Human Rights Act? How delicious that he who would have us widen the English Channel by 1,000 miles (not kilometres) if he could, now goes blubbing his pain to the very people he purports to despise.

Sooner or later, grown up people will judge each other on important things, not where they came from or the amount of melanin in their skin. I hope people like India Knight will help the process by being less thoughtless with their casual remarks. They be quite hurtful.

Iteration the Eighth: STUDENT NAME: God. SUBJECT: Intelligent Design 101. MARK: D--

Posted: 26-Oct-2008 12:51
As we have learned, class, it is possible to extract a decent photograph from the cheapest of cameras. This is because camera engineers employ a system that we may call intelligent design. Unfortunately, this system does not seem to have been known to the designer of that ubiquitous, if flawed, entity known as the Human Being. Oh, some sections of creation were clearly done by first-rate students; the cream who went on to become doctors, scientists or those who can deal with flat-pack furniture, and those who came up with such glories as the Great Barrier Reef, kittens and Pont l'Eveque cheese. But we humans obviously got stuck with the thick, nerdy kid who sat at the back of the class, picking his nose and surreptitiously reading a copy of Guns n' Ammo under the desk. OK, some bits of His work come close to perfection - Kylie Minogue's bottom comes to mind- but as for the rest... I mean, would you want to cross a bridge built along the lines of the human spine? Hip joints wear out at around fifty years and hearts tend not to last much longer (on that subject, we quite sensibly come fitted with two lungs, kidneys and testicles/ovaries - redundancy in design is sound engineering - but why only one heart or liver? Was redundancy in these area included in the original spec. and the build went over budget? Or did some of the cash end up in the Cayman Islands? We Should Be Told!) And as for the eye, well it's pretty hopeless. Easily damaged, no zoom function, the aperture adjustment is stuck on automatic and the whole thing has to be fitted with compensating lenses in a vast proportion of cases just to allow it to carry out its basic function. The difference with cameras is that they have evolved. God, it seems (and I make this observation from having watched the actions of His followers), has a hissy fit if anyone even suggests that His design may be flawed. He sulks and sticks His fingers into his ears, refusing to listen to even the mildest suggestion that the appendix, say, whilst great at helping koala bears to digest eucalyptus leaves, wasn't a very clever thing to put into humans. And the designer of the koala was probably none too pleased at having the idea nicked. This obtuseness has condemned millions of people throughout history to a rather nasty and painful death. Come to think of it, our Creator probably nicked the design for Kylie's bottom as well. Meanwhile, the designer of the glass plate camera happily accepted the superiority of roll film, and when the 35mm cassette came along in the 1920s no-one felt the need to nail Oskar Barnack at Leica to anything, even for a short time. Naturally humanities' problems would have been fewer had God been a woman. Less smelly for a start. Women are far too sensible (on the whole) to sulk because someone told them that there could be a better, more efficient way of doing things; they are a rational, logical species (except when it comes to shoes and hair, of course). God could learn a lot from the makers of cameras. And his biggest mistake? Making man in His own image. Could Do Better.

Iteration the Seventh, in which we muse on Wittgenstein, death and underpants

So, why is a washing machine like a camera?
No, this isn’t one of those surrealist riddles to which the answer is something like ‘logic is not representative; there can be no representative of the logic of facts’ as Wittgenstein, the old funster, had it. Nor is the answer ‘because they both have incomprehensible instruction manuals’ which is closer, as the one for the washing machine will be written in Swahili, but still wrong as the camera will come without any proper manual at all.

To find the answer, come with me on a short journey in which we may discover the essence of my contention.

The story begins with a death.

Perhaps I am over-dramatising here, as the death we are talking about is that of a washing machine, but you may well have cried had you seen what it had done to my underpants. A man came, shook his head sadly, directed us to a showroom, and we became the proud owners of a new machine. (A process which was a touch surreal: The engineer came at the time he had said he would come, the people in the showroom were knowledgeable and helpful and delivered when they said they would deliver. Which was one hour, ONE HOUR, afterwards. A round of applause, if you would, for Becks Electrical Centre of Glastonbury).

