The French for hurt is 'blessé', and I've always found it tempting to translate it into English directly as 'blessed', so I'll do so here. To all those who have been 'blessed' by my words, often written in haste, but never without feeling, I'm sorry. In blessing you I have done my heart and my art a disservice, which was not my intention. The fatalist in me says 'que sera sera', whatever will be, will be, but the determinist retorts, 'Oh come on, you can do better than that!', and I'm inclined to agree. So again, with an eye on future failings, I apologise, to those of you blessed when my meaning hasn't been quite clear, and to those for whom my incoherent ramblings have just become a bit much (but thanks for reading all the same). The French for blessed is 'béni(e)', but try as I might I couldn't come up with a more apposite cultural reference than Benny from Crossroads, and if you're old enough to remember that, you're getting on a bit! Getting on is good though, isn't it? Bless you!
Thursday, 15 September 2011
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Forge Ahead, Pixel Pundits
iPhone Photo Chronicles
~ Forge Ahead, Pixel Pundits ~
|
I'm not talking about the creative limits of course, because they don't lie in the camera, but the technical ones. Strangely, I'm going through the same thing I did when digital photography was just taking off, and each increase of a few hundred K's worth of pixels was front page photo press news.
Now we are there again, just this time it's the little transparent disc on the back of your phone which is going through growing pains, and we too, as we hold back and hesitate and hold back some more on labelling phone-photography 'proper'.
Personally, I love it, and in particular the restrictions placed upon me by this highly sophisticatedly basic device. The sophistication is more in what you can do with the photo after taking it, from manipulating it with crazy apps to sending it around the world in a sec. The basicness is in terms of resolution and control over the photo-taking process - very limited indeed.
But although I end up with pictures well under 1MB most of the time, with grain-a-gogo (and not of the sexy silver crystal type either), I'm still lovin' it, as McDonalds would say. Never thought I'd be positively quoting McDonalds, but there you go.
The phone I have gives me 3 megs of raw photo. The current version has 5. I'm waiting for 7. And so it goes.
The funniest thing of all is that camera manufacturers are in the midst of a pixel war, and fools like you and I are buying cameras based on the highest pixel count irrespective of how many they actually need for the end result.
In my case, the end result, for the moment (waiting for the coffee table tome), is generally what you see above. 500 x 500 of those little babies folks - oh yeah! Which when fed through the compressor for your downloading comfort comes out at a paltry 150 or 100 K or less. What a joke! Whilst all those gigabytes of forgotten garbage hog our hard discs, here we are looking at 100K of creativity. And quite happy at that!
Times will move on, progress will out, and I'll be working with a whole bunch more megs, like a Ferrari idling down the motorway at 55, and I guess it will be nice to know that there's plenty of latent capacity humming away under the hood. But the result will still be more or less the same. Another pic like the one above.
In the end it's not the technology which concerns me. This will always forge ahead. It's the creativity which has to be constantly worked on and nurtured. And in its turn also forge a head: mine, and occasionally others with a bit of luck.
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Twinklings Of Tolerence
iPhone Photo Chronicles
~ Twinklings Of Tolerence ~
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Back in those days, and you may feel things haven't changed that much, an uprising, or even a simple affront, was good enough reason to enact similar, or why not worse atrocities in the name of righteousness, revenge or simple delirium.
We occasionally squint through parted fingers and wonder if the ends are really justifying the means, however injust the perceived ancien régime was thought to be. Especially by those that lived under it.
Luckily, for those who believe in a higher power or intelligence, especially a particularly (if suspiciously) silent one, this power is always on their side; the right side, the just side, that is.
Unfortunately, for the rest of us, the Taciturn One hasn't felt the need to enlighten us definitively as to which right side actually is the right side, or if it has, I must have been out of the office.
Thus we are confronted with the spectacle of possessed lunatics carrying out insane acts of true faith, inebriated by a fairytale of a ludicrous better life to escape the emptiness of the present one, their backward societies shackled by the very faith they profess to adhere to; the ultimate Catch 22 situation. Followed immediately by the victims' pitiful praying to the very same God for... what? An answer? And a rapid and very human desire for veangeance, or at least some sort of 'closure'.
