Down With Numbers

Writing posts is hard. It’s getting increasingly difficult to think of something to write every week (okay, every 9 days now). Take this week, for example. My options are:

1. Talk about how I’ve been getting to know classical music. But that isn’t interesting to someone who doesn’t listen to classical music. How can I talk about a certain piece if my readership hasn’t heard what I’m referring to?

2. Talk about how I’m pretty much convinced of getting a Nikon D50. But I already talked about photography recently, and talking about it again would be dull.

3. Talk about some TV show or other. But who am I kidding, I can’t review things.

4. Talk about mathematics. But what in mathematics? About how Perelman rejected the Fields medal, despite having been instrumental in solving the Poincare conjecture, a solution worth a million dollars?

Actually, thinking about it, option 4 sounds good.

But I can’t be bothered.

Mathematics. Trinity College. University of Cambridge.

October 2006. Me.

Back in the mists of time, I was very interested in photography. After spending a few months diligently saving up £80 (which was a lot of money to me at the time) I finally bought what I wanted, my first camera: a Vivitar V3000. A full-manual SLR which came with a generic 50mm lens, it was the most basic modern camera money could buy. No autofocus, no program modes, no flash, no nothing - just an internal light meter, a shutter speed dial and the aperture ring on your lens.

For those who are unfamiliar with the details of photography, your fancy automatic camera is constantly walking a tightrope. There are two variables that a camera must control: how long the film is exposed to light (shutter speed), and how big the hole is through which the light hits the film (aperture). In order to produce an image which matches what you see with your eye, a certain amount of light has to hit the film. This can either be with a large aperture and fast shutter speed, a small aperture and slow shutter speed, or somewhere in-between.

If you double the shutter speed, then to achieve the same exposure you need to make the aperture area twice as large. However, different shutter speeds and apertures have different characteristics, meaning you’re going to want to select different combinations in different situations. For instance, if you were photographing sports then you’d want a fast shutter speed (giving large aperture) so as to capture the action without blurring. However, if you were photographing a sweeping landscape then you’d want a small aperture (giving slow shutter speed) because smaller apertures produce a greater depth in focus (called depth of field).

Anyway. The point is that most modern cameras do all that for you, but on a cheapo manual SLR it’s all up to the photographer with the assistance of a light meter to tell you if you need to admit more or less light onto the film. Taking all your photos this way means you quickly learn how to use it all, and eventually you’re raring to upgrade to something with a bit more power.

Upgrade I did, and was eventually the owner of a Pentax MZ-30. Autofocus and varying degrees of auto-exposure: luxury! Much snapping of shutters ensued and many rolls of Velvia 50 and Kodachrome 64 were exposed in my attempts to do macro photography of flowers on a budget.

And then I stopped. To this day, I’m not sure why; perhaps it was the cost of good slide film, which ran me £10 a 36-exposure roll after processing. Perhaps I just got bored. Who knows - the whims of the mind are odd. At any rate, my point is this: I think I want to get back into photography.

As everyone knows, this is the digital age. Film isn’t used anywhere near as often as it was in the consumer arena - everyone’s busy snapping away on their twenty uber-giga-superpixel digicams. I want to do that too, but I must have an SLR.

My dilemma is this: should I buy a Pentax *ist DL and use my existing lenses but suffer the lower availability of new lenses and other accessories, or fork out and get the technically better Nikon D50 with a new set of lenses?

Anyone have £500 to spare?

… is now out, after much procrastinating. Please digg it.

The latest product of the Wachowskis’ brains, V for Vendetta, was released on DVD a few days ago. Set in London, it tells the story of- wait, set in London?

10/10. That is all.

Fine, be that way. I’ll write more of a review. But I think we all know what the conclusion is going to be. Hollywood seems to have realised that there is more than one English-speaking country in the world and I want to encourage this.

V for Vendetta tells the story of the mysterious masked ‘V’, played by Hugo Weaving, and his pathway towards vengeance. Taking place in a future London under totalitarian rule, V wishes to right the wrongs of the past. Evey, an average girl played by Natalie Portman, happens to intersect with his path and becomes embroiled in what sometimes seems like the liberation of an oppressed society and other times verges on the maniacal butchering of any and all who V deems to have wronged him.

Now, I’m no good at film reviews. It took me 10 minutes to write the previous paragraph when I could have copied the back of the box and obtained a much better description. As a consequence, I shan’t bother to tell you more about the plot - the internet can furnish you with as much or as little detail as you desire - but I shall instead talk about the style of the film.

Being the writing of the Wachowskis, the action is over the top. We expect nothing less. In general, this works well for the film. However, while bullet time and perfect reactions had an explanation in The Matrix, V for Vendetta is more tenuous. The final fight between V and the army broke the line separating the fun from the stupid, which is such a shame when the rest of the film had been executed so well.

As you’ll have gathered, I approve of the setting. It seems most films these days are set somewhere in California, so it’s refreshing to watch an American film set in London and full of British accents. Hugo Weaving has developed a chilling accent, and Natalie Portman also played a Londoner flawlessly. This can’t quite be said of some of the other American actors attempting to speak with a British accent - I heard a few words pronounced so strangely that I didn’t understand them, and someone said ‘lever’ in the American style rather than the British style (it should rhyme with beaver).

Accents aside, the film has an immersive quality which seems to be missing from many recent flicks. Hell, Stephen Fry’s in it, and that’s a good enough reason to see it in my book. Even if you hate him, you can look forward to seeing him get beaten up, so there’s something for everyone.

Oh, and you get to see every commuter’s daydream; the Houses of Parliament blown up by a tube train.

Neat.