Be that as it may, we choose a washing machine. We had a choice of, ooh, around twenty of the things, varying slightly in size and colour, rather more in price. The most expensive was two hundred pounds more than the cheapest. All were machines that fall into the ‘basic domestic’ category; not washer-driers, not built to cope with hotel-size loads, just wash clothes.

So why the difference in price? Does the more expensive machine make your underpants £200 cleaner? Can it do extra tasks such as make a nice cup of tea to drink while waiting for it to do the wash? Will it use £200 less power/water/washing powder?

No. To all of the above.

Now look at these two photographs:




One was taken on a digital camera that cost, new, under fifty pounds. The other on a full-spec pro DSLR that would (and did!) absorb a month’s wages. You can probably see where I’m going here.

For basic photography, or basic washing of underwear, a basic machine is adequate. If all you want from a camera is to get a decent snap shot in straightforward conditions, go for the cheapie. I can’t see much significant difference between a modern camera costing £50 and one costing double that. If you do more challenging photography, sport, say, or wildlife, then you will have to spend more. The washing machine we ended up with has 3 dials, 6 buttons, 16 cycles and 10 lights. All of these add to the cost. How many are necessary? Are there really 16 different ways to wash underpants?

Visit the website: http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk

Jon Ryan

Iteration the Sixth

PUBLISH AND BE DA

Seems a shame, doesn't it? Just when we're getting to know each other, here we are at the very last Snapping Point column. Indeed the very last column of any sort, come to that.

Those of you who keep up with the important news rather than all that fluff about collapsing economies, elections in former colonies and wars here and there, will know where I am heading: The End is Nigh. And it's all the fault of a photographer. On Wednesday, a scientist in Switzerland will press a button that is attached to a camera called the Large Hadron Collider in an attempt to take a snap of something called the Higgs Boson. After a yawn-inducing wait of 0.00000000001 seconds, or just long enough to read the interesting bits in Wayne Rooney?s autobiography, the world will cease to exist.

Photographers are always being blamed for this sort of stuff. Back around 1510 Leonardo Da Vinci took a snap of Jesus, the first known paparazzo shot, the ramifications of which can be read about in Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince's THE TURIN SHROUD: IN WHOSE IMAGE?, (New York, Harper Collins, 1994). Then, in 1826, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a scientifically-minded gentleman living on his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saone, France, took a picture of his back garden, thus launching an obsession with gardening and lifestyle magazines that is with us still.

More recently, during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Hubble Space Telescope grabbed a shot of an object that is both 13 billion light-years away and also 13 billion years old. This was upsetting to fundamentalists, who insist that nothing is older than 4004 BC. Even more upset were the people who, having paid around $5 billion for the Hubble, found that the picture was of, as reported by the New York Times of April 14th 2000, "a reddish dot."

Personally I would argue that $5 billion for a reddish dot 13 billion light-years distant represents better value for money than $4 million reportedly paid for pictures of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, given that all new babies look like reddish dots.

Of course we cannot be certain that CERN will end life as we know it, or even this column, and you may be assured that, even if it does, the matter will be fully reported in next week's Wells Journal and its associated titles. Nothing as trivial as the destruction of the universe could stop us from going to pr

