Hutong Life

It's been five days since I am in vacation. These things should be more often.

So five days of real hutong life. I wake up to birds. And hawking Chinese, but that's irrelevant.

Dogs bark... actually they mostly yap, because all the dogs around are tiny. And vicious.

There are trees all around.

Today it rained, and I listened to the rhythm of the falling rain... (cue soundtrack).

I am so happy that I have nothing to do for three weeks, that I don't even know what to write now.

I'll have to post again.

A picture - this is what I see when I open the door to the roof terrace.

Book Nightmares

In very recent future IP laws are very powerful.

People are forbidden to share books. What pirating was before -sharing an electronic version of a book or a sound file you had bought online has evolved into a ban on sharing all authored printed materials.

People have to catalogue their home libraries and register the books with PIPPA ( Printed Intellectual Property Protection Authority). People's online conversation are monitored and if they mention reading a book that is not registered on their name they are investigated.

This leads to new ways of sharing - reading aloud. There are parties where a certain book in possesion of the host never leaves the hosts hands but he reads it aloud and the guests listen on. Viewed as the right of people to free speach this activity cannot be criminalized. People under investigation explain they overheard someone reading the book. PIPPA passes a ban on reading books aloud in public spaces but cannot touch the reading home parties.

Libraries receive huge security budgets and all electronics are taken from readers when they go in. They are patted down airport style and allowed to browse the books while monitored with cameras. Borrowing books to read at home is not allowed anymore.

Book markets are very popular and well advertised, but in order to buy a book people have to provide valid identification. Some businesses use books as end-of-year bonuses.

Schools have pretty much stopped teaching books from great writers due to their unavailability.Literature lessons now teach the IP laws and how to protect our books from theft.

Every person who starts writing a book of their own must first obtain a permit to do so. The permit is easily issued, but the authors are registered and often monitored to make sure they haven't given the book to someone to read it (usually to family and for an opinion) because this constitutes facilitating a theft. If the author does not bring charges against its family, the state has the right to brings up charges on their behalf, and they can even sue the person writing the book on behalf of their virtual identity which is being hurt by the physical person sharing the book.

Copying the books by hand is considered plagiarism and falls under the restrictions imposed by PIPPA. It can be done and is allowed as long as the hand-copied book does not leave the home where the printed version is registered. Copy machines are licensed only to businesses and not to homes, and every year their hard disks are changed and searched for illegal copies of books.

An underground movement forms which uses a loophole in the regulations. All books must be registered by language. This movement translates random parts of the books in a different language, usually the beginning of every sentence, or every second word. This way the advanced software that the PIPPA ( Printed Intellectual Property Protection Authority) uses cannot correctly identify the books and they fall in the cathegory of unregistered sribblings and therefore are not protected by the law. These semi- translated books are easily decipherable by anyone with knowledge of the languages in question and there are many groups for Scribblings Disposal that have a good business on the side.

Registered books in home libraries are not allowed to be taken out of the home without the proper permits, and are forbidden to be taken out of the state or the country. In the past there were drug mules, now there are book junkies. These are people willing to trafic books. The best and most expensive ones spend months to years in preparation and effectively learn the trafficked book by heart. Then they travel to their destination, successfully passing through all security controls, and once arrived in a safe place, they recite the book exercising their right of free speech.

Now that's a nightmare.

Back To Fuji (F810)

It’s been some time since I posted here. My excuse is work, work, and unfortunately no time to take pictures. No time to take good pictures, I mean, because I work in a kindergarten now, and we HAVE to take pictures every day, loads of them, to send them to the parents. And once the work is over I am so tired, that the world is simply not beautiful enough to tempt me to take a picture. Sigh.

Then the Chinese New Year holiday came, and things changed.

I dusted off my cameras, (nikon D40 and Fuji), charged my beloved fuji F810 and found out that the flash problem didn’t go away on its own as I has secretly expected. The camera somehow thinks that flash is always on, and tries to take pictures with it, closed or not. The result is underexposed images with the flash closed and a battery that runs out in the matter of hours. The only work around is in landscape mode.

So I opened the Chinese shopping sites, and on Taobao found another second-hand F810, and promptly bought it.

I doesn’t have a flash problem so far, or any other problem, and little by little the world regained its beauty.

Why I keep coming back to this discontinued camera? After all it came out in 2004, that is six

years ago.

Because it delivers amazing pictures for its size.

Before, cameras used to write images on light-sensitive emulsion, placed on film. Now cameras use sensors, a lot smaller than a film negative. There are advantages to this, as cameras get to be lighter and smaller and thinner. The disadvantages are loss of picture quality. A problem with most digital cameras is enlarging the pictures. When you do that you’ll see smudged corners, blurred details. The bigger cameras, DSLR , professional or not, use bigger sensors.

There are many things that make up a good picture. I’ll keep it short and simple. Each digital

sensor has a lot of pixels. They are millions of pixels, and 1 000 000 pixels amount to one 1megapixel, or 1 MP.

When you put a lot of pixels on a small sensor, the pixels have to be smaller too. Smaller pixels catch less light. Light is very important when you take a picture...You realize this when you shoot indoors or in the evening. Even when your eyes tell you that the light is enough, your

camera often doesn’t think so. That’s why we have the flash, but you can’t always take pictures with a flash.

