The Perfect Vehicle for Manila Traffic?

One of the best things about living in Vancouver is that you don't really need a car to get by, due to the very efficient public transportation system. We have the bus, skytrain and seabus, which generally operate like clockwork and are usually on time. Zexiv, Puff, and I have actually been able to explore many of the parks around the city and travel as far as Victoria and Bowen Island without once getting behind the wheel. Planning a route is really very simple as all you need to do is check the website of Translink and enter your point of origin and destination and it tells you where and what time to catch your bus (or other type of public trasport), where you have to transfer, how long it will take and the walking distance involved.

Not so in the home country, where public transportation is not that developed (electric powered rail transport is still very limited in reach and most of the routes are being plied by smoke belching buses and jeepneys) and having a car is a necessity especially if your work involves frequent travel. Unfortunately driving there is a very harrowing and stressful experience likely to put a couple of early grays in your hair. Aside from the monstrous traffic jams one encounters frequently in many of the urban areas, undisciplined drivers seem to rule the roads. It is not uncommon to see drivers creating multiple lanes out of say one or two, disregarding lane lines completely, and driving on the opposite side of the road, forcing incoming cars off to the side. Speed limits seem to be non-existent as well and you have buses trying to push their way through, and create openings in traffic, in order to pick up more passengers. Zexiv told me of one instance where he was driving along the main thoroughfare and saw a few bolts or nuts suddenly come bouncing down the road towards him followed shortly by a rolling tire that had become detached from its car. It seemed all so surreal and he felt like he was inside the old video game Spyhunter trying to dodge all these road hazards. It is a small wonder that there are not more vehicular accidents but I guess it is because people have also learned to drive very defensively.

Zexiv and I found this video on YouTube a while ago and thought it had some interesting possibilities. We had a good laugh imagining how we would market the product ... we thought of maybe calling the company Sherman Motors, having the tanks available in different color options, and attractive saleswomen dressed up in military fatigues pitching it in the Sherman dealership. Its slogan could be something like "Driving is a pleasure when you are king of the road". It would just need a few minor improvements like maybe some airconditioning and a good sound system. Traffic, rude drivers and even parking would no longer be a problem :) ...

But then I guess if everyone had a Sherman then we would be back to square one.

Don't take this seriously! ...

Zexiv's First Group Show

Zexiv has 2 prints in an upcoming group show at a local photo gallery this September. He spent the afternoon today working with a brilliant young custom printer from school, a fascinating experience which has revived his interest in the possibilities of the wet darkroom.

The gallery is believed to be one of the very few in Western Canada dedicated purely to the photographic arts.

The show, featuring black and white photography, will run from September 15 to 30 at the gallery's new location in East Vancouver. Check it out ...

A Lunar Eclipse Over Grayloft

It's not often in one's lifetime that one sees a total lunar eclipse so when Zexiv first learned from his friend The Reader of one that would occur today, we thought this might be another interesting photo opportunity. Puff had provided more details and we learned that the eclipse would start sometime after 2am, Pacific Standard Time, so we set our clocks and prepared our gear before turning in last night.

When we awoke it was a bit cold and our first thought was that we had missed the eclipse, as the moon was nowhere in sight from where we had last seen it from our window facing east. It turned out it had simply moved out of its previous position and was now slightly behind the chimney (pointed out by Puff). We made our way silently to the balcony, our senses alert for a possible nighttime attack by the Toyanese but all was still. It was a beautiful and quiet night outside and one could still see that pale glow above the horizen one often sees on summer nights.

Zexiv and I had brought just one digital camera and lens, an 80-200 zoom, and we quickly set this up on our tripod. It turned out we were a couple of minutes too early and it took quite a while before we started noticing any changes in the moon. The lens we had on was nowhere long enough and it took us a while how to figure out how to set the self timer in the dark and get the focus right, but we eventually started snapping a series of pictures. The picture shown here is the last we took, and is not exactly the kind we had been hoping to get; we realized later that we should have waited until the moon was one solid orange orb but we were getting quite sleepy and also very concious of the sound of the shutter, which seemed so much louder in the night.

The next total lunar eclipse I hear is seven years from now and we hope to try again then. Hopefully we'll have a 500mm lens and a teleconverter with us next time. Or one of those converters that attaches a camera to a high powered telescope.

P.S. Zexiv is reminded of the time he and two of his gym buddies, Platz and Segovia went up on the roof of Segovia's parent's house many years ago to get a glimpse of Haley's comet. It was a most unsuccessful sighting but the night wasn't a total waste as they probably had half a case of San Miguel Beer between them and it was fun just being up on the roof in their own world and having interesting conversation.

