Derek won the Weekly Photo Challenge. The topic was ‘Celebrations’. His wonderful photograph is below.
My entry was a pic of the Jinju Lantern Festival last year. My photo set of the event is here
Next week’s contest is an ‘Open Challenge’, so I’ll have to drag a decent photo out from somewhere…
We don’t get snow in New Zealand.
Well, on the mountains, sure (there’s some good skiing in NZ), but not in the parts that most people live anyway. Certainly not my hometown of Napier. Ergo snow is always exciting for me. The first White Xmas I had was in Canada, staying at my buddy Erik’s house in Wasaga Beach, Ontario. That was back in 1989(?). Man, we had some fun. Wasaga Beach is a ghost town in Winter (in Summer, it rocks apparently). There was a large pond just down the road from where he lived and it freezes over during Winter. We were out there playing ice hockey and tossing a nerf ball around. It was great.
I find it difficult to understand people who don’t like snow. I guess if you have to live year after year in a white Xmas, it would be a hassle. Mind you, in the Southern Hemisphere we have the same thing year after year too. But a Summer Xmas never becomes a problem.
So we had some lovely fine snow yesterday afternoon.
It got heavier and last night it snowed quite a lot. I was trudging through snow about 3 inches deep on the way to work today. I enjoy that. Here’s a shot of GyeongBok Palace. I occasionally take some pictures there on the way to work.
Actually, the snow was beautiful last night. It was the kind that glitters like powdered glass.
Well, Paul won the photo competition this week with his superb (and topical) photo of the fireman at the Namdaemun fire. No surprise.
My unsuccessful entry:
Next weeks topic: Celebrations!
We went to see Bjork in concert last night at the Olympic Stadium here in Seoul. Approx 5000 people were there to see her first performance in Korea and to promote her latest album ‘Volta’.
I bought Bjork’s then latest album ‘Post’ back in 1997, ‘Homogenic’ was released very soon after so I picked that up too.
Cover art for ‘Post’
Her style is very unusual. Electronic music (which as a general rule, I don’t enjoy) mixed with brass and her unusual vocal style. I think that’s why I do enjoy her, because of her eccentricity. The concert was super. It took about two or three songs for her to get warmed up, but it just kept getting better. I must admit, I’m not familiar with her material since ‘Homogenic’ but she performed plenty of her earlier stuff, so that was cool. She didn’t communicate with the crowd much, a very cute “Thank you” between songs was about it. She did however introduce the band prior to the encore. Not that the crowd seemed to mind, everyone was rocking – except me. I enjoy concerts rather in the same fashion as I enjoy a movie. The band consisted of her, four members on percussion, electronics and synthesizer, and a 10 piece brass section called the ‘Wonder Girls’ from her native Iceland.
She has an incredible voice. Very powerful and varied. The highlight for me was ‘Army of Me’ from the ‘Post’ album. It was awesome. Seemed to be the crowd favourite too. Though I was a little disappointed she didn’t perform ‘Oh, So Quiet’ from the same album as that was the song that turned me on to her. At about 80 minutes, the concert was a little short I felt. But I’m not complaining. The wife loved it too. She was never a huge Bjork fan, but she likes her visual style (clothes, atmosphere etc). She’s a fan now.
I am still.
One of our P.E. teachers retired today. Miss Bang has been at our school for 34 years – “Not Likely at Home (anymore)” case 1. Amazing. And she’s not the longest serving current staff member. She’s retiring to take care of her grandchild when he/she is born (soon), so both parents can continue working – “Not Likely at Home” case 2. We had a ceremony at school, students and teachers, past and present attended along with close friends and family.
An interesting observation about Korean society is that they seem to require the national anthem, pomp and ceremony for the most trivial (from a Western perspective) things. I’m not suggesting Miss Bang’s retirement is trivial, but opening and closing ceremonies for the year and the semester and camps and sports day and this and that seem a little excessive and unnecessary. Again, this is from my point of view.