Iteration the Fifth

	Which camera should I buy? (The story continues...) Posted: 28-Aug-2008 13:58		Reply
(Reposted from our website) Well, Dr Who as Hamlet worked. David Tennant got away from the modern tendency to see not the ghost of his father, but that of Olivier walking the ramparts of Elsinore and was thus able to imbue the role with a rare freshness and energy that avoided the obsequious reverence which all too many contemporary actors have brought to the part. The previous evening saw Angus Wright give a wonderfully nuanced Shylock in a performance that sadly saw him receive little support from an otherwise rather wooden cast, and on our final night we were given one of the worst Tamings of a Shrew since Kate was first Kissed back around about 1594. All of which goes to show that spending the same amount of money in the same place for what appears to be a similar product can result in wildly differing results. Which, and perhaps we're trying a bit too hard here, brings us back to cameras. You'll remember that during The Merchant of Venice Bassanio, when looking into the casket in the hope of winning a wife (the 16th century equivalent of on-line dating?), says: "May the outward signs be least themselves, the world is still deceived by ornament," What he is saying here is that when looking for a camera, or a wife presumably, don't get taken in by the advertising. A phone may advertise the fact that it is fitted with a 10MP camera, a device that you may think is capable of taking a pretty good picture, but what it may not say is that the lens is half the size of your little fingernail and made of plastic. On the other hand, for less than a tenth of the cost of the phone you may be able to pick up a camera with fewer pixels but a proper lens, and you too will be able to say to your mum: "Look here, upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See, what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself..." As Hamlet did to his when showing her a picture of his dad. With the phone cam, she probably wouldn't be able to see Hyperion's curls at all as, despite the higher resolution, the poor quality lens would let the whole thing down. Which may have been what drove Hamlet mad, of course. Do a little research. Pretty much every camera ever made has been reviewed somewhere and had its review posted on the net. Think what you need a camera for; just the odd snap-shot? sports events? wildlife? landscapes? There are plenty of books, courses, magazines and people who already know some photography who will be willing to answer your questions. The salesperson is primarily interested in your money, not your pictorial aspirations. "No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en", as Tranio so aptly put it in Taming of the Shrew, he having obviously come up against some fly salesman who fobbed him off with an unsuitable camera before Kate and Petruchio's wedding. Don't let it happen to you! Just to cheer you up, I won't end with another quote. Jon Ryan

Iteration the Fourth

Arrrrrgh! Which camera should I buy? Posted: 28-Aug-2008 13:57		Reply
(Reposted from our website) Did you know that if you took one of each type of digital camera currently on the market and stacked them one on top of the other, you would be arrested for not having planning permission? They would make quite a stack. So, how on Earth do you decide which to buy? The one thing that seems certain is that, in this world of computers so powerful that they can calculate huge numbers (the number of times that Gordon Brown has assured us that the economy is sound, say) and tiny numbers (the collective IQ of callers to a football phone-in, perhaps), no-one knows just how many different models of digital camera there are. This would be fine if all of them did different things, but of course they don't. As with cars, televisions or telephones, there is an awful lot of duplication going on here. What they all have in common is this: you can get a decent picture out of any camera. Even the cheapest on the market, such as the one I recently bought for under £60 (new) can give you a good result. Which begs an obvious question: why pay more than £60? In many cases, there is no reason at all to pay more. If all you use a camera for is the odd picture from your holiday, then fine; get the cheapest you can find. It will probably come with some sort of manufacturer's warranty - they nearly all do now - and will in any case have to comply with (deep breath) the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (SGA), the Sale and Supply of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002 (SSGCR), the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 (SGSA) and the Distance Selling Regulations 2000 (DSR). (And if anyone wants to know what being in Europe has done for us, you could start by pointing out that many of our indigenous consumer laws stem from European law). In essence, even the cheapest of goods, be they cameras or curtains, must "be of merchantable quality" and "suitable for the purpose for which they were intended." That last bit is important. It's up to you to make sure that whoever you're buying from knows what the thing, whatever it is, is for. You would, for instance, tell the sales person what size window the curtains are for. If you don't and they turn out too small, that's your fault, not theirs. For basic snapshots in undemanding conditions, a cheap camera will do the trick, especially if you take some time to read the manual (see previous blog for how to get one if your camera came without). If you want to photograph birds on the wing or pictures that can be blown up to the size of bed sheets, the cheapy can't be expected to hack it. What camera to buy is a big subject, so we'll come back to it, but not for a couple of weeks. I'm off to see what Dr Who and Jean-Luc Picard are doing to Hamlet! As ever, if you have any questions or comments, leave them below. Jon Ryan

