Archive for April, 2014

Nanu Pics Part 1 – What do all these buttons do…?

Welcome to a new venture for Nanu Nanu – a small blog about starting up with how the hell to get your head around the basics photography. This series will follow our own attempts to get to grips with cameras, and how to use them properly, as and when we learn them. This will by no means be an extensive account of what you need to know but try to break down the complexity into laymen”s terms, and we will post links to places that offer more details when we have them available.

 

So you”ve just got a camera – what the hell do you do now?

So many buttons, so little time to press them all (and so many fears that what you will press will ruin everything) – but worry not, we are hear to help. Here are a few things to do before you get started!

Step 1) Look through the instructions – I know it”s boring to say it, but it will tell you most of what you need to know about what the camera does. What struck me as a first looked through the guide, was the amount of settings one could go through without even touching individual buttons, just from the main knob – so let”s take a look at what they do and how to use them.

 

Most cameras have a dial that you turn to different modes, with little pictures next to them which change the way the camera takes photos. Within these different types of modes there aretwo major distinctions between them – some are creative and some are basic preset modes. The first bunch, the so called “creative” appear on the dial as letters – could be things like M (Manual), Av (Aperture Priority AE), TV (Shutter Priority AE) and P (Program AE). Don”t worry, we are going to go through these modes one by one, and not use the technical jargon. The “basic” set of modes are more obvious and are set up according to specific needs. These may differ a lot depending on the camera model, but are more self explanatory.

Basic Set

The basic set are your off the peg options that you can just click your camera into the right gear and get shooting. Here we go through some of the modes and what they can be used for:

A – Scene Intelligent Auto – a “fully automatic shooting mode with auto scene detection” where many of the features of the camera are set automatically according to the scene you are in. Auto-flash, Brightness, Flash, Color tone are set according to where you are. This mode is ideal for when you don”t know what you want, and is great for learning the very basics of how to shoot, composition and so on.

Flash Off – flash is disabled. If you have a flash that pops out, this will prevent that from popping out, and even if not, will make sure that the flash is not on for any shot you make. This is ideal for when you are in museums, galleries and other places where flash photography is prohibited. Importantly, without a flash you will have to rely on natural light, and this has a massive effect on how your images will look. Without meaning to go into details, the camera itself warns me when I”m in this mode that my images may become shaky – this is because in low light areas it will take longer for enough light to get into my camera so I can see anything, so even the slightest nudge when I”m taking a photo will make the image change slightly.

CA – Creative Auto – Auto mode for easy setting of Image Brightness background blurring, flash, and everything else. This mode seems ideal for when you want to start messing around with the little buttons and features without going to far wrong.

Portrait – This is the mode you would use when the subject of your image is a person. This setting blurs the background, so that subjects stands out, and smooths skin textures and hair – making your image more flattering to people (I assume)

Landscape – this has a wide depth of field meaning that a lot more of the image is kept in focus (not just the background or foreground)

Close-Up – for capturing things incredibly close to the lens, typically flowers, insects that sort of thing. This sort of thing is ideal with “Macro” lenses, and will give really high quality images to things that are small and super close to your lens.

Sports – For shooting subjects in motion – the important thing for this is that includes a continuous shooting mode that keeps the subject in focus

Night Portrait – For taking portrait shots when the background is dark and full of illuminations (stars, lights at a fair, that kind of thing). When this is being used, as is similar to the non-flash mode) it may cause blurry images, so recommends the use of a tripod – or a very sturdy hand!

Handheld Night Scene – a shooting mode for at night which doesn”t require a tripod. This uses four separate shots taken almost at once to create a single stable image. This is very useful for taking simple images when you don”t have the use of a tripod (and frankly at our level – who does!).

HDR Backlight Control – combines three shots at three different exposures to improve the high light and show detail. Again, this will only work if you have a tripod, but what it does is when you take a photograph which has some light elements and some dark elements, it will take image on three different settings and amalgamate them into one image, so that things that are in shae are not simply blacked out or too dark to see, where as parts of the photo that are very bright aren”t over saturated in white light.

