Too-Big Data? That don’t impress me much

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On a whim, I spent the evening in Edinburgh at a meetup presentation/meeting concerning Big Data, the talk given by a “Big Data hero” (IBM’s term), employed by a huge multinational corporation with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies (including the UK Welfare system).

I think I was supposed to be awed by the scale of data under discussion, but mostly what I heard was all immodest massive business-speak and buzzwords and acronyms. A few scattered examples to claim “we did that”, “look at the size of our supercomputer”, but the only technical word he uttered all evening was “Hadoop”.

In the absence of a clear directed message, I’ve come away with my own thoughts instead.

So the idea of Big Data is altogether a source of disappointment and concern.

There seems to be a discrepancy: on the one hand, one’s fitbit and phone are rich sources of data; the thought of analyzing it all thoroughly sets my data-geek senses twitching in excitement. However, the Internet of Things experience relies on huge companies doing the analysis – outsourced to the cloud – which forms a disjoint as they proceed to do inter-company business based on one’s personal data (read: sell it, however aggregated it might be – the presenter this evening scoffed at the idea of “anonymized”), above one’s head and outwith one’s control. The power flows upwards.

To people such as this evening’s speaker, privacy and ethics are just more buzzwords to bolt on to a “data value pipeline” to tout the profit optimizations of “data-driven companies”. So are the terms data, information, knowledge and even wisdom.

But I think he’s lost direction in the process. We’ve come a long way from sitting on the sofa making choices how to spend the evening pushing buttons on the mobile.

And that is where I break contact with The Matrix.

I believe in appreciating the value of little things. In people, humanity and compassion more than companies. In substance. In the genuine kind of Quality sought by Pirsig, not as “defined” by ISO code 9000. Value may arise from people taking care in their craft: one might put a price on a carved wooden bowl in order to sell it, but the brain that contains the skill required to make it is precious beyond the scope of the dollar.

Data is data and insights are a way to lead to knowledge, but real wisdom is not just knowing how to guide analysis – it’s understanding that human intervention is sometimes required, and knowing when to deploy it, awareness, critical thinking to see and choose.

The story goes that a salesman once approached a pianist, offering a new keyboard “with eight nuances”. The response came back: “but my playing requires nine”.

Tips for Creative Photography

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If there’s a term I particularly despise, it is the “tip”; in 3 letters it makes a promise it cannot keep and belittles the photographic process into the bargain.

It is particularly repugnant when it appears in forms such as “tips for creative landscape photography: HDR”. Consider that example, and substitute the last term with any other technique that you can name – intentional camera movement (aka ICM), “use a tripod”, “use an ND filter”, “focus-stack”, “use a circular polariser filter”… what they all have in common is the tail wagging the dog, a not-entirely-latent suggestion that if you just do this one little thing, you’ll necessarily get better photos as a result. 

Not so; of course, even if the technique were used appropriately, the results are either demonstration shots, or following in the footsteps of convention.

One dictionary defines “creative” as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc”.

If a tip is something one applies to the camera in search of a panacea, creativity is what one applies from one’s head in order to bring something new to the light-table. There is a progression from “a photo of” to “a photo where” and thence to “a photo that tells a story” – yet one can still pretend to make such on any street corner. Rather, I suggest it arises from concepts as a motivational force – an idea that you so desire to represent that you go out and make it happen with whatever techniques and equipment it takes.

Timescales

I wanted to make a photo to illustrate the timescales at which things happen. That means an extreme shutter-speed, motion either obviously frozen or obviously prolonged, relative to the subjects at hand. Daffodils, shrubs and trees would blow around in the wind; with any luck, a sufficiently long exposure would capture some motion in the clouds; the Parish Church isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

So, a long exposure was chosen – over a minute – with welding glass and rubber bands – that requires the tripod. Even at its widest 18mm focal length, the kit lens only just got the width of the church in the scene, so I shot 8 photos working my way from bottom to top – that’s a vertorama, giving a massive field of view and playing with perspective distortion. As I panned up, taking exposures over a minute long, the sunlight illuminating the scene varied and obviously the sky was brighter, so I varied the exposure (both shutter time and the aperture) to avoid blowing highlights in the clouds – and that’s HDR. I wanted reasonable local contrast, both in the stonework and, critically, in the sky – that’s tonemapping. And I wanted a vintage feel – that’s black & white with warm toning.

But it’s not that I have “an HDR vertorama” to show – hopefully, what I have is a scene in which three subjects are portrayed operating at different speeds. That’s what matters.

Today, anyway.

