A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Cross

Zakopane Cross
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is the third of the spectacular cemeteries I’ve been to. It’s the Peksow Brzyzek in Zakopane, Poland, a place which introduced me to a wild array of funerary monuments of a very different sort from the codified Victorian catalogue of motifs. (Among other things, many of the Peksow Brzyzek markers are vastly more recent.) It was actually difficult to photograph the place well, since everything is crammed together cheek-by-jowl, but you’ll see more of it as the month wears on. This height of this cross is not an artifact of the angle; it towered over everything around it except the trees, and gave those a run for their money. Those beads are a rosary necklace, if you need a comparison for scale.

Also, here again we have a splendid example of what Lightroom can do for you. The cross was rather backlit, but fiddling with the settings allowed me to bring out the carving on the front, which was otherwise lost in shadow.

A Year in Pictures – Brompton Cross in Ferns

Brompton Cross in Ferns
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Parts of Brompton Cemetery are nearly as overgrown as Highgate, but in a different way: fewer trees, more ferns. (And a wall that bids fair to win the award for Most Ivy Per Square Inch, which you will see later.) There were seas of underbrush to the sides of the main path, with headstones and crosses poking up, and some of the ferns orange with the season. I do not know if there are plans to try and clear the cemetery grounds and restore them to a more manicured state.

A Tale of Two Leicas

It turns out that the reason I could only get the Leica V-Lux 4 from Austria was because they’ve discontinued it. And the reason they’ve discontinued it is because . . . there’s a new one out as of about, oh, yesterday.

On the left, my Leica V-Lux 2: not sure how old it is, but given that I’ve had it since 2011 and it was a hand-me-down from my mother who used it for some amount of time before that, let’s go with “elderly (in camera years)” and leave it at that. On the right, the V-Lux Typ 114, which is O_O shall we say a little bit larger.

I’m okay with this. I just didn’t realize how much larger it would be. Still nothing compared to my father’s setup, but his rig — body and lens — weighs about four pounds, which is way more than I ever want to carry around myself. This should be fine. I’m going to sit down with the instruction manual and learn how it works, including both the stuff the V-Lux 2 couldn’t do and the stuff the V-Lux 2 could do but I never actually learned it, and then I’m going to find an excuse to go photograph something dark just so I can cackle at what it’s like to have an up-to-date sensor that isn’t borderline at ISO 400 and useless above that.

Best thing? I called the Leica store in San Francisco yesterday to ask when the Typ 114 was going to be released, and the guy told me they’d arrived that morning. I thought about going to the city to pick it up, but it turned out that shipping would cost less than parking, would require zero effort on my part, and would have the camera to me today — way sooner than I could have gotten up there to claim it in person. Laziness for the win!

Stories, stories, everywhere

A number of these things have been piling up:

  • “Daughter of Necessity” is live at Tor.com today! Some of you heard me read this at FOGcon this past spring; well, now it’s out in the world. With fabulous art by Ashley MacKenzie — seriously, it is gorgeous and amazingly appropriate to the story and not a spoiler. Which is a remarkable balance to strike.
  • I just got my contributor copies for Zombies: More Recent Dead, which includes a reprint of “What Still Abides.” (Shhhh, don’t tell Paula Guran that I used to refer to that as my Anglo-Saxon vampire story. It’s as much a zombie story as it is a vampire story, which is to say it isn’t really either, but you can read it both ways depending on the angle you tilt your head at.)
  • The anthology made from the first four issues of Mythic Delirium‘s online reboot won’t be out until November, but it’s gotten a starred review from Publishers Weekly, with a specific shout-out to my story “The Wives of Paris.”

(Now I feel like there ought to be five things. But at the rate I do (or don’t do) short fiction-related stuff these days, that would mean delaying even longer, which is silly.)

A Year in Pictures – Moss-Covered Urn

Moss-Covered Urn
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

October will be a themed month, sort of — the theme is “October-ish stuff,” which is to say autumn color, cemeteries, and bones. (Only two photos of bones, if you’re put off by that sort of thing.)

To start us off, I have one of my favorite photos from my 2013 trip to England and France. This is a funerary urn in Highgate Cemetery, covered in a velvet layer of moss. I know all the growth on and around the monuments in Highgate is not good for them, and people are working to restore the ones that have been badly damaged . . . but of course the partially ruined state of the place constitutes a large part of its aesthetic appeal.

A Year in Pictures – Bright Blue Beetles

Bright Blue Beetles
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Today we are kicking it old-school, not just with another print scan, but with a photo from my oldest album. I thought I wasn’t interested in photography until I went to Costa Rica; then I realized I just needed to be in a place worth taking pictures of.

Or at least presented with beetles worth taking pictures of. πŸ™‚

A Year in Pictures – Etched Window

Etched Window
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

If I needed evidence that proper cameras still have the edge over cameraphones, this provides it. I tried to take a photo of this window (in the Okinawan Prefectural Budokan) with my phone, and it came out useless, with the etching totally washed out. When I came back the next day with my actual camera, though, I could control the settings enough that it came out beautifully.

A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Church

Zakopane Church
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

It took some fiddling in Lightroom to get this photo to reflect what I saw; the initial result left the leaves above so thoroughly silhouetted that their color didn’t come through at all. The framing pleased me, though, with the evergreens on the sides and the changing leaves fringing the top.