 

Creative Set

The creative set I would describe as more useful when you want to tweak and play around with the more complicated things available to you.

Pioneers: Tax-i for one, tax-i for all

This week, the world – or at least predominantly that of the British Press and Public – are waking up to the realisation that companies are avoiding tax. Corporations such as Amazon, Google and Starbucks are not only avoiding tax, but avoiding it within the framework of the law, and at an unprecedented scale.

Rather than try and judge the morality of taxation, an issue that is being written about endlessly by real journalists, I want to explore this subject using the contribution of the internet in this debate. What very few are mentioning is the fact that these problems are not local. They exist everywhere and can be explained through a different problem – the problem of the digital globe, and the bizarre notion of nations.

In the case of Amazon and Google, these companies are clearly based online. Although they have a very real presence in the world – especially substantial is Amazon’s incredible network of distribution centres globally, but google’s own data centres are as equally “present” despite making their money through immaterial production – they are vast conglomerates with a very international, digital footprint. Seen in this way, it makes sense then to include Starbucks in this debate – even though their web presence is that much more limited than Google or Amazon, they have a similar sense of international dominance and scale that enter into our debate. In order to move towards some sort of understanding here, we must begin to unveil what – the erosion of national boundaries through an international medium.

What I would like to argue here is simple – our use of the internet is in some sense international and as we do more and more online the ramifications of this will emerge, and in fact are already emerging, in what we do in real life. Whether this would have taken place without the internet through globalization, a tricky term which I will facetiously reduce by which we all eat the same burgers and spend money at virtually the same shops on similar looking high streets, is not particularly important as it is a world we cannot know. However, I would like to argue that the way this process of globalization has taken place online makes it’s appearance far less visible, and it is through this that we have slipped into a globalized world, while elsewhere we still hold onto modernist notions of nations and states.

This makes sense if we look at what we do at a very simple level. Our mundane use of the internet – in the sense of the usual and the everyday things we do, as opposed to simply being “boring” in any sense – is seeing us stumble into international quagmires on an almost daily basis, but we very rarely realise it. Through the internet, physical limitations of geography are being undermined, and in many ways the process is visible – most noticeable in our ability to converse with friends in other cities with more ease and convenience than was possible pre-internet. Skyping someone or chatting with a friend you wouldn’t otherwise see, is an act that barely deserves recognition – and our participation in markets and commerce are becoming this way too. If we are becoming internationalised, the most profound of these movements are taking place without us noticing – by virtue of simple, and unwitting actions as opposed to any progressive or constructive liberal sense towards active cohesion – and as such we must begin to consider our emergence world through an international legal framework. But just how international is the internet?

Understanding that the internet you and I read is very much slanted towards a particular notion of universality is easily exposed when you consider typical use of the internet for people in the UK. For example, one might stumble through links to see unattainable items on amazon.com that aren’t available on amazon.co.uk – and in the case of dvds even if they can be bought, they are locked to a particular region that you have to circumvent if you want access. There are other limitations that prevent access – not having an american bank account will be problematic in shopping abroad, and even if you can use your own services, a certain amount of conversion takes place behind the scenes. In this moment, the barriers of nationality become overt, but are rarely treated as rational. These limitations are entirely artificial, and present inconceivable barriers to transactions which would otherwise be simple. In a basic sense then, we can see that there are parts of the internet that are privileged by certain factors.

But what if you were intentionally looking for something outside of your world? For example will tend to see the part of the internet that writes in your language, forgetting the diverse networks of material available in other languages. One could access google.fr if you wanted to, and explore a world which is built towards searching French websites, or francophone sources. Interestingly here, one is not defining the international through nationality, but through classification by language. The French part of the internet is as much Canadian and Algerian as it does belong to the digital world of France.

