Down With Numbers

k+1 = 2 for some k. Therefore for all k, k+1=2.

A few weeks ago I made a rambling post on photography and wanting to buy a digital SLR. Well, I bought a Nikon D50, along with 18-55 and 70-300 standard Nikkor zooms. I love it! It’s exactly what I was hoping for - not too small, easy to use and well thought-out. The lenses are good enough for the prices I paid, too, so I shan’t have any excuses for not taking lots of photographs of Cambridge.

I also got a Hoya R72 infrared filter. This is a rather strange filter in that it cuts out all light with a wavelength shorter than 720nm, thus allowing only infrared to be detected on the sensor. The thing is, digital sensors are extremely sensitive to infrared (moreso than visible light, usually), so camera manufacturers insert filters to block out infrared. They aren’t perfect, though, so given a long enough exposure time you can get very interesting infrared images.

This isn’t the thermal imaging kind of infrared, mind - you need extremely sensitive equipment for that, and it’s at a much longer wavelength than the kind we’re talking about here. This is infrared from the sun or household lighting, reflected off objects, just like visible light.

There’s one main visual difference when shooting infrared: foliage reflects infrared much more strongly than visible light. This leads to images like these, where the leaves are glowing a snowy white. Another side-effect is the sky becoming much darker, leading to striking visual contrasts.

I’m still experimenting, but initial results are positive. Now I just need to get a tripod so I can photograph things other than the view from the garden table.

In other news, possible future purchase: 60mm Micro-Nikkor lens. There’s little life flora-wise at the moment, but when it picks up next year I may invest in this fine lens. Stay tuned, folks.

As I noted in a recent post, I’ve been getting to know classical music recently. Despite having grown up surrounded by it, my sum total knowledge of it was only about the average. It basically amounted to being able to identify Beethoven’s 5th, the Planets, the Four Seasons and the Sea Interludes. Anything else and I was lost.

So I’m working to gradually change this. This is not for the sake of just knowing about it - far from it. I could listen to classical music for a year and still not properly know about it, such is its diversity. Rather, I’m getting to know it because it’s such a rich world which many people leave untapped.

The thing is, many people know more classical music than they realise. I could play five pieces which would be universally recognised, and yet most people couldn’t go into a shop and find a recording of it. To that end, I thought I’d identify some pieces which are well-known, should people want to explore classical music themselves. After all, you have to start somewhere.

Note that most of the recordings I link to are awful, I’m only giving them so that you know what music I’m talking about. If you want to properly hear a piece, I suggest either buying a CD or grabbing it on iTunes (which has a very large classical section at reasonable prices). The web doesn’t have very many decent, free recordings floating around.

First and foremost, Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Absolutely everyone will know this, and probably by name. It’s one of the most popular pieces of classical music ever written, the first movement in particular. The fourth movement is even better than the first, but that isn’t the bit usually played. Different conductors take this at markedly different paces and even have different interpretations of the timing of the ubiquitous opening few bars; comparing recordings is fascinating.

In piano solo music, the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (”Funeral March”) is also engraved into the collective consciousness, although less identifiable. Everyone can hum a few bars from the third movement, but the other three movements are also great. Heck, the third movement is quite long, and has a brighter section in the middle than the opening and ending sections.

The last movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (”Choral”) is the official anthem of the European Union, and is again extremely popular. It was used a lot in A Clockwork Orange. Not that that’s necessarily a good thing.

The Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem is often used in films. It’s a musical setting of the fire-and-brimstone from the Roman Catholic funeral mass, and so is extremely dramatic and powerful. The other sections are also worth a look, especially the Tuba Mirum. (The same sections in Berlioz’s Requiem are just as powerful, if less well-known, and are also worth checking out.)

Another symphony, this time Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. Another one you’ll know when you hear. ‘Nuff said.

I think that’ll do for now. I could go on with Beethoven’s piano sonatas, some of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, and more. But this is already a long post as it is.

You’ll be surprised how much classical music you know.

I’m not one for the whole podcasting scene. While everyone else is raving about the latest episodes of the TWiT podcast or somesuch, I’ve let it all pass me by. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike them - my apathy is through sheer laziness more than anything. It feels like a lot of effort to navigate to a site and click the relevant links to get to whatever it is I want to listen to, when the energy could be much better spent doing absolutely nothing.

It’s a fact of the internet that eventually boredom claims all, so I found myself navigating over to The Show with Ze Frank. It consists of a daily video weblog (vlog, if you’re all web2 and mashed-up and ajaxified) lasting for a few minutes in which Ze Frank rambles on about various topics which take his fancy, occasionally breaking into song or saying something about rubber duckies.

There went the next couple of evenings. I watched all the archived shows, and then proceeded to be sure to catch the new ones each day. Or I did, for about a week, until I realised that his newest shows are very dull and forgot all about it.

Then there’s Ctrl+Alt+Chicken, to which I was very recently introduced. A twenty minute cookery show by two people who can’t cook, it demonstrates that mere mortals CAN produce edible food which didn’t arrive in a microwave packet. Most of the time. It’s more professionally produced than The Show with Ze Frank, with proper lighting and a crew and everything, courtesy of the free online show company Revision3.

That then brings us to a few days ago, when I found myself surfing the Revision3 website and happened across Diggnation. Unlike Ctrl+Alt+Chicken, I was already familiar with the concept of Diggnation being an internet-savvy tech head, since it revolves around the social news website Digg. Two guys, both ex-tech TV channel presenters (one of whom created Digg itself), chat for 40-50 minutes about some of their favourite stories that appeared on Digg that week while drinking varying amounts of beer.

It’s good fun. Some episodes are funnier than others, but generally they have interesting and amusing things to say about the various topics at hand. The size of the tangents they go off at bears no relation to the quantity of beer they’ve drunk, so you can usually guarantee there will be some kind of argument about all things internet. They occasionally do shows in front of an audience, too, which actually doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to it.

But that’s it. I haven’t watched any other video podcast type things. Maybe I should. Suggestions, anyone?