Hearts - What do they really mean?

In the above image you can see variations on the heart shape, which is usually associated with love or being in love. But it’s also associated with the (human) heart,  which is where I assume this shape gets its name from. At least, this is what is generally accepted by societies around the world. Lovers like to send this heart shape to each other, especially on Valentine’s day, to tell each other that they’re in love with one another. But what are you really saying to a person when you send this heart shape to him/her?

Doesn't look like it to me

I can still remember being a little puzzled while looking at an image of the human heart back when I was in high school during a biology lesson, because of the fact that the human heart looked nothing like this shape. And yet I grew up with people and information around me suggesting that this is what a human heart looked like. I’m sure you can remember the cartoons and movies where people are in love and you see this heart shape coming out of their chests, or see little heart shapes floating around their heads. And I think the likely reason why this shape is associated with love and the human heart is because typically when you’re in love or “heartbroken”, there can be an intense feeling inside your chest. But this feeling has nothing to do with your real heart. And the heart shape also doesn’t look like a real human heart. So where does this shape really come from, and why is it associated with the feeling of love?

For the answers to these questions we have to go back a couple of hundreds of years ago to Greece:

Silphium Coins

Approximately 2,600 years ago– around 630 BCE– the Greek island of Thera was plagued by drought and overpopulation. According to legend, an assortment of settlers were selected to sail south to establish a colony in more hospitable climes. The men and women apprehensively put to sea, and the gaggle of enterprising Greeks eventually erected the city of Cyrene on Africa’s northern tip. There, the settlers encountered a local herb which would ultimately bring them and their progeny fantastic wealth.

The prized plant became such a key pillar of the Cyrenean economy that its likeness was stamped upon many of the city’s gold and silver coins. The images often depicted a regal-looking woman sitting in a chair, with one hand touching the herb and her other hand pointing at her genitals. The plant was known as silphium or laserwort, and its heart-shaped fruit purportedly brought the ancient world a highly sought-after freedom: the opportunity to enjoy sex with very little risk of pregnancy.

The silphium plants were giant fennels which grew wild along the dry hillsides of the Mediterranean coast. It didn’t take long for the Greek settlers to discover its value as a food source, and the vegetable flesh came to be prized as a delicious garnish, while pleasant perfumes were coaxed from its yellow blossoms. Over time further uses for the wild fennel were found, such as the resin extracted from its stalks and roots which was used to treat cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, snake bite, “warts in the seat,” epilepsy, and a host of other disagreeable ailments. But of all of the plant’s virtues, the silphium was certainly most prized for its pregnancy-preventing properties.

As word of the birth-control wonder-herb spread through ancient Europe, Africa, and Asia, a market for the versatile fennel developed rapidly. The seeds became widely used among the world’s wealthier nations, including the citizens of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and India. By some accounts the silphium seed was also a potent aphrodisiac, a property which considerably compounded its perceived value. The Roman bard Catullus famously alluded to its sexual properties in one of his love poems, where he declared that he and his lover would share as many kisses as there were grains of sand on Cyrene’s silphium shores. More plainly, “We can make love so long as we have silphium.”

More about silphium:

Long before hippies thought hemp could solve all the world’s problems, Romans used an alleged wonder plant of the carrot and parsley family called silphium. It was a sort of giant fennel that grew wild near Cyrene, an ancient coastal city in North Africa. Silphium had many uses — perfume from its flowers, food from its stalk, and medicine from its juice (or resin) and roots. The Romans didn’t discover the plant’s properties — there’s evidence the Greeks and Egyptians used it as a contraceptive as early as the seventh century BC on the advice of physicians, who recommended a monthly dose that mixed a lump of resin the size of a chickpea with water. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described use of the resin (called laser or laserpicium) “with soft wool as a pessary to promote the menstrual discharge.” Menstrual discharge, of course, means no pregnancy. One physician in the second century AD named Soranus claimed a special recipe using silphium had been used to terminate pregnancies. In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992), medical historian John Riddle claims that modern studies show the recipe and others like it would work.

It’s easy to see why silphium would be so important to the Greek and other civilizations back then. Sex is a very important part of life, and this was most certainly the case in these ancient societies. It’s clear that repression of sexual desires can be destructive not only for an individual, but also for society as a whole. Dr. Sigmund Freud established sexual desires as the primary motivational forces of human life. Silphium, used as a method for birth control, enabled these societies to be able to enjoy sex  and express their love for each other as much as they wanted without the risk of pregnancy. It was so important to them that images of the plant and its seeds were stamped into their gold and silver coins.

A Cyrene coin bearing the image of a silphium seed

And if you look at the image of the Cyrene coin on the right, it shows what the seed/fruit of the silphium plant looked like. And that is an exact match with the shape of “the heart” that we’re all so familiar with and which is used to express the feeling of love these days. It should be clear to you, now that you have this information, why this “heart” shape is used as a symbol of love. Because of the fact that silphium was very important and used during the act of making love hundreds of years ago, it automatically became associated with love. And this is really the reason why love is associated with this “heart” shape, not because it represents a human heart!

I love you = I want to have sex with you

So from now on when you send a “heart” to someone, keep in mind what you are saying to that person: You are telling that person that you want to use silphium (birth control) with him/her, which means that you are essentially telling that person that you would like to have sex with him/her. And when you think about it, that makes a lot of sense!

This image is seriously in focus.

For the last few months I’ve been having a blast with the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens. I wrote about my first impressions of the lens soon after I got it in August last year. I won’t be repeating that here, so you may want to go back to read it. Back then I hadn’t yet used the lens for work, but now after a few months of using the lens on assignments I have a much better idea of how the lens performs. And in short, my conclusion is: it absolutely rocks.

Keep in mind that this isn’t supposed to be a review where I’ll discuss all the technical aspects and features of this lens. For that you’ll have to look elsewhere. I’m just going to give you my personal opinion of this lens after using it for a while.

First of all, the lens is expensive, but I can assure you that it’s worth the money Canon is asking for it. It has quickly become one of my favorite lenses to use. You can get really creative with it and it just never gets boring. I’ve used the lens for a variety of purposes so far, but mostly I’m using it to shoot architecture, panoramic images and aerial shots. I absolutely love the effect this lens gives to aerial shots; it really exaggerates the roundness of the earth. You can see what I mean in some of the sample images in the gallery below.

I think that especially photographers who shoot images for 360 degrees panoramas and virtual tours are going to really love this lens. The reason for this is that the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens allows a photographer to shoot both “low” resolution and high-resolution panoramas at the same time without having to change the camera or the lens. The nodal point of the lens is exactly the same at both 8mm and 15mm. Because of this, shooting at 8mm or 15mm doesn’t require you to recalibrate your setup to make sure that the nodal point is in the correct position. So at 8mm you can shoot a panorama consisting of about 4-6 images (approx. 65MP final resolution on a EOS 7D body), but at 15mm you can shoot a much higher resolution panorama of about 25 images (approx. 240MP final resolution on a EOS 7D body). This gives you the flexibility of shooting both resolutions on location at the same time very easily. You shoot first at 8mm, zoom to 15mm and then shoot again without changing anything else.

The panorama below was shot at 15mm and has a final resolution of approx. 240MP. You can zoom in all the way to view all the details.

The panorama below was shot at 8mm and has a final resolution of approx. 65MP. This was shot shortly after the one above, and all I had to do was move the camera and zoom the lens to 8mm.

When focusing this lens manually, you’ll have to look really carefully to make sure that your subject is in sharp focus. It is really difficult to see through the viewfinder if the lens is focused correctly. Everything pretty much looks in focus most of the time and it can be difficult to see slight changes in focus. I’ve found that using Live View on the camera in the greatest magnification possible to focus gives me the best and most reliable results. You’ll have to double-check your focus especially if you want to set the focus to infinity. Don’t rely on the infinity marker on the distance scale on top of the lens! Even Canon warn you to double-check your focus in the manual that comes with this lens. With autofocus this isn’t an issue.

The bottom line is that I am extremely satisfied with this lens and I can’t recommend it to you highly enough. I think this lens is a real gem in Canon’s assortment of lenses right now, and since it is so unique, it could influence a lot of people to choose a Canon DSLR just to be able to use this lens. When I had to choose which brand of DSLR I would buy 5 years ago, the wide assortment of Canon lenses (along with their lead in image quality at the time) was one of the important things that made me choose Canon. Traditionally Canon has always had the lead in the area of lenses, and this lens just strengthens their position even more. When the Canon EF 200-400 f/4L IS 1.4x (another brilliant design) hits the market later this year it’ll become even more difficult for the competition to catch up.

Canon EOS 1DX

Could 2012 be the year where Canon makes a serious comeback in the professional photography industry? Well, from the looks of it, it’s going to get very exciting for photographers using Canon equipment.

For the last 4 years I’ve been bashing Canon here on my blog for their poor quality control, poor product releases (50D, 5D Mark II, 7D, 60D) and questionable business practices (5D Mark II, 50mm f/1.2L). I’ve also often mentioned how it seemed like Canon was out of touch with the market and didn’t listen to what professionals were asking for. But with the announcement last year of the EOS 1DX, I think I’m starting to see the long awaited change we’ve been asking for.

On paper, the 1DX is a dream camera. Just reading the specifications will get you high in seconds. The most important thing to note, in my opinion, is the sensor size. Canon actually went back from 21 megapixels on the 1Ds Mark III to “just” 18 megapixels on the 1DX. If you’ve been keeping in touch with the industry, you’ll know that this was one of the important things photographers were asking for around the world: less megapixels and better image quality, especially at higher ISO values. To be sure, the priority was more on better image quality. And reducing the amount of megapixels is an easy way to achieve that (because of the photosites becoming bigger). While Canon appeared very stubborn in the past with regards to this issue and kept pushing the megapixels up at the expense of image quality, now all of a sudden even Canon acknowledge the fact that “there’s more to image quality than just resolution”:

The biggest specification change to the 1D X is its new sensor – an 18MP full-frame CMOS chip capable of shooting at 12 frames per second. This represents a big change over the 1D Mk IV (it represents a move away from the smaller APS-H format that Canon has previously used in its sports cameras), and a decrease in pixel count compared to the 1DS series. However, as Rick Berk, Technical Specialist in Canon USA’s Pro Engineering and Solutions Division says: ‘there’s more to image quality than just resolution.’

For years I’ve been having heated discussions in some of the posts here on my blog with many people about megapixels and noise in images, and I have to say that I’m happy to see that even Canon admit this now. More resolution in images is pointless when there’s also more noise present. Using any kind of noise reduction on those images eliminates the extra resolution you had in them as well. So I would rather have less megapixels with cleaner images that also have better dynamic range and colors.

I’m happy to see that Canon has finally listened to all the professionals who were asking for this, and after so many years, has finally made a camera that I can honestly say that I seriously, seriously want. In fact, I think this may be my dream camera. I just like everything about this camera. The sensor that promises (at least from the specs) great image quality, the insanely high frame rate of 12-14 frames per second, the 61-point autofocus system which is able to focus in EV -2 (equivalent to shooting under the light of the full moon!!), ISO range of 50 – 204800, 7D style viewfinder upgrades, built-in Ethernet port etc. etc. For a detailed overview, check out the technical information on the Canon Europe website. Pay attention especially to the capabilities of the Dual Digic 5+ processors and the functionalities that they enable such as being able to stack multiple exposures and correction of chromatic aberration, color fringes and halos. Image quality is taken to new heights with the 1DX.

And what’s crazy about this is that Canon actually announced the 1DX on my birthday on October 18th, 2011. What a strange coincidence. I mean here I was consistently bashing Canon for more than 4 years, and I mean seriously bashing them, and then they go ahead and announce what I consider a dream camera on my birthday – almost 6 months before it will really be available. Perhaps this is the present they’re giving me after all the effort I put into providing them with all the valuable feedback in the last 4 years.

But seriously, Canon has me excited again to be using Canon equipment and I’m hoping that with the 5D Mark III (if that’ll be its name) they will surprise us all again. With the announcement of the new EOS Cinema line (the C300 camera and the EOS C DSLR) things are looking to get very, very exciting in the near future for Canon users. I love the fact that we can use our L lenses on the C300 camera, for example. And of course, I also love the fact that the image quality of the C300 is currently the best out there in low light situations. This is why I chose Canon 5 years ago; they were the king of image quality and it looks like they’re on their way again to reclaim that title. Because when it comes down to it, all the bells and whistles on these cameras are nice to have, but nothing is more important than image quality. Nothing. And closely related to image quality is of course a working autofocus system. Because a clean image that’s out of focus is also bad image quality (poor resolution). So it’s image quality and great autofocus (in terms of speed and especially accuracy) that really matter in the end. And Canon appears to have nailed that with the EOS 1DX. I hope that this will also be the case with the next 5D camera.

Let me also mention that at this point I haven’t yet seen sample images from a production 1DX, so my assessment of the image quality is solely based on the specifications of the sensor, which theoretically should provide exceptional image quality. I’m hoping that this will be the case once the camera is released. Let us also hope that this camera won’t be plagued by quality control issues like the 1D Mark III (autofocus issues) and 5D Mark II (noise and banding in images, autofocus issues).

The only negative thing I can say about this camera is that the price is a bit too high at $6800. Many people have complained about this. Nikon recently also announced their D4, which is at least as good as the 1DX, with a price of $6000. In my opinion the 1DX should cost around $5800. Considering that the 1D Mark IV was priced at $5000 when it launched, and that the 1DX is essentially a 1D Mark IV with a full frame sensor, a price of $5800 for the 1DX would have seemed more reasonable to me. And as you can see, Nikon is closer to that price point as well with their D4.  Even with the C300 camera Canon appears to have been overconfident with their pricing. Many people also complained that the price of the C300, though it is an excellent camera, isn’t worth the $16000 Canon wants for it.

However, I’ve read somewhere that the price of the 1DX at $6800 is not a final price, so here’s hoping that Canon will lower the price to something more affordable, especially now since Nikon is selling the D4 at $6000.

The bottom line is that I’m very impressed and very satisfied with the 1DX and I look forward to being equally as impressed with the next 5D. I hope Canon continues to listen to us and keeps impressing us from now on.

Microsoft Flight Sucks!

Back in January 2009 Microsoft shut down ACES Studio, the team at Microsoft who were developing the Flight Simulator game. The announcement came as a surprise to everyone, especially the large community of fans, developers and hardware manufacturers that exists around the Flight Simulator franchise. Why would Microsoft want to shut down the team that’s responsible for arguably one of the most succesful gaming franchises in the history of the personal computer? At the time there was the ongoing economic crisis, and the shut down of ACES Studio was just part of a layoff of around 5000 people at Microsoft. It seemed to me that Microsoft was trying to cut expenses during the economic crisis, but it’s unclear why they would want to shut down such a successful game like Flight Simulator. Back in 2006 when Bill Gates was showing off Windows Vista, Microsoft Flight Simulator X was one of the important games he demoed to show the capabilities of Windows Vista and DirectX 10. Up until today, Microsoft has never given a clear reason as to why exactly they shut down ACES Studio and apparently stopped development of the Flight Simulator game.

As soon as I heard about them shutting down ACES Studio, I wrote an angry email to Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer complaining about this decision. Apparently he must have forwarded the email inside Microsoft and a few days later someone from Microsoft Game Studios responded as follows:

Thank you for writing to us about the closing of the Aces Studio and the future of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Closing the studio was not a reflection of the quality of the products Aces has developed, the sales performance of the games, or the quality of the team at Aces. This difficult decision was made to align Microsoft’s resources with our strategic priorities. Microsoft Flight Simulator X will remain available at retail stores and web retailers.  The Flight Sim community will continue to learn from and encourage one another, and we remain committed to the Flight Simulator franchise for the long term.

Microsoft Game Studios is investing significant resources in many exciting and new areas of gaming and entertainment, including Windows games. We believe these future investments will push innovation, community, and collaboration to unprecedented levels and will provide more synergy with our ongoing investments in Games for Windows – LIVE as well as other Windows entertainment technologies. We have nothing specific to announce at this time, but stay tuned for more information.

We are humbled and proud of the passion and support that the Flight Simulator franchise has developed over its more than twenty-five year history. This includes you, the large community of flight simmers, as well as the vibrant third-party ecosystem that has developed around the game. We will continue to produce, sell, and support the latest version of Flight Simulator as we plan for future versions of the franchise. Thank you for your understanding of our decision and for your continued support!

Pay attention to the section in bold letters. They already had plans to change the course of the Flight Simulator franchise and make some kind of a Windows Live game instead. It would not be until the 18th of August 2010 that Microsoft would announce the development of the Windows Live based Microsoft Flight game.

The decision to shut down ACES Studio and change the course of the Flight Simulator franchise was taken within Microsoft’s Internal Entertainment Business:

Microsoft has confirmed the closure of ACES Studio, with a spokesperson commenting to IGN that the decision was made within Microsoft’s Internal Entertainment Business “to align our people against our highest priorities.”

In addition, the company noted: “You should expect us to continue to invest in enabling great LIVE experiences on Windows, including flying games, but we have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

They shut down ACES Studio even while they were profitable. Even the ACES team didn’t understand why Microsoft’s Internal Entertainment Business did what they did:

Aces was steadily evolving a property established in 1982, one synonymous with the entire genre; it had a loyal following and turned a steady profit. At around the same time, Microsoft also closed Ensemble Studios, despite a long history of strong sales and great games. It wasn’t about talent. It was about “restructuring”.