Despite this, some notions of nationality still exist, particularly in nation-specific domains that are controlled by specific jurisdictions. The .fr domain is one such example, as too is .co.uk. In Chris Morris’ brilliant British comedy Nathan Barley, registering a domain in the Cook Islands allowed one to register the crass “Trashbat.co.ck” in a practice now commonly echoed in a number of start-ups hoping to make, quite literally, a name for themselves – especially in URL shortening services who try to use .ly (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya) and .io (British Indian Ocean Territory) that have become trendy. The fact that many of these fall under the jurisdiction of these states – and as such must abide by whichever arbitrary rules the states desire – are ignored and often foolishly, with the popular domains of unstable states in danger of succumbing to the whims of geo-politics. In this sense, we can see once more notions of geography and national specificity thrown aside in small, and simple acts that are motivated by notoriety and commerce far more than they are by national allegiance in the new digital world.

But through this it is worth trying to understanding more coherently how the internet works technically for cutting through simple appearances of a global network. Borrowing from a ELI5 thread on reddit, the internet can be understood as a series of rooms, in which people can communicate if those rooms are connected. Now, to communicate with certain rooms, you need special messages, and importantly you don’t need to know where the room is, but simply know where to hand over the messages to get it to another room. In each room there is a book in which builds a knowledge of how to – and messages can be exchanged with other rooms to get

Basically, servers across the world host the websites you view, and the jurisdiction of each country relates to the physical geography of that server. When you make an attempt to access any website, a request is sent to that server to access the information. Between you and that server however is an ISP (Internet Service Provider) who themselves. hosts their own; and . A good example Google#s attempts to enter the chinese market caused much – the fact that they were asked to . Although accessing international .

It’s because of this that we see odd things happen that are tied to specific nations. For example Syria just this week plunged themselves into an internet blackout, a rather precarious and scar moment.

In much the same way that in an emergency, you’ll notice the mobile networks go down, the same can be said the infrastructure that upholds the internet. As much as simply unplugging the entire thing, at a national network level, or traffic can be prevented, surveilled or

Tor is an interesting project.

Control in this ; the region locking system is an interesting one

One arguement made on Radio 4 tired to eliminate the need for corporate tax at all – tax, they claimed, could not be paid by an entity like a – but in this same arguement he tried to claim that tax could only be paid by, defeating the sense of impossibility at all – his idea was a complex way of saying the people. The real problem however is that – stockholders and higher end employees have far more access to less physical geography. Someone who buys a coffee can only do so where they are, and similarly . The company itself is a diverse and complex network of arrangements, as too are the invested parties . In this sense, money permits a different kind of mobility that is presented in some ways to the consumer through the internet.

NFT April – Horror and Social Anxiety

 

*** This feature will feature spoilers. For a little guide on what to expect without spoilers, check out our introduction ***.

The two films we’ve chosen for this month’s double bill are not typical of the time they were created in – but stand as noteworthy types of the genre, despite often exceeding or expanding it. Even with the gaping chasm between them, combined they allow us to come closer to understanding what horror as a genre is – at least as can be found with a very gentle excavation of the form in mainstream cinema.

George Romero’s fantastic “Night of the Living Dead” is as close to classic horror as you can get.  Released in 1968, the independent feature is often considered the original presentation of zombies to a mainstream audience, and this despite not actually mentioning zombies at any point. The voodoo zombie of older films here is replaced with a more modern monster, the stand-out somnambulists that walk and yearn for a new level of violence and gore, but which camouflage themselves amongst a more usual, contemporary setting. Even if it wasn’t the first – it most certainly is the most remembered film of the genre.

It’s notoriety can best be understood to its originality at the time it was created. Outside of a multi-million dollar culture of cheap thrills horror,  Romero’s film could appear to be simply one drop in a tsunami of shite, but it is anything but.  Before Romero’s masterpiece, horror took place in deliberately scary venues, with danger subdued and left to reside in the shadows. Romero’s monsters take what scares us, takes those creeping fears that are so usully buried, and brings them to the surface. Put simply, the Zombies, as we know them now, were not only coming to get you – but they were like you too.