The bigger cameras, DSLR have larger pixels on a larger sensor. The pixel density with them is something like 2-5 million pixels per square centimeter. While the lighter and cuter digital cameras have between 30-45 million pixels per square centimeter. It affects the picture quality, and it’s best seen in low light conditions. The cute digital cameras have higher ISO, light sensitivity, but it brings another problem - digital noise. These are dots of color on your photographs, that simply do not belong - blue, green, purple. To deal with noise, cameras employ noise-reduction techniques, which ultimately hide these colorful dots, but smudge the

fine details in your pictures.

Now back to Fuji F810.

It’s sensor size is 1/1.7, or 0.43 square centimeters. That’s is not bad at all for a camera this

size. The pixel density is 14 million pixels per square centimeter. It has only 6 megapixels. It makes quite good pictures. Another thing that drew me to it, is its ability to save images in RAW. Most point-and-shoot cameras deal only with JPG pictures. They are fine, but what the camera does is to take all the control from you, process the sensor data, adjust levels, colors and white balance, and compress the image to a ready to use JPG file.

If you want to keep that creative control, you need to take pictures in RAW format, and then process them with Photoshop or another program that deals with them. Many people don’t bother and are perfectly happy with the JPG output. I, however, want to experiment with my pictures. I want to see if I can bring up a picture shot in the evening, if I can brighten up a portrait taken at home, not close to a lamp or a window.

Of course, i can do all this with my Nikon D40, that’s why I got it. It has a larger sensor and pixel density of 1.6 million pixels per square centimeter. But my Nikon is larger, heavier,

impossible to carry in a pocket, to hang from my wrist, and definitely attracts attention

whenever I point it at somebody. While candid pictures, or street pictures are not even noticed if I am brandishing a little silver camera taken out of my pocket.

Because in the case of Fuji F810 appearances deceive. It can save images in RAW format, and later, in the comfort of my own home and Photoshop I can make them appear the way I saw them.

Our eyes and brain are the best camera. They adjust quickly to light, and compile an unforgettable image in our memories.

How many times you have you taken a picture of an amazing scenery, only to arrive home and find out that the image is not what you saw? The greens don’t shine the way you remember

them, the colors of the sunset are washed out, and the sun reflection on our friends hair is just a white blotch? If I save the pictures in RAW I try to process them to get the image I saw. The

image that inspired me to press the shutter.

So there it is, my reason to hunt down and get another second-hand Fuji F810. Because they

just don’t make them like this anymore. Its tiny silver metallic body hides the fact that this camera has a low pixel density on a relatively large sensor, it produces low noise pictures, it is able to save them in RAW format, it has very sharp and clear lens. It has full manual controls, which means that I can adjust the speed, the aperture (opening), the light sensitivity (ISO). And it fits comfortably in my pocket.

Here are four images taken with it, to illustrate what I mean by good pictures.

Posted on www.silviamyworld.blogspot.com

Things we say to strangers

There comes a time when all the people we meet are strangers. On the streets, at work, in the cafes, on the planes.

Everyone is a stranger, and we tell them things.

It doesn’t matter what we say, because they don’t care. Or we won’t see them anymore.

It’s such a fascinating opportunity to make a new person of ourselves. We don’t have to lie. We just have to not say certain things. We omit mistakes, family members, years spent doing things that are not important anymore.

And it makes me wonder, of all the people I meet and talk with, how many are doing the same thing as I am? How many are showing just a side, a polished shiny side of them. They are like icebergs; they look different if you move a step away, different if you take a step closer. Different under the sunlight, and different in the fog.

Iceberg is a cold word. I used to think that people are like diamonds, multifaceted, and beautiful. Impossible to see them all.

Impossible to know them all.

There is a certain relief in the fact that no one will know me as well. I even don’t know myself.

I had a fair recollection of my teenage years. I thought I remember well what has happened and how I have felt.

That was until the moment I went home, after the passing of my father, and started reading through my diaries.

They were written in a time without global technologies, when I couldn’t always speak to people when I needed it. There were evenings I had come home, in my room, bursting with thoughts and feelings, and my diaries were my best friends.

I sat down by my old desk, my sister’s former desk, and took out my diaries from deep inside it, behind old textbooks and forgotten books. I started flipping through pages, full of writings and suddenly realized something.

I realized that I have been a very different person then. I was seeing myself through the rose-tinted glasses we all put on when we look back. The diaries forced me to take them off.

My diaries played like movie to me, and the scenes were subtly different. I had the director’s cut, and it was rough.

I have a been a sweet girl, full of questions and dreams. I found the notebook with my poems and started comparing the dates. Somewhere around the age of 16 I have somehow grown fangs. Rash, and impulsive, quick to take offense and shout, black and white about the world.… If I could go back, I would have probably spent hours with myself, trying to tell of what could happen, what will happen… I tore away pages, filled with scribbles that needed to be thrown away. Words that screamed with rage, words written with the sole purpose to hurt. If I could meet myself then, I would have been a stranger. A diamond with way too many sharp ends, still fragile and rough.

I saw my friends then with new eyes. There were details, recorded on the pages, that I have missed to notice really. Things my friends have said, or did, things to which I would have reacted in another way now.

It made me think. It’s scary how we change. We become our own strangers one day.