Last week marked the 200th installment of a blogging rhythm I wasn’t sure I could keep up for a year, let alone nearly four. I thank any readers I have, the makers of iA Writer, WordPress, and of course, my wife for graciously giving me space on Sunday mornings to engage in this act of reflection and blabbering.
Except I’m not writing this on Sunday, no it’s currently Thursday and I’m getting a head start with some structure because we’ll be in Hong Kong for the weekend. It was a last-minute idea, driven by a primal craving for Chinese roast goose, a desire to escape the summer heatwave currently roasting all of SE Asia, and the realization that we won’t have a pocket of clear calendar space like this again for several months.
I haven’t been back in the territory since May 2019, and so much has obviously happened since. Did you know that this very site was once blocked by the great Chinese firewall? I have no idea why, but I hope I don’t find myself unwelcome upon arrival. Anecdotally, I’ve heard the city doesn’t quite feel the same these days, and we’ve seen the numerous ChannelNewsAsia documentary features about people looking for fresh starts, emigrating to the UK and so on. But as an infrequent visitor with only superficial interactions to speak of, I don’t expect to sense any changes at all.
What’s changed is that while I used to be excited about Hong Kong’s lack of sales tax and abundance of electronics and camera emporiums, not to mention official Apple Stores, those things are less interesting these days. I’ve got nothing on my shopping list (plus I’m in low-cost mode — see previous entries), I’m content with snapping photos on my iPhone and Ricoh GR III, and Singapore has so many Apple Stores these days I’ve started taking them for granted.
(CW: some camera nerdery ahead)
I am looking forward to photographing the city a little with Dmitri Novikov’s new camera app, Zerocam (in beta). The concept is an extremely simplified camera with one button; there’s not even a way to quickly look at the last photo you took. When you hit the shutter, a RAW image is captured with as little of the iPhone’s intelligent processing as possible, plus some specific settings that Novikov prefers (-0.5ev and some very light touch color grading, as far as I can tell), and then saved directly to a HEIF file.
Unfortunately it only gives you photos at 12mp size, probably because third-party apps don’t have the option of 24mp and 24mp is a result of the computational photography processes that Zerocam avoids anyway. And while you can use Halide to capture similarly unprocessed photos (turn off “Enable Smartest Processing” in its settings), you can’t make it remember a lowered exposure setting between sessions.
The intermediate solution I’ve landed on to retain 24mp files while getting better everyday photos is to set Apple’s stock camera app to remember a -0.7ev exposure, and tune Photographic Styles to -20 Tone and -7 Warmth. I really like the look of this “recipe” on iPhone 15, and it’s kinda like shooting with Highlight Priority exposure and the Negative Film effect on a Ricoh GR III (which I’ll also be doing).
Actually in HK now:
We’ve chosen a wet and gloomy weekend to stop by. Our flight was delayed by 2.5 hours, I suspect because of turbulent conditions at HK International Airport around our original arrival time. Just two days earlier, some Cathay Pacific passengers were tossed around and couldn’t land for six hours, with the descriptions of a vomit and scream-filled cabin in the news fulfilling the conditions of a personal nightmare.
I take back a little of what I said — things do feel somewhat different. The city is grubbier than I remember; prices are higher and some people must be struggling to get by (well, HK isn’t alone in this); and there’s a hint of economic decline in the many empty shop units with ‘For Lease’ signs up.
One tool that’s been super helpful all week has been the Arc Search app on iOS, which added a voice mode that you can assign to the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pros. When the app launched with an AI feature that summarizes search queries on custom-generated webpages, I was wary of this “browser that browses for you” concept, which gives users few reasons to visit the underlying pages being mined (thereby ruining the web), but maybe they’ve made some changes since. It’s easier to click through to the sources.
I’ve been using it to answer questions like “what interesting art exhibitions are on in HK right now?” and it performs some light research, and I do end up visiting the linked websites for further details like location and pricing. It’s effectively a better way to present search results (albeit with the same bias and ranking concerns as search results). I hope iOS 18’s AI overhaul will see similar utility coming to Siri and Safari. Perhaps this is where the rumored Gemini partnership with Google comes in.
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Media activity:
- I started on a new Jack Reacher book: Night School. It’s what I do when I can’t decide what to read next.
- I’ve been watching the new-ish MF Ghost anime, which is a sort of sequel to Initial D. Some people seem to think it’s an insult to the original show, but I wouldn’t know — I might watch it after this? It’s got a funny premise: in a future Japan, electric vehicles are the norm and gas-powered cars are only allowed in a special racing tournament called MFG. But drifting has become a lost art! Enter Kanata Rivington, a hafu born in England who trained under a master who I presume is the main protagonist of Initial D, returning to Japan for the first time to find his lost father and school a nation on how to burn rubber while chucking a uey.
- The Japanese saxophonist Sadao Watanabe is back with a new album at the insane age of 91. It’s called Peace, and I’m digging it. Speaking of, I first heard him as a child digging through my dad’s music collection.
- I’m also loving Tigers Blood, by Waxahatchee, which I discovered on Pitchfork’s list of The Best Music of 2024 So Far. I’m aware that Anna Wintour fired a bunch of people from Pitchfork and it’s supposedly not the site it used to be, but this is a great pick. They say: “Recommended if you like — Indie-country; Sheryl Crow; Gillian Welch; that Brad Cook Sound; MJ Lenderman showing up; catchin’ skinks down by the creek; ice cream stand off the highway; letting your legs dangle off a pier”.
- What a week in rap battle history! The beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been giving us explosive drama and incredible diss tracks, sometimes more than one a day, and Kendrick’s the winner in my book but honestly I’m afraid just watching it unfold. It feels like someone’s going to get shot or jailed as a result of this.
Oh one more thing! The Cannes Lions Festival announced the shortlisting juries for 2024’s awards, and I’m pleased to share that I’m on the panel for the Brand Experience & Activation Lions. That should keep me occupied for the next few weeks.
sangsara.net 