The success of this formula bred with this success. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead began an entire genre of movies, not only from Romero himself , who’s “of the dead” series is perhaps the most well known, but also the equally loved “Living Dead” series from Dan O Bannon and John Russo, who base their series on the suggestion that the original film was a real event – and introduce zombies as an altogether more terrifying foe, communicative and essentially unstoppable in their quest to nosh on your brains. Even beyond this particular clique, Romero’s work has inspired countless other retellings, reimaginigs and spoofs – and all obsessed with the same, simple monster.

Our other film, Rec

Since remade from it’s spanish origins.

 

One commentator argues that this film

 

Most specific to Romero’s ouevre is the notable inclusion of meaning, as each new film points towards a new feature of contemporary society which is expanded upon by the traditional framework of the horror film. This is most clear to see in the original Dawn of the Dead, where Romero places the zombie hordes in a shopping mall  who, framed by the incessant commercialism that remains rife in society, continue to enact the anaesthetized behaviours of their former selves.  Rarely however, does this habit towards meaning get in the way of a fun, camply violent romp – and perhaps it is this feature of the film, in which we are shown our vices while enjoying something equally as empty and full of surface delight, actually contribute towards a further, more complex feeling for the audience in relation to the movie. When this is later remade, this confused space is rearticulated without any of the potency of the original, sealing any of this complexity away.

This leads us to where “Rec” and Romero collide most prominently, within the less well received Diary of the Dead, in which the protagonist’s make them film as part of a documentary. Their experience of this world is seen through the lens of a camera, deliberately shown through within the movie. Obviously inspired by the sort of film-making rekindled with the success of Blair Witch Project, by no means does Romero succeed with this attempt, but this doesn’t impact significantly – we know what to expect in the zombie genre as much as we know what to expect from this found footage ordeals; bizarrely, it could be argued that Romero doesn’t ever bring anything new, but merely repeats what we’ve already seen a thousand times before – but does so at a point in which our society is so overly saturated and aware of itself that to do so now merely repeats the symptoms of society itself.

The most significant reason why this film fails is that it doesn’t speak to an audience of viewers as is usually understood, but an audience of new film-makers. The horror therefore is not in the flesh eating zombies, but the morality of filming, the naivety of those that approach the camera without knowing its potential violent affects. Because of this, many that watch the film feel above the horror, separated from its meaning as a kind of knowing spectator, where as the rest – a clearly diminishing number which are not truly inseparable from the “film-makers” I mean, what with our own tendency to capture and share many, often mundane, facets of our own lives – don’t find the traditional horror in the film authentic, or engaging.  Therefore, it fails to engage any viewer as others in the series do, but fails in an ever shrinking space of uncertainty, a distance within which it could be claimed Romero is most astute, albeit merely ineffectual due to society’s flaws rather than the director’s own failure of vision.

This is where the baton is handed over – where a new breed of film-making can speak with this audience.

Undeniably, “Night of the Living Dead” shows it’s age, particularly when contrasted with the more modern horror style with which we have become accustomed. Everything from the cheap looking film stock to the dialogue and costumes scream that this film was made in a different era to today. The opening sequence, in which a couple end up stranded in a grave yard, has the hallmarks of every classic american – but it feels naff because it was so original, and as a result endlessly copied. That doesn’t say it isn’t any good any more – frankly, it still has the potential to be enjoyed beyond that naff, ironic experience that one can expect, simply as it is a well made film that stands the test of time to a certain extent.

This passage of time is worth touching upon again. Despite it’s originality and attention to social issues, in its original release, it was the film makers who were most criticised by the content of the picture – with a public supposedly unused to the “pornography of violence” on display, many children went to see the film without supervision, and the many more who saw this film from a distance, saw only it’s  . Blinded by the apparent gratuitous violence of cinema and the shocking presentation of cannibalism, they failed to acknowledged the real horror taking place – the horror within ourselves.

