In this issue

1. My Artwork of the Week

2. Frontispiece

3. Finding God in Smitville

4. Photographer's corner-why 35mm format anyway?

5. Waiata mou te Ata-A murmuration of weeds

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

7. Endpapers

My Artwork of the Week

One of the joys of travelling as a photographer is finding new things, meeting new people from a different culture, of being open to anything and everything. With a digital camera, you don't have to worry about what works or doesn't work. Instead, the critical thing is approaching wide-eyed and responding to what appears before you. Evaluation can come later.

South Africans are proud of what they call the Garden Route, a journey around the bottom of the continent from Port Elizabeth to CapeTown.

"You must do the Garden Route," they would say. "It is so beautiful."

So we did. And, while it was whelming, I wasn't that whelmed. Beautiful, yes, as beautiful as a journey down the West Coast of the South Island, no.

One night we stayed in a hotel in Wilderness.

The sun was setting, and the light was beginning to fade. As it did so, the room lights grew stronger and stronger. The interior lights reflected in the window looking out over the ocean and gave me a sense of visually reaching into another place and time.

Then, one solitary wave picked up the very last of the light as it broke.

I once asked a young friend who was a passionate surfer what it was he loved about being on the waves.

He thought for a moment, then replied:

"you know, the waves have been travelling around the world. So it's an honour to be there at its death and celebrate its journey."

Frontispiece

Atamaarie E whaanau:

Good morning everybody

It has been quite the journey this week. I am still finding files I haven't seen for at least a decade. As I catalogue each folder into Lightroom (240K and climbing), I'm finding threads of enquiry I have followed on and off for quite some time. I think it's a good thing to look back from time to time and gather up the threads of the past to re-weave them. Perhaps then we may better understand our life and where we are now.

Who we are now.

I nearly called this week's newsletter the Gospel Edition, but I have opted not to do so. Perhaps that is because, on my last trip to South Africa in 2010, I became more drawn to how Africans live, particularly the poorer black Africans. So we began the visit with a tour of the townships around Cape Town. It was a sobering experience, seeing people with nothing attempting to live their best lives. Yet, to my knowledge, South Africa has no social welfare.

So what keeps people going when their prospects are limited?

Perhaps it is Hope, the child of Belief.

Finding God in Smitville

Suppose you drove into the small town of Barrydale, on Route 62 in the Little Karoo area of South Africa, with its neat Cape Dutch architecture and manicured gardens. In that case, you could be forgiven for thinking it was an Afrikaner community with almost no black or coloured inhabitants.

However, you would be wrong.

At the north end of town, just before you leave, a road to the right leads down into the valley, across and up the hill on the other side. Follow it into the next valley, and you will find the town of Smitville.

When the town became a municipality, when apartheid was on the rise, the founding fathers created Smitville for the coloured and black community to live. Over the hill, out of sight and out of mind. The white people would live in Barrydale, the non-whites in the next valley, available for work when needed but otherwise invisible.

One day, with time on my hands, I suggested to my hosts that I would like to drive over to Smitville and see what it was like. They were nervous and hesitant about it and worried for my safety. Finally, however, they approved it. Just be careful, they said. I was more worried about the boomslangs and Cape cobras.

When I got there, a huge marquee had been erected on a village square. I got out of my car to see what was happening. Beautifully-dressed people carrying Bibles were hurrying from all over the village to enter the tent.

I drifted closer. Nobody seemed to mind.

An African in a suit and tie standing by the entrance came over to me.

"Would you like to join us?" he asked. "Please come in."

"What is this?" I replied.

He explained how he and his team would come up from Worcester to Smitville monthly, to spread the Gospel and the Word of the Lord. Of course, I was welcome to join them.

He held out an arm and beckoned me into the tent.

I slipped inside and made my way down the back.

When I entered, I ran into a wall of sound. A pair of preachers were tag-teaming the congregation, chanting to them in Xhosa, the local language, and they were responding. They would speak, and the audience would reply. They would talk, and the audience would answer. The exchange went backwards and forwards while the music from the stadium-grade sound system grew louder and louder.

