In this issue

1. My image of the week

2. Front end

3. Seeing beyond the Visible and Accepted.

4. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

5. Backend/Bookends

My image of the week

Front end

Welcome to the 13th edition of this newsletter.

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

It seems appropriate and perhaps corny that this edition should be coming out as we approach Halloween. Supposedly the walls between the worlds are thin enough on All Hallows Evening that we can cross between them, or more worryingly [if you believe in this stuff], that The Other Side can travel through to our side of the Great Veil. However, given the way our world is Nowadays, I wonder if all those supposedly dark forces and creatures may Opt to stay away for now. Maybe they will pass over the opportunity.

However, I've been reflecting on the importance of personal travel pictures and how our visual souvenirs are aides-memoires for the path each of us has followed to the present time.

Ten years ago, I had a fantastic opportunity to go to Romania and spend some time in Transylvania, in the Carpathian mountains. There are Two Romanias, as far as I Could tell.

The first is the flat area around Bucharest which is grey rusty, grimy ex-Soviet chic, and appallingly polluted, and there is a sense of danger everywhere you go. It's rather like being in one of those 1950s black and white spy movies with the MI5 agent is waiting to paper trade at any point. I can almost hear Michael Caine's gravelly voice and inscrutable expression as he tries to survive.

It certainly felt that way to me, and our drive across the plains wasn't without incident. I stopped to photograph some gas pipelines running across the fields and, before I knew it, a pair of local security guards appeared, quite upset at what I was doing and quite threatening. When I suggested I could delete any pictures I had made and do it in front of them, they allowed me to go.

Of course, I wasn't going to tell them that deleting the files on a memory card doesn't delete them at all and that I could recover them later (I never did).

Nevertheless, it left my Kiwi complacency a little shaken.

A couple of hours later, we began the climb up into the Carpathians, and we entered a completely different world, one covered in forests and small wooden chalets. At one point, I rounded a bend and saw a timber wolf walking up the road. I swore I could hear the baying of werewolves somewhere in the night—(I have a fertile imagination).

Naturally, having gone that far around the planet, there was no way I would miss a visit to Castle Dracula. And, before you ask, after thoroughly exploring the castle, I found no vampires (it was daytime, so perhaps they were getting their beauty sleep!)

So instead, the only vampires I found were in the marketplace at the foot of the hill, flogging off the usual memorabilia (keyrings, T-shirts and blood-stained everything).

Remember how we once used to gather up our photographs and store them in albums?

We don't seem to do that anymore.

And yet, perhaps we should.

After all, our photographs are mile markers for the unique journey each of us has walked.

We are all one-offs. No one has ever walked our walk, and no one will ever do so again.

There has never been anyone quite like us, and there never will be in the future.

And why shouldn't we celebrate the wonder of our own life by printing out our pictures or assembling them into books?

So we leave a record of our passing through this life.

Seeing beyond the Visible and Accepted.

A long time ago, in a place far, far away…

I was coming up through the photography ranks and learning as much as possible, as fast as possible.

In the mall next to the school where I taught was a photography shop. Jim, the manager, was old-school, a retired professional who stayed close to his passion by selling cameras and helping newbies like me. And, because I had lit a fire within myself, it needed feeding, and he willingly helped me keep it going.

One day I took a print of a portrait across to him for his judgement.

He looked at it for a time, looked up at me, smiled, and then he said:

I have never forgotten that pearl, so I gift it to you today.

I have a venerable Fujifilm X-Pro 1, honourably scarred and battered, with the brass showing through the paint. It was my first experience with the X-line, and frankly, it is a sod of a thing to use compared to the cameras I use today. The shutter is slow to release, focusing seems to take forever, and the viewfinder has no diopter adjustment. It feels ugly and angular in my big hands. Making an exposure is a mission.

And yet, I am very fond of it.

As I bought newer and improved models, it sat in a corner for some years. Then one day, a dear friend, Ray Cho, who is passionate about infrared photography, came to visit me in Rawene. We talked about the new way of shooting IR, and he offered to take my Pro 1 back to Taiwan with him and have it converted to shoot full-spectrum IR.

What does that mean?

Our human eye responds to visible light, whose wavelengths are between 350 and 650 nm. Remember those experiments in Science classes at school where you shone white light into a prism, and it split them into different colours (wavelengths), or that mnemonic you had to learn-ROYGBIV?

Even a rainbow is a visual representation of the visible light spectrum.

However, your camera sensor doesn't see it quite the same way. A typical digital sensor sees from near-UV to well into the Infrared, 250nm to > 1000nm. And, because camera manufacturers want to give you results that approximate how your eyes see the world, they put an IR cut filter in front of the sensor to limit its response to the light arriving on its surface.

Your sensor is seeing more than you can.

So in conversion, they remove the IR cut filter and replace it with a clear one.

And boom!

The world as you/your camera sees it expanded.

Perfect for my world-writ-small project.

Now I have to learn to see my camera.

The image below is how my Pro 1 sees it.

I have to catch up.

There is a deeper explanation I the links for any of you who are interested in reading further.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Halloween’s Forbidden Fruit: Michael Pollan on Gardening as Radicalism and the Scandalous Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends — www.themarginalian.org

“Oh that beloved witch-hazel,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, “one loved stalk as hearty as if just placed in the mail by the woods… witch and witching too, to my joyful mind” — her garden, across the hedge from which lived the love of he

HEART CHAKRA HEALING Hang Drum Music || Attract Love & Balance Emotions

HEART CHAKRA HEALING Hang Drum Music

Witness the majesty of moths taking flight at 6,000 frames per second — aeon.co

The Ultimate Infrared Photography Guide — chriswright.photography

The end to end Infrared Photography Guide demonstrates how to do infrared photography with DSLR or Mirrorless cameras.

What can a Kurosawa classic tell us about reality, knowledge and truth? — aeon.co

A samurai is found dead. Four eye-witnesses come forward to tell their version of events, but their stories contradict one another. What’s going on?

Sweet Potato & Black Bean Chili — www.eatingwell.com

Rating: 4 stars Chipotle is a must! The first time I made this recipe I didn't have the chipotle powder so I just used extra dark chilli powder. It wasn't nearly spicy enough for me and the sweetness of the sweet potato overpowered it.

The Science of Spooky — getpocket.com

Searching for rational explanations for our irrational fears. Plus: Why some of us enjoy a good fright.

Backend/Bookends

I have a couple of things to mention this morning.

First, a big thank you to the new people who have jumped on board in the last week.

Nau mai haere mai. Welcome.

It is an absolute joy to have you here!

Readers Corner

Last week one of you suggested I should have a space where you can pose a question for me to answer.

What a great idea. Thank you, Ferg.

If this resonates, please let me know.

As always, if you enjoyed this issue, please share it freely and/or forward it to a friend.

Let us remember that we are all one, part of something far greater than the individual vessel we sail in, that there is no separation.

And now, after the early arrival of summer here in the South, the weather has shifted. Several days of rain are on the way.

Yesterday I spent a lovely few hours wandering around town, making pictures of the flowers lifting themselves upwards to the light. Now it is time to work on editing and creating new art works.

Ngaa mihi arohaa me whakapono me rangimarie nunui ki a koe.

Love, truth and peace to you.