One conclusion that needs to be drawn is that it should never surprise you how short sighted people can be, not because they are wrong necessarily, but because they only see things as they are now. In much the same way that those opposing inter-racial marriage are now rightly seen as moronic racists, those opposing gay-marriage today will in some future point be seen as the homophobes they really are. Not meaning to needlessly beat the drum of equality, but it is only through those pioneers who errode the fringe of consensus with cinema like this that we can grow and move closer. I’m not saying Night of the Living Dead

Hindsight is a remarkable tool for seeing the naked truth, and though there is no inevitable position in the future from which we can pretend to look back, there are social positions which in just over a decade of mainstream internet communication have already been eroded. Censorship is all well and good for protecting the young from things which will trouble them – but when adults are not allowed to discuss ideas openly, these taboos take on a repressive and dangerous power

This is why these films are important. Because they are, they go into places which we otherwise do not allow ourselves to go. They let us

Although

Hell, without we wouldn’t have had the stupendous spoof Zom-Rom-Com Shaun of the Dead (which points throughout to seemingly hundreds of movies as diverse as and Rain Man)

How this film relates to social anxiety is played out in the final sequence – with the shocking. Despite the gruelling ordeal of the night before, he is dispatched like any other piece of rotting meat.

But people went to see it in their droves, becoming at that time, one of the most profitable horror films made.

 

Rather beautifully, due to an error by the distributor, the film now resides in the public domain, meaning anyone can access this for free. Download it, remix it, do whatever you like with it – as now it is our film.

 

 

#EdFringe Survival Guide

It’s the most wonderful, tiring and rainy time of the year! To have maximum fun at the Edinburgh Fringe 2013, follow these simple steps. Guaranteed to ward off Fringe Fatigue and Fringe Flu.

Have a wee

Before going in to see a show, a well timed wee is essential. Fringe venues aren’t made for inconspicuous exits and if you do slip out, you immediately become susceptible to audience interaction.

Freeze some dinners

It’s such a good idea. But making a cottage pie and not eating it straight away is tough.

Put something proper on your feet

Like any festival, the Fringe involves lots of walking and portable toilets. A covered and supported sole is best to avoid blisters and seeping liquids.

Allow 10 minutes for the tourist slalom

The streets are congested and slow with street performers, tourists and tourists watching street performers so allow a few extra minutes to reach your destination.

Plan…but not too much

If you don’t have an idea what you’re aiming for at the Fringe it can all be a bit overwhelming. So book a few things you really want to see but leave plenty of gaps for impulse buys.

Don’t let FOMO ruin your life

Fear Of Missing Out is inevitable at the Fringe because you are going to miss out because you need to go to bed. But if you repeatedly succumb to FOMO you will, at some point, end up sitting on the toilet, sobbing.

 

Have a great Fringe!

Nanu Book Club: The Sirens of Titan

Welcome back to the Nanu Book Club – this month’s book was

The Book

Vonnegut’s novel is a piece of science fiction that questions

Reactions

Katy “It’s like I wrote down a list of all the big ideas that I like to wax lyrical about after 2 pints in the pub: time travel, free will, religious symbolism for a start. Then someone stole my beer soaked napkin list, fleshed out all the ideas and crafted them into a story which is really smart and finely tuned. Only criticism is, the ideas it presents are much more interesting than the characters representing them.”

Ellie “I got to page 102 and gave up on Sirens of Titan. I already knew that sci-fi wasn’t my thing but tried and tried to get to grips with the book. I like Kurt Vonnegut’s ideas and enjoyed the discussion at Book Club about the ideas behind the novel but it was the langague and style of writing that didn’t appeal. I understand that science fiction is a good medium for discussing complex experiences, like Vonnegut’s own experiences of war, but the straightforward, matter of fact way that the novel was written put me off. ”

 

Next Month: we’ll be reading James Joyce’s The Dubliners