The energy and emotion in the tent spiralled higher and higher over the next hour. First, there would be preaching, then chanting and then singing. So it went backwards and forwards as the congregation slipped into a state of otherness, a type of ecstasy. A natural contemplative with an Anglican upbringing, I felt myself being drawn into an experience entirely foreign to anything I had ever known. I had no idea what was being said, but I could feel the movement of energy swirling in the tent.

I shook myself and focused on my camera settings.

The congregation were utterly oblivious to me, lost in a world of sound and devotion. They had gone to another place.

It was time for me to leave.

I staggered out of the tent and leaned against my car, trying to catch my breath, waiting for the ringing in my ears to subside and come back to earth.

At the top of the hill, I pulled over on the shoulder of the road. I got out, kicked off my sandals and planted my feet in the red earth of Mother Afrika. I breathed into the silence of ancient, timeless mountains and felt for the heartbeat of the earth. There it was, rhythmic and slowly pulsing.

And then I understood.

In a world full of hardship, to be able to lose themselves in ecstasy and worship for four hours each month gave them Hope and a sense of Belonging.

Photographer's corner-why 35mm format anyway?

I wonder how many of you have ever thought about why we have the 35mm format. Where did it come from? Who invented it? And why have we continued to use that to this day?

Nowadays, we tend to refer to it by its ratio, 3:2. However, if you have experimented with the different ratios on your digital camera, you will know you have various options. For example, there are 16:9, 1:1, 5:4 and 4:3. Which do you choose? Which should you choose?

And why did Henri Cartier Bresson make a comment that

Perhaps a history lesson is in order.

In the early 1900s, a German inventor named Oscar Barnack worked for the Leitz Optical Company. He had a generous supply of short lengths of movie film. If you have ever looked at how movie film passes through a projector, you will see that it moves vertically past the projection gate. Each image sits across the film and sprocket holes on either side to help guide it at the requisite speed.

Each frame is 18 mm deep by 24 mm wide.

It occurred to Barnack that he could make a small stills camera from short lengths of movie film. To do this, he created a small camera, the Ur-Leica, which transported the film horizontally. He made a gate using two frames, thus 24 x 36 mm. In 1934 Kodak Eastman introduced the first 135 films with standardised sprocket holes, and 35mm as a format was born.

Thus, it could be said that 35mm as a format (now referred to as full-frame) began because of one person's parsimony.

It's worth adding that we have all these other formats. And some thoughts about those…

The natural viewing ratio of the human eye is quite close to 16:9. Which probably explains why your televisions and monitors tend to use this ratio. We see wider than we see tall. I have no idea why we have evolved this way; however, I have a theory.

I'm not sure if you have ever noticed, but it's easier to see from side to side rather than up-and-down. Our natural spinal articulation is horizontal rather than vertical. Perhaps it is because our Neanderthal ancestors were used to scanning the horizon for threats. They probably expected that any attacks from sabertooth tigers would come from one's hiding in the grass and that the likelihood of a sabertooth tiger dropping on them from a tree was minimal. Well, it's a theory.

So which ratio should you use? Here is a suggestion (bear with me).

The absolute minimum design element is the point. Imagine pumping air into a point. It expands to become a circle. A circle is perfect and complete. Now, if we add corners, it will become a triangle or a square. A square is formal and balanced. If that is what you are seeking with the work you are making, then choose the square.

We have a rectangle if we change the length of two opposite sides. Now the ratio has changed, with one pair more dominant than the others. As we expand that difference, the ratio changes, favouring one pair of sides to a greater extent than the others. The further we move that ratio apart, the greater the informality of what we are doing. Thus 16:9 is much more informal (less formal) than 1:1.

With 1:1, we tend to focus on the centre and look outwards. 1:1 is static and momentary. 16:9 requires us to look from side to side; thus, time passes. It is dynamic.