This is where my patience with believers wears seriously thin. Seriously. OK, I know they've been brainwashed and had their future adult beliefs rammed down their throats and into the deepest recesses of their innocent childish sub-consciences by equally unwitting and powerless parents. Not to mention the insidious, pernicious peer pressure and societal norms we all conform to to a greater or lesser extent. But still. It's laughable really. Terribly, tragically laughable.
If I had my way I'd throw all religions and other irrational beliefs out the window with the holy water and just get on with trying to do right by myself and others. Can the Enlightenment really have come and gone, snuffed out like just one more revolutionary flare dragged to the ground and trampled underfoot by the heavy boots of ignorance, intolerance and fear of losing illicitly acquired privileges?
If I had my way I'd invite the whole world to Paris and take them on a whistle-stop tour of the city's soul to see what it might teach us of heady human heights and desperately shameful lows.
If I had my way I'd cut out that paper plane bottom right and send it soaring back with crayon hearts drawn on the wings and a powerful dose of common sense in the fuselage, along with a bag full of start-your-own-business books with a few micro-loans tucked inside the sand-cover and some summer frocks for the gals (and the guys) and copies of Gary Larson cartoons all wrapped up in painestakingly placed pages from Rights of Man...
If I had my way.
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
Monday, 12 September 2011
Stuck In Suburbia
iPhone Photo Chronicles
~ Stuck In Suburbia ~
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At 7.52 on a Sunday morning. In Saint-Germain-lès-bleeding'-Arpajon.
It might sound glamorous or exotic or oh-so French to you but, believe you me, at 7.52 on a chilly Autumn Sunday morning there ain't nothing glamorous about it. Whatever an 'arpajon' is.
Since I wrote the lines above, a day and a half and a photo tour and a Sunday afternoon and a Monday full of 'stuff', so I've lost the no doubt scintillating weave of my now threadbare thoughts, so I'll leave it at that, and may we all be thankful for that.
Stop me, oh stop me before I start asking myself and anyone who'll read if he isn't happier than I am, with his funky brush and his fresh air and his blissfully stress-free existence. Well, he didn't look stressed out anyway. I hope he isn't but I've gotta rush; my blood pressure's far too low for this time of day... I'm sure there's a train or something I should be running for...
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Saints Alive!
iPhone Photo Chronicles
~ Saints Alive! ~
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Or maybe not. Maybe these Paris street and place names, while seeming somewhat familiar, strike you as somehow... strange.
You wouldn't be wrong because - saints alive! - these streets really do still exist in Paris today! Yes, still exist because, at one time, they were called exactly as given above!
Revolutionaries, you see, generally want to change things; shake things up; turn things on their head (or just chop them off). Kings and creeds didn't fare too well during French revolutionary times, it has to be said.
What generally happened was that the up-enders went around looking for anything which represented the old ways, and destroyed them. Thanks a lot guys! But in destroying what would doubtless have made some interesting Paris curiosities, they inadvertently created others. As shown above.
One of their favourite irreverent acts was to chisel out any references to saints, as well as smashing up their statues too of course.
As with everything, what goes around comes around, as the word revolution itself would suggest, and in due course, there was some other revolutionary reactionary up a ladder plastering and pasting back in all the missing 'Saint' and 'St' references. Hilarious or ridiculous really, depending on your point of view, or perhaps just tellingly ironic, but there it is, still on the walls of Paris for us all to see and reflect upon. Thank godness.
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
How About Free?
iPhone Photo Chronicles
~ How About Free? ~
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I come out at Miromesnil (pron: 'Me-row-may-kneel', kinda, but whatever you do, DON'T say '...mezz-nil' at the end = Tourist Loser ;~S)
So anyway, there I was, making my way up the escalator and into the big wide world of work, when I heard... music. That's right, the miserable old RATP (Paris public transport company) were having a party!