More than a year later, former Aces employee Kathie Flood is still baffled. “We simply don’t know,” she admits. “Both studio closures were puzzling, given the rabid enthusiasm of their audiences and the consistent profitability of their titles. Microsoft is a big company. The decision was made outside of the Aces Studio itself, and we weren’t privy to the details [of] how or why the decision was made. In hindsight, it provided a tremendous opportunity for us to work on our own game designs, which we’re extremely excited about.”

Shutting down Flight Simulator development and apparently drastically changing the direction of the franchise is one of the worst decisions made at Microsoft in the last few years. I can’t imagine what they must have been thinking at the Internal Entertainment Business division. I wonder if they ran this by Steve Ballmer before they actually went ahead with the implementation, because I can’t imagine Ballmer signing off on something as stupid as this. Or else he must have been misinformed.

With this decision they’ve managed to shut down and ruin one of the most successful gaming franchises in the history of the personal computer, not to mention THE BEST flight simulator that has ever existed. Nothing comes even close to Flight Simulator X; none of the competitors out there are even half as good.

When Microsoft announced the new Flight game in August 2010, I was somewhat relieved and had hope that we’d possibly get something even better than the older Flight Simulator game. So I decided to wait and give it a chance. But I’ve recently had the chance to try out a beta version of the new Microsoft Flight game for Windows Live, and the impression I got was that this new title sets back the Flight Simulator series by at least 12 years. Not to mention that it is far from being as good a simulation as Flight Simulator is. The graphics and realism have taken a serious hit and the game has been limited to just a few locations, compared to being able to fly all over the world in Flight Simulator. There’s no real world weather simulation and no air traffic control. But the biggest set back has got to be the loss of backwards compatibility with all the content created by fans and third party developers for the Flight Simulator series. This includes thousands of aircrafts, scenery add-ons, plugins and other content. This was really the power of the Flight Simulator franchise and one of the most important reasons why it became so successful. This strategy is similar to why Windows became so popular in the early days, because of Microsoft encouraging  developers to develop for the platform providing them with free tools to develop applications for it, which in turn attracted users. In Flight Simulator, even though the original game may have lacked the content people were looking for, such as specific aircrafts to fly, there were many fans and third-party developers who filled in the gaps and created tons of additional content which in turn made the game bigger and more complete. For example, I’ve been wanting a crop dusting aircraft in Flight Simulator for many, many years. I even wrote the team about it a few times. Very early versions of Flight Simulator had a crop dusting functionality in them and this was left out of the game in later versions. In the end, this aircraft was created by a fan and I finally got what I wanted and spent countless extra hours playing Flight Simulator X just because of this. If I didn’t own Flight Simulator, I would have bought it just because it would allow me to fly this crop dusting aircraft. And this is all because of the strategy that was used during the development of the Flight Simulator franchise to not only allow, but also actively support users in generating more content and building on top of the game.

However, all of this, many years of work by thousands of fans and developers, this entire ecosystem around Flight Simulator, is now being destroyed by a couple of business executives at Microsoft who clearly know jack shit about the franchise. It is very sad to see this happening, and what is even sadder is that it is being replaced by something as pathetic as Microsoft Flight.

The technical beta forums at Microsoft are filled with people complaining about the direction Microsoft is heading with Microsoft Flight. People are very, very disappointed and are asking for Microsoft to bring back ACES Studio and start developing an upgrade to Microsoft Flight Simulator X. There’s also a petition online for this, please sign it, as well as a Microsoft Flight Sucks Facebook page. Please let your voice be heard and also personally write Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to get him to pay attention to this. Not only is it in Microsoft’s best interest to not let Flight Simulator die, but it is also in the interest of the entire industry that exists around this franchise.

This year, 2012, would mark the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Flight Simulator which was first released in 1982. It is a shame that on the 30th anniversary of one of the biggest and most popular PC game franchises, Microsoft will launch Microsoft Flight, which is such a disgrace to what Flight Simulator represented and a huge disappointment.

Sunglasses (Model: Carol Chen Poun Joe)

I was hired recently by Art Design to create images for the 2012 calendar for Optiek Ninon and Instyle Optics. Optiek Ninon is an optician in Suriname that sells eyewear and related accessories. Instyle Optics is a special division by Optiek Ninon that focusses on the more exclusive eyewear and related accessories.

This was essentially a rush job as I had just about a week to deliver the images after I got the job. It wasn’t until four days before the deadline that I got an idea of what I wanted to do. I had gotten some sample eyeglasses from Optiek Ninon and after selecting two of them I decided that I wanted to do something with beautiful eyes that would complement the eyeglasses. I teamed up with model/artist Carol Chen Poun Joe, whom I worked with before to do the images in the Cactus V5 review and for the photo shoot with Natasha Benjamin, among other projects. I had two reasons for working with Carol again: number one is that she has very beautiful eyes, and number two is that she’s a very good make-up artist. I knew she’d be able to create what I needed.

Reading glasses (Model: Carol Chen Poun Joe)

We did the photo shoot two days before the deadline and because of the limited time we had, everything was done in a hurry. For example, the photo shoot took place late at night just so that Carol and I could match our schedules and work together on this.

The Optiek Ninon / Instyle Optics 2012 Calendar

While this looks like a fairly simple and easy photo shoot, there were some challenges. We had to prevent reflections in the glasses as much as possible, not only from the lights but also from the surroundings. It looks very unprofessional if you can see the studio and body of the model or photographer in the reflection in the sunglasses for example. Another challenge was to keep the glasses as clean as possible, free from fingerprints and dust.

Fortunately everything worked out and I was able to get exactly what I wanted in the end. The client was not only surprised, but also extremely happy with the results. Apart from the calendar, these images should also appear in at least one billboard design in the near future.

In search of food

The 2012 calendar for Historex is out featuring six of my macro/micro pictures. Historex is a brand of paint being made by Varossieau Suriname N.V. and is especially suitable for painting buildings in a tropical climate. The design and production of the 2012 calendar was being done by Henna Brunings of Art Design, who hired me to deliver six colorful macro photos for use on the calendar. The theme for the 2012 calendar is “The colours of detail.” In the end a selection was made by the client which included some of my older work as well as more recent pictures. You can see them on the calendar in the image below.

The HISTOREX 2012 Calendar

The months March and April feature a picture of a Crab Spider which is one of my more recent pictures. You can read more about how I took that picture by clicking here. Below are the images that were used in this calendar.

Crab Spider

It’s amazing how much exists around us that goes unnoticed every day while we go about living our busy lives. Everywhere around us are areas that, when closely focused in on, reveal a whole new world that can sometimes look very alien and different to what we’re used to. One of the things that I’ve learned while doing close-up/macro/micro photography is that once you zoom in on the world of the small, many surprises await you.

Flowers

Take this flower bouquet for example. I bought these flowers on a rainy afternoon at a flower stand for a photography project I was working on. I just randomly picked out flowers with different colors and the owner of the stand added some green leafs to make it all look better. In the snapshot to the right it looks quite normal and boring right? But once I set up some good lighting and zoomed in on them through my macro photography setup, it was as if I entered a whole new world. A world filled with beauty that you can only really notice once you start to pay attention and look closer at what’s in front of you. And in this case, the small world of the flower bouquet filled with beautiful colors, patterns and small (sometimes alien looking) creatures.

Where fairies live

I felt like an explorer in a new world that I had discovered. Every shot I took contained detail that you can’t really see that well with your naked eye. The challenge was to find nice angles to capture these details. Soon enough I encountered the first few very small insects. My jaw almost hit a hole in the ground when I came across the scene below.

Final Destination

It almost looks like a staged scene, but believe me, it’s not. There in the middle of one of the flowers lied a small lifeless insect. He was so small that I hadn’t noticed him until I took the first shot and saw him appear on the LCD on the back of my camera. It seems that he must have died shortly after reaching the middle of the flower. He was already in a state of decay as you can see from the white spots on his body. In the image below you can see how small this insect really is with some 100% crops from the image to be able to see the detail that was captured.

Final Destination (Close-ups)

Being able to see these small areas at such a scale really helps to visualize what life on a flower might be like for such a small creature. To us, this is just a small flower, but to such a tiny insect it’s a whole world to live in.

As it turned out, this bouquet of flowers was home to yet another creature. While I was busy taking pictures I suddenly noticed something moving. When I looked closer and focused on it, I saw a tiny Crab Spider walking on one of the flowers. But before I could take some good pictures of him he vanished deep into the bouquet. Being the patient guy that I am, I decided not to look for him but to continue shooting other things until he would appear again. It wouldn’t be until the next day that I would see him again while taking pictures. And this time, instead of hiding as soon as I came closer he just seemed to ignore me and went about his business. He literally traversed the whole bouquet, and I have to say, I had a blast following him around and trying to take shots of all the stunts he was performing. Later when I looked at the shots on my PC I found out that he was not just walking and jumping from flower to flower, but that he was actually spinning a web all the time. It was just difficult to see the very very thin strands of web through the viewfinder of my camera while I was taking pictures.

The Crab Spider lived on the bouquet for 5 days until all the flowers dried up. On the last day I searched for him in what was left of the bouquet and when I found him I released him outside before throwing away the flowers.

To be honest, it wasn’t all beauty that I came across while exploring the world of the bouquet as you can see from the image below.

Left Hanging

This guy was hanging in mid-air on a very thin, almost invisible, strand of web very likely from the Crab Spider. He was probably dead for more than a day at least and was already starting to decay. If you look closely you can also see that one of his eyes is busted. One can only wonder what happened to him and how he ended up hanging in the middle of the flowers like that.

So the next time someone brings you flowers, you may want to take a closer look at what exactly you’re getting along with the flowers. Chances are that you’re getting much more than just flowers. ;)

Queen of Sadness

This is the fourth part of my article on Understanding Women. The first part can be found here, the second part here and the third part here. If you haven’t yet read them, I recommend reading them first so that you can better understand the rest of this fourth part.

A lot of what we’ve been taught about the world we live in is simply wrong. Not only is it wrong, but in many cases we’ve been taught to believe the exact opposite of the truth. If you’ve read the previous 3 parts of this article, you already have a good idea about why we’ve been taught these things. Back in 2006 I wrote the following:

The world as we know it today is largely based on deception. Incredible amounts of deception going back even thousands of years. A lot of what I learned in school, for example, was just based on lies. The feeling you get when you start to realize what’s going on is like going crazy, but in reverse. You realize that you’ve really been crazy all your life, believing and accepting all kinds of nonsense as normal, and that now you’re realizing what’s been going on and are becoming a sane person, seeing things as they really are. It’s like growing up with everyone telling you the sky is red, and later finding out the sky is actually blue. Once you find out, you have no choice but to re-evaluate everything you know and view them in a totally new perspective. It’s almost like forgetting everything you know and starting from scratch again.

But re-evaluating everything you know and taking action based on that isn’t something everyone can do. It requires a lot of courage. Quite often people are so dependent on the way things are right now that they will refuse to accept anything else if it means they’ll have to change their lives or lose the things they depend on. It’s especially difficult when changing yourself means that you’ll be swimming upstream in society. In addition, those in control in our society will do everything they can to prevent any change that would be against their interests. After all, as I have shown in the previous parts of this series, they are the ones who benefit from this mess. In the second part of my article on understanding women, I mentioned the following:

Fortunately it’s often easy to detect disinformation because it will usually try to make you believe the exact opposite of the truth. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. In fact, that’s exactly what Alice in Wonderland is based on. ;)  Remember that in the Matrix movies, Neo had to “go down the rabbit hole” to get to the real world. Right now, we are not in the real world. The real world is the opposite of our understanding of our current world.

And one of the areas where this is especially true is when it comes to our understanding of love and our sexuality. Let me bring the following quote to your attention again:

For hundreds and maybe even thousands of years, people have been forced and brainwashed into accepting the opposite in order to frustrate their lives and make it easier for others to control and manipulate them. And this is just one of the areas where this is the case. If you look around you, it should be more than clear that what we’ve been taught about love, and the rules we’ve been told to live by only serve to frustrate our lives, hurt our relationships and make things more difficult for us.

In the first and especially the second part of this series I have shown exactly how we’re being manipulated with our sexuality. I’ve also shown, specifically in the first part, how and why women are the primary victims of this manipulation. In cases where women are unaffected by all the brainwashing for whatever reason, they behave normal as you’d expect. But strangely that’s when these women get labeled as being abnormal. An example of this are women (a.k.a. nymphos) who suffer from hypersexuality or nymphomania (excessive sexual desire by a female). This is how crazy the world we live in really is, so much so that people who’re behaving normal are treated as if they’re sick. If you read the description for hypersexuality on Wikipedia, it becomes apparent that essentially most men are suffering from it. Because most men masturbate and think about sex all day long and are constantly looking for sex. And for men that is considered normal by society. But strangely, when a woman behaves this way, it is wrong and is treated as some kind of disease. This is a prime example of the way in which women have been forced to repress their sexual desires for thousands of years. From Wikipedia:

Many Victorian era mental institutions treated nymphomania as an exclusively female mental illness. Women were classified as mentally ill for nymphomania if they were a victim of sexual assault, bore illegitimate children, “abused themselves” (i.e. masturbated), or were deemed promiscuous. Upon arrival at the asylum, doctors would give the woman a pelvic exam. If doctors felt that the woman had an enlarged clitoris, she would undergo treatments. These treatments included induced vomiting, bloodletting, leeches, restricted diet, douches to the head or breasts, and, at times, clitoridectomies.

While those women were behaving according to their true nature trying to satisfy their sexual desires just like men do, they were treated as victims of a made up disease. The only option these women had was to conform to the rules of society and repress their sexual desires, which led to all kinds of (mental and health) problems which I have discussed in the first part of this series. And not to mention the bigger issues this causes in society and which Dr. Freud warned us about. Just go back and read about female hysteria and vaginal massages. Even then it was clear to doctors what the real issue was, but they choose to benefit from it financially instead of doing the right thing. In addition, those in control who put this system of manipulation into place, would never allow the truth to become known. Doctors who would mention the truth would risk losing business and maybe even their license. This happens even today, for example with the HIV/AIDS fraud (if you want to know what I’m talking about watch a documentary called “HIV=AIDS: Fact or Fraud“, I highly recommend it).

This is how crazy the world we live in really is. And this is what I meant when I said that we’re conditioned to believe the opposite of the truth in order to frustrate our lives and make it easier to manipulate us. We grow up feeling that something is seriously wrong with the world that we live in. It’s largely due to big conflicts between what we are taught to believe about life and what we feel is right according to our true nature. Things don’t make sense, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong until we start to do enough digging and find out that we’ve been living in wonderland all this time. A world where nothing is what it seems and where everything is upside down, inside out and the opposite of what it is supposed to be.

What is clear to me and what I want to really stress is that it’s really the women who behave like nymphos who are the normal women. In the beginning of this series I mentioned the following:

There was a time when women thought pretty much the same way about sex as men. During that time women had (and still have, although it is suppressed) a comparable sex drive to men, and they were after sex as much as men, if not more. Sexual desire is something we all get born with naturally. It would have made no sense for nature to put a greater need or desire for sex in men compared to women. In fact, if I look at how women are naturally capable of having sex a lot more often than men (they don’t get exhausted as quickly and are able to have multiple orgasms in a very short amount of time), then I would have expected nature to have given women a greater sex drive than men. It would have made sense, seeing as how they’re biologically capable of having it more often than men.

Now, you may say that many studies that have been done recently show that men have a greater sex drive than women. For example, in a talk by professor Roy F. Baumeister he says:

Look at research on the sex drive: Men and women may have about equal “ability” in sex, whatever that means, but there are big differences as to motivation: which gender thinks about sex all the time, wants it more often, wants more different partners, risks more for sex, masturbates more, leaps at every opportunity, and so on. Our survey of published research found that pretty much every measure and every study showed higher sex drive in men. It’s official: men are hornier than women. This is a difference in motivation.

And this is true. But would this still be true today if the system of brainwash and sexual repression that targets women had not been in place for thousands of years now? I think you know the answer to that question yourself. As I have discussed in the first part of this series, society still forces and brainwashes women into repressing their sexual desires leading to all kinds of psychological issues which makes women difficult to understand and difficult to live with. If you put a system into place that makes women repress their sexual desires for thousands of years, then OF COURSE if you’re going to do a survey today you’ll find that women have less sexual desire than men. Any survey about sex drive done today is essentially flawed because it doesn’t take this female sexual repression that is built into society into account. It has had a lot of impact on women. It’s like teaching kids in school that 1+1=3 and then a survey finding out 30 years later that most people think that 1+1=3. Well, duh!

Baumeister also mentions that men and women have about equal “ability” in sex but that there’s a difference in motivation. This isn’t entirely true, as women are physically more capable of having sex than men. And as I said at the very beginning of this series of articles, it would have made absolutely no sense for nature to give women less sexual desire compared to men, while at the same time making them physically more capable of having it. Especially not when you consider that the survival of our species essentially depends on the women since they are the only ones capable of bearing children. So making them less motivated to have sex doesn’t make sense. What does make sense is nature giving them an equal or greater sex drive compared to men, similar to how nature made them capable of having sex a lot more often than men (for good reasons). And when we look at nymphos, or in other words normal women, then that’s exactly what we see.