Iteration the Third

Crack those vac snaps! Posted: 28-Aug-2008 13:55		Reply
(Reposted from our website) What did you bring home from your holidays? Well, a few bottles of that local red wine that went down so well in the Taverna (especially after the third bottle!), but which now mysteriously tastes of creosote. A shell-covered box that, when opened, plays Nessan Dorma and has been doing just that for three days non-stop, despite your trying to turn if off. With a hammer. A nearly-gold necklace set with almost-emeralds that you bought from that lovely young man on the beach, and which has left you with a strange rash. (The necklace, not the young man. You hope...) And, of course, some photographs. Ah yes. Those photographs. Let's take a peep at the photographs... Look: here's one of the Taverna. Which seems to have acquired orange decor. And orange patrons. And all the food is, well, orange... Remember the lovely view over the bay? Well, here it is. Actually the sea wasn't at quite that angle... And as for the pictures of the Cathedral, and me in the sea, and both of us on the mountain taken by that friendly German chap - well, I'll try to explain what they were meant to look like, only the battery ran out, or the camera was full, or when I plugged it into the computer when we got home all the images sort of evaporated... Sound familiar? Odd, isn't it, how people will plan their holiday down to the last sock and aspirin and yet the camera, which arguably will bring back more memories than anything else, including the stuffed donkey, often gets shoved into a pocket as an afterthought - if, that is, it gets remembered at all. Having remembered your camera, here are a few things that can spoil your holiday shots... Flat battery- take spares (or pack the charger) Dirty lens - get a cleaning kit (about £5 from camera shops) Full memory card - Clear the old photos before you go And a few things that can improve them... Practice! Take some shots at home. Read the manual. Amazingly, and to their shame, some retailers fail to provide a full manual with their cameras and may even try to charge extra for one. Do they do this with televisions? With washing machines? Complain bitterly and very loudly if this happens to you. Sneer at the manager's tie. Write to your MP. Walk out of the shop. Then take a look at this link: http://www.retrevo.com/samples/index.html This site has thousands (I'm not exaggerating) of manuals that you can download free of charge. Vary your eye line. Crouch down for some shots. Stand on a wall (only when sober...) Look for a different angle, and then use... ***THE NUMBER ONE TIP IN THE HISTORY OF HISTORY*** for taking better photos: Take another shot! Pictures taken on a digital camera are essentially free. As long as you have spare memory, ALWAYS take extra shots. Whilst you can delete the ones you don't like when you get home, when you get home it will be too late to take extra ones. Happy holiday! Jon Ryan Edited by: Moderator on 30-Aug-2008 10:53 That's what you get for copy and pasting in a hurry!

Iteration the Second

(Reposted from our website)

This one comes up quite frequently on the courses I teach. The snappy answer (sorry) is: around 1/250th of a second at F5.6. If you take a photo, and someone buys it, then voila!, you are a pro. The trick lies in finding the someone willing to pay you. If your shot is of, say, Elvis riding Shergar down Glastonbury High Street you will retire in utter luxury (or should demand your money back from whoever sold you the mushrooms). A seventeen-year-old amateur recently earned around £20,000 for his shot of a car used in a failed bombing in London; this was a poor quality picture taken on an ordinary phone. The point of it, and what made it so valuable, was its rarity. It was news. And news sells.

Most things, though, are not news. Your dog is not news (unless it bites Elvis), nor your baby (ditto), even if it is the most beautiful in the world (and it is!). Even things that are news are not news if you don't have your camera with you, and know how to use it. Although the more excitable tabloids may be persuaded run a story about the aliens that landed in your back garden to ask directions to Venus, real newspapers will only be interested if you can supply evidence. Contrary to popular belief, we who eke our living hacking away at the word-face go to great lengths to ensure that what we write is, well, right. I'm not saying fakery doesn't happen, because it does. But - witness what happened recently to the Express and the Star in the 'Maddy' case - papers that try it get brought before the Beak. Journalists have been jailed for fabricating stories, and quite right too.

