Blog

Everything has its own time.

I’m going back to film. I’ll still shoot digital, but I like the look of film images; they are softer, and seem to capture reality more truthfully than digital images. Which is puzzling, because digital cameras take much sharper images. But the softer focus, the dust, the scratches, the unpredictable interaction between light, old glass, shutter speed, aperture, film speed, camera shake, the film developing process, and all of the conditions around one–when one is trying to make a photograph with an old manual camera–all of these things give the film photograph a sense of reality that digital cameras can’t provide.

The viewer of a film photograph instantly knows, mostly on an unconscious level, that the photo before him really happened. He can imagine, briefly, the circumstances that may have occurred when the picture was taken. The imperfections in the image convey information which the mind uses to reconstruct the event captured.

And, therefore, film photographs help you extrapolate from those circumstances to a wider scope of circumstances. Take the photograph of my sister, for example. A healthy, happy 13- or 14-year old girl. Well fed, well groomed, well cared for. Living in a beautiful, well-constructed home, in a nice neighbourhood. Lots of tree-lined streets and boulevards; single-parent families with lots of children everywhere. An economy that supported a fairly stress-free existence. People were well-mannered and polite, and kind. They attended religious services and cultural events and visited each other.

Every decade since then has seen a decline in all of those qualities of living.

Even the means of making photographs has declined. Used to be you would need cameras and film and darkrooms; chemicals and people who would sell this equipment and explain how to use it.

Nowadays, all of that is gone. Most people have a tiny electronic camera built into their telephone and that’s it. And the cell phone of today is a poor substitute for the large, comfortable, analog telephones of yesteryear. The sound quality of those phones was superior to today’s cell phones. The fact they were attached to walls meant you had to have a room with a chair and a table to sit near when you placed or received a call; you would sit down and have a real conversation with another person.

These days you’re lucky if you get a text from an AI. We’ve all been placed in cages in the sky, working for a heartless computer god who will incinerate our remains when we’re gone and dispose of our possessions–all of them digital–in the bit bucket when we die.

Wow, that got dark quickly.

Sitting out on our front steps with our cat as I do several times each day, I ponder random ideas as they occur, drifting through my consciousness like the passing breezes.

We’re in a warm spell for late March. I wore my grey cotton onesie over my blue flannel pajamas, and covered everything with a navy blue peacoat. Boot socks and crocs on my feet. No rain at 4:55 AM when Hazel and I took our places this morning, so Hazel was happy. Two days ago we were out at roughly the same time and the temperature was cold; rain was heavy, and Hazel wanted to come back inside after five minutes. But this morning she was content and so was I. Although it was dark I could tell that the air was clean; both by sniffing it and by looking west, down the length of the block across Smith Street, a distance of some 1000 feet, I’d guess. No haze in the air. I could see the cars and streetlights clearly at the intersection of Boundary and Elmwood.

Not so five hours later when Hazel and I once more sat on the front steps. A definite haze in the air, with an organic smell to it. The air was moving with a warm breeze gently blowing. Did the breeze blow some dust or pollen into the neighbourhood. I looked east, to my right, and haze was all around me. Very strange! Hazel didn’t seem to notice, or mind. Then it dawned on me: today was recycle and garden waste day, with garbage trucks moving up and down the alleys.

On my afternoon walk yesterday I noticed neighbours raising Canadian flags here and there. This one, on Kalyk St., was attached to a parking sign by a nice lady who came from Iran after the Shah was overthrown there, back in the 70s. She raised her children and became politically active in her community, enriching us all by representing her neighbourhood when a large “high tech park” was being developed. Nice to see she is still politically aware and making a statement on behalf of her adopted country.

Several days each week I am filling the first of four raised garden beds. Filling them with topsoil, which I dug from the front yard last year. A few minutes ago I was watching a video for beginning gardeners; the topic was raised garden beds similar to the ones I have, and the expert was saying not to fill the entire bed with topsoil, lest it become waterlogged. Oops.

This first bed is only about half-way full, so perhaps it is not too late to mix in other stuff. I might buy a few bags of pumice to mix in. For the remaining three beds I will probably buck some fallen rotted trees, then place the wood pieces at the bottom of each bed. If I have leftover topsoil I’ll spread it in some depressions in the back yard to even out the surface of that lawn.

The northernmost raised bed, pictured above, will be shaded throughout the growing season so I’ll need to plant leafy greens and root vegetables; possibly some broccoli and cauliflower. Rhubarb, too.

When I was finishing my industrial instrumentation diploma at BCIT in 1999, my instructor, Bob, once spoke of the differences between Canada, the USA, and Europe, regarding instrument mechanics. He was speaking on the topic of BCIT instrumentation graduates finding work in the United States.

“They have no idea who or what we are,” he said, referring to America’s understanding of the role that I and my fellow instrumentation technicians were being prepared for. “Down there they only have two types of workers: engineers, and grunts on the factory floor.”

In Canada and in Europe, the idea that you might have an intelligent worker capable of taking an engineer’s specifications and building a mine or a mill is generally understood. But Americans weren’t familiar with this type of worker because in America there were two classes of workers in industrial sites. Smart people (engineers) and stupid people (grunts).

America’s consensus regarding industrial worker capability was that most Americans’ capabilities were limited with respect to higher cognitive functions. Most workers were pretty good at following instructions, if those instructions were simple ones. And this was why, he said, in American industrial sites, everything was spelled out and people followed instructions to the letter. Initiative was not a common quality.

A smaller part of their population had a greater ability to reason things through. To strategize and plan; to evaluate and assess; to solve problems and imagine creative solutions.

Now we see a government in the US of A where stupid people form a majority in the three branches of government that comprise their political system. When it comes to voting, the more capable people—the engineers–tend to vote for the Democratic party, and the less able people—the grunts—tend to vote for the Republican party. Unfortunately there are more stupid people than smart people in the United States.

This partly explains why they elected a man-child into their highest political office; grunts are easily led, and are led to vote for someone they can relate to.

There are other factors at play. Social media gives foreign actors enhanced abilities to manipulate American public opinion. Cyberespionage enables foreign governments to target American politicians in a number of ways. Greed itself, baked into the American economic system, has an insidious corrupting influence of American citizens, lowering ethical standards across the spectrum of civil society.

There’s a saying “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I hope the upheavals our southern neighbours are experiencing now make their government stronger (by which I mean more truthful, more just, more equitable, more reliable, more charitable, and kinder), rather than the alternative.