March 10, 2007
Spring in Tennessee
This shot is from the second round of my tests of HDR photography. This is my favorite of the magnolia set (that's a magnolia to the right.) I'm pretty much just using the defaults in Photomatix at this point and haven't started tweaking the settings much. I also uploaded a few shots of Emma and Anita's visit.
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:54 PM | Comments (2)
March 4, 2007
World history is made of the same dough as bagels
I recently finished Isaac Bashevis Singer's Shosha. Singer has been on my list for a long time, and I happened upon a copy of Shosha at my favorite Knoxville used book emporium, McKay's. (If you're one of those rare Knoxvillians who hasn't discovered McKay's, do it soon. It's awesome, though I have to admit I miss their old location on Kingston Pike, cramped and claustrophobic as it often was.)
In short, Shosha blew me away. From the first page, I just kept going, pulled in by Singer's narrative expertise and this story of Tsutsik, a Polish Jew, making his way through the first half of the 20th century. Particularly effective were the descriptions of Warsaw's Jews nervously awaiting Hitler's impending Holocaust in the '30s and Tsutsik's love of the childlike Shosha. I can't speak much to Singer's style, since he wrote in Yiddish and I'm not sure about the quality of this translation, but his storytelling is superb.
In one of my favorite passages, the professorial Feitelzohn holds court: "World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us.”
Singer's portrayal of the Warsaw ghetto's Krochmalna Street is particularly vivid. The mix of Hassidic rabbis, prostitutes, scammers and the destitute leaps of the page. And the beauty of the book is that hope and innocence prevail, even in the shadow of horrendous events. Shosha keeps Tsutsik rooted.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:17 PM | Comments (0)
March 3, 2007
Surreal Sunset
The first time I saw an HDR photo, I was amazed. These vivid, almost surreal images just vibrate with color and light. But the quick research I did suggested you needed Photoshop to do High Dynamic Range photography, and I wasn't willing to shell out $700 for software that I was going to use only as an HDR toy. Then, via BoingBoing, I found a link to O'Reilly's Short Cuts on HDR photography. For less than $8, you can download a 57-page guide to producing HDR images, including suggestions on HDR software that are much cheaper than Photoshop. This is my first attempt, shot off our back deck at sunset. It's a compilation of three images shot under-, correctly and over-exposed. If you want to see examples of HDR that are truly mind-blowing, check out the Flickr HDR group. I'm hoping to take something at some point that's worth submitting there. But for a first attempt, I'm pretty pleased with this one.
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:44 PM | Comments (3)
March 2, 2007
Far Side in Estonian ...
As I was paging through some of the Estonian papers that Ragnar and Kristjan left behind, I stumbled across a Far Side cartoon in Estonian. Tried to find a web translator to tell me what's going on but could only find dictionaries and I didn't have the patience to piece it together word by word.
How's your Estonian?
"Miks sa seda tegid, Biff? Ma tean küll, et autode tagaajamine on sui veres - aga milleks seda teha presidendi limusliniga?"
The image is a female dog talking to a male dog on telephones like the ones they use in prison visiting rooms ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 10:35 AM | Comments (1)
March 1, 2007
Cyberdemocracy ...
We had a few Estonians in town this week to look at our web operation and exchange ideas. In addition to lots of interesting online discussion, Kristjan, who works for the Eesti Ekspress weekly newspaper, told us that he had voted in the Estonian parliamentary elections just that morning. He promptly pulled out a voter ID card with a chip in it that he passed around, explaining how we was able to log in on the Internet and securely cast his vote in the elections.
I guess this shouldn't be too surprising. After all, these are the folks who launched a "singing revolution" to free themselves of Soviet rule. Since then, they've taken democracy and capitalist ideas and completely embraced them. When Lara and I visited Tallinn a few years ago, we were struck between the vast contrast between signs of the decaying Soviet Empire and the still-solid Estonian structures that date back hundreds of years.
Another interesting side discussion we had was about the Estonian language. It's a difficult tongue, linguistically related to Finnish, and Ragnar, Kristjan and I were talking about whether Estonian would be able to survive in a 21st century where the world is contracting. A stock market burp in Shanghai rattles Tallinn and New York. How can a lanaguage with only 1 million native speakers manage to thrive and surive? I hope it does.
More
-- Here's a link to Ragnar's paper, the daily Eesti Päevaleht. Both publications are owned by AS Ekspress Grupp. I met their CEO, Hans Luik, when I spoke at the World Association of Newspapers conference in London last fall, and that's how Ragnar and Kristjan's trip here originated.
-- Here's a link to some of my posts about Estonia from our trip over there, and here are some photos from that trip.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)