Questions from beckyc

[ewx]

1) What would you most like to take photos of?

You. Naked. Aside from eclipses and scrabble boards I've not taken many photographs lately. Partly that's a consequence of the computer I use for the processing being in for repair, but also I'm getting a little bored of the ‘candid shots of friends’ thing (though I still like the results so far).

As the year progresses there should be more interesting plants and insects for macro photos, so I'll probably be spending some lunchtimes pottering around the university gardens. Dragonflies for instance are hard to get close to, but the rewards are good when you do.

Paris and London Zoo were my last really pleasing large photo sets, so I'll probably aim for something along similar lines. Getting up in a small aircraft during the day would be good too, I'm quite pleased with some of the night-time aerial photographs.

2) Are you ever going to come back to karate? ;-P

I'd like to sometime. Timing is a part of it: Mondays and Wednesdays are days when I fairly regularly get to see Naath in the evening and going back to Karate on those days would reduce that. There is the nagging worry of picking up another injury (or injuring someone else). And there's plain old inertia...

3) Do you intend to take any photography or history courses?

I suspect a proper photography course would do me a lot of good. I have no trouble with technical stuff and I think I do a reasonable job of composition much of the time, and I'm content for the time being to keep going with what I've already learned of the subject by reading and experiment.

My biggest gap is lighting, where I have a rather limited set of techniques. I've been reading up on the subject but emulating a well-equipped studio with a couple of flashes and maybe a window is not an easy translation to make; a course that either focused on more limited equipment or had a reasonable amount of studio time might be helpful.

As for history, that's indeed the other thing I've wondered about, but actually I like being able to just meander through history according to whim, rather than having to study according to the demands of a syllabus. But it might be worth a look at some point.

I don't really feel like taking on new time commitments until house-related stress is out of the way though!

4) Where would you most like to go on holiday?

I'd quite like to see Krak des Chevaliers one day, though I have trouble convincing myself that visiting Syria is a good idea. Even if you could persuade me it was safe enough I'd not be sure I wanted my tourist pounds to be going in the direction of an unpleasant regime.

I picked up an interest in visiting Istanbul after reading Norwich's and Gibbons' histories of the Byzantine Empire, though admittedly that has faded lately. Closer to home, and a more likely bet, I think a trip to Rome is in order sometime.

5) What's your favourite book?

I'm not sure I do single 'favourite' things as such but...

The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire made quite an impression. Gibbon writes very well and though the work is very long it's not really possible to accuse him of verbosity; and for all that he was writing over 200 years ago and both language and our understanding of Rome have moved on since then, I still see an essentially modern sensibility to it. (I would say that I find more difference between e.g. Hobbes or Defoe and Gibbon than Gibbon and modern writers, despite his being closer to them in time than to now.)

The subject is also one I find inherently interesting. The names, languages and boundaries set down in Roman times, and by the empire's successors (which Gibbon includes in the story), are still important today. The national border of France may not be in the exactly same place as the limes but it's not far off, and the basic relationship between modern European states, languages and religion and the Romans is clear.

Hardly a chapter goes by without a fresh cast of individuals unwilling to settle for a role as a provincial governor or successful general. Usually most of each generation fail, of course: so why do so many try when success is uncertain and failure lethal? Today in Britain we have a society where you can accept second place, or choose between entirely different fields of endeavor, and not risk being killed as too great a threat to whoever has the reigns of power, but many of these people would have risked a fatal fall from grace even if they'd not tried for the top spot.

The cheerful willingness of everyone involved - emperors, rebels, invaders, popes, medieval warlords, kings and bishops - to make and break alliances according to the exigencies of the moment seems initially like something we would hope to have moved beyond, but if you look at Russia's role in WWII or for that matter the evolution of Germany's alliance with the West from being a Nazi fantasy to a central fact of the Cold War, or America's shifting alliances in more recent times, it begins to look like an inevitable aspect of human nature, or at least of human organizations.