Memories of a Summer Road Trip

A road trip we had planned for the long weekend this September to the Rockies won't be pushing through, so I decided to post some old pictures instead, from a very memorable road trip that we made to the BC Interior last summer ...

Except for short trips to the U.S., Zexiv, Puff and I don't get to leave the Lower Mainland that much. We've explored a lot of the parks here and have been to Whistler, Victoria, and Bowen island, but have not seen much of the East (or North, for that matter), so this particular trip to the Interior was really a rare treat for us.

It was great to leave relatively busy Vancouver and head out on the highway to experience a different type of scenery and topography altogether - wide open spaces and fields, mountain lakes and semi-arid country, and views of horses, tractors and wineries. During the two day trip to Kelowna, we made stops at Hope (site of the filming of First Blood), and places like Manning Park and Bromley Rock, where Zexiv and Puff's two friends stopped to have a dip in a cold lake while Zexiv went around taking pictures. We had a picnic lunch in a grassy field surrounded by gophers that kept popping in and out of their holes. We stopped many times along to way to take pictures of breathtaking scenery along the way, at one point surrounded by hordes of grasshoppers. And the winetasting at their destination was an interesting experience as well, although we wish we could have had more.

Thanks to Zexiv's and Puff's friends who helped make this trip a success. You really see different things when you are not looking out the window of a bus for a change.

We still hope for one last summer blast, before the rains start again; perhaps another trip to Bowen Island.

Those Tintin Books

Zexiv and I have been following with great interest the controversy involving Herge's book Tintin in the Congo. To recall, following a complaint by a human rights lawyer who came across the book in the children's section of the bookstore chain Borders, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) in the UK called on stores to pull the book from their bookshelves. The CRE said in a statement that "the only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying 'old fashioned, racist claptrap'". To their credit, Borders refused to ban the book outright, saying that they were committed to let their "customers make the choice" and subsequently moved the book from the children's section to the adult graphic novels section. And as is often the case however whenever one tries to to censor or limit accessibility to books, rather than achieving the aim of stopping the public from reading it outright, it seems to have had the opposite effect. As of this writing, Tintin in the Congo ranked 351 in sales in amazon.uk.

This book, the second of a series of adventures of the famous young Belgian reporter and his dog, has never been easy to get hold of in the first place, as is the first Tintin book by Herge, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. We first came to know about Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in the Land of the Soviets after reading Michael Farr's Tintin: The Complete Companion a few years ago. Unlike the rest of the Tintin books that followed, these are not in color and are available in hardbound only. They are not as readily available as the other more well known Tintin books - we found just one of them in a small chain of bookstores here and ended up buying both books in Strands in New York during our last trip there - and are probably something that would appeal primarily to the die hard Tintin fan and collector. The sketching of the characters is still pretty rough, especially in the first book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, where Tintin and Snowy look unrecognizable and the storyline is nothing great, compared to the books that followed. Also we are not yet introduced to some of the other characters that formed a big part of the later adventures and whom Tintinologists have come to love and who provide at times a lot of the humor and wit in the stories, such as Thompson and Thomson, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Rastapopolous, etc.

To a Tintin collector, however, these are books worth having as they show the development of Herge and his craft and were written during a time when communism was still relatively new and feared and colonial powers still ruled a large part of the world, in effect providing an interesting snapshot of these times. In Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, for instance, Tintin travels to Soviet Russia to expose the truth about communism and the supposed red paradise and has many encounters with the OGPU, the predecessor of the KGB. He finds idle factories that are made to look like they are operating in full production and a population intimadated into voting for the one ruling party. Likewise, Tintin in the Congo has the reporter hero in the former Belgian colony battling savage beasts and evil witchdoctors and "educating" the locals on the ways of their colonizers, while simultaneously busting a diamond mine operation of Al Capone. The storylines are overly simple and it is quite obvious that Herge didn't put in much of exhaustive research on the settings of the stories he became noted for later on, as he uses a lot of cultural stereotypes.

Are these books politically incorrect? By today's standards, I would say definitely yes and Herge would probably be condemned worldwide if he released the book today for his ignorance, oversimplistic depiction of certain cultures and political systems, and racial stereotyping. But we have to understand that it was written during a very different time and Herge himself later admitted he didn't know much about the countries in which these stories took place. He tried to correct this in later books, such as in Tintin and the Blue Lotus (considered by many to be Herge's best Tintin book), which takes place in China in the period preceding and following the Mukden Incident and which seems equal in its harsh treatment of corrupt western bureaucrats and Imperial Japanese aggressors but sympathetic towards the Chinese people. The two earliest books should just be taken thus simply in this context, as a snapshot of history and of people's views in a time long gone, and as a record of Herge's development as a writer and cartoonist.

