Blue Planet 2, Electric Boogaloo

So the new blue planet is out, to some amount of interest.  The only reason I know about it is through the internet, via osmosis, so I assume it has gained a fairly sizeable viewership despite only being one episode in.

The videography is amazing.  It's absolutely stunning.  I can barely fathom how long it must have taken the cameramen to capture the images they did, especially when filming migratory behaviour.

Of course a lot of it is fake - the last series was renowned for using footage from inside aquariums and passing it off as the real deal, but what programme isn't a complete lie in this day and age?  For the sake of the overwhelming majority of the footage being spectacular, it's easy enough to overlook the lies for a few scenes.

The voice over is done by David Attenborough, who we can only assume isn't writing what he says.  We can hope, at least, because the script is entirely forgettable.  As in, it just narrates what's on screen and doesn't offer any insight into the animals we see.  For example there's an extended sequence where a fish uses a rock to open shellfish.  This is incredibly cool to watch, and something I had previously assumed was reserved for mammals.  Or at least animals with thumbs.

But the voiceover for this section consists of, 'this is cool, we didn't know fish were intelligent enough to do this, but look he has no hands and he keeps dropping the thing.  Oops.  Oops.  Dropped it again.  Oops, he dropped it.'

Insightful stuff.

But I'm skirting around the real issue.  The sound work is fucking atrocious.  Holy shit.

I don't know what their budget was, but the producers spent literally all of it on the visuals and had their toddlers do the sound for free on their TOMY (tm) Copyright 'my first animal phone.'  You know the ones, they have a picture of a cow, you press it, it plays a recording of what is obviously a bored man saying 'moo.'

I can't believe how badly they fucked up in this department.

Every.  Single.  Shot.  Is accompanied by the sound of roaring ocean, regardless of whether the shot is ten miles underwater or ten miles above it.

Fine.  You are making a documentary about the ocean.  Let's assume it's more of an art piece.

Some dolphins rub up against a coral to clean themselves of parasites or whatever.  Quite interesting - but why does it sound like sandpaper rubbing against a wood railing?

A fish flings itself at a bird that's in mid air and manages to grab it.  Really, really cool shot that must have taken the video guy ages to shoot.

The sound effect they use?  I implore you to watch it because no one who hasn't seen it will believe me, but they dub over the sound of a lion or tiger, or some kind of monster, roaring.

I shit you not.

Go to one minute and 10 seconds.

The very next scene.  THE VERY NEXT SCENE, has a bird preparing to fly for the first time.  It kind of gently puts its foot on the ground while it stands in place, as animals are wont to do.

The narrator makes it sound like it's preparing for a fight against Mike Tyson in his prime, and the audio fucknut plays a sound effect of a HAMMER BLOW, AS THE FUCKING BIRD STEPS ON THE GROUND IN SLOW MOTION, TO MAKE IT SEEM LIKE THE FUCKING BIRD IS PSYCHING ITSELF UP. 

HAMMERS.

The producers were one meeting away from playing eye of the tiger at this very moment.

Christ, this garbage isn't a documentary.  How dare they call it anything other than populist trash dressed up as science.

It's an absolute crying shame because the producers have rightly surmised that we, as a population, have the collective IQ of a pickle farm, and need a story to make it interesting for all us idiots.  We need these animals to have human traits, otherwise they're not relatable, and we need ridiculous sound effects because that's what hollywood does.

Go fuck yourself producers.  Go fuck yourself David Attenborough, for putting your name to yet another soap opera dressed up as a documentary.

The funny thing is that this will win hundreds of awards for being the most realistic, lifelike documentary ever to have graced a human eyeball.  Idiots will lap it up as the most spectacular, honest, truthful stuff ever sent over the airwaves.

It's garbage.

But, just as trash humans get by on looks alone, so will this.


I might go back and watch it muted, while listening to music.  But for the love of god don't spend money on it.  Pirate it and mute it, play Beethoven or some classical shit over the top.  All the amazing slow-motion scenes will go great with some classical music instead of the Godzilla soundboard the director decided upon.

Fly, My Dragon

So part of my Grandads camera gear were a set of lenses.  There were enough that I might even call them a suite of lenses.

One of the highlights is a macro lens that lets you get within centimetres of your target, allowing a really large photo on the other side.  I was interested in getting a macro lens before I came across this one because they're way, way cheaper than their telephoto counterparts.

