Posts

It’s finished! It’s alive! And it’s been discussed on all the major channels, like:

• Andrew’s blog:
  • start here,
  • then move here,
  • finish off with this post.
  • And don’t forget the instructions on how to cut the book and make a new edit.
• Shifter, aka Daniel Milnor’s blog.

Allow me to quote from Andrew’s blog:

October 2016, I finally get the chance to ride my Nicolai Mojo in a proper setting. And what a test it has been!

I have been riding for seven days straight on some wonderful trails mostly around the Huesca province in Spain, south of the Pyrenees. That means mostly Ainsa, for the more knowledgeable bikers, that may remember the 2015 Enduro World Series race.

And yes I should mention the geological significance of Ainsa too. In fact, I have been in this part of the world years ago – around 2006 if memory serves well – but honestly the emotions you get from riding on these rocks are way above those you get from studying them.

The long Norwegian September is a period of the year when I’m still very much in holiday-mode, with my skin still burning from the southern italian sunshine, and at the same time dreading the dark winter ahead. It is a period when my congenital hatred for office life and rituals reach the highest peak; it is a period where all these first-world problems are channeled into the research of a new camera to play with¹.

[Click here for italian version.]

I have kept this yellow notepad for I don’t know how long.

It serves the basic purpose of taking notes but it’s tough and water resistant too. Real geologists use this kind of notepad when they’re out in the field to record events, log rocks, sketch outcrops, maybe draw funny faces too.

I am not a real geologist but I have had the opportunity from time to time to visit interesting places. I thought this notebook would be ideal to collect what I call my geolandscapes.

How can you capture the wind on a photograph? How can you make the viewer feel the cold or the warmth of a place? How can you make landscape photography communicate the sense of a place? Can a photo be a substitute for the simple, raw emotions that one feels when he’s out in the woods or in the mountains?

These are the things that lately have been on my mind. I’m pretty sure it all started with something that Andrew Molitor wrote on his brilliant blog. He keeps bashing on these points but right now I will not search those two or three relevant posts but here’s the gist of it (or more correctly, my interpretation):

Wedding photography is something like newborn photography; cheesy, kitsch and very very false. Obviously I’m talking about the kind of wedding and newborn photography which is most in vogue nowadays (i.e., the first hits you get when googling these keywords).

I just happened to read Milnor’s blog that featured an interview with some wedding photographer I didn’t know – and i still don’t know – but what was interesting was the little background story Milnor wrote so I thought about something:

the climb

celebrations

the cross-country skier

Forget what I said in previous posts. I may still have some sympathies for Laroque and Simpson and Johnston but I have reached a place where there are no more photographic heroes for me on the web.

Unless you count Andrew Molitor, of course¹.

There are so many wonderful ideas on his blog, and once you start reading you realize what’s missing from the internet these days; the excitement that I still remember from the days when the web was young, when you could discover brilliance without the taint of money-making.

Yesterday I started to write a little background story to introduce a post on how I use Python and how fun and creative that is. However, the “little background story” started to grow and became something else entirely, so I decided to cut off the science part and leave it for this post here.

So here we are: this post is just a big fat link to one of my Jupyter notebooks that shows how to code rock physics models from published equations, build a rock physics template and use it in conjunction with real data (plus, how to make it interactive through widgets, but to see that you need to download the notebook on your computer, run it locally and basically you need to know what you’re doing).

Since I picked up Python a couple of years ago I have enjoyed my everyday job more and more. It’s like being thrown back to my 12-year old self playing with a ZX Spectrum or Commodore-128, when all I wanted was to create videogames or do some other stuff¹; only back then I didn’t have the perseverance and the excuses that I have now.

“Excuses” is a fine word for what I do; I am assigned a task (or sometimes I go looking for one), and I see this task only as an excuse to solve the problem in a way that I see fit. So if there’s even a hint of repetition I will go and write a for-loop to do that. If I need to use a dumb-ass software that I don’t like I will write the dumb-ass piece of code myself². Etc.

I wanted to get a Leica this time. For real.

You know Leica: stupidly expensive cameras that are more likely to be kept in a closet or worn like a piece of jewellery than actually used (it wasn’t like that before, when actual journalists back in the fifties used it as a fast, robust little camera to be used in the field).

Anyway, even if now they seem to be more of a fashion statement, I have always liked the impression of solidity, their simplicity, and that funky way of setting the focus¹. But I would have never considered one for real if I had not played with the original Monochrom; that really changed something, the simple pleasure of using and holding this rather large, deceiptively simple and “dense” camera changed somehow my perception of Leicas. I will be honest and declare it right now that none of this matters when it comes to photography; but I’m talking about something else here, I’m talking about very elementary pleasures that are tangentially related to the actual making of photographs; the same pleasure that I get from using bycicles or a Faber-Castell pencil for example.

Warning: this is serious nerdy stuff. Not for the faint of heart. Carry on reading if:

• you know what Python is
• you have a blog, but not the easy kind like Tumblr or Blogger, something that allows you to write in HTML (or Markdown), e.g. Pelican or Jekyll
• you have a Flickr account and want to post links to photos or albums in said blog

What these two scripts do is simply to print out to console a nicely formatted <figure> tag with the static URL of a 1600 px (long side) version of your original photo and a caption with all the common shoot data (aperture, shutter speed, etc, like you used to have in the old times before artists got fancy and began shooting with iPhones; I know I used to record on a little paper notebook these data long before Exif was born). If that’s not available (for older photos I know flickr did not create such versions) the script will fall back to a standard “Large” size (1024 px long side).

Since I last wrote about (stolen) bikes my friend Phil (from T-P 2010) convinced me to get a bike which I would have never thought of buying; a short-travel, full-suspension Norco with 29" wheels. The price was very reasonable too, which I think was essential for my decision.

I have had this Norco since March 2014, and rode it everywhere; from banal cross-country loops to gnarly rocky trails in Finale Ligure (my preferred training playground). It was a blast, and since then I have had only positive thoughts for big wheelers. After a while, I began pushing the bike to its limits and I was considering to upgrade fork and shock but it sounded like one of those stupid upgrades where I had to spend more than what the bike was worth to have truly significant changes.

Well it seems I have successfully ported my blog to Pelican. After hacking my way through jekyll to make the site look like I wanted it to look, I had the irresistible urge to try out Pelican.

And I liked it so much it seemed logical to spend a few more sleepless nights to make it work. Honestly though, that was easier than Jekyll; not sure this is due to the familiarity I have with Python, but it’s probably more to do with approaching the whole thing more organically, without switching this on and that off and see what’s the results.

Yes I know, the last post before this one is dated March 2015.

But stuff happened, and I will write another time about our recent move to Norway. This is just a brief post to mark the day that I have finally uploaded to github the latest iteration of my Jekyll blog.

If you fancy a bit of history, in 2012 I moved my blog to github & jekyll, then in 2013 I made some radical changes to the layout.