I don't believe though that these books should be banned. It wasn't too long ago that there was a clamor to remove the golliwog characters from Enid Blyton books because they were thought to be racist depictions; I'm not sure if the publishers eventually caved in to this. I found this sad, as I always thought of the golliwogs in the stories as just another one of the lovable and mischievous toy characters Enid Blyton created. And now it is happening to Tintin. If these people start banning Tintin in the Congo, what's to stop them from banning Tintin in America (which some people might say show native Americans in a bad light), or Tintin and the Blue Lotus? And if they do that, is it too far fetched to imagine these same people talking about banning classic books by Rudyard Kipling, CS Lewis, JD Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell, to name a few? Definitely there's someone bound to be offended by any of the books of those authors. You really can't please everybody.

Going progressive is not necessarily progress ...

The World Through a Normal Lens

Sometime during the remaining weeks of summer, before the rains start falling again, Zexiv and I plan to go out and photograph some World War 2 tanks, with a 645 medium format camera and a 80mm f/2.8 lens.

There is something about shooting with a fixed focal length manual focus normal lens (so called because it supposedly approximates the field of view of the human eye; this would be a 80mm lens in a 645 medium format camera and a 50mm in a 35mm camera). Everything becomes much simpler as you're not changing lenses all the time and instead become more focused on walking around trying to find the most interesting viewpoint to take your picture. Not too long ago before the days zooms became standard, one's first 35mm SLR camera would usually come with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. That was how Zexiv started as well, and he remembers a fun trip to New York many years ago, exploring Central Park with his very first manual focus Nikon and 50mm lens, and taking pictures of Puff and her friends and some resident pigeons. Photography seemed so much simpler then, and more exciting as well, just like it is when you are a kid first starting to ride a bike in old jeans and sneakers, and not concerned about having the right biking shoes, helmet, shorts or front suspension, as the fun was basically about the bike and the wind hitting your face.

At the same time, shooting with a normal lens can be quite challenging, especially for someone that's used to shooting with wide angle and telephoto zooms. Composition is more difficult as you sometimes cannot get wide enough to include enough of the scene or zoom in on a particular spot to isolate all the unneeded details. I think if you keep at it though you can come out with quite good results and improve your photography in the process. Zexiv remembers maybe 1 or 2 classmates in photography school who shot with just a 50mm lens (this was with digital slrs) most of the time and came out with very good pictures. To make it work they would usually have to get very close to their subject and use selective focus (i.e. very wide apertures) to blur out the background, and be quite creative in their composition. It was quite impressive what they were able to do with minimal amount of gear.

In the next few weeks Zexiv and I hope to explore the city trying out a new kind of photography for us - call it back-to-the-basics, "normal" lens photography and our personal rebellion against the highly automated and post processing driven world of digital photography. Instead of using a 35mm camera, we'll be using Zexiv's Mamiya 645e medium format camera and just one lens, an 80mm f/2.8. The 645e is a manual focus, manual loading and manual winding camera which was phased out sometime in 2004 or 2005. It lends itself naturally to a more deliberate type of photography which will force us to slow down a bit and use a tripod most of the time. We'll try to post the pictures here as they come ...

Zexiv's Photo in Schmap

We learned today that this photo of Zexiv's, taken at Granville Island Model Train and Ship Museum, was selected for the newly released 3rd edition of the Schmap Vancouver Guide.

Schmap is a leading publisher of digital travel guides for 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Visit their website at http://www.schmap.com/.

This picture of Zexiv's was taken handheld in available light (the museum prohibits the use of flash photography), sometime in October of 2005, when he was touring his New York based friend Walrus around the city. He remembers using a fixed 24mm f/2.8 lens and his favorite black and white film, Kodak TX-400 film (also known as Tri-X Pan or simply Tri-X).

If you love model trains and ships and happen to be in Vancouver on one of those gray and rainy days the city is known for, this museum is a nice place to get away from it all. It is our favorite place in Granville Island (followed by this place in the Public Market where they serve great apple pie and the puppet store at Kids' Market). It is great for miniature lovers of all ages, although probably not recommended for very young children, who may find it fascinating at first but might not have the patience to go through the whole exhibit.

Speaking of model trains, Zexiv made a note to check out his old electric train (Atlas, HO scale) in storage in subterranean vault in the home country this Christmas and see if it is still in one piece ...