If you want an example of how women can be normal, behaving just like men with regards to their sexuality, just read up about the women in Iceland. Check out this article on women in Iceland and check out the video below.

Iceland seems to have been mostly isolated from the world and they’ve developed their own culture where you can essentially speak of gender equality. I think in a normal world, the relationship between men and women and the way women behave would be much like the way it is in Iceland but even better (it’s still far from perfect). They don’t have the kind of rules and brainwashing in society about love and sexuality that exists in the rest of the world. There aren’t any stupid dating games and rituals. Women don’t have the kind of unrealistic “romantic” fairy tale expectations that put a huge burden on them finding a partner. In Iceland, women behave very normal and realistic with regards to their sexuality and are even the ones who approach guys and take them home at the end of the night. And when reading and viewing the information I just linked to, keep in mind that these women would be labeled as nymphos, whores, sluts, etc. in other parts of the world where there’s a lot of female sexual repression in society. It’s no surprise to me when reading people’s comments that apparently Iceland is a very beautiful country and society to live in.

Professor Baumeister also mentions the following:

I have not exhausted all the ways that culture exploits men. Certainly there are others. The male sex drive can be harnessed to motivate all sorts of behaviors and put to work in a kind of economic marketplace in which men give women other resources (love, money, commitment) in exchange for sex.

This is essentially what I’ve also shown in the previous parts of this series, and I believe that this is the real purpose of all the manipulation that has been going on. All of this is to exploit men and motivate them to work. We’re really modern slaves being used by those who are in control. One of their attack vectors has been our women. I’ve written about this in more detail in the third part of this series and in the second part we’ve seen how our sexual energy is being harnessed when I discussed the documentary “The Century of the Self” and Dr. Freud’s theories. Remember how I discussed the movie “The Never Ending Story” where the hero, Atreyu, had to go through so much unnecessary (from his perspective) trouble just to get laid in the end? They’ve made our women sick in order to make it difficult for us to satisfy our sexual needs which creates sexual tension. This build up of energy then gets harnessed to motivate us to behave in a way that benefits those who are in control. We’re being manipulated into becoming slaves, or batteries like Morpheus explained to Neo in the movie “The Matrix.”

Dr. Freud said that “the sexual instincts are remarkable for their plasticity, for the facility with which they can change their aim…for the ease with which they can substitute one form of gratification for another.” And this is really the basis upon which all the manipulation I have discussed is founded. Dr. Freud is one of the most brilliant men to have lived, and people have just recently started to admit this. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, used Freud’s ideas to create the field of public relations as we know it today, proving many of Freud’s theories about the unconscious in the process. I’ve discussed some of this in the second part of this series. Bernays essentially showed everyone that his uncle’s theories could be used to understand how to control and manipulate people by tapping into their unconscious desires. But looking at it in a positive way, Freud made some brilliant and groundbreaking discoveries that can today help us understand a lot of what’s going on in the world. It’s important to realize however, that although Freud may have discovered this knowledge by himself in the 20th century, this knowledge had to be known by others, mostly secret societies, for hundreds and even thousands of years. Not only that, but Freud may have discovered just a fraction of this knowledge. A lot of what we think we’re discovering today, and what we think is new to us, isn’t new at all. But this is a different subject.

Understanding women is something that also kept Freud busy as evidenced by this quote:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

I’m confident that if Freud had lived longer, he would eventually have been able to answer that question. But I think that with this series of articles I’ve been able to answer that question, mostly based on, and especially due to Freud’s groundbreaking work.

suriname360 - Visit Suriname from the comfort of your own home!

After many months of hard work I today finally launched suriname360 - a website that features high resolution 360 degrees panoramas and interactive virtual tours of places in Suriname. I’ve had the idea for this website for a few years now but due to other priorities it wasn’t until March of this year that I could start working on this project. And I did so mostly in my free time while also working on other projects for clients of mine (after all, the bills don’t pay themselves ).

Most of the websites that promote tourism in Suriname focus too much on text and on information. But nothing is capable of attracting people more than nice and interesting visuals. People don’t like to read; they want to see and experience things. People remember 80% of what they see, and only 20% of what they read. So there was a need for a website promoting tourism to Suriname that focuses on strong visuals and the experience of visiting Suriname. And so with suriname360 I’m hoping that I’ve filled a gap and that the website will deliver a significant contribution to the development of the tourism industry in Suriname.

I’ve enjoyed working on this website and I hope you’ll enjoy viewing the content that’s available so far. I’ve invested a lot of time, money and other resources in this website and I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue to further develop this website in the future. There’s a lot more content coming up and I have a lot of very exciting (long term) plans for suriname360 that I hope to be able to share with you soon.

Visit the suriname360 website and take a look. A good place to start is the tour of the City of Paramaribo.

Rainclouds - Picture taken with a Canon EOS 7D and Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens (click for larger view)

Ever since Canon announced the EF 8-15mm f/4L fisheye lens back in September 2010 I have been impatiently waiting for it. I knew that, at least in theory, it was going to be awesome and after having it for a few days now, I can say that it’ll blow you away. Whoever came up with the idea for this lens has to be a very brilliant designer. I know it may sound like I’m biased, but I’ve got plenty of negative posts here on my blog about Canon. The most famous are my posts on the EOS 5D Mark II autofocus issues. But with this lens, if I want to be honest, I have no choice but to praise Canon.

The lens is beautiful, extremely well built, feels very solid in your hands, focusing and zooming are very smooth and the image quality is simply awesome. The lens delivers very sharp images all the way to the edges. Even on an APS-C camera like the EOS 60D or EOS 7D you can now get a 180° view in your pictures with a full 180° circular fisheye view on full frame cameras such as the 5D Mark II. You can capture the entire sky with just one image on a full frame camera.

The picture above was taken two days ago just outside my house. I noticed some really scary looking rainclouds outside and grabbed my camera with the 8-15mm lens on it to capture them. The picture was shot at 8mm on an EOS 7D, and I did crop out the corners to remove the vignetting. But even then, just take a look at how much of the sky I was able to capture in just one shot!

The angle of view is so wide that it takes some getting used to because objects at the edges that you don’t want in the frame show up, such as tripod legs and even your own hands or feet.

Where dreams take me (click for larger view)

As you can see in the picture above, having a 180° field of view can give you interesting results. You can see my feet as I was standing outside while I took a picture of what was in front of me. I did crop out the corners again to remove the vignetting, but even then, it’s incredible how much you can get into a single frame.

The Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens attached to a Canon EOS 7D

I’m very satisfied so far with this lens. I have yet to do some real work with it, but so far I’m impressed. The only issue I had with this lens as soon as I started using it was the fact that the lens cap can easily come off. I’m not the only one complaining about it, you can find more info on this issue in the review at The Digital Picture. But next to the incredible awesomeness of the lens itself, the lens cap issue is a very minor problem.

Keep in mind that this post of mine is not meant to be a review of this lens. I’ve just used it for a few days and not yet on assignments. But my initial impressions are that you’ll be blown away by the results and the awesomeness of the lens itself. I’ll be posting more about this lens in the future once I have done more work with it.

With this lens Canon strengthens their lead in the area of lenses even more. All they need now is an update to the EF 16-35mm f/2.8L that can rival the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 G in sharpness, or a 14-24mm f/2.8 lens of their own. I hope that the 5D Mark III will be a significant upgrade to the 5D Mark II when it will be released soon and that everything we complained about will be addressed. If that happens I’m going to be a very happy Canon user.

Update January 31st, 2012: I’ve added another post about this lens after using it for a few months. You can read it here.

Timeless Stare

This is the third part of my article on Understanding Women. The first part can be found here and the second part here. If you haven’t yet read them, I recommend reading them first so that you can better understand the rest of this third part.

Humanity has been hijacked. To a very great degree we’ve lost our beautiful women who were both pure at heart and at mind. The kind of women we can now only read about in fantasy stories. This was done on purpose in order to frustrate our lives so that it would be easy to control and manipulate us. Believe it or not, we’ve been like this for thousands of years now. When you do enough research you’ll quickly discover old stories and legends that mention how humanity was deliberately divided in order to control us. There are ancient stories from Africa that mention how a long time ago “gods” came from the sky one day in large silver orbs (reptilian aliens) and how they divided men and women in order to control them. Even in the bible you can read about how Eve was misled by a snake and how as a result life became a lot more difficult for both Adam and Eve. And there are many more examples, but this goes beyond the scope of this post. Check out David Icke’s work for more details on this. Suffice it to say that the issues between men and women go back many thousands of years.

What is clear is that their attack vector included our women and our sexuality, or in other words, the way men and women connect with each other at the highest level. When I mention sexuality, I don’t just mean the physical part of it, but also the emotional/mental aspect. And both of them are very important. We’re prevented from experiencing love to the fullest, without our minds being contaminated by all the brainwashing. Those who are responsible for these issues, and who are now in control, appear to be so confident of the control that they have over us that they even tell us exactly how they’re controlling us. They’re essentially saying “look, this is what we’re doing to you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” David Icke often mentions this during his talks. It’s like in the movies where the villain captures the hero, and before killing him, starts to elaborate on his plans first. Imagine the confidence they must have to be able to do this. When you consider that they’ve been controlling us for thousands of years now, it becomes easier to understand their confidence. If we haven’t been able to fight back for so long, we’re probably not going to succeed any time soon.

One way of how they’re showing us what they’re doing to us is through stories and movies. The movie “The Matrix” comes to mind, but there are also many “fairy tales” and “fantasy” stories that tell us what they’re doing to us, without most people realizing it. One of those “fantasy” stories is called “The Never Ending Story.”

I saw the movie based on The Never Ending Story when I was very young and loved it. But I never realized its true meaning until recent years. The Never Ending Story begins by showing exactly what they’ve done to us. When the story begins, we quickly learn that Bastian, a young boy who is the central character, lost his mother and is trying hard to deal with the loss. To a young boy the most important woman in his life at that age is his mother. So here they’re showing us right from the start that we’ve lost something very important to us, namely our women. Bastian is stuck being alone with his dad who doesn’t seem to care much about what Bastian is going through and only seems to be interested in reminding Bastian about his responsibilities - much like our society. Bastian needs to stop dreaming, stay on his feet and do what society demands of him. When Bastian walks on the street later on his way to school, he’s stopped by bullies who call him a weirdo and attack him. This is symbolic for when we’re on our way to learn about life and the rest of society seeing us as weirdoes and attacking or mistreating us in various ways. Once you start to learn about what’s going on, you automatically set yourself apart from the “normal” crowd and appear different or weird to them. It’s like Morpheus says to Neo in the movie “The Matrix”:

But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

In other words, if on your journey to learn about life you begin to wake up and start to point out what you see, you’ll be seen as a weirdo and will be attacked by society.

Bastian runs away from the bullies and tries to hide in a bookshop. The owner of the bookshop first tries to send Bastian away, telling him he shouldn’t be there because there’s nothing there that would interest him. Just “small rectangular objects called books, that will require effort on his part.” This is symbolic for the fact that most in our society aren’t really interested in reading and learning and prefer to party and play instead while staying in their ignorance. But Bastian proves to the owner of the bookshop that he’s very interested in books, and then asks about a specific book in the hands of the owner. The owner then explains to Bastian that it is a very special book, not like other books Bastian is used to. In other books you become the hero while reading, and then after reading it, you become yourself again and continue your own life. As the hero in the stories in those books, you can go through all kinds of dangerous situations and not worry because, after all, they’re just stories. But in this special book, that’s not the case. Why not? Because this book tells Bastian – tells us - about our own lives. When Bastian later reads the book, he is in fact reading about his own life. The hero, Atreyu, in the book is really Bastian himself. And while we look at the movie, we are in fact looking at a movie about our own lives - we’re both Bastian and Atreyu. This is mentioned again at the end of the movie, when Atreyu talks to the Empress and she says to him:

He (Bastian) doesn’t realize he’s already part of the Never Ending Story. Just as he (Bastian) shares all your (Atreyu’s) adventures, others (you and me) are sharing his (Bastian’s). They were with him when he hid from the boys in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book with the Auryn symbol on the cover in which he’s reading his own story right now.

So it is made very clear to us that when we read The Never Ending Story we’re actually reading about ourselves. It’s a story about us, about our own lives. They’re showing us what they’re doing to us. And when we’re finished reading the book the story doesn’t end for us because our lives are the story. That’s why the owner of the bookstore mentions to Bastian that the other books he knows are “safe”, but that this special book wasn’t. There’s no escaping back to reality from the dangerous situations in this book. We’re living those situations every day. So if you had any doubt about whether the story in the book was about our reality, then this should remove all doubts.

When Bastian starts reading The Never Ending Story, he finds out at the very beginning that the Empress of Fantasia, the world in which the story takes place, has become deadly ill. This is again symbolic for the fact that they’ve made our women sick with all the brainwashing. It’s also interesting that the Empress in the story is a child, a young girl, no doubt showing us that they’ve been making our women ill starting from early childhood. Remember that in the first part of this article, I mentioned how the brainwashing starts from very early childhood. And so the hero in the story, Atreyu, spends the rest of the story trying to deal with the problems this creates for the world of Fantasia, and tries to find a solution to what is causing all the problems. On his journey he goes through places like “the Desert of Shattered Hopes” and “the Swamps of Sadness” no doubt symbolism for what we go through in our daily lives because of all the frustrations we have to deal with in search for answers. At the same time, we’re constantly kept in fear, symbolized in the story by the Creature of Darkness who follows Atreyu everywhere. War, terrorists, AIDS, religion, financial crisis, Justin Bieber etc. - there’s a lot to fear in our world. Throughout the years, fear has been one of the primary tools used by those in control to motivate and manipulate the masses.

And in the end, like most fairy tales, Atreyu finds his way back to the Empress and finally has sex with her, after essentially having gone on a wild goose chase. Because, and I couldn’t make this up, when Atreyu finally gets back, the Empress tells Atreyu that she knew what the solution to the problem was all along. So Atreyu, realizing that he unnecessarily went through a great deal of trouble, rightfully gets angry and goes:

You knew about this all along?? My horse died, I nearly drowned, I just barely got away from the Nothing!! For what???!! To find out what you already knew??

Like I said in the first part of this series on Understanding Women, women are being programmed to make it especially difficult for a man to get closer to them. Even if there’s absolutely no logical reason for it. You’ll come across this everywhere. This is similar to when a guy really goes out of his way to impress a girl, only for her to tell him in the end that she was interested in him all along but said nothing on purpose just to see how far he would go for her. Only after Atreyu went through all kinds of difficulties for the Empress that weren’t necessary did he, at last, get to have sex with the Empress. And yes, he has sex with her, though that’s not what you explicitly see in the movie. But all the symbolism points to sex. First of all, the entrance to the Empress’s Ivory Tower looks like a giant vagina. Just take a look at the picture below.

If I ever build another house for myself, this is what the main entrance will look like

Atreyu enters the vagina and then arrives in the uterus where the Empress sits on her throne. Now, in case you’re still in doubt of where we are at this point, the walls around the throne are decorated with figures that clearly resemble vaginas, leaving us with absolutely no doubt whatsoever that we have, in fact, penetrated into a vagina.

I think I may have to decorate the walls in my house like this

As if all this isn’t enough, during what appears to be the orgasm when the entire uterus is shaking and cracking and lightning strikes outside because of all the energy building up to the climax, Bastian has to call out the Empress’s name. And of course, it’s raining during the climax while Bastian yells out her name. I don’t have to explain the rain to you, do I? Have you heard about the concept of rain impregnating mother earth? Alrighty then. Just seconds after the rather violent climax, everything quickly calms down again, exactly like you would expect. Bastian then replaces Atreyu, because they’re really the same person in the story (remember we’re reading about ourselves), and the Empress gives a small glowing grain of sand to Bastian, resembling a seed. And then a new life is born and there’s a new beginning. Bastian then heads out again temporarily experiencing how great life feels when you’ve just unloaded all your sexual energy, only to prepare himself for another round of manipulation ahead. Because like the narrator says at the end, Bastian will have to return to the ordinary world. And once he’s there, the cycle starts all over again. This is why the story is called The Never Ending Story (it really never ends) and why on the cover of the book you have the Auryn symbol of the snakes that are eating themselves in an endless loop. The Auryn symbol is a complexer version of the Ouroboros:

The Ouroboros often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end (the mythical phoenix has a similar symbolism).