A head-and-shoulders portrait will tend to favour 1: 1 because it has a single subject. 16:9 is better used for panoramas because we tend to read them from left to right. Time passes.

I hope that helps. Or, at least, it gives you food for thought.

Waiata mou te Ata-A murmuration of weeds

A murmuration of weeds

Wearying of spiral clouds and circling wolfpack mists

prowling shiftily along the wind-defined rim of the day,

I turned within and followed my heartbeams

to the whisper-filled sanctuary park nearby,

to sit among its ancient timetwisted windworn runetrees

and simply, gently be.

Then a summerperfume scent of cloying clematis drew me by the nose

to the green hidden garden across the road

I whirred my hummingbeak bee-beaming way

among an unruly jostlejungle jam

of quarrelling lightpolished heritage plants from distant lands

and bands

of fading magnolias with melting moondripped mascara mimefaces,

of red-faced, pompous stiff-upperleaved rhododendrons

with crinoline complexions and little left to offer the day,

holding fading, furrowed court,

while the weedwreathed colonised natives

ferned and spurned their alien advances.

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

Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians — nautil.us

When, at the dawn of the 19th century, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traversed western North America, they encountered a wondrous bestiary: the “fleet and delicately formed” coyote, the “bear of enormous size” which we call the grizzly.

A Biochemist’s View of Life’s Origin Reframes Cancer and Aging — www.quantamagazine.org

The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared before genetic information. His ideas could lead us to think differently about aging and cancer.

Camera Basics Explained — www.dpmag.com

If you’re a beginner photographer who is just getting to know your camera and looking for some expert help, the below video is a great place to start. Led by photographer Tyler Stalman, the camera basics tutorial is a beginner’s guide to aperture, shutter speed and ISO.

Parts of the Great Barrier Reef Show the Highest Coral Cover in 36 Years — mymodernmet.com

The Great Barrier Reef is a global treasure. Visible from space, the marine park stretches over 1,800 miles along Australia's Queensland coast. The bright coral is a phenomenal living being visible under crystal-clear waters.

The Rise of the Women Movement: 7 Feminist Art Pieces You Should Know — www.thecollector.com

Feminist art emerged in the early 1970s. Women artists began to approach their work differently and showed their ways of fighting women’s oppression through art.

The Unique Merger That Made You (and Ewe, and Yew) — nautil.us

At first glance, a tree could not be more different from the caterpillars that eat its leaves, the mushrooms sprouting from its bark, the grass growing by its trunk, or the humans canoodling under its shade. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older — www.themarginalian.org

We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans

Rogan Josh From Scratch — greatcurryrecipes.net

Make BIR rogan josh from scratch without base sauce. Many people want to make curry house style curries but can’t be fussed with preparing the ‘essential’ base sauce.

What the 'golden age' of flying was really like — www.cnn.com

Cocktail lounges, five course meals, caviar and an endless flow of champagne: life on board airplanes was quite different during the "golden age of travel," the period from the 1950s to the 1970s that is fondly remembered for its glamor and luxury.

End Papers

I am noticing more and more evidence that Spring is creeping in and lifting the dark blanket of winter. The grass on my lawn is starting to push through and overwhelm the moist mosses that have held sway for the last few months. Even though we still have the clinging fogs of winter masking the lake, the light has shifted and has a different energy. Yesterday, for the first time in a while, I heard a bird announcing the arrival of Dawn. Forest, my neighbour's cat, called by, trying to convince me that he hadn't had breakfast. Or at least a breakfast that didn't meet his expectations. I ignored him.

And there it was, in a planter pot—a daffodil, which is undoubtedly the harbinger of Spring.

And there it is—the cycle of the seasons, renewing itself.

Life will go on, with or without us.

As always, I wish you the four things we are permitted to ask for; strength, health, wisdom and insight.

Ngaa mihi nunui arohaa ki a koutou

much love to you all