My Photography Zen just ran over your Dogma

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In a previous life I used to attend the local photography club; there were ups (friends; winning the occasional competition; being involved, mostly in geekish matters; making the occasional presentation) and some noteworthy downs (a very rude judge; a feeling that photos were judged according to how “lucky” they were to have been found, rather than appreciating skill in the making). On the whole, however, they were welcoming and friendly and it was generally “my” club.

So, now we’ve settled elsewhere in the country, I thought I’d investigate the local camera club.

Such conversation as there was was mostly limited to willy-waving equipment:

  • someone’s selling their Canon 550D and someone else has a 7D. I don’t care; show me the results from either.
  • “oh yeah, oh yeah, Sigma’s a good make. I’ve got a Tokina 11-16mm lens, that’s quite wide-angle”. Immodest one-upmanship, as though one’s lens’s field of view is something to boast about.
  • “I don’t use Photoshop. I figure if you’ve spent thousands on a good camera…”. Well good for you; if I’d spent thousands on my camera I’d consider it imbalanced not to be matched in complexity of software.
  • “I don’t use Photoshop. It makes competitions unfair, that someone puts in the work to do it correctly in-camera and someone else takes a lousy photo and makes it good”. Wake up: post-processing is a necessary part of photography, and at least they’re getting results.
  • “So what do you use?” A Panasonic. “Oh.” Pause. “I have a Nikon” (points to bag emblazened with a Sony logo). I’m as glad for you as the results you get are good.
  • “I bought a 100-400mm lens for £650; the chap selling it said it had auto-focus but I was disappointed when it didn’t”. Tough luck; my favourite lens cost me £40 on eBay.

It being the first night of the season, there was a short presentation of a selection of images (of varying degrees of appeal; “sorry but we haven’t calibrated the projector yet” – and it showed, as the red channel was completely blown) and an awful lot of laying-down rules about competitions (down to 2 photos per contributor per competition, inexplicably; a meagre 1024*768px size for digital submissions).

The arguments are old, tired and banal. There was no evidence of people being interested in each others’ choice of subject-matter or approaches to it – what makes them tick as photographers, people, artists. Like landscape or find it too anyone-can-appreciate-it common-denominator? Like portraiture? Sports? Abstract art, fine art? Microscopy?

As a parallel to the hardware fixation, all talk of software – including, critically, “advancing one’s photography” – centred on Adobe Photoshop, as though it were the only tool out there.

Nature:TNGTo state the obvious, photography is not about hardware – the clue’s in the name: light-writing; it’s about image – the image – and what thoughts it evokes in one’s brain. Advancement is a matter of choice, control (pushing the right buttons for desired outcomes) and knowledge – the practical experiences of requirements and attainability at time of shooting and of rationally choosing settings for their consequences as a function of the image-space (rather than as individual corrections or tweaks) in post-processing.

Nor is post-processing all about Photoshop either – but I know what saturation, high-pass sharpening, barrel-distortion-correction and channel-mixing do to an image, and I know how my particular camera behaves with noise arising from high ISO as distinct from longer exposures, and that I prefer to remove both kinds of the camera’s noise as much as possible only to reapply synthetic grain using a Perlin noise generator. All are functions of the image, independent of the software being used.

From experience, the best a competition can do is assign a score – subject to the judge’s biases – and, typically, make some superficial remarks about if one were to “…just tweak the sharpness a bit”… as though there were only one such control (I can think of simple, deconvolution, unsharp masking, high-pass, refocus and Wiener sharpening algorithms off the top of my head – which of these do they just mean?!). This does not lead to advancement.

I do not have to subscribe to their arbitrary rules, limitations and regulations.

I will not be attending that photo-club.

I have images to be making!

A Spirituality of Dog

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One of those small vignette-style scenes that occasionally goes through my mind has resurfaced of late.

A few years ago I was sitting in church when the preacher related a story. Apparently he’d recently met his friend, who’d said that, while he wasn’t a Christian, sometimes when he was out walking his dog, he felt close to God.

“Ah, but is there salvation in it?”, the preacher asked us.

Had it not been only a rhetorical question, my answer would have been an enthusiastic “Yes (smartass)”. Because isn’t that the definition and purpose of salvation?

When the destination is the same, at the other end of the motorway, insisting on travelling a given trunk road to join it is particularly futile and partisan.

We’d do a lot better to recognize the grace behind Gandhi’s quote: So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian.

Our Earth Was Once Green

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A few months ago, when we moved into the area, one of the first local scenes I spotted was this view of beech trees along the brow of a small hill, running along the side of a fence, terminating with a gate and a hawthorn tree.