Note that I'm talking about stuff for getting up close and/or magnifying macro, not the type to take photographs of people.  I'm sure there's a name for the different types, but I don't know them.

Anyway, as a bonus to buying the adapter to see if I can get Grandads slides onto the computer, I can also use his cool macro lens with my digital camera.  The result is this:

And this:

The video shows how hard it is to keep this thing still.  Modern cameras have image stabilisation, some in the body, some in the lenses.  Canon have chosen to put their system in the lenses, and because I'm using an old lens, it most certainly does not have image stabilisation.

The colours are also wonky, so I had to pep them up in my video software.  The result is an imperfect picture, but I quite like the image even in video.

Getting up close with a dragonfly is hard, especially at arms length without a tripod.  Next time I'm going to try to find a co-operative insect that's at waist height.

I don't know what the green insect is, but it was a piece of cake to take a picture of.

Luckily for me I managed to take a few more pictures at the park we went to, and I still have a ton from the UK to go through.  Tons more pictures to look at on a rainy day!

Cameras and Whatnot

So I recently came into possession of a bajillion 35mm slides.  They were my Grandads and are a chronicle of his time as a photography enthusiast.

Unfortunately, no one looks at slides anymore and the only way for me to check them out would be to find, or fashion, a projector.  This would happen exactly once in my lifetime, then the pictures would be stored away, never to be seen again.

The solution is to digitise them.  This presents problems, all relating to money.

If I send them away to a company to digitise, it will cost a fortune and the quality will likely be pants.  If I send them away to a company to do them properly it will cost more than buying my own studio in the Bahamas full of photography equipment, yachts and supermodels.

Clearly, these are infeasible.

The second solution was to buy a scanner and scan them in myself.  My time is worth nothing to anyone, so I win on that front.  Unfortunately I don't win on the buying a scanner front.  For the kind of scanner I would want (top of the line of course) it would be just shy of one thousand dollars.

Clearly this is also unfeasible.

To make scanning matters worse, in order to get the best quality scans possible, you have to employ a wet scanning process.  Once you've invested in the 1,000 USD scanner you behoove yourself to go the whole hog, buy the fluid and gloves, and scan everything in properly.

This is terrible and I would hate myself every time I squirted a tenners worth of mineral oil all over my scanner.

For psychological reasons, then, scanning is less than ideal.

The final alternative is something Grandad unwittingly provided for me.

Back in the good old days, the easiest way to reproduce a slide, enlarging areas or changing the shot, was to buy a big tube with a slide holder on the end, which twisted and turned every which way to line the slide up correctly.  You could then twist the cheap, plasticky barrel to zoom in and rearrange the shot.  Hold this monstrosity up to the light and presto, you have a new negative or slide of your original photo.

Grandad had one of these, which I didn't think anything of (I'm not reproducing his pictures, enlarging or cropping them with film) until it came time to wonder as to how to commit his slides to digital.

I wondered how to best go about the process, and while mulling it over came to the realisation that a lot of people use their digital cameras to commit prints, negatives and slides to their computers.

Clearly, I was onto a winner.

So without delay I found a Beschoi adapter for C/Y to EOS mounts (this adapter has no way of releasing the C/Y half of the setup without long nails and/or 3 sets of hands, so I cannot recommend it) and hooked it up to my camera.

This is a sample shot.  You'll notice it's on the piss.  That's fine, I can fix that with a rulers or a level.

One of the great things with this system is that once it's set up I can slide the slides in and out quickly, take a ton of simple pictures at this decent level of quality (this picture was taken with 10 seconds of setup pointing at a lamp) and then pick out the ones I want to do properly.  To do them 'properly,' is then a case of bracketing however many shots, shoving them into photoshop and asking it to do the rest.  This will give a nice dynamic range, ensuring as much of the subtlety of film is captured as possible.

Another bonus with this bizarre setup is that I can zoom in 2.4x the original size, so I could go absolutely overboard and capture however many shots zoomed in, then recomposite the final image in photoshop to ensure the maximum quality.  (each of those images would have to be bracketed, so dozens of images.  Clearly something I might only consider for the single best photograph in his entire collection).

So I think this will do.

It's not as good as wet scanning with an Epson V850 or whatever the hell - but it is a lot cheaper.