The Auryn

What they’re telling us here is that we’re in an endless loop of control and manipulation. This concept was also clearly present in the Matrix movies and explained in much more detail there. When Neo finally meets the Architect in the movie, the Architect explains to Neo that this was not the first time that they met, and that in fact there were many Neos before him. Neo then sees the Neos that came before him in small screens on the wall. This same concept can also be seen in The Never Ending Story at the end, when Atreyu enters a place where he sees drawings on the walls around him depicting him in every situation that he had experienced - the whole story up until that point. This is only possible when there were many Atreyus before him and his path was pretty much planned and set in stone even before he began his journey. And that’s what the Architect explains to Neo in the Matrix when they meet. There can be slight variations, but overall the same cycle keeps repeating itself. The system of control and manipulation was designed to give us a limited amount of freedom to maintain the illusion of choice, but as a result (and by design), in the long term this would eventually lead to more and more people waking up and getting behind what was really going on. So measures were built into the system to effectively deal with this process and control it once it would inevitably happen. Neo was essentially created by the Matrix itself to deal with the problem of people waking up. By “prophesizing” to everyone that he would be the One, the messiah who would save them all, everyone would follow him when he arrived and as a result, the Matrix would have control over the process because they controlled Neo. This is why Neo was able to stop Sentinels in the real world. He was part of the machines. He was part of the plan to lead humanity back to the beginning of the cycle of control and that’s how the Matrix trilogy ends. And since this cycle has happened so many times, it has constantly been perfected. As the Architect explains to Neo, they’ve destroyed Zion (the resistance) so many times that “they have become increasingly efficient at it.” Perhaps this also explains their confidence in showing us what they’re doing, because they think we’re not going to be able to do much about it.

The fact that these days so much information is becoming available and many more people begin to realize that there’s something seriously wrong with the world we live in should worry us. It should worry us because when this happens, it means that a “reboot” isn’t far away. The current situation gets destroyed and we’re set back at the beginning to start the journey all over again. Maybe the theories about the end of the world as we know it in 2012 do have some validity after all? It’s interesting that the first Matrix movie, where they show us how we’re being controlled, was released in 1999 – 13 years before 2012. The number 13 is a special number in Freemasonry. When you do enough research you’ll discover that the people who are behind all of this control and manipulation go by the name of the Illuminati and/or Freemasons. Check out the works of Jordan Maxwell, David Icke and Alex Jones on this subject.

If you think sex in children’s stories is unique to The Never Ending Story, then I’ve got news for you. It’s not. The Illuminati and/or Freemasons seem to be fixated on human sexuality. And this should come as no surprise to you having read the first two parts of this article. Check out the movie below on YouTube for a few examples of sexual messages in some of Disney’s animations.

Subliminal Message

These are called subliminal messages and they work on our subconscious. They influence us without us consciously realizing that we are being influenced. This is yet another example of their sexual manipulation. Disney was a 33° Freemason, and all of these messages in their animations serve a purpose, read about it here.

There’s a lot of energy in human sexuality. A lot of the rituals the Illuminati and/or Freemasons perform involve men, women and even children in sexual acts. Again, do your own research and check out the works of Jordan Maxwell, David Icke and Alex Jones. Alex Jones has a couple of documentaries on this with live footage. In public these people remain politically correct, but behind closed doors is where they put their sexual perversions into practice. I already mentioned the book “Trance: Formation of America” in one of the previous parts of this article, but I’m going to recommend it to you again. Get it and find out what’s happening.

But getting back to the subject of women, The Never Ending Story is a clear example where they’re showing us what they’ve done to us with regards to our women. They have corrupted our women in order to frustrate our lives so that we become easier to control and manipulate. It is very interesting that simultaneously with the release of the movie based on The Never Ending Story, the young actress Tami Stronach who plays the Empress in the movie, released an album with two songs titled “Fairy Queen” and “Riding on a Rainbow.” If you listen to these two songs, the text also tells you a lot about the issues we’re dealing with right now. Let’s look at the lyrics for the song “Fairy Queen”:

If I could be a fairy queen, then I would hold a magic key, to reveal the hidden secrets of the mind. Then I could see the darkest blue, the mystery that’s part of you, and I’d weave a spell to take away your sorrows.

It’s very cruel that they had a young girl sing this song to us, and more so because it’s the same girl who played the sick Empress in the movie. It’s like chopping off someone’s hands and then letting that person sing about wishing to have a pair of hands. First they brainwash these young girls everywhere making them become much less of the person that they could really be. Then they have this young girl sing to us how she wishes that she could be a fairy queen, or in other words, how she wishes that she could be a real woman – the kind of woman that we’ve lost and can now only read about in fantasy stories. She tells us that if she could be such a woman, she would be able to reveal the hidden secrets of the mind. This makes sense, since without all the brainwashing going on from early childhood, women would realize their true nature and their true desires – the  secrets of the mind that are now hidden behind all the brainwashing. And if women were capable of breaking out of the mind control and see the hidden secrets of the mind, they’d see the world so much better, their minds would become pure again, free from all the deep-seated feelings of anger and frustration. They’d understand us and would most certainly be able to take away our sorrows.

Fairy queen, changing teardrops to a smile, holding daydreams for a while. Fairy queen, she’s your shelter in the night, the guardian angel by your side.

Such a woman would indeed be able to change teardrops to a smile and enable us to dream again. And she would most certainly be our shelter in the night and a guardian angel by our sides, looking after us and caring for us.

If I could be a fairy queen, I’d find the long forgotten dream, that is deep inside the memory of a child. If I could hear what words don’t tell from way down in the wishing well, then reality would turn into illusion.

Again, they couldn’t have made this text clearer for us to understand. The long forgotten dreams deep inside the memory of a child are our repressed desires due to all the brainwashing starting from early childhood. The wishing well is a metaphor for our subconscious which resides way down in our minds. If women could hear the message from their subconscious, if they could hear what their subconscious desired and wished for, then reality would indeed turn into illusion. They’d find out about their true nature and realize that they have been living an illusion all this time; an illusion that they thought was reality.

If I could be a fairy queen, I’d take a walk behind the scene, where the puppet acting plays that never ends. I’d pull their strings to set them free, they’d play their parts most perfectly, and my magic wand would make them live forever.

If we wake up and start to see the illusion, we get a glimpse behind the scenes where all the control takes place. We start to recognize and see how we’re being controlled and manipulated. And so indeed, a fairy queen would be able to go behind the scenes to see how the puppets (all of us) are being controlled. Not only that, she’d also be able to set us free from all the control and manipulation.

But sadly, all of that, only IF women could be fairy queens again. Will we ever get back our fairy queens?

Update 11/21/2011:

I’ve posted a fourth part to this post here.

Arigato Mrs. Roboto

This is the second part of my article on Understanding Women. The first part can be found here. If you haven’t yet read it, I recommend reading it so that you can better understand the rest of this second part.

I want to use this second part of my article on Understanding Women to go into more detail on some of the things I discussed in the first part. For people who are new to the theories of Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis, it may have been difficult to understand the connections I was making in my first article. I would totally understand if people would think what I was saying there was too far fetched or if they thought I was probably high on crack when I wrote that. Now, I’m not saying I wasn’t high on crack while writing the first part, but even if I was, my arguments there are still based on some very interesting facts.

Let me first bring your attention to the following quote from the first part:

Thank god that vibrators (“massaging devices” LMAO) were invented or else those poor physicians would have to work a lot harder for their money. Couldn’t they just tell those women to go have (a lot more) sex? I guess not, that would mean “a loss of business” for the physicians. Better to have the women come in regularly to get “massaged.” This is a good example of how protecting the financial interests of a few often holds back important progress in our society for the many.

It’s important to note that those physicians knew exactly what was going on. They knew the cause of the symptoms that the women they were treating were suffering from, namely, sexual dissatisfaction. It’s also important to note that those women apparently had no idea what the causes were of the symptoms they were experiencing, because otherwise they’d probably know what to do and not need the physicians. But the physicians kept quiet about the cause because they were more interested in making money than doing society a favor by telling everyone exactly what was going on. You’ll probably say that they kept quiet maybe because it wouldn’t have been politically correct to send women out to have more sex at the time, and that the physicians were afraid of putting their jobs in jeapardy. But I think the financial motives had a lot more influence in keeping them quiet about the real cause. Why? Because they had at least one other alternative, namely, sending those women to midwives for treatment:

The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve “hysterical paroxysm.” Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.

A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician’s treatment capacity.

And though they had that option, instead they wanted to benefit financially from the psychological issues women were having and looked for better ways to be able to treat these women themselves. The money isn’t in the cure, but in the treatment (you’ll come across this more once you start investigating issues in the healthcare industry today).

And that was around 1870. So some people had a pretty good idea of what was going on in society even at that time. Freud came up with his theories in the early 1900s. You’d think that if we knew this long about these issues that we’d already have done something about them after all this time. But as I’ve shown with the physicians, people seem to be more interested in exploiting the problems, instead of solving them. And there are more examples of that.

Years ago I saw a documentary titled “The Century of the Self.” If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t recommend it to you highly enough. You can watch it here on YouTube. It explains the theories Freud came up with (which I’ve used to explain women’s irrational behavior in the first part of this article) and it shows you how these theories are now being used by the few to exploit the many and benefit from it. Instead of addressing the problem of large scale sexual repression in society, these people choose to keep it the way it is so that they can tap into the irrational forces it creates inside individuals to control and manipulate them to forward their agendas and/or for economic profit. That’s where the term “social engineering” discussed in the first part of this article comes from.

For example, you’ll learn from the documentary how women were manipulated into smoking in public:

Bernays believed that there is a lot more going on in human decision making, than just the clear presentation of accurate information about the product or service.  He believed that businesses should play to peoples’ irrational emotions, in order to convince them that they must buy a company’s product or service.   His first big success was persuading women that it was OK to smoke in public. At that time, in the early 20th Century, men had made it taboo for women to smoke in public. George Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Corporation, asked Eddie Bernays if he could find a way to break this taboo, and encourage women to smoke in public. George Hill thought his company could double the number of its customers in this way.

Edward Bernays consulted with his uncle, who told him what cigarettes mean to women. The psychoanalyst told Bernays that the cigarette represented male sexual power (cigarettes were a symbol of the penis), and that if he could find a way to link cigarettes to women, as a challenge to male power, they would begin smoking in public.

Every year, New York City held an Easter’s Day Parade to which thousands of people came. Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of rich debutants, to hide cigarettes under their clothes, and join the parade. Then, at a given signal from him, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically. He then told the press, that he had heard a rumor, that a group of suffragettes were going to protest the unequal rights of women, by lighting up cigarettes which they called “torches of freedom”.

Edward Bernays knew that this would cause a controversy, and that all of the newspaper photographers would be there to capture the moment, so he was ready with a propaganda slogan which was; TORCHES OF FREEDOM. The idea worked exactly as planned, and the next day the photographs and story were in not just the New York newspapers, but in newspapers all across America, and around the world.

After that, the sales of cigarettes to women began to rise rapidly, because Bernays had made them socially acceptable. In the minds of the women who began smoking in public, they thought of themselves as being more powerful and independent. An idea that still persists to this very day.

In the documentary it is made very clear that the hidden irrational emotions that are being tapped into, are linked to the “primitive sexual forces” (our natural sexual desires) in every individual. And as I have argued in the first part of this article, if these “primitive sexual forces” get suppressed, strange things start to happen. People start to behave strange and irrationally. And as I have also argued, all of us, but especially women, get trained and brainwashed from early childhood to suppress our sexual desires to the point where we don’t even realize anymore that we are actually suppressing our sexual desires - something that is referred to as sexual repression.  So we unconsciously suppress these sexual desires and though we’re suppressing them, these desires are still there. We just aren’t (fully) aware of them anymore. They’re often driving us crazy, but we don’t know or realize what’s driving us crazy (such as in the case of women). And the documentary shows how the few in the know and in control tap into these unconscious desires to, for example, make people want to buy things that they don’t need, or do things that they wouldn’t normally do. Remember what I said about women’s seemingly insatiable desire for clothes, shoes, jewelry and related items?

And before I end this post, did you ever wonder what’s up with women’s seemingly insatiable desire for clothes, shoes, jewelry and related items? It’s like they can never have enough of those. By now you probably already have a pretty good idea why this is the case. But in case you don’t, here’s the answer: They’re simply compensating for their chronic lack of sexual satisfaction. Because it’s very difficult for them to satisfy their sexual desires, they try to compensate for it by focusing their attention on other things that make them feel better about themselves in order to get some kind of feeling as if they’re getting the satisfaction they need. But this never works for the long term because the root problem keeps existing, namely, their repressed sexual desires keep longing for satisfaction. So women find themselves in a situation of perpetual discontent. So by the time they get the new shoes they’ve been longing for, they’re already looking to get the next pair.

So this whole fucked up mess (scientific term) in our society is being kept in place, on purpose, so that the few who are in the know and in control can easily control and manipulate us so that ultimately they can benefit from it.

I didn’t come up with the theory about understanding women (first part) myself. All I did was put together information that’s been around for hundreds of years already and try to make sense of it. So essentially we’ve known for a very very long time now exactly what the causes are of all the issues we’re having in our society. But we’re just not willing to fix those issues. Benefiting from them seems to be more important to us. Or at least to the few who know and are in control. They’re using the rest of us who don’t know about this as resources. So essentially we’re their slaves in these modern times.

One thing that you have to keep in mind is that though the documentary “The Century of the Self” talks about Dr. Freud’s theories and about propaganda, the documentary itself is also propaganda and also contains lots of disinformation. For example, in the beginning of the documentary the narrator says:

A hundred years ago a new theory about human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces that if not controlled led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.

This is, of course, bullshit. The natural sexual desires that every individual is born with don’t lead to chaos and destruction themselves. It’s the suppression and repression of these desires that is dangerous and that can lead to chaos and destruction! It is the desire to manipulate these forces that leads to chaos and destruction. And our society is proof of that. From here:

The history books have shown us that repressing human sexuality very often leads to a loss of perspective, dangerous compulsions and inhuman behavior. For centuries, the Catholic Church has sought to repress human sexuality and encouraged its brethren to abstain from sex. Millions of priests and members of the clergy have been forced to suppress their natural sexual urges over the years, which has undoubtedly led to an untold numbers of cases of sexual abuse against vulnerable children.

The act of sex, whether through masturbation or intercourse, helps to dissipate sexual energy, which is why a person usually feels a great sense of serenity and relaxation in the aftermath of an orgasm. Victims of sexual repression, or anyone who is unable to have an orgasm, will be unable to find relief, and over time their sexual energy builds up and can cause deep-seated feelings of frustration and anger.

In that same documentary you’ll see how they used these forces to manipulate people into going to war causing lots of death and destruction. They would have us believe that they’re doing a good thing for us by controlling these forces, when in fact, it is their control and manipulation of these forces that causes a lot of the suffering that we see around the world today. The way Edward Bernays manipulated Americans into going to war by telling them it was to spread democracy (you’ll see this in the documentary), is still being used today to fight wars.

You’ll also hear the narrator saying:

But what frightened the rulers of the empire even more was Freud’s idea that hidden inside all human beings were dangerous instinctual drives. Freud had devised a method he called psychoanalysis. By analyzing dreams and free association, he had unearthed, he said, powerful sexual and aggressive forces which were the remnants of our animal past. Feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous.

This, again, is nothing but a big pile of bullshit. Disinformation at its finest. First, they again want us to believe that the sexual forces inside us are dangerous. The sexual forces themselves aren’t dangerous, it’s the suppression and repression of those forces that is dangerous. If people can’t satisfy their natural sexual desires, they’re going to start acting strange and in extreme cases become violent. The same thing would happen when people wouldn’t be able to satisfy their hunger because of limited food supplies. They would start getting violent to satisfy their hunger in extreme cases. They also want to brainwash us into believing that we’re repressing these sexual feelings ourselves because they are too dangerous. This is of course to make us believe that it’s actually a good thing that we are repressing our sexual desires, just in case we find out about it. Because if we know that it’s bad to repress those feelings, then we stop repressing those feelings, and then as a result, they can’t manipulate us anymore. In addition, we’re not repressing our sexual desires ourselves, THEY ARE MAKING US do it by keeping in place, and even enhancing, the system of brainwash that exists to do it. Do you start to see the connections and why they are spreading all of this disinformation?

In fact, Freud himself WARNED THEM about the serious consequences of repressing our sexual desires:

What constitutes sexual repression is subjective and can vary greatly between cultures and moral systems. Sigmund Freud was the first to use the term widely, and argued that it was one of the roots of many problems in western society. Freud believed that people’s naturally strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed by people in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life.

See the disinformation again? In the documentary they’re telling us that Freud thought the sexual desires/forces themselves were dangerous, but what we see here, in fact, is that in reality Freud thought that repressing these desires/forces is what was dangerous. And if you think about it, that makes sense. When our desires get satisfied as human beings, there’s no need for conflict and all is well. It is when we can’t satisfy these desires, and especially when our lives depend on the satisfaction of these desires, when all hell breaks loose. And nothing is more threatening to us as a species, as denying us our rights to satisfy our sexual desires, which threatens reproduction, which is essential to our survival. Remember that Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life. So if you mess with that, things will indeed get dangerous.

So be careful with how you interpret the information in the documentary, and in fact, from everywhere around you. There’s a lot of  disinformation everywhere around us these days and that’s just something you have to keep in mind constantly. Fortunately it’s often easy to detect disinformation because it will usually try to make you believe the exact opposite of the truth. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. In fact, that’s exactly what Alice in Wonderland is based on. Remember that in the Matrix movies, Neo had to “go down the rabbit hole” to get to the real world. Right now, we are not in the real world. The real world is the opposite of our understanding of our current world. It’s interesting that in the MK ULTRA mind manipulation program they had a theme based on Alice in Wonderland. Read the book “Trance: Formation of America” for a detailed explanation of how that worked. Remember how I said that fairy tales were used to brainwash and control us in the first part of this article?