And so it is with pictures. These days, I rarely feel the need to bite anyone but have been known to grow distinctly tetchy when people suggest that a picture of mine owes more to Photoshop than my ability to drive a camera. Sure photos are Photoshopped - they have to be, in the same way that back in the Stone Age pictures had to be processed by fumbling about for endless hours in a smelly, sweaty dark-room using poisonous chemicals (care to guess which I prefer?).

And yes, it is now easier to fake photos than it used to be, but then photos have always been susceptible to a touch of judicious tweakery - do you think those Hollywood types from the Thirties really looked that good?

A photo in a newspaper does the same job as all those words. It tells the story. It helps to sell the paper. And - important point this - it will be as accurate a representation as we can make it.

So can you become a press-snapper? There is no reason why not. Photography isn't inherently difficult, but it does take time, dedication, attention to detail, a desire to stand around on cold, muddy football pitches and so forth, as well as a good eye, and the field is extremely competitive (as well as crowded), but as long as there are newspapers, there will be news photographers. And that's going to be a long time.

Jon Ryan

Edited by: Moderator on 28-Aug-2008 16:23

Iteration the First

(Reposted from our website)

I am not a great photographer.

Kindly editors have sat me down in their offices to point this out to me on more occasions than I care to remember. Reporters stroll over to my desk to check an image they have sent me on a forty-mile round trip to obtain, at night, in the rain, only to murmur how it is a pity that I seem to have missed the main thrust of the story, or how, despite the pic being just what they wanted, the story has now been dropped.

Total strangers stand in front of my lens at jumble sales and cricket matches, waving copies of last week's paper in my face and demanding to know why their child/spouse/vegetable marrow/prospective Parliamentary candidate was not on the front page/was on the front page/has a green face or, as it may be, only half a face.

I try to say something placatory and blame an Editorial Decision or an Act of God (roughly the same thing), or a drunken Sub, or that the reflection from the moons of Saturn caused an exposure error - anything, in fact, rather than the truth, which is:

I am not a great photographer.

No.

What I am is a competent photographer.

Put me and my Canon in pretty much any situation - ankle-deep in the frozen mud of a sleet-lashed rugby pitch with six feet of visibility and a growing suspicion that the players have already left the field, the awarding of a prize to a child with a nose-picking fixation, or even that most feared of all assignments, an advertising shoot at a beauty salon - and I will come away with some publishable snaps.

Photographers come in a variety of flavours - Wedding, landscape, portrait, glamour, sport - and many, if not most, tend to specialise in one area. As a press photographer I have been called upon to take photos in each of the above categories on the same day (with the exception, sadly, of glamour), all of which require quite different techniques.

And that is what I hope to impart with this blog; with each entry I shall try to pass on some of what we may call, for want of a better term, my photographic skills, and answer any questions - please do send questions, it will save me having to make them up - you may have, particularly if you are new to digital photography.

A tip to start you off:

When did you last clean your lens?

Every time I ask this during the courses I teach, there is a mass shuffling of feet and a lot of guilty expressions. A dirty lens is perhaps the number one cause of unsatisfactory photographs. As the lens on most compact cameras is only about a centimetre wide, a single raindrop or fingerprint (particularly fingerprint) can dull the image. If you have used your camera at the seaside, you will have, take my word on this, a thin crust of salt on the lens.

Any decent photography shop will sell lens tissue for a couple of pounds (ordinary tissue can contain scents that leave a film on your lens, or leave bits behind, or even scratch the glass, but can be used in a pinch). The trick is to be gentle when using it. The same shop should be able to sell you a lens cleaning kit that will have tissue, cleaning fluid (which you put on the tissue, never directly onto the lens), swabs and a 'puffer brush' that removes dust.

These kits are about £6, although I recently found a perfectly decent one for just £1. Lint-free cloth is also available, and this is fine but using it transfers the dirt from your lens to the cloth - and then back onto the lens next time you use it...

Enough for now.

Let me know what you think.