I got a free orange juice thrust into my hand and a microphone shoved under my nose, as the camera rolled (seriously)! Of course, it was an internal promotional effort, trying desperately to make up for the fact that most people hate the system, and especially the loathed 'Controllers', but I took the orange nonetheless.
What was funny about the interviewer was that every third question was 'So you're happy?', if you can call that a question. It was like:
RATP Interviewer: "So do you like the event?"
Me: "Sure."
RATP: "What do you like best?"
Me: "The music."
RATP: "So you're happy?"
Me: "Yeah, I suppose so."
RATP: "Are you enjoying your free coffee."
Me: "Sure."
RATP: "Would you like to see more events like this?"
Me: "Why not? It makes a nice change to see metro employees actually smiling."
RATP: "So you're happy?"
OK, they couldn't really do much with someone on camera saying, "Well it makes a change from the usual miserable service you provide...", but the heavily leading closed question was a bit weak I thought.
But I took the coffee nonetheless. Actually, I don't (necessarily) hate those people in their little green uniforms at all, and fully accept the possibility that the rumours that they are human beings too are founded in some sort of reality. The main reason they are hated is that so many people don't pay for their tickets, or try and get away without paying, and, unfortunately for them, get caught fairly frequently by the very same little green meanies.
The approach taken by the RATP is completely different to London, for example. In London, there's a dude standing by the ticket barriers watching everyone go through. And for some reason no-one jumps over them (the barriers or the dudes). Simple, elegant and effective.
Here in Paris, you can jump over just about every metro station's turnstyles, and there doesn't seem to be anyone watching you do it. On the other hand, hundreds of people are paid to lurk around dark corners where you're not expecting them and jump out and 'control' you, especially when you don't happen to possess a ticket, even for the best possible reasons.
The trouble is, they're pretty inflexible, and actually get a bonus for each person they catch, whence the hate.
But to cut a long story short, today was pleasantly different, and I have to admit I also took the free RATP bonbons, the free RATP maps, the free RATP pen and I'm waiting with caffeinated breath even as I type to win an iPad 2 in the RATP competition I entered. I guess you're getting a pretty good personality profile of me drawn up by this stage, but I was feeling rather pleased with myself whatever anyone else thought.
Not only that, but when I finally surfaced, having tried to scrounge at least a second freebie of everything (yep, your character assassination was spot on), I was greeted at the top of the stairs by... hoards of people trying to give me more free stuff!!!
Imagine my surprise and delight upon having not one, not two, not three, but four free publications to savour. Now I can keep up to date with all my favourite suicide bombings and sordid sex scandals in a host of different rehashes of the same syndicated press release; heaven! And to cap it all, a rather aromatic young lady offering me a completely unusable little coffee filter thingy from 'Carte Noire' (I haven't got the right machine) but I took it nonetheless. Forcing me to requalify my day as 'good', as opposed to 'weird'; an extremely bonne journée, in fact. And it cost me nothing to say so either - even better!
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
Friday, 9 September 2011
Something For The Weekend
iPhone Photo Chronicles
~ Something For The Weekend ~
|
I always enjoy going by this perpetually good-humoured fellow on my way through my favourite Paris passage en route for my favourite Paris passage tearoom (although I'm willing to be introduced to others, it's just that I wrote my 'Stains' poem there, a long time ago).
Like a lot of no-doubt great Paris attractions, I've not yet made it to the Musée Grévin, but will one day, for sure, probably when I get around to doing my Top Ten Peculiar Paris Museums on Paris If You Please. What I need, is a toowit. A round one though, it has to be a round toowit. And as soon as I get a round toowit I'll let you know what I think, I promise.
Nor have I been to Madame Tussauds back in the old home town, so it's not as though I'm snobbing the original Paris palace of plastic people or anything. It's just there are are so many funny sights to be seen on the streets themselves, I generally prefer them to the waxwork ones.
Mentioning no names, of course. Just let me keep trying to surprise you.
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
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