Camera Hunting

Warning: camera neepery ahead. Or, depending on your temperament: yay, camera neepery ahead! πŸ™‚

I’m looking to replace my Leica V-Lux 2, which is a hand-me-down from my mother, ergo more than a few years old. Searching for a replacement has been educational, because it’s illustrating for me the extent to which the niche occupied by this model appears to be, well, disappearing.

There are DSLRs. There are point-and-shoot cameras. What there doesn’t appear to be is a point-and-shoot with specs that are equal to or better than what I have right now. Nikon’s Coolpix line is right out; they don’t seem to have any model with an aperture range bigger than f/3 to f/6.5. (My Leica goes f/2.8 to f/8.) The Leica website still lists the V-Lux 4, but given that I can’t seem to find it for sale anywhere, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s been discontinued. My best bet so far is Canon’s PowerShot G1 X Mark II . . . but, and I admit this is a trivial concern, its LCD is embedded in the back of the camera. My Leica has the screen on a swivel arm, which has come massively in handy when I’m trying to take photos at weird angles, like from over my head or around a corner.

The Nikon D5200 has the swivel screen — but it’s a DSLR. (Or, to be more precise, it’s a system camera/ILC.) I’ve kind of wanted to move to interchangeable lenses for years now, so I should leap at the prospect, right? Well, not quite. Because that means carrying lenses with me, and I’m not keen to have the added weight, given how many of my trips involve being on my feet all day. Not to mention that switching out lenses will slow me down, and my husband is already wonderfully tolerant for putting up with the amount of time I spend taking photos. (Not to mention carrying our backpack part of the time, so he’d be dealing with the added weight, too.) I’ve worked hard on being as quick as I can, but swapping out for a wide-angle lens or whatever is going to inevitably take time.

Sure, I could get the Nikon and then just never buy any other lenses. But at that point it seems stupid to have a system camera in the first place.

Except that I’m not sure I can get what I want otherwise. The Canon comes closest, if I’m willing to give up the swivel screen; it’s gotten some excellent reviews. But the point-and-shoot market is being cannibalized by smartphones: they may not be as good at taking photos as a dedicated camera, but for most people’s purposes they’re good enough, and much more convenient. If you actually care about the finer points of photography, it seems like you’re increasingly looking at the higher end of the market, just because of the way the lower end is vanishing.

All of which is extended background leading up to a question: is there another camera I should consider? The swivel screen is negotiable, but I definitely need f/2.8-f/8 or better, decent zoom, and ISO up to 1600 (bonus points if the levels above 400 are actually usable). Right now it’s a race between the Canon Powershot G1 X Mark II and the Nikon D5200, but I’d love to know if there are any alternatives.

A Year in Pictures – My Husband at Dusk

My Husband at Dusk
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A while back we were at Point Lobos late in the day, and the light and atmospheric conditions combined to form what the internet tells me is called “altocumulus stratiformis perlucidus” clouds — yeah, no, that isn’t a term I’ll be in the habit of using any time soon.

The fellow you see on the path there is my very own husband. ^_^

The Littlest Shodan-ho Enters the Inner Circle

I started up with karate again last week: my first time back since the seminar in Okinawa. As with the previous surgery, I’m not up to full speed, but even just getting to move around is a good thing.

It also paid an unexpected dividend. As shodan-ho — a term which means “probationary black belt” — I’m on the border between “black belt” and “not a black belt,” neither fish nor fowl. I was the only shodan-ho at the seminar (most of the other dojo in our organization apparently don’t use that ranking), so when Shihan said “black belts do X; lower belts do Y,” I had to ask which group I ought to go with. He initially sent me down with the lower belts, but then changed his mind and moved me to the other group, which is how I ended up learning kusanku way earlier than I expected to.

At home, my liminal state puts me in an ambiguous position where classes are concerned. I had told myself I wouldn’t ask until I was out of the ankle brace and more or less recovered . . . but as it turns out, I didn’t have to. On Monday, I was informed that I am now permitted to attend the Thursday class — the black belt class.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it this week, because I already have plans for Thursday night. πŸ˜› But it’s official! I count as a black belt! It really does feel momentous, even though I’ve been to the Thursday class during the vacation periods where it’s open to all belts, so I know it isn’t actually anything special. And I’m glad that it happened this way, with Shihan telling me, rather than me asking. There’s an element of etiquette to how these things get handled; me being patient and not pushing is the way it’s supposed to go.

Presuming I can avoid any other surgeries or suchlike, I should be able to test for the next degree of shodan-ho at the beginning of December. Then it’s sixty classes (minimum) to becoming a Real True Black Belt, with no ambiguity. Five or six months, but probably longer given that there are holidays and I miss classes and so forth. But it is entirely plausible that I’ll be shodan before 2015 is out.

I’m looking forward to it. πŸ˜€

A Year in Pictures – Dome of the Rock

Dome of the Rock
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I recently had all my print photos from old trips scanned, and then tackled the (rather large) task of editing them all. Most are not that great; they are, by their nature, the pictures I took when I was a less experienced photographer, with predictably mediocre results. But it’s a little fascinating to watch my skill develop as I learned, by trial and error, the basic rules of composition.

This is one of my better efforts, and an early example of my tendency to try and get symmetrical shots of large architectural features. πŸ™‚ It is, of course, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.