24 June 2009

Images of Canberra - More Fog!

| johnboy
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RandomGit has sent this photo in with the following note:

    Taken on a Canon Digital Ixus 100 IS. Pity I couldn’t budge the ice cream van out of the shot.

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Slightly off-topic, but I just returned from Melbourne, after our flight reached about 50km from Canberra and had to return due the airport closing. About a dozen flights into Canberra had to be cancelled due to the fog being so thick. Interesting there was nothing about it in any media today when we returned though.

houellebeqc wrote a fantastic volume on lovecraft you fans here should all read… s’entitled: ‘against the world, against life’ of course…

as for photo tips in fog, thing is mainly composition and try not – as in any night shot – to have too much non-image forming light bearing directly into the lens. exposures will of course be long, again, as for any night shot. i’d suggest as a rule of thumb to try to use a tripod when the shutter speed as a percentage of the second will be more than the focal length of the lens (eg, if the speed will be 1/15th of a second, then any lens longer than 15mm (very wide!) will likely leave you with some camera shake… even in bright light this rule applies; so lesson is to learn to know what the shutter speed will be ebfore you take the shot, or type the word ‘before’ wrongly)

G-Fresh said :

Playing football last night was so awesome. The coach formed an eerie silhouette at the side of the pitch

You need to re-write that in Lovecraft Horrible Crap-ese to fit in with this topic.

Playing football last night was so awesome. The coach formed an eerie silhouette at the side of the pitch

Hidebound editions of Lovecraft?
Are strangely soft and warm to the touch?

Emlyn Ward said :

Incidentally – I was in Dymocks (or was it Borders?) in Sydney a couple of weekends ago and saw a very large BLACK paperback edition which contained Lovecraft’s Works.
It wasn’t too pricey and I was sorely, sorely tempted…

That’s ‘Necronomicon’ – a new collected edition of Lovecraft’s prose works (leather bound) done by the same people who published ‘the Complete Conan’ (which is also really cool, albeit in a different direction).

Lovecraft is awesome, but if you read too much of it in one sitting, it can become a bit repetitive.

– There was a young man who: visits a strange New England Town/comes across a strange book/has an odd dream
– Which leads to intimations of supernatural and otherworldly activity
– He goes adventuring to find …
– something horrible (I’d like to say more, but it’s so inhuman and eldritch and undescribable that it would send you mad)

The tone and atmosphere of his works is awesome though: the implied horror is always greater than the revealed horror.

All this Lovecraft is giving me a geek boner. I propose a Riot ACT photo comp of spooky Canberra images, with horror oddities placed in the background. I could just see a guy in a hoodie with glowing red pinprick eyes standing next to the ice cream van, veiled in shadow.

davesfk, I walked out, turned off the flash, lined up the shot, half depressed the shot button to focus, fully depressed to take the shot.

Maybe you aren’t gentle when you push the shot button and jiggle the camera as it is shooting. Digital cameras hate movement, even with OIS.

Pass the prozac please.

Incidentally – I was in Dymocks (or was it Borders?) in Sydney a couple of weekends ago and saw a very large BLACK paperback edition which contained Lovecraft’s Works.
It wasn’t too pricey and I was sorely, sorely tempted…

Nemesis!:

    Nemesis
    by H. P. Lovecraft
    1 November 1917
    Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
    Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
    I have lived o’er my lives without number,
    I have sounded all things with my sight;
    And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

    I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
    When the sky was a vaporous flame;
    I have seen the dark universe yawning
    Where the black planets roll without aim,
    Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

    I had drifted o’er seas without ending,
    Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
    That the many-forked lightning is rending,
    That resound with hysterical cries;
    With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

    I have plunged like a deer through the arches
    Of the hoary primoridal grove,
    Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
    And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
    And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

    I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
    That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
    I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
    That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
    And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

    I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
    I have trod its untenanted hall,
    Where the moon rising up from the valleys
    Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
    Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

    I have peered from the casements in wonder
    At the mouldering meadows around,
    At the many-roofed village laid under
    The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
    And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

    I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
    I have flown on the pinions of fear,
    Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
    Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
    And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

    I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
    The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
    I was old in those epochs uncounted
    When I, and I only, was vile;
    And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

    Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
    And great is the reach of its doom;
    Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
    Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
    Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

    Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
    Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
    I have lived o’er my lives without number,
    I have sounded all things with my sight;
    And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

H.P Lovecraft is fantastic.

They made movies from some of his short stories: “The Color[sic] out of Space” & “The Re-Animator”.

The movie about a bloke turning into a Fly was close to a Lovecraftian short story, too.

Brilliant stuff.

Here’s a good excerpt:
http://alienbrain.net/about/lovecraft/

“…With Akeley’s permission I lighted a small oil lamp, turned it low, and set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of Milton; but afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my host’s strained, immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormal and corpselike….”

He also wrote poetry:
“XXI: Nyarlathotep

And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.”

Some of Lovecraft’s more subtle peices (like “Polaris”) are pretty darn cool!

And it’s the source material for other much better modern stories.

To put it in context, Lovecraft wasn’t sure Nikola Tesla was up to any good, electrocuting dogs etc.

If you think 1920s horror was unreadable with its electro-wizards, try reading the original Frankenstein.

Would any of the brilliant photographers who have been putting up shots of the fog like to give some of us less brilliant photographers some hints as to how to capture these sorts of images (camera settings and such). I’ve got the same camera as this image was taken with and have been trying to get good fog pictures all week!

Reading that poop is a waste of good eyeballs. Horrible it is: horror it may be; readable it ain’t.

1920s pulp horror is terrible, in an “I dare not look away” fashion.

Skidbladnir said :

It was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood

What is this horrible crap? Is this dungeons and dragons? Argh. You should put a warning on first.

RandomGit said :

I took some shots with the flash but the fog lit up and ruined them. It’s a great little camera though.

My first digital was a little Ixus/Elph and it out-performed my crappy superzoom for years. Sadly, it has become possessed by devils and won’t talk to any CF card now. It might have got sick of living in ski jacket pockets for entire winters and given up.

*expects an old priest to stand on that street corner at any moment*

Jim Jones said :

I kind of expect Cthulu to be buying an ice cream in the background.

Nyarlathotep is so much better than Cthulhu…
He may be known as the the Crawling Chaos (and Haunter of the Dark, Horror of Forms Infinite, Messenger of the Old Gods, etc) but he holds science information evenings, and shows educational films at public events…

It was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences – of electricity and psychology — and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered.
My friend told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend had said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the glimmer of the eyes.
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon…

PS: Lovecraft may have been paid by the word.

I took some shots with the flash but the fog lit up and ruined them. It’s a great little camera though.

I’ll send through the street light/UFO landing one eh?

Holden Caulfield1:03 pm 24 Jun 09

The fog has been great the last couple of days. I wish I had my camera on my drive to work on Monday. The view across the lake from Wentworth Ave was very serene.

I thought I was driving through Silent Hill last night o_o

Stunning photo!!

Pity I couldn’t budge the ice cream van out of the shot.

as ant astutely notes, was going to suggest that, au contraire random, i’d have perhaps also shot one with the focus at the van and see what ghosty effects the twigs present… but noice, very noice. ; )

You should have featured the Ghostly Mr Whippy van, rather than the tree!

Nice shot, well done.

I kind of expect Cthulu to be buying an ice cream in the background.

i like the icecream van being in the shot. adds a certain creepy ‘silence of the lambs’ type element.

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