Isn’t it interesting how far research can lead us when we just wanted to explain the irrational behavior of women?  As you can see, there’s a lot more to explore, but I’ll leave those for follow up posts in the future. Meanwhile I encourage you to do your own digging to find out just how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

Update 8/18/2011:

I’ve posted a third part to this post here. Feel free to check it out for a more detailed explanation of some of the background information I discussed here.

Update 11/21/2011:

I’ve posted a fourth part to this post here.

Sad for Life

You’ve probably heard men complaining about how women are difficult to understand. Even women complain about having difficulty understanding other women, and in many cases, even themselves. This has been a topic that has interested me for years. Not just the question of why women behave the way they do sometimes, but also how this is related to society’s understanding of love and relationships. I don’t think you can look at all of these things separately because they’re all related and they all influence each other. And the issues we’re experiencing with all of them might have the same root causes. In the past I’ve written about love and about relationships. And now it’s time to look at women.

I believe that women, more than men, are the victim of the rules of our society. Stupid rules that we’ve lived by for centuries. In one of my previous posts on relationships I mentioned the following:

For hundreds and maybe even thousands of years, people have been forced and brainwashed into accepting the opposite in order to frustrate their lives and make it easier for others to control and manipulate them. And this is just one of the areas where this is the case. If you look around you, it should be more than clear that what we’ve been taught about love, and the rules we’ve been told to live by only serve to frustrate our lives, hurt our relationships and make things more difficult for us.

Women are difficult to understand because they’re constantly struggling internally with the conflict between what they have been taught about themselves and their true nature. There was a time when women thought pretty much the same way about sex as men. During that time women had (and still have, although it is suppressed) a comparable sex drive to men, and they were after sex as much as men, if not more. Sexual desire is something we all get born with naturally. It would have made no sense for nature to put a greater need or desire for sex in men compared to women. In fact, if I look at how women are naturally capable of having sex a lot more often than men (they don’t get exhausted as quickly and are able to have multiple orgasms in a very short amount of time), then I would have expected nature to have given women a greater sex drive than men. It would have made sense, seeing as how they’re biologically capable of having it more often than men.

Just like we have to eat every day to satisfy our hunger, so too do we have to satisfy our sexual urges/desires. If we don’t eat enough and on time, we become weak and sick. And in the same way, if we fail to satisfy our sexual desires adequately, we also become sick and it becomes difficult to function as a human being. It’s foolish to think that suppressing and neglecting our sexual needs won’t have an impact on us in the long term. In fact, it can and will lead to issues. And that’s exactly the problem we’re experiencing with women. You just have to look at the work of Dr. Freud where he made the connection between the suppression of sexual desires and psychological issues. Freud went so far as to say that sexual desires are the primary motivational forces of human life. So you can choose to neglect and suppress them if you want to, but not without consequences.

A long time ago some “brilliant” minds decided that they should go ahead and regulate human sexuality. One of the reasons why they decided to regulate human sexuality is to prevent overpopulation which was putting a serious pressure on the available resources (birth control was not always available). Indeed entire civilizations have come to an end in the past because of the problems caused by overpopulation. But a more important reason why they did this was to be able to control and manipulate people.

Today, thousands of years later, we’re still stuck with many of those rules and the system of brainwash that they’ve created for us. From very early childhood women are being taught to suppress their sexual desires. Men too, but women a lot more so than men because apparently women can be influenced a lot easier when it comes to their sexuality. In a paper titled “Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive” by Roy F. Baumeister, he writes:

The gender difference in erotic plasticity suggests that women present a better prospect for achieving cultural progress than men, at least with regard to sexuality. To be sure, the differences are relative rather than absolute, but, on both individual and collective measures, there was consistent evidence that women’s sexuality can adapt and change more effectively than men’s. To the extent that the road to Utopia runs through the bedroom, social engineers may find that male inflexibility presents the greater problem whereas female plasticity represents the more promising opportunity.

So because women have a much greater erotic plasticity, meaning they can be manipulated a lot easier when it comes to their sexuality, these so called ”social engineers” targeted them much more compared to men because they could more easily achieve the results they were looking for that way. And if you ask me, they were very successful. However, I don’t think they achieved “cultural progress.” On the contrary, as a result of their “social engineering” I would say that our society is a fucked up mess (scientific term).

Our whole society is set up in such a way where women are being programmed with the wrong (often contradictory) information and the wrong assumptions about life and about their sexuality. They learn these things from their parents, their family, in school, from books, television, religion, you name it. It’s all around us and there’s no escaping it. Because of this it often appears as if women have a weaker sex drive compared to men and don’t desire or think about sex as much. But this is just because women have essentially been trained and brainwashed from early childhood to suppress their sexual desires and to think differently about sex. In the worst (and I think most) cases women aren’t even consciously aware that they are suppressing their sexual desires - something that is referred to as sexual repression:

Sexual repression, also known as sexual ethics, is a state in which a person is prevented from expressing their sexuality. Sexual repression is often associated with feelings of guilt or shame being associated with sexual impulses. What constitutes sexual repression is subjective and can vary greatly between cultures and moral systems. Sigmund Freud was the first to use the term widely, and argued that it was one of the roots of many problems in western society. Freud believed that people’s naturally strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed by people in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life.

It’s not that women don’t want to have sex or have no desire for it, it’s just that they’ve been conditioned to believe that there’s a procedure that they need to follow, and certain requirements that have to be met, in order for them to have meaningful (to them) sex, and in order for society to approve of it. For example, women are taught that they should make it especially difficult for a man who’s interested in them to get closer to them. Just to give you an idea of how far this brainwashing goes, you can find this even in fairy tales that we tell our children and which they grow up with (thanks Disney!). Why is it that a prince always has to go through great difficulty before he can reach the princess? And why is it that the prince has to go through great lengths to please the princess and show a lot of patience before he can finally kiss her and/or sleep with her? Children read this and are being programmed to believe that this is how it’s supposed to be in life; that this is the process which leads to happiness in the end and that this is “romantic.” When these children become adults, these stories and experiences are what they’re going to expect from their relationships in reality. A woman then suppresses her sexual urges and waits for that one man who will go through great lengths for her to change her mind from “no,” to “yes.” It’s often the case that women know from the very beginning if they’re interested in a man or not, but playing the game is what they’re after and what makes them feel as if they’re getting the “romantic” fairy tale experience. So though they may also be interested in a guy, they’re still going to play games and not give in too quickly. This behavior causes a lot of problems. For one, reality is nothing like what they’ve been taught in fairy tales. Once the guy wins their approval and gets what he came for, the game is essentially over and “happily ever after” depends on their willingness to deal with the hard reality of maintaining a relationship. In addition, the whole fairy tale experience of relationships gets so overhyped to women that reality stands in stark contrast next to it and women inevitably get disappointed. Secondly, due to the fact that they’re making it difficult for guys to get closer to them, they often force guys to mislead them in order to get what they want. Guys will tell them what they want to hear, and do what they expect, just to get in their panties. Even if guys don’t mislead them but really go out of their way to please them, all this extra effort isn’t likely to last in the long term. It’s not hard to imagine how it ends once the guys get what they wanted. This is one of the causes of all the relationship issues we’re having today, and one of the reasons why it’s so difficult for men to approach women. When women get hurt in the end, they’ll blame it on the men, but fail to see how their own difficult behavior based on expectations that are inconsistent with reality caused a lot of the issues.

Access Denied

The various rules in our society also play an important role in women repressing their sexual desires. For example, a woman is expected not to give in too quickly when a guy is interested or else she may risk being labeled as too easy, or, in the worst case, a whore. Somehow society thinks it’s positive for a man to have more women (he’s a “playboy” then, enhancing his macho status), but very negative for a woman to have more men in her life (in which case she’s a whore/slut/etc.). But when it comes down to it, all these rules and assumptions in our society are essentially bullshit. None of it really matters. When you do even a little bit of research, you’ll quickly discover that these rules differ based on religion, culture, era, civilization etc. What’s considered normal now according to the rules in our society, may not have been normal a couple of hundreds of years ago, and vice versa. For example, incest was tolerated and quite normal thousands of years ago in Egypt. Today, in our society, it’s viewed differently. In some cultures it’s perfectly OK for a man to have more than one woman. In other cultures that’s a sin. People grow up with all this stupidity around them when it comes to sex, love and relationships, and in the end it shouldn’t surprise us to find that we have so many issues in these areas in our society.

After being programmed with all this stupidity from early childhood to early adulthood, it becomes very difficult to function in society when, through trial, error and experience,  women start to see that reality doesn’t match with what they’ve been taught. In addition they start to realize, eventually, that a lot of what they’ve been taught about their sexuality and the many rules in our society, have served only to frustrate them and to make their lives more difficult. And it takes a lifetime for most women to deprogram themselves from these assumptions. This is why most women think and behave very different once they start reaching the age of 40 or 50. One might say that they’ve become “wiser.” But the truth is that they’ve managed to finally deprogram themselves from all the stupidity they learned in their early life by experiencing reality themselves and finding out the hard way what works and what doesn’t, and what’s real and what’s not. Unfortunately, by that time it’s also too late to go back and experience the things they’ve missed out on. While they might be wiser now, they’ve lost their youthfulness and a lot of their beauty. That, however, doesn’t stop many of them to still go out to seek younger guys in an effort to make up for lost opportunities and missed experiences.

Most guys, myself included, would prefer the mind of a woman in her 50s, in the body of a woman in her 20s. That would be a young woman freed from all the fairy tale programming, with very realistic expectations regarding potential mates and regarding life in general. Unfortunately this is fantasy in the world we live in today. And this is mostly because of all the brainwashing and rules in our society which I discussed earlier. Under normal circumstances, our current situation being abnormal, the 22 year old girl with the mind of a 50 year old woman (at least on the subject of their sexuality) would be found everywhere around us.

But let’s get back to understanding women. The answer to the question of why women are so difficult to understand is very simple: They suppress, and more often even repress, their sexual desires because of the reasons previously mentioned, which leads to various psychological issues. Dr. Freud had all the answers all along. I strongly believe that the type of irrational behavior exhibited by women, where they are very difficult to understand and where their (often mean, angry, hostile and sometimes even violent) behavior defy all kinds of logic, is the result of psychological problems caused by the suppression or repression of their natural sexual desires and needs. Because they suppress or repress these very important needs, the lack of satisfaction in that area leads to psychological issues which manifest themselves in strange and unpredictable behavior in seemingly unrelated areas. As a result, men find it difficult to understand what’s wrong when women start to act up, and even women will often admit that they don’t understand other women or even themselves. Women will often make a big deal out of nothing, or in the best case out of something very small, leaving guys, and incredibly even themselves, to wonder where all of that is coming from. Well, now you know. It’s coming from their subconscious struggle to want to satisfy their natural sexual desires but not being able to due to the rules of society and due to the difficult and cumbersome process that they believe they must follow in order to find a mate and satisfy their needs. Most of the time, women aren’t even consciously aware of the fact that they are suppressing their sexual desires (sexual repression), which makes it a lot more difficult for them to do something about it. Here are some of the symptoms of sexual repression:

Victorian doctors recorded all kinds of symptoms in women who were evidently suffering from some kind of sexual repression, including a nervous disposition, insomnia, irritability, faintness, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, a tendency to cause trouble, and no appetite for food. Many physicians believed that “hysteria” led to an increased likelihood of developing nervous disorders and problems with the reproductive tract.

Rachel P. Maines has observed that such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death, but needed constant treatment. The only problem was that physicians did not enjoy the tedious task of vaginal massage (generally referred to as ’pelvic massage’): The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve “hysterical paroxysm.” Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.

A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician’s treatment capacity. Already at the beginning of the 19th century, hydrotherapy devices were available at Bath, and by the mid-19th century, they were popular at many high-profile bathing resorts across Europe and in America. By 1870, a clockwork-driven vibrator was available for physicians. In 1873, the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of hysteria.

While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it.

Thank god that vibrators (“massaging devices” LMAO) were invented or else those poor physicians would have to work a lot harder for their money. Couldn’t they just tell those women to go have (a lot more) sex? I guess not, that would mean “a loss of business” for the physicians. Better to have the women come in regularly to get “massaged.” This is a good example of how protecting the financial interests of a few often holds back important progress in our society for the many. And take a good look at the water massaging treatment for hysteria. I’d say that there are certainly more effective ways to “massage” that area of a female’s body and treat “hysteria.” This is a testament to the crazy fucked up world that we live in. You just can’t make this stuff up.

To be sure, women are not the only ones suffering from all of this. Men are too, not only directly from the rules of society themselves, but also as a result of the behavior of women caused by these rules. Women are just suffering from it a lot more than men because they’ve been the primary target. In addition, since we’re living in a male dominated society, men can get away with breaking certain rules. For women that’s nearly impossible, causing them much more stress. Our whole society is fucked up (scientific term) in a very serious way with people struggling with the psychological effects of suppressed sexual desires without them even realizing it. Many issues in our society are caused by this, a lot of them seemingly unrelated. It influences the behavior of people in a very significant way and issues caused by this show up in all parts of life. It’s also interesting to note that sexual repression can lead to perversions of desire. And there’s a lot of that in our society.

One of the biggest issues we’re having is that men and women don’t know anymore how to approach each other and this is becoming increasingly more difficult and frustrating. There are too many unrealistic expectations and too many wrong assumptions, mostly on the part of the women, when all it really comes down to in the end is simply satisfying our sexual desires. There’s a trend going on right now where both men and women are giving up and start looking for satisfaction among themselves. I see more women seeking intimacy with other women, and I see more men seeking intimacy with other men. The reason for this is that right now, there aren’t any rules and procedures in society that interfere with our natural behavior in those areas. For example, there aren’t any predefined expectations and procedures for women partnering with other women in society’s system of brainwash, as compared to when women would partner with men (there aren’t any fairy tales that tell us how a princess has to go through great lengths before she can finally kiss or sleep with the other princess… at least, not yet). For this reason it is so much easier for women to find intimacy among themselves. It’s like a huge burden gets taken off of their shoulders; all the expectations, requirements and procedures that would normally apply with men, don’t matter anymore when another woman is involved. The same is true for men. When looking for sexual satisfaction among themselves, men don’t have to expect to go through a long and cumbersome process just to have the woman change her mind from “no” to “yes” and most certainly don’t have to deal with the weird, difficult to understand female behavior as a result of psychological issues caused by their suppression of their own sexual desires.

And before I end this post, did you ever wonder what’s up with women’s seemingly insatiable desire for clothes, shoes, jewelry and related items? It’s like they can never have enough of those. By now you probably already have a pretty good idea why this is the case. But in case you don’t, here’s the answer: They’re simply compensating for their chronic lack of sexual satisfaction. Because it’s very difficult for them to satisfy their sexual desires, they try to compensate for it by focusing their attention on other things that make them feel better about themselves in order to get some kind of feeling as if they’re getting the satisfaction they need. But this never works for the long term because the root problem keeps existing, namely, their repressed sexual desires keep longing for satisfaction. So women find themselves in a situation of perpetual discontent. So by the time they get the new shoes they’ve been longing for, they’re already looking to get the next pair.

All of this is because we choose to live according to the stupid rules of our society and against nature. So can we change any of this? I’m not sure, but that won’t stop me from trying. One of the first things that we have to do to change this is to admit the problem and to start talking about it openly, which is what I’ve done here.

This really puts the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” bullshit in a whole new light, doesn’t it?

Update 8/13/2011:

I’ve posted a second part to this post here. Feel free to check it out for a more detailed explanation of some of the background information I discussed here.

Update 8/18/2011:

I’ve posted a third part to this post here.

Update 11/21/2011:

I’ve posted a fourth part to this post here.

Shiny and Black

I launched a new design for my blog today after launching a re-design of my website weeks ago. Visually the new blog design matches more with my new website. I think this is a nice improvement on the older design while still using a similar layout. As usual I’ll still be doing some tweaking in the background in the coming days. Any feedback you have is very welcome, and if you notice issues or broken links, please let me know.

Destined Evolution My Ass!

By now you’re probably thinking I’m being too hard on this camera and I understand if that’s so. After almost 3 years my opinion on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR hasn’t changed at all. In fact, from what I’ve seen I’m just more convinced that so far this has been the biggest piece of shit camera ever released by Canon (maybe even by anyone), with the Canon EOS 1D Mark III very close behind it. From the moment this camera was announced by Canon back in September 2008 I knew it had issues. In fact, I was one of the very few who didn’t buy into the hype and saw the rather serious shortcomings of this camera. A few days after it was announced by Canon, I wrote here on my blog about one of the biggest issues that would haunt this camera during its lifetime, namely the old and crappy autofocus system. Many rushed to attack me and tell me how I was being stupid and wrong. The comments to all my posts about the 5D Mark II are still there and it’s quite amusing to go back and read them. It turned out that there were many more issues that we’d have to deal with when using this camera, among which the rather poor image quality it produces under certain circumstances (banding and noise issues).