As an aside, we are a private school. We have a related High School and University, we all have the same name and are administered by a common board of trustees. Indeed, one of my co-teachers went right through system, attending our middle and high schools and graduating from our Uni. But we operate within the public system, government grants for renovations etc, set curriculum and I’m employed and placed by the Seoul Metropolitan Office Of Education. One big difference between private and public is that teachers can only stay at a public schools for a maximum of 5 years, then they have to go to a different school. That sucks.
Anyway, the soon-to-be-graduating 3rd grade students (another ceremony for that tomorrow) lined the halls applauding her from the theatre to the library where went to have a morning tea/lunch spread for the teachers and other adults. So I’m finally getting to the point here. “Not Likely at Home”, case 3 – there was beer and soju laid out on the tables along with the various foods. So there we were, headmaster included, consuming beer and hard liquor at school, during school hours, the occasional student coming in and out and we were back to work afterwards. It’s part of life here. Last year we did the same thing on a much larger scale for the then headmaster’s retirement. Admittedly we didn’t have any classes this afternoon and nobody was trying to get inebriated, but I had to stop for a minute and contemplate this happening back in NZ.
I couldn’t.
I finally finished the small project of mounting my new Rokkor lens.
Not a big job, but not without some minor difficulties. I had to acquire some new tools, broke a drill bit, broke off the mount’s AF confirm chip (hooray for super-glue) and got aluminium shavings all over the kitchen table.
I’m very happy with the results. The pics so far are very satisfactory.
There is an infinity focus issue, but I’m not too worried about that, I’ll get the mount machined down in the future. In the meantime, photos of close – medium range subjects are ok.
Unfortunately I can’t use my m42 lenses now until I get another m42 – EOS adapter.
I just found out that there was a fire last night and “Korean National Treasure No.1” has been destroyed.
Tragic. Arson is suspected. I guess we’ll get more on that in the coming weeks.
Namdaemun was the southern gate of the original city of Seoul. A few details about it on Wikipedia here.
Some pics from the Korean media here and here.
The dramatic photograph above was taken by one of my fellow Seoul Photo Club members. Putting the tragedy aside, compare this photo to the ones in the news links above. There is a sense of urgency and the dramatic here, certainly a picture with a story. This is different to the pics from the media, seemingly devoid of these important elements. Good job Paul. More awesome photos of his from this incident here.
My father-in-law used to own – I say ‘used to’ because he died about 6 months or so before my wife and I met – a Minolta SLR camera from the 70s. I have an interest in old photographic equipment, especially lenses, so while I was down there during Seollal, I had a closer look at his gear. One of the lenses was of particular interest – a Rokkor 58mm f/1.2.
Just a brief diversion to explain what that means.
Rokkor is the brand name for Minolta lenses, just as Takumar is for Pentax, Nikkor for Nikon and Zuiko for Olympus. 58mm is the focal length – how much the lens sees. 50mm is considered to be pretty much what the human eye would see through the camera if there was no lens attached, so 58mm is a slight magnification of that. The close-up shots you see at sports games are typically taken with 300mm or 400mm lenses. The “f” indicates the amount of light that enters the lens. It is a complicated concept, suffice to say that the lower the number, the more light can enter the lens, the heavier the lens is and the more expensive. For a good explanation of the “f stop” concept see here.
I do a lot of low-available-light photography (I abhor using the flash), so the low “f stop” number on this lens caught my eye. I did a little research on the ‘net and discovered that this particular lens has some excellent characteristics and is highly desirable. “Great” I thought, “but can I use it on my Canon DSLR??”. The mount is the problem. 1970s Minoltas of course, have a different lens mount than a 2007 Canon. I own several Takumar (Pentax) lenses from the 50s and 60s that I can use on my camera via a special adapter so I assumed that there would be one for the Minolta. There is, but there are a couple of reasons why this particular adapter is not good, so I have to adapt an adapter to get the thing onto my camera.
The lens needed some work, it had some pretty serious fungus inside. Yesterday I took it apart and cleaned it and it came up very well. The fungus doesn’t appear to have damaged the glass at all, which is fortunate. I removed the unnecessary parts that would get in the way of the mounting and filed down where the mount will be attached. I’m going to try and appropriate an electric drill from school today so I can complete the conversion tonight.
Too Many Questions, Not Enough Answers 