For anyone else beset with near-debilitating levels of pedantry and grammar-induced obsessive compulsive disorder, this website has a pretty hefty list of wrongs, rights, dos and don’ts to wade through at your leisure:
Common errors in English usage
I’d like to meet the person who took the time to compile such a useful resource, but they’re probably locked in the their own house, too scared to leave in case they leave the cooker on by mistake.
I’m very much a fledgling photographer: unsure of the processes, mystified by some of the terminology, and none too accomplished. Because of this, my photographs are often governed more by good fortune than sound judgement, and I’m always quietly surprised when one of my efforts turns out quite nicely.
Given this relative ignorance, then, my decision to blunder into the jargon-filled, process-heavy world of DIY negative development may look a little rash, but spurred on by a friend in the UK already chatting development tanks, stock solutions and stop baths, I thought it was worth a crack.
In a fit of purchasing fervour, I bought most of the required bits and bobs over one weekend, spending about HK$600 in the process. The rest of the kit was acquired over the following week for around HK$200 more. It was then time to work out what the devil I was supposed to do with all these unusual new playthings. The internet beckoned.
There are many in-depth and accessible explanations of DIY development on the internet—many with step-by-step instructions, images and even videos—but after reading a few of these tutorials it soon becomes clear that, like snowflakes, no two explanations are alike. These variances are in part down to what combination of film, developer and fixer is being used, and are in that sense somewhat inevitable, but even folks using the same chemicals and equipment will subtly tweak their methodology to suit their own needs.
This made my initial research slightly bewildering, but with persistence I read on, and eventually a few common threads started to emerge. It was then just a matter of concocting my own mishmash methodology and hoping, praying, pleading for the best.
Should anyone wish to do the same, here are some invaluable resources:
Well, anyway, enough of this chatter, this is what my first batch turned out like, and, for the record, this is how I did it:
I visited the Hong Kong Science Museum the other day, and buried among all the knob-twiddling, lever-pulling exhibits is a simple dot-matrix display designed to plunge people (like me, specifically) into prolonged terror. The information shown on the screen relates to the Earth’s human population, which, it turns out, is increasing by around 2-3 people every single second. That means that by the time you’re done with reading this paragraph, there’s an additional 60 people scouring the planet in search of food, water and shelter. (Not to mention fame and fabulous wealth.)
Only a small amount of arithmetic reveals that such an increase equates more or less to:
Were such a rate to be sustained, the current (and there’s a word being ripped apart at the seams) population of the planet would double within the next 86 years—a startling fact considering the 200,000 or so years that went into the making of the first 6.8 billion.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Such a projection relies upon a sustainability that we simply haven’t got. Even at our current (and there’s that word again) level of population we’re eating, displacing and hunting animals into extinction, eviscerating our natural resources in the name of economic efficacy, and causing irreversible damage to our climate by burning fossil fuels. It doesn’t take an awful lot of brain power to realise that these problems are only going to increase (and exponentially so) along with our burgeoning population. And that’s without throwing things like disease, overcrowding, and food and water scarcity into the mix.
In a very real sense then, we have become victims of our own evolutionary success. Our survival instincts, which have brought countless medical, scientific, agricultural and mechanical advances in the name of human longevity, may yet, in fact, be the end of us. We are just that bit too good at surviving, procreating and making use of what’s around us. We really are canny bunch, that’s for sure, but then this isn’t a question of resourcefulness, it’s a question of resources.
Others, I admit, would argue that the opposite is in fact true: that questions of resources can and will be answered by human ingenuity and brilliance. It’s certainly a tempting interpretation, but then any argument that suggests we can maintain the status quo is always going to be tempting. It’s just far too easy to accept a viewpoint that divests us of ethical responsibility, and in placing the fate of humanity in the hands of an unnamed, messianic scientist, we can free ourselves from our consciences without changing a single aspect of our lives. Perfect.
I think this is what economists and political scientists would call the ‘status quo bias’—a model which states that without a compelling imperative for change, no change will come. If we’re given the choice between change and stability, the theory posits, we will nearly always choose stability, and only significant benefits (or threats) to our health, status or bank balance can alter this outcome. When our notion of ‘stability’ entails flat-screen TVs, expensive holidays and never going hungry, it’s easy to see how the case for change rapidly loses weight and significance, and the unseen abilities of a miracle scientist look all the more appealing.
Unfortunately though, as demonstrated by the population figures above, this status quo is actually in rapid and increasingly entropic movement. We’ve just managed to convince ourselves otherwise. Our ballooning population, spurred on by capitalism’s need for year-on-year economic growth, will just consume more, spend more and waste more until such time that any compelling imperative for change has transmogrified into a very real change we’re no longer able to temper.
Things are moving away from us, and the longer that we remain swaddled in the solipsism, luxury and greed of the 21st century, the more permanent this ‘distance’ becomes. We need to remember that we are part of an ever-expanding planetary population, and that the choices we make in our everyday lives matter, more now than ever before.
|