And although in the beginning it seemed like I was almost the only one who didn’t like the 5D Mark II or had issues with it, as time passed and reviews started appearing and people actually got to use the camera professionally, more and more professional photographers started to express their frustrations with the 5D Mark II autofocus system and other issues. I have documented a lot of those instances in previous posts and in the comments of those posts. Below is a listing of my posts so far on the 5D Mark II:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Not all it could have been
• Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Barely worth it!
• Canon EOS 5D Mark II: NOT WORTH IT - Save your money!
• Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Camera from Hell

In the past I’ve covered well known photographers such as Zack Arias and Lloyd Chambers expressing their frustration with the 5D Mark II autofocus system and other issues, as well as comments from many other pros. More recently celebrity stock photographer Lise Gagne made a blog post where she expressed her frustration with the recent Canon cameras, among which the 5D Mark II, and explained how she had to switch to Nikon:

I’ve always been a Canon addict. I was in love with the 1ds Mark II. Then the 1ds Mark III arrived, Ive bought one and, I was on shock, I was not able to have a good sharp image. After 3 months, I sold it, I continued to use the MarkII. Then, I’ve tried the hassel. I was in love with the sharpeness, razor sharp details, etc.. I’ve bought one. This camera is amazing, but.. this camera has been built for studio and to work with lot of strobes. In natural light, in low light situation or to capture a real moment, this camera is too slow, it needs lot of light to focus properly, so very hard to capture THE moment.
I’ve started to try the 5dmarkII’s Louis, to at least, produce some natural images, unfortunately, don’t know what’s wrong with that camera, but I just cannot autofocus properly! The focus goes everywhere except on the target. It looks like that camera only focus on the brigher point.  I was quite disaapointed. So I’ve tried a couple cameras and, after those experiments, I’m now a Nikon’s user. The focus is where you want, the quality is awesome, it’s sharp, focus is real fast… It’s sad for Canon, I’ve always been loyal to them, but since the markIII and 5dmarkII, they’ve lost me. Hopefully they will come with a better one this year, I still keep all my lenses (anyway Louis uses them for video).  Nikon will probably announce a new one even if I’ve just got mine (3dx for those who are interested, the dx4 might be announced this spring and will be available in fall for us). Then I’ll choose between them but my trust is now for Nikon.

Lise Gagne makes some interesting remarks about the 1Ds Mark III and the 5D Mark II. She was unable to get sharp images with both. Many people complained about soft images being produced by the 5D Mark II, and since the 5D Mark II was said to use a similar sensor to the 1Ds Mark III, or slightly “improved” even, then it’s possible that they  both suffered from the same issues. It’s also possible that these issues are related to poor quality control. And in the case of the 5D Mark II, the softness produced by the 21MP sensor was compounded by the poor performance of the autofocus system. This would explain many of the comments I received about the 5D Mark II over the course of almost 3 years now. I sure am glad that I didn’t invest in the 1Ds Mark III myself. In fact, I almost did so but couldn’t get one in the beginning due to the low stock levels in the first few months, and then the autofocus issues with the 1D Mark III received publicity thanks to photographer Rob Galbraith and I decided to wait and not buy the 1Ds Mark III until the issues were solved (and they never were really solved).

If you think Lise Gagne is alone here, think again. Top stock photographer Yuri Arcurs expressed similar frustrations with the 1Ds Mark III in his comparison with the Nikon D3x. Arcurs was using the 1Ds Mark III when he later switched to the Nikon D3x because it has a better  autofocus system, or to be more precise, it delivers sharper images compared to the 1Ds Mark III:

The Canon has lower noise levels and the lenses perform generally better, but what does this matter if your images are more out of focus, if the camera is much harder to work with on a daily basis and if you can get the same results form a Nikon by just choosing the right lenses and get another 3 mega pixel on top?

…

If Canon is to stay competitive then they have to start listening to their photographer’s needs and they also have to come up with a new top model within the next six months or so.

So issues with soft images may be related to the sensor being used in the 1Ds Mark III (and the 5D Mark II) and/or the autofocus systems on both cameras. I know for a fact that the autofocus system on the 5D Mark II is simply inadequate to do the job. But the sensor itself may also just be producing soft images making the problem much worse.

Wedding photographer Ryan Brenizer made the following remark on Twitter recently:

Always an adventure shooting a wedding with the 5D and its faith-based autofocus. The D3s in my other hand kept snickering.

Even award winning photographer and Canon Explorer of Light, Vincent Laforet, recently mentioned the old autofocus system on the 5D Mark II as one of its disadvantages:

Lastly – the autofocus system (for still photographers) is the same system that was found in the original 5D – therefore it is close to 5 years old relative to newer systems.

You have to keep in mind that Laforet often closely works with Canon and he can’t openly come out and be too critical of Canon and put his relationship with them at risk. Under normal circumstances this shouldn’t have to be an issue, but a lot of photographers seem to be afraid of Canon. And if I look at Canon’s recent behavior towards photographers, then I can certainly understand those fears. In the last 3 years I’ve received emails from professional photographers who agreed with me on many of the issues I was blogging about but weren’t willing to openly come out and say certain things about Canon in public. But I think that it’s exactly this behavior that has now caused Nikon to gain ground and be ahead of Canon. Nikon photographers were very critical of Nikon in the past and Nikon listened and fixed many issues (among which the noise issues) and came back stronger than ever. Now the latest Nikon bodies (consumer and pro) produce image quality that far exceed anything Canon can currently offer according to benchmark data from DxOMark. Even professional photographers, like Lise Gagne and Yuri Arcurs, have made similar comments. In fact, quite a lot of professional photographers have switched from Canon to Nikon in the last 3 years. I’ve written about some of those cases here on my blog, but Fake Chuck Westfall has also documented a lot of them on his blog.

Here’s what photographer Laurence Kim had to say recently:

That’s one of the frustrating things about Canon. The 5D produces gorgeous image files. In fact, I prefer the files from the 5D to any other dslr. But it’s saddled with a crappy focus system. So they come out 3 years later with the 5DmkII – more megapixels, better high ISO, video mode………..but still the same crappy focus system!

It’s not hard to understand what’s going on. Clearly, Canon wants to protect their flagship 1-series by deliberately crippling all of their “lesser” camera bodies. By contrast, look what Nikon is doing. They put their best professional focusing system in the D700 (their equivalent to the 5dMkII). Hell, they even put nearly as good a focusing system into their D7000 – a body that matches up against Canon’s 60D! To quote Thom Hogan, it’s as if Canon missed a memo somewhere.

If you want a great focusing Canon, you are forced to pay $5k for their (crop sensor) 1DmkIV. So in other words, there is no such thing as a full-frame camera with a top-notch focusing system from Canon!

And let’s not forget Thom Hogan:

Canon missed a memo somewhere. The camera market is changing, but they seem stuck on executing on the old memo. Basically: more pixels, more video, same camera. Some things (autofocus comes to mind) are getting a little stale in the Canon world, while other companies seem to be pushing lots of new tech into their equipment (pellicle mirrors, new focus systems, new metering systems, etc.). This needs to change or the overall trend of Canon being nibbled to death will continue. I don’t see any evidence yet that Canon is going to change, though. 2010 was more of the same. Everyone will be looking to see if 2011 is more of more of the same.

Although it took some time, many in the industry have come to agree with what I said right from the start. But this post is not to tell everyone that I told you so, although, yes, I told you so (even before the 5D Mark II was actually available):

So now you have a high resolution sensor, 21 megapixels, but guess what? You can’t easily take pictures that are in focus, eliminating the entire point of having that much resolution available! So now you have a sensor that is extremely capable for low light, high ISO photography, but guess what, you can’t quickly and accurately focus in low light conditions. But hey, you can shoot HD quality video!

The reason why I’m writing this post is that I hope that I and many others have done enough to make it clear to Canon exactly what it is that we want to see in future cameras. And since the successor to the 5D Mark II is probably going to be released this year, I hope that we’ll finally get the full-frame camera we’ve all wanted. Like Thom Hogan said, everyone will be looking to see if 2011 is going to be more of the same for Canon, and I’m very much hoping that it won’t be. Nikon has had a 51-point professional autofocus system (same from the D3s!) on the D700 for almost 3 years now and it can only get better for the D800. Canon needs to seriously step up their game with the 5D Mark III and in my opinion can’t afford to include anything less than the autofocus system from the 1D Mark IV in it. Because Nikon, aggressive as they are right now, are going to be throwing everything they’ve got into the D800, and then some (just look at what happened with the Nikon D7000 and the Canon EOS 60D). It will be interesting to see what happens in a few months.

Update June 12, 2011:

Photographer John Edgar, a Canon shooter, recently decided to try the Nikon system for a day and although he went in expecting not to like it, you’ll be surprised by his remarks about the difference between the Canon and Nikon systems. Just like many others are saying, and like I wrote above, Canon has a serious problem with autofocus. Here’s some of what Edgar said:

Generally, a pretty high proportion of my images shot with my Canon system are out of focus, mostly because it just can’t seem to focus on the right thing. This has been a frustration for a while and definitely my main friction point with the Canon system.

…

I realized that in less than 30 minutes of using the camera, it felt second nature to me. Believe it or not, after 10 years of shooting on the Canon system I still sometimes get lost and turn things the wrong way or forget where a setting is. I was very, very impressed with how quickly I was able to adapt and learn the Nikon layout, and found it extremely natural and ergonomic. Hours in I said to a guest who asked me about the camera, “it really is a joy to shoot with.”

…

This was the perfect time to test the higher ISO ranges. I sent a quick message to my friend Ryan Brenizer to confirm that the files are pretty clean around 6400 ISO before I went trigger-happy. He gave me the nod and with a smile I set the camera there and went to town. I shot for a bit and then zoomed in to 100% and checked the shadows. Just as Ryan had mentioned: very, very clean.

…

The AF focus system is, at worst, much better than anything I’ve experienced with Canon. In continuous focus mode, while a lot of the AF lag is gone, so is a lot of the accuracy. That being said, I still found more of the images to be in than out or at least acceptability soft. During the photo session, shooting with good light in AF-S, the focusing was almost always spot on.

The only thing Edgar didn’t like about the Nikon system was the way it renders bokeh, though he admitted that was more his personal taste. But if I have to choose between different bokeh and to have a working system with reliable autofocus, then the choice is very easy for me. And I don’t think I have to tell you what it is.

Natasha Benjamin (Singer)

I recently had a photoshoot with singer Natasha Benjamin from Trinidad and Tobago. I wanted to do some portraits involving extreme/creative make-up and so I naturally teamed up again with painter and make-up artist Megan Fox Carol Chen Poun Joe. I had previously worked with Carol on a test photoshoot involving the Cactus V5 flash triggers and you can read about that here. For this photoshoot Carol was again free to come up with an idea for the make-up, so the artwork you see on Natasha’s face is completely her idea. I only gave some input on the color combinations we would use in combination with Natasha’s outfit. Personally I think it all worked out very well in the end. All the colors match together, even with Natasha’s skin-color. And Natasha actually had a performance scheduled right after the photoshoot and she loved the make-up so much that she decided to leave it on for her performance.

For this photoshoot I used a Canon EOS 40D with the infamous EF 50mm F/1.2L lens. I’ve included a lighting diagram below detailing the setup that was used and some of the gear. Unfortunately I don’t have the power settings of all the flashes. I also had to adjust those settings during the shoot as I was switching from shallow depth of field portraits at f/1.8 to f/5.6 during the photoshoot. At the end of the shoot I also did some shots on a black background, and for those shots I removed the background light. All the lights were Canon 580EX II speedlites in manual mode triggered by the Cactus V5 transceiver. The Cactus V5 performed flawlessly here. I took about 250 shots and all flashes fired for every shot, so I’d say reliability is great. But that was already clear during my tests for the Cactus V5 review. I also used a 14″ bright silver beauty dish from Lumodi as the key light. Gave a nice contrasty effect with a quick fall off when positioned close to the model. I’ve done a few photoshoots with it now and can highly recommend it.

Lighting Setup (click for larger image)

Below you can view a gallery (Adobe Flash required) with some of the shots taken during this photoshoot including some behind the scenes shots of Carol doing the make-up on Natasha from start to finish. Click on the fullscreen button all the way on the right to view larger images.

And if you’re wondering about Natasha’s singing talents, check the Youtube video below. I think she has a wonderful voice.

Canon's new slogan

Canon are at it again and this time they’ve sent a take-down notice to a fan site called Canonfilmmakers.com. The owners of the site have posted some information about the issues on their blog. The exact details of why Canon wants them to take down the website aren’t clear, but what is clear is that the reasons have something to do with claims that the Canonfilmmakers.com website is infringing on Canon’s trademark. I took a look at the website and the only reason I could immediately see why they would claim infringement is the use of the word “canon” in the domain name of the website.

This is not the first time Canon tries to shut down a fan site. A few years ago they also tried to shut down Canonrumors.com, though the owners of that site were later able to work something out and keep the site online. I believe they removed the Canon logos from the site and included a statement saying the site was not affiliated with Canon in any way. Canonrumors.com remains online to this day. Fake Chuck Westfall, who’s blog was also being targeted by Canon lawyers two years ago, has written about this on his blog where he lists some more examples of Canon’s legal attacks and ill behavior towards customers.

A screenshot of the Canonfilmmakers.com website

In the case of Canonfilmmakers.com there was no use of the Canon logo, and no claims being made that the site was affiliated with Canon and I don’t see where there could be any confusion in that regard. You’d have to have a very low IQ to take that site as an official Canon website.

And yet this doesn’t stop companies like Canon from intimidating innocent fans and customers on the Internet. A post on The Blog Herald mentions the issues Canonfilmmakers.com are having, and also details how other companies (the smarter ones) treat these kinds of issues completely different:

The real problem with fan sites isn’t merely the legal aspect of them, it’s that virtually every company and creator has a different set of rules as to what fan sites can and can not do.

For example, where Canon is obviously out to try and stamp out every site that uses their mark, no matter how genuine their intentions, Star Trek actively links to interacts with fan sites in their community and Blizzard entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, even provide an official fan site kit to help fan sites get started and provide clear licensing terms.

In short, no two communities have the same set of rules. Where one artist or one company may routinely go to war with fan communities, often times pushing the boundaries of what the law actually says they can do, others may offer licenses and do everything they can to nurture them.

Trademark law doesn’t so much exist to protect the rights companies have to their trademarks but more to protect consumers:

Trademark law is designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. By identifying the commercial source of products and services, trademarks facilitate identification of products and services which meet the expectations of consumers as to quality and other characteristics.

The problem is that companies, such as Canon, abuse these laws and go out to intimidate people for no good reason. They’ll mention how the use of the word “Canon” in the domain name may confuse people and lead them to think the site is an official Canon website, but that is just bullshit. Canon Inc. didn’t invent the word “canon” and can’t prevent people from using that word, especially not when people need to use it to talk about their products. I mean, if you run a camera club for Canon users, how else will you be able to indicate your club is specifically for Canon users if you can’t use the word “canon” anywhere? How would you run a magazine specifically for Canon gear? Jon Connor, one of the owners of the Canonfilmmakers.com website, made a funny video showing just how difficult things can become when you can’t use a trademark when talking about it:

The purpose of trademark law was certainly not to limit free speech or to limit the way in which people can express themselves. Here’s an example of a case where this is made very clear:

Some courts have recognized a somewhat different, but closely-related, fair-use defense, called nominative use. Nominative use occurs when use of a term is necessary for purposes of identifying another producer’s product, not the user’s own product. For example, in a recent case, the newspaper USA Today ran a telephone poll, asking its readers to vote for their favorite member of the music group New Kids on the Block. The New Kids on the Block sued USA Today for trademark infringement. The court held that the use of the trademark “New Kids on the Block” was a privileged nominative use because: (1) the group was not readily identifiable without using the mark; (2) USA Today used only so much of the mark as reasonably necessary to identify it; and (3) there was no suggestion of endorsement or sponsorship by the group. The basic idea is that use of a trademark is sometimes necessary to identify and talk about another party’s products and services. When the above conditions are met, such a use will be privileged. New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc., 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992).

That sounds logical, right? That “the basic idea is that use of a trademark is sometimes necessary to identify and talk about another party’s products and services.” If I want to run a website where I talk only about Canon gear, I should be able to use the word “canon” to talk about their product in all communication and that includes in my domain name and meta data in my webpages. The domain name is what people use to find your site on the Internet, and if you’re running a website for film makers specifically using Canon gear, it makes sense to me to let that be clear immediately to everyone by including it in the domain name, which gets indexed by search engines and will help you reach those film makers using Canon equipment more easily. In the same way, if I want to start a fan club for Canon DSLR users specifically, I should be able to call it the Canon DSLR Fan Club so that it is immediately clear what kind of fan club it is. How else can I communicate to people that the fan club is specifically for users of Canon gear if I can’t use the word “Canon”? How can you start any fan club if you’re not allowed to use the trademarks, and as a result, are not allowed to say what your fan club is for??

Let’s look at nominative use a bit more:

Nominative use may be considered to be either related to, or a type of “trademark fair use” (sometimes called “classic fair use” or “statutory fair use”). All “trademark fair use” doctrines, however classified, are distinct from the fair use doctrine in copyright law. The nominative use test essentially states that one party may use or refer to the trademark of another if:

1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute).
2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol).
3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial, and the same test applies for metatags.

Furthermore, if a use is found to be nominative, then by the definition of non-trademark uses, it can not dilute the trademark.[2]

With the above 3 points in mind: Canonfilmmakers.com wouldn’t be able to effectively run their community website if they couldn’t use the Canon trademark in their communications to exactly identify the type/brand of gear they cover or specialize in, so therefore, their use of the word “Canon” in their name (including domain name) is justified (1). They used only as much of the trademark as was necessary, in their case just the word “Canon”, no use of the Canon logo (2). And they did absolutely nothing to suggest that they were being sponsored or endorsed by Canon themselves (3).