I managed to capture the view with the remnants of snow as the deeper drifts melted away:

Some Trees

Some Trees

and I wrote a previous article about what set that image apart from a quick mobile snap of the scene as well.

As a photographer, I was looking forward to capturing the scene in varying seasons – indeed, I could anticipate my output becoming repetitive and running out of inspiration for different ways to portray it.

I got as far as two variations.

First, The Answer: tall beech trees, covered in new foliage for the onset of summer, blowing in the wind:

the answer

The Answer

and then an evening portrait of summer skies with blue wispy cirrus clouds above the trees:

Some Sky

Some Sky

In the past week, the impressive beeches have been cut down; a drain pipe has been laid just this side of the trees, the fence is removed and the whole hillside has been ploughed so what used to be an expanse of green grass is currently brown soil. I guess at least that won’t last long before it recovers.

Our Earth Was Once Green

Our Earth Was Once Green

Yesterday evening I caught a TV programme about Scotland’s landscape, from the point of view of some awful Victorian book, a rather romantic tourist guide for “picturesque” views, the programme showing the contrast with tourists’ search for an “authentic experience” of Scotland – yet pointing out how, more or less by definition, to be a tourist is inevitably to be an uninvolved spectator.

One of the guests in the programme was a local photographer, who explained how landscape photographers struggle with the dichotomy of presenting the landscape as timeless, pure, untainted by human hand, whilst knowing in the back of their mind that they’re perpetrating a myth through selectivity, that the landscape is far from wild and natural – the deforestation dates back 8 millenia to pre-history, what now appears as Highland heather-clad grouse-moor heath used to be crofting land prior to the Clearances, etc.

While landscape used to be my chosen genre of photography, and a fair proportion of what I now shoot – including the above – still qualifies as such, I think it’s time to recognize that landscape photography is not just about the tourist photographer seeking ever-wilder ever-more-northern scenery, nice as that can be, but rather includes potentially less travel whilst valuably documenting the landscape changing from year to year, whether those changes arise from natural forces or human intervention.

Selectivity, or Why is Good?

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I remember two particular thoughts from my time in a photo-club (past-tense, as we’ve moved house since).

First, discussing landscape photography with another member, he said he used a large-format (5×4) camera and Fuji Velvia film “because it gets results that express how it felt to be there at the time”. To be quite honest, this put me off landscape – particularly large-format – because I realised the nonsense behind it: after all, if I can name half a dozen people who all shoot LF+Velvia then that conflicts with the unique individuality of a feeling. Face it, it’s just a trend. [0]

Second, a lingering suspicion from club competitions. I felt that the previous photo-club had a bias toward photos where the photographer “got lucky”, which prompted thoughts of rebellion – surely a photo should be marked according to the skill exhibited in its making?

So what is landscape photography? Is it right to just wander around the landscape, see what looks nice and point the camera in the right direction? Or is it desirable to spend hours poring over OS maps, Google Streetview and the MetOffice weather to plan a trip to a specific scene with particular favourable lighting and conditions?

By what criteria will the resultant photograph be regarded as “good” – that it conforms to some guidelines of composition, that it tells a human-interest story, or that it merely represents what it looked like to be in a given place and time?

This pair of images serves as an example.

I like it, as a reminder of walking the dog here every day (my story!), but it would be fair to say it was little more than an illustrative snap – the lighting is sub-optimal, the tonality is crass, the image-quality is fairly poor (as befits an image taken on a mobile phone), and above all, it’s cluttered with many elements as the road and wind-turbine introduce whole new themes of mankind’s interactions with nature.

But a couple of weeks ago, I made a photo Some Trees from nearly the same viewpoint:

And this is favourably regarded in photographic circles. The difference is selectivity: by choosing a tighter framing (both at the scene and only a slight crop in post-processing), I’ve avoided the road and wind turbine, concentrating on the wind-blown trees plodding like Atlas up the outline of the hill and the remaining vestiges of snow. Of course, by also removing the colour in favour of plain black and white, I’ve made the silhouette more stark and concentrated on shapes and lines and form rather than realism.

But the snap is still true to life. Maybe there’s room for saying landscape photography should be both about the photography (which introduces the detached external off-line phenomena during the stages of image-construction and criticism) but also about the landscape, which one should simply appreciate for how it really looks without being excessively selective?

 

[0] The other member left the club soon after, but returned for just one evening a couple of years later, where we had quite a cathartic chat: I was returning to landscape on my own terms, and he was now shooting sports digitally elsewhere in the country. And the wheel turns…