So I don’t really see why Canon would insist that Canonfilmmakers.com take down their website. It’s not like their trademark was being diluted or misrepresented in some way or otherwise being abused. On the contrary, you could argue Canonfilmmakers.com only added value to Canon’s products.

What happens when you're being stupid about protecting your trademark. Photo is (c) Anthony Dunn Photography.

I absolutely hate it when people and/or companies abuse the law to unnecessarily limit, attack or intimidate others like in this case with Canon. Often it’s the case that these kinds of threats are being sent out by lawyers even while they know that they don’t really stand a chance in court, but they do it anyway just to see if the victim (yes victim) gets scared and allows him/herself to be intimidated by their threats. Similarly, a while ago I also got a Cease and Desist letter from Amazon/dpreview where they claimed I was infringing on dpreview’s rights. I replied and after more than a year I have yet to hear from them. These companies shouldn’t forget that the victims can also take legal action against them when they make groundless threats of infringement:

Various jurisdictions have laws which are designed to prevent trademark owners from making wrongful threats of trademark infringement action against other parties. These laws are intended to prevent large or powerful companies from intimidating or harassing smaller companies.

Where one party makes a threat to sue another for trademark infringement, but does not have a genuine basis or intention to carry out that threat, or does not carry out the threat at all within a certain period, the threat may itself become a basis for legal action.[17] In this situation, the party receiving such a threat may seek from the Court a declaratory judgment; also known as a declaratory ruling.

I’m sad that I am not the owner of Canonfilmmakers.com because I would have loved this opportunity to defend myself against these claims made by Canon, assuming that their infringement claims are based on the domain name (because so far that’s the only reason that seems likely to me if I look at the website). We need to stand up against this kind of abuse of trademark and copyright laws because if we don’t, it will only get worse in the future. As a photographer, I love that I can have certain rights to my work under copyright law, but I’ll be the last one to abuse those laws for something that I shouldn’t be doing (like in the Amazon/dpreview case where they clearly tried to influence my criticism). I respect their copyrights, but they’re not going to stop me from exercising my right to free speech.

There are many other websites out there using the Canon brand name in their domain name such as Canon-Questions.com and even ACanonLawyer.com. A simple Who-Is lookup reveals thousands more of which hundreds are really related to Canon. So it seems that when Canon’s lawyers have nothing to do, sending out take-down letters to fan sites could give an impression that they’re working hard to earn their money. You may think that this is a silly idea, but these kinds of things really happen. I was told by a lawyer (yes really) a while ago that since it is often the case that they get paid for every letter that they send out, it doesn’t always really matter to them whether the claims they make in those letters are valid or not, and if their client’s position is strong, weak or groundless. They get paid for sending out a letter, so they do it and it’s another $100-$200 earned. Especially if the other party is just a simple person with limited resources where they can have some kind of expectation that he/she will let him/herself be intimidated by the threats made in the letter and give in to the demands. I’ve been the victim of this myself so I know what I’m talking about.

I really hope that the owner of Canonfilmmakers.com lives up to his name (Jon Connor) and decides to fight back and lead the resistance against Canon Inc. He will be doing the entire Canon community and the global population in general a really big favour, especially so when he wins and makes the details public.

Timeless Stare

Today I launched my new website after spending almost 3.5 months working on it in my spare time. The previous site was launched in 2007, so a refresh was necessary. Along with some updated information about the services that I offer I have also updated all my portfolios and there’s a lot of new work to see. I’ve also finally written some more about my background and there are some testimonials from people I’ve worked with over the years to give you an idea of what it’s like to work with me. I’ve gotten feedback from clients in the past who mentioned that I had to “sell myself more” and talk more about my work. I could totally understand them, I’m not one to go out and promote myself or boast about my work. I find that very difficult to do, but at the same time I also realize that sometimes I have to act like a salesman in order to sell my services. So instead of me talking about my work, I choose to have some of my clients giving their opinion about their experiences in working with me.

I’m still doing a little tweaking in the background but the site is now essentially complete. In the near future, as time permits, I’ll also be updating my blog to match the design of my new website more closely. Head on over to take a look and if you have any feedback whatsoever, just leave a comment on this blog post.

Sad for Life

What exactly is the purpose of life? Why are we born and what are we supposed to be doing here on this planet and in this reality? Those are questions I’ve asked myself almost every day ever since my early childhood. And I still don’t have answers to those questions. It bothers me every day. What bothers me even more, is that I think it won’t ever be possible for me, or anyone else, to really find answers to those questions. At best it will always be a lot of guesswork.

The fact that I don’t really know what I’m doing here makes it difficult to live life. Difficult because it’s impossible to find a meaningful direction in life without answers to those questions. I look around me and I see people chasing after lovers, careers, money, fame, power and many other things that in the end don’t matter at all. Why not? Because when we die, we leave everything behind. All of it. So really, what is the use of constantly pursuing any of those things in life? What’s the use of constantly wanting to achieve more and more?

I look at the way society is structured, how there’s a small group of people who have everything they could want in life and indeed much more than they really need, and how at the same time there are many more people who struggle to make ends meet every day and who’re being denied a normal life. And I ask myself, what drives the wealthy to seek even more wealth? And will it ever be enough? Sometimes when I’m out I look at all the big houses people build, houses that could easily be home to 3 or 4 families, and I wonder why a single family of 4 needs all that space. And I hope you don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I begrudge these people, on the contrary, I wish the best for everyone. It’s just that I don’t understand their constant need for more often at the expense of others. It’s almost as if these people expect to have all that wealth forever and keep gathering even more of it. Don’t they realize that our time in this life is limited and that we can’t take anything with us in the end?

Another example is the never ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. Why can’t these people just get along? Why can’t we just acknowledge that all of us are entitled to certain things in life, in this case a home we can call our own, and just respect each other and live together? Why is this so difficult?

When it comes down to it, all we really need on this planet as human beings is food on the table every day and a roof over our heads. That’s basically all we really need to get us through our lives. After all these years, you would think that by now we’d all have figured this out already and have structured our societies in such a way where every human being on this planet could at the very least have access to those two things for his entire lifetime. But instead what we have is a constant struggle of people trying to have more than the other in order to stay on top in this system. Like crabs in a barrel. Everyone fighting for more and more, even if they have more than enough already, at the expense of others. As a result, we end up with a situation where the richest 1% of adults own 40% of global assets, where the richest 10% of adults own 85% of global assets, and where the bottom half of the adults own 1% of global wealth. Think about that for a moment. Then we go on asking ourselves why we’re dealing with so much crime. Nobody is born a criminal. Nobody really wants to be a criminal. Crime is just a symptom of our flawed society. When we create situations where a small group of people are hoarding all the resources on this planet, while a large group of people are struggling to survive every day (and in extreme cases are just outright being denied their basic rights), we shouldn’t act surprised when people start behaving in extreme ways in order to survive. And with this I’m not validating criminal behavior, but just saying that there’s a lot more to the problem and that we have to start looking at the root causes now instead of simply blaming the criminals while we fight the symptoms.

So when you know that in the end you’ll die and leave everything you have behind anyway, then what is it that ultimately matters in life? I think the only thing we can do in life that really matters is to help eachother and to make sure that everyone can live a good and comfortable life in complete freedom. And the only way we can achieve this is by realizing that the only thing that really matters in life is love. Just like David Icke wrote in his book: Infinite love is the only truth, everything else is illusion. And David Icke was certainly on to something. In the end all that you see around you doesn’t matter. As far as you are concerned it all gets left behind and disappears once you die. And death can come at any time. When that happens, all your wealth and all your successes will be worth absolutely nothing to you anymore. So why spend all your life gathering more and more of that for yourself? Instead, why not  spend your life gathering more and more for others who don’t have enough to live a comfortable life? Why not spend your life loving and caring for others? Like Albert Einstein once said: “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” The only way you can really become a man of value in life, is by meaning something to others; by bringing value into the lives of others. And you can only do that by loving others. Infinite love is the only truth; nothing else matters in life. Imagine what the world might look like if all of us would realize this.

A while ago I saw a documentary on electrodynamics and free energy, where Tom Bearden was interviewed explaining the concept behind free (or radiant) energy. The documentary is titled “Hidden electrodynamics and the final secret of free energy” and is the fifth part of the Energy from the Vacuum series. If you’ve never heard of this series, I highly recommend you check it out. In the interview Bearden explains how it’s possible to get energy out of the vacuum, seemingly out of nowhere, by creating a charge and having the environment (or vacuum) react to that essentially trying to neutralize that charge. It’s important to understand that this isn’t just theory anymore, as there are working concepts of machines that demonstrate how this works. All of this can be seen in the documentaries.

This knowledge exists for a long time now, ever since the time of Nikola Tesla. If Tesla could have had enough funding for his research, the world we live in today would have looked very different. Instead Tesla’s research was sabotaged and stopped because J. P. Morgan, who was financing most of Tesla’s research at the time, didn’t want free energy technology to become available to everyone. That would have been against his financial interests (see the movie “The Secret of Nikola Tesla” for more on this). So instead, all of this technology (free energy, anti-gravity etc.) was held back from reaching the public and today the world is being financially milked by those in control with alternative energy sources that are expensive, finite, pollute the planet and create artificial scarcity. Even today, as Bearden explains, people are experiencing all kinds of resistance when they try to research free energy and try to develop technology that makes use of free energy. It’s either difficult to get funding for it, or scientists end up missing or are assassinated. Meanwhile the entire population of this planet is being held back so that a small group that’s in control can profit. Millions of people are living in poverty and are dying because, supposedly, there are not enough resources to feed them and take care of them.

An electron surrounded by positively charged particles

But the reason I’m writing this is because I think the theory behind free energy, based on electromagnetism, can be used to explain the concept of karma and the way the universe works. I think the goal in this universe, or in nature, is to constantly have balance. If things aren’t balanced, then the universe reacts and makes sure balance is restored. So in the case of the theory behind free energy, as Bearden explains, once you’ve created a negative charge in a vacuum, seemingly out of nowhere positive particles appear and surround the negative charge. What was thought to be empty space around the negative charge, suddenly isn’t empty anymore. This process is called “broken symmetry,” particles that were previously not observable appear and are now observable. This is easier to understand once you realize that what we think of as empty space or vacuum really isn’t empty at all. The reality is that there’s a lot of matter even in what we think of as empty space, but we’re just not capable of seeing or detecting it. Consider that humans are only capable of seeing a fraction (3.5 x 10^-26 %) of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine how much exists around us that our senses and our technology simply cannot detect (not unless it enters our range of observable reality).

So once a negative or positive charge exists, the universe responds by supplying the energy to bring back balance. And I believe that in our daily life this is also the case. I’ll try to explain this by using an simple example with two persons, person A and person B. Each person is made up of energy (we’re all essentially energy, positive and negative) and in an ideal situation there’s balance.

Balance

In their daily interactions person A and person B exchange energy with each other. Consider what happens when person A decides to do something negative to person B (for example misleading or hurting person B).

Person A does something negative to person B

By doing so, person A projects some of his negative energy onto person B. The result is that person A becomes positively charged (more positive energy present), and person B becomes negatively charged (more negative energy present).

Balance is lost, person A has more positive energy and person B has more negative energy

So you can probably imagine what happens next. Since the goal in the universe is to have balance, the universe responds to this situation by sending negative energy to person A and positive energy to person B.

The universe brings back balance

And that’s when what people refer to as ”karma” comes into play. If you project negative energy out onto people, you’re going to get negative energy back. If you do something bad to someone, you should expect to get it back. On the other hand, if you’re hurt or otherwise need help, the universe will respond by sending help. It’s difficult to say how fast the universe reacts, but usually it takes time and maybe things are brought back into balance by other events and other persons also interacting with person A and B even before the universe responds. It’s also important to note that things like conscience and intention may also play an important role in all of this. Whether or not the energy person A projects onto person B is negative or positive from the perspective of person A, may depend entirely upon person A’s intention and conscience. Was person A’s intention to really hurt person B, did he know the consequences? Or was it to help, or was person A not even aware of what was caused to person B? Similarly, the way person B perceives the energy projected onto him by person A may influence the way the universe responds to person B.

Consider what happens when person A projects positive energy onto person B from a neutral starting position, for example by helping person B or by giving something to person B.

Person A does something positive to person B

The result of that is that person A becomes negatively charged (more negative energy present) and person B becomes positively charged (more positive energy present).

The universe responds

The universe then responds to this by sending positive energy to person A and negative energy to person B in order to achieve balance. So for person A we see the concept of “do good and you will receive it back.” However, in this particular example, person B ends up with too much positive energy and even though he may have done nothing wrong, the universe sends negative energy his way. We could argue that since person B was in a neutral/balanced state before receiving positive energy from person A, person B didn’t really need it and should have declined. Or, person B could have accepted the positive energy, but then make sure that he gives back as much of it as possible to someone else who needs it instead of holding onto it.

And so what we see here is that if you think that you’re going take a lot more than you give in life things will get difficult for you. Life is about giving and receiving and the balance between those two. The universe will always try to maintain balance. So when it comes to giving and receiving, we all should strive to maintain a balanced life. Don’t take more than you need but also think of others. If you’re blessed with a lot of positive things in life, consider giving back to those who are in need.

This is exactly what happens if we go back and look at the example of the electron in a vacuum. Being negatively charged, the universe responds by surrounding this negative charge with positive particles. What happens, as Bearden explains, is that the electron continuously absorbs these positive particles but as soon as it has absorbed enough, it releases the absorbed energy again in the form of a photon. It keeps absorbing energy, but it also keeps giving back energy, at such a rate that everything appears to be balanced and static. In reality there’s a continuous process of give and take going on at incredible speed.

All the universe really wants is balance. It makes no distinction between positive and negative, or good and bad. Those are labels that we put on things depending on how we perceive them and depending on our understanding of our reality. To the universe everything just is. Nobody gets rewarded, and nobody gets punished. The universe doesn’t pick sides. The only thing that really matters is balance. This concept is also used in the Matrix movies, where the Architect character is tasked with maintaining balance in the Matrix:

In The Matrix Revolutions, the Oracle explains to Neo that the true purpose of the Architect is to balance the mathematical equations that make up the programming of the Matrix, and he is unable to see the world as anything beyond a series of equations. It is also because of this that he is unable to comprehend choice and free will and cannot see the results of such choices as they are no more than variable factors in an equation to him.

So karma is essentially just the universe trying to maintain internal balance of energy.

Colorful Eyes

I’ve moved my blog to its own subdomain at http://blog.kareldonk.com. If you had subscribed to any of my feeds please make sure that you update the feed URLs in your reader. I’ve made every effort to make sure that old links work and that everything gets redirected to the new location, but I may have missed something in the process. If you find any broken links, please leave a comment or send an email and let me know.

This blog update is part of some changes that will be made to my website in the coming weeks as time permits.  My current website went online in 2007 and an update is long overdue.

A car belonging to a frustrated Korean photographer. The text on those banners translates to: “Camera that is a piece of trash – Canon EOS 1D Mark 3”

Canon has been seriously disappointing everyone since the release of the EOS 1D Mark III camera. The 5D Mark II sucked, the 7D sucked a little, the 50D seriously sucked, the 60D sucked, and the recently released 600D and 1100D also suck. Professional photographers using Canon equipment are in desperate need of a working DSLR body that will make them competitive again compared to other photographers using Nikon gear and these days even Sony gear. The only good option Canon has right now is the 1D Mark IV, but even that can’t deliver image quality as good as the Nikon D3s for example, and costs close to $4500 while being a lot bigger and heavier (not something most photographers appreciate).

Fake Chuck Westfall has put up a petition online for feature requests for the next update to the 5D Mark II, which may be a 5D Mark III but could also be a new model like a 3D or 6D if we are to believe some of the rumors. If you are a Canon user that needs a good body now or in the future, take the time to sign this petition and let’s hope Canon Inc. will actually deliver something close to what is being requested demanded.

Cactus V5 Transceiver Review. Model credit: Carol Chen Poun Joe (more test images with this model in the gallery below)

In the second week of November 2010 I was contacted by Harvest One Limited as part of a small group of photographers around the world about testing a new version of their Cactus wireless flash triggers. At that time their latest model was the Cactus V4 Wireless Flash Trigger which I had been using for a few months already. So when the opportunity was presented to me to be able to have an early look at the next generation of these triggers I accepted it immediately. Harvest One would ship all participating photographers a couple of pre-production versions of the new units and the only requirement was that we would give suggestions for improvements and other feedback during the testing period and in the end write about our experiences with the new units on our websites and/or blogs.

As a user of the Cactus V4 triggers I have overall been very happy with the value I got for my money. The V4 triggers have proven to be very capable and reliable and I have done some serious work with them including using them during my photoshoot for the president of Suriname. There were some things that could have been better with the V4 system. For example, the battery compartment door could easily get detached and this was an issue many people complained about. Occasionally you could also get some reliability issues with flashes not firing when taking a picture, though this didn’t happen very often. In my post about the photoshoot for the president of Suriname, I mentioned how the Cactus V4 trigger was a lot more practical and reliable when in use than Canon’s wireless trigger (the ST-E2, which I also own), while also being a lot cheaper. And I still think this is the case. So the Cactus V4 already offered some good value for the money you’d spend on them. But with the new Cactus V5 transceiver the value you get for your money is taken to a much higher level.

The Cactus V5 Transceiver compared to the Cactus V4 Trigger

Improvements

The Cactus V5 system represents a significant improvement over the older V4 system. Let’s look at some of the new features:

- New Transceiver Design

The Cactus V5 has a new transceiver design. This means that each V5 unit can function both as a trigger and a receiver (controlled through the Mode Switch on the unit). It is also much bigger compared to the V4 unit so you’ll have to keep this in mind when using it with other gear.

The Cactus V5 mounted as a trigger on the Canon EOS 40D

With the V4 system you had a dedicated trigger unit and a dedicated receiver unit. You’d then use a V4 trigger to trigger a number of V4 receivers. If the trigger unit became defective then you’d have to have a backup trigger unit to be able to continue to work. But with the V5 system any of the units can function as a trigger, so you can just take one of the receivers and use that as a trigger in such a case. This is one of the advantages of the transceiver design. You can always walk around with an extra V5 unit and that can be used both as a backup trigger and backup receiver. In comparison, with the V4 system I had to walk around with an extra V4 trigger unit and an extra V4 receiver unit.

Cactus V5

The specifications are as follows:

- Working radio frequency: 2.4 Ghz.
- 16 selectable channels
- Sync speeds of up to 1/1000s supported
- Maximum effective distance of 100 meters
- Operating temperature of -20 °C to +50 °C
- Dimensions: 82mm (L) x 70mm (W) x 37mm (H)
- Weight: 58g
- Power input: 2 x AAA 1.5V batteries
- Flash voltage handling up to 300v
- Camera voltage handling up to 6v

- Better Reliability

The Cactus V5 transceiver is a lot more reliable than the V4 system. I have yet to experience reliability issues with these units. They’re practically 100% reliable within 50 meters. During tests, as long as my flashes were able to recycle fast enough, these units kept firing them every time.

- Frequency Self-Tune (FST)

The Cactus V5 transceiver has a unique new Frequency Self-Tune (FST) feature that automatically adjusts for frequency shifts in extreme weather conditions to increase reliability. According to Harvest One this feature will minimize no-fires in extreme conditions. I live in a tropical part of the world, but some of the other photographers in our testing group have tested the V5 in very cold weather conditions and they have proven to be practically 100% reliable. Check out the list of other reviews further down for more information on this.

- Improved Battery Compartment

The new battery compartment on the V5 is a big improvement compared to the V4 and according to Harvest One it is highly durable and has been tested to continue to function even after 3000 clicks. The door to the battery compartment on the Cactus V4 could detach all by itself if you merely gave it the wrong look. In comparison this new design on the V5 is just great.

The Cactus V5 Battery Compartment

- Maximum Range of 100 Meters!

The Cactus V5 transceiver can work reliably over a maximum distance of 100 meters. Some testers have reported even greater distances, as far as 240 meters (with decreased reliability), where they were still able to use the V5 with some no-fires in between. At least one tester reported reliable results at 200 meters (check links to other reviews below). But it is important to note that Harvest One themselves only advertise a reliable working distance of 100 meters. How much further you can take this also depends on the environment that you’re working in.

- Multi-Channel Triggering

With the Cactus V5 transceiver you can have up to 4 groups of receivers each with their own channel (Channel 2 – 5) and with any number of receivers in each group. You can then control on the trigger which one of these groups you want to trigger when taking a picture. Channel 1 on the trigger fires all groups. If you want to trigger only a certain group of receivers, all you have to do is set the trigger to the group’s channel and only that group of flashes will fire.

- Camera Shutter Release Functionality

The Cactus V5 transceiver can also be used as a wireless shutter release. To be able to use this functionality you’ll have to buy a shutter release cable that is being sold separately by Harvest One. When using this functionality, half pressing the test button on the trigger activates the autofocus system of the camera and fully pressing the test button takes a picture. Using this feature you can reliably trigger your camera wirelessly from up to 100 meters away.

The Cactus V5 mounted on a Canon EOS 40D and being used as a wireless shutter release (shutter release cable is sold separately)

- Extra Hot Shoe

There is now an extra hot shoe on top of the V5 unit that functions as the trigger. This enables you to mount a flash on top of the trigger on your camera and use it as an on-axis fill light. TTL information will not be passed through to the flash mounted on top of the trigger so you’ll have to work in manual mode.

The Cactus V5 mounted on a Canon EOS 40D with a Canon 580 EX II Flash on top

- Improved Status Led

The status led on the V5 indicates when the receivers are being triggered by the shutter release on the camera (green light), when they are being tested by half-pressing the test button on the trigger (orange light) and when the batteries are low (blinking red light). The battery low indication is a very welcome new feature because on important shoots you can get an early warning if the batteries need to be replaced. According to Harvest One, after the low battery indicator flashes at room temperature, it’s possible to get an average of 7-8 hours of “standby” time until the batteries completely die out.

- Maximum Sync Speed of 1/1000s

The Cactus V5 supports a maximum sync speed of 1/1000s. I used the V5 on Canon EOS 40D bodies and was able to work at the maximum supported (by the camera) sync speed of 1/250s without banding issues. On some Nikon bodies for example you’ll be able to work at sync speeds up to 1/1000s.

- Better Flash Stands

The Cactus V5 transceivers come with a much better flash stand compared to the older V4 system. The flash stand can be used on the V5 unit itself or on the flash.

A Canon 580 EX II Flash mounted on the Cactus V5 Transceiver

No Support for TTL

The Cactus V5 does not support TTL. So if you plan on using these triggers, prepare to work in manual mode all the time. It also does not support TTL pass-through for the flash mounted on top of the V5 trigger on the camera. Depending on how you like to work, this may or may not be an issue for you. When using off-camera lighting I want to have precise control over my lights, so the fact that TTL is not supported is not a big deal for me personally. If TTL is important to you then you’ll have to look at the more expensive Radio Popper or Pocket Wizard.

Compatibility with the Cactus V4

As far as compatibility with the older V4 system goes, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that you will not be able to trigger the V4 receivers with the V5 trigger, and you will not be able to trigger the V5 receivers with a V4 trigger. The V5 is not compatible with the V4 in that way. However, the good news is that if you already have invested in the V4 system, it won’t be useless if you want to get a couple of the V5 units. You can use the V4 system together with the V5 by mounting the V4 trigger on top of the V5 trigger on the camera as shown in the image below.

Using the Cactus V5 with the Cactus V4

This way you can trigger both V5 and V4 receivers when you take a picture. It is not an ideal way of working, but it does the job. There’s also the possibility of having a V5 receiver trigger the V4 trigger using the supplied sync cable, but then you’ll get banding at the maximum sync speed. So the best way to use the V5 and V4 together is by mounting the V4 trigger on top of the V5 trigger on the camera. I’ve actually used this setup during two test photoshoots that I have done (read about them below) and it worked very well. But you’ll have to keep in mind that using the V5 and the V4 together is not recommended and not supported by Harvest One, and any damages resulting from using these units this way will not be covered by the warranty.

Test Photoshoots

While testing the Cactus V5 I thought of doing some test photoshoots to see how it would perform if I were to use it for actual work. Based on my experiences during these test photoshoots I would know if the V5 would be worth upgrading to in the future.

I like macro photography so one of the first things I tried out was to see if I could use the V5 for off camera lighting during macro photography. I went out with a lightstand, a Canon 580 EX II flash on a V5 receiver and a shoot through umbrella and made shots of insects, flowers and other small objects. In most cases the flash was positioned to my left at about 45 degrees from the subject, about 50cm to 1 meter away. Sometimes I would stand at equal distance from the subject to the light and sometimes even slightly in front and to the side of the light. This is a scenario that wouldn’t work with the Canon wireless trigger, the ST-E2 since you’d always have to place your lights in front of the trigger within a specific range and distance. But with the Cactus V5, I just placed my light where I wanted and was free to walk around to try all kinds of angles on my subject. I had 100% reliability here. A couple of images I took during this outdoor macro session can be seen in the gallery below, all were taken with the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5 L Macro lens.

I also tried a portrait shoot to see how the Cactus V5 would do in a studio setting. I invited my friend Navin Poeran, a SEO specialist, to have some photos taken which he could later use on his blog and social networking websites. For this shoot I wanted to end up with a specific kind of tech-look, which was achieved in part with the lighting and in part with post processing. I used 4 Canon 580 EX II flashes, 2 of them triggered by Cactus V5 units and 2 of them triggered by Cactus V4 units. There was one background light, 2 lights (small shoot through umbrellas) on each side and slightly to the back of the subject and one light in front and slightly to the side in a 90cm x 90cm softbox. I wanted to experiment with shallow depth of field so I shot mainly at f/2 (Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L lens), which meant that the power on the flashes was dialed down all the way to about 1/64th. The lights were placed close to the subject. Here I had 100% reliability for the V5 units and some no-fires for the V4 units. All shots were taken at 1/250s (max sync on the EOS 40D) and I had no banding issues.

And finally I did yet another studio shoot with a very talented painter and make-up artist named Carol Chen Poun Joe. You can find her and see some of her work on her facebook page. I wanted to do a photoshoot with extreme eye make-up and Carol was prepared to not only do the make-up but to also be the model for this photoshoot. This means that she had to do the make-up on herself. I told her what I wanted to do for the eye make-up and she came up with two very nice make-up styles all by herself: A zebra eye make-up look and a fantasy look. The fact that she also did this make-up on herself (especially the more complex looking zebra eye make-up) is a testament to her skills. You can see her doing her own make-up in the gallery below. Apart from being very talented she’s also very beautiful and can sometimes be mistaken for Megan Fox.

Carol Chen Poun Joe or Megan Fox?

Now if you’ll stop staring for a moment, I want to explain the lighting I used for this photoshoot. The lighting here was very similar to the previous photoshoot with Navin, but the difference here was that I placed the lights much further away from the model and used higher power settings. So it was 4 Canon 580 EX II flashes, 2 of them triggered by Cactus V5 units and 2 of them triggered by Cactus V4 units. There was one background light, 2 lights (small shoot through umbrellas) on each side and slightly to the back of the subject and one light in front in a 90cm x 90cm softbox. During the photoshoot I sometimes moved the softbox to the left or right of my position depending on the orientation of the model. Here I also experimented with some shallow depth of field shots using the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L lens. I also used the Canon EF 35mm f/1.4 L lens for some of the shots. During this photoshoot I had 100% reliability for the V5 units and some no-fires for the V4 units. All shots were taken at 1/250s (max sync on the EOS 40D) and I had no banding issues.

Gallery

Below is a gallery of pictures I made during my test photoshoots. Click on the “Full Screen” button in the lower-right corner to see larger images.

Conclusion

Based on my experiences with testing the Cactus V5 transceiver, I can tell you that I am going to be buying them as soon as they are available and will be replacing my Cactus V4 system entirely. They are a lot better than the Cactus V4 and certainly a lot more reliable. And if you look at the costs (two V5 units for a mere $60), I think it’s an incredible deal. Radio Popper and Pocket Wizard have some serious competition now with their (lots) more expensive products. For the price of a single Pocket Wizard FlexTT5 unit ($229) you can get 7 Cactus V5 units. And reliability is just as good and perhaps even better if you look at the comparison another reviewer made (check reviews below). The only thing the Cactus V5 doesn’t have that’s really worth having for some users is the TTL functionality.

Another thing is that the Cactus V4 already put the Canon ST-E2 to shame and now the Cactus V5 is doing it all over again. Canon is still trying to sell us a fucking piece of plastic junk for almost $250 with a maximum working range of 15 meters (10 meters out-doors) that needs line of sight to be able to work well. For that price you can get 8 Cactus V5 units that work a lot better and give you a lot more freedom. I keep wondering when Canon is finally going to bring us some fucking innovation after all the mediocrity they’ve been releasing recently. If a small company like Harvest One Limited with limited resources is able to design such a relatively kick-ass product in about 18 months, why can’t the big and mighty Canon do it? Okay let me stop now, I’m beginning to sound like someone else.

Availability

The Cactus V5 will be available for sale on Gadget Infinity starting on Monday, January 24, 2011 at 00:00 (PST) and first shipments are expected to begin on January 26th. It will be available in two packages:

• Wireless Flash Transceiver V5 Duo - Price: $59,95
  A box containing two Cactus V5 transceiver units.
• Wireless Flash Transceiver V5 Single – Price: $34,95
  A box containing a single Cactus V5 transceiver unit.

Other Reviews

There’s much more to say about the new Cactus V5 system and many more tests were done by others. Below is a list of reviews done by other photographers in our test group where you can find additional information:

• Review by Brian Hursey
  General information, maximum range reliability tests up to about 180 meters and videos.
• Review by Nicolas B Photo (French)
  General information, maximum range reliability tests in cold weather, wireless shutter release information.
• Review by Eric Duminil
  General information, maximum range reliability tests comparing the V5 with the Pocket Wizard Plus II. According to this test the V5 is a lot more reliable than the Pocket Wizard Plus II, even as far as 240 meters. Very impressive.
• Review on Steelevisions
  General information.
• Review on Pentaxforums
  General information, maximum range reliability tests, comparisons with other wireless flash triggers.
• Review on Rudy’s Rants
  General information, maximum range reliability tests up to 200 meters in cold weather, maximum frame rate tests with an impressive 39 fps result!
• Review on Lighting Rumours
  General information, max sync speed tests on Nikon D40 (1/1000s) and D700 and comparison with other wireless flash triggers on the market.

Updates

Update January 25, 2011: There appears to be an extremely high demand for the new Cactus V5 transceivers and initial stock has been completely sold out within 15 hours. Gadget Infinity seems to be caught by surprise with the high demand, but in my opinion they had to have seen this coming because the V5 is a killer product. So if you go on their website and find the Cactus V5 out of stock, try again the next day. Here’s part of a message from Gadget Infinity:

As many of you are aware, the Cactus Wireless Flash Transceiver V5 (V5) was released yesterday, and after less than 15 hours, the V5 Duo was all sold out while a limited number of V5 Single is still available.

We are extremely excited about the high demand for V5. However, given that each V5 unit is inspected one-by-one to ensure quality and reliability, our supply level is insufficient to meet this unexpected high demand. In light of this, we are making efforts to increase our production supply, and hope to achieve this within the shortest timeframe possible.

For the time being, we will make a limited supply of V5 (Duo and Single) available on Gadget Infinity every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 00:00 PST.

Please accept our sincere apologies if this supply shortage has caused any inconvenience for you. Lastly, we’d like to thank you for your support of Cactus Image and Gadget Infinity, and we look forward to serving you soon.

Snapsort

Today if you want to buy a digital camera, and especially if you’re new to photography, it can be quite difficult to choose a camera from all the many different brands and models out there. The market is saturated with all kinds of cameras with various capabilities at price ranges from $200 to $8000 and more. In addition there are many websites on the Internet where you can find reviews for cameras which can often be many pages long containing all kinds of technical information which may or may not mean something to you. Making things even more difficult is the fact that on these review sites the reviewers often give a very subjective rating to the cameras. For example, if you compare the Nikon D7000 with the Canon EOS 60D on Dpreview, the Nikon D7000 has a score of 80% while the Canon EOS 60D has a score of 79% making it seem like these cameras are practically similar and that it almost wouldn’t matter which one you choose. But this is very far from the truth. Dpreview used to be a lot worse in the past, where almost all cameras got a simple “Highly Recommended” rating in the end, making you wonder why you’re spending time reading 20-page reviews if every camera is highly recommended anyway. Many other review sites have similar issues.

Enter Snapsort, a refreshingly simple and easy to navigate website that helps you to quickly and easily go through a whole database of currently available cameras to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Simplicity

The Snapsort website has a very simple and clean layout making it very fast and easy to navigate. At any given time only the information you need is being displayed, which is a big difference compared to other sites that surround the content with all kinds of unnecessary information. When I saw Snapsort initially, the thought that came to my mind immediately is that this is the Google of the camera review websites. And this for many more reasons than just the website layout.

User centric

Snapsort cares about what the user wants and gives the user all the tools he needs to help him make a choice. As soon as you’re on the site, you get presented with 4 options right at the top: Explore, Compare, Learn and Just tell me! You can choose an option under Explore if you want to start looking at cameras based on a combination of criteria which you can define yourself out of a list of possible options. Snapsort even provides you with simple explanations for all of the available criteria options. Are you looking for an entry-level DSLR costing around $700? No problem, just select those options and do a search. But what if you also want just the cameras in that price range that can record HD quality movies? Simply add the Movie Format criteria to your criteria list and search again. All kinds if combinations are possible. I’m not kidding when I say that in just a few seconds you can have a pretty good recommendation on what camera to buy.

Explore cameras on Snapsort

If you click on one of the cameras in the search results, Snapsort gives you detailed information about its capabilities with pictures of the camera. What I find important here is that you can easily see how it ranks compared to other similar cameras and other cameras in the same price range.

Easily check camera rankings on Snapsort

If you want to have detailed information of how it compares to its competitors, you just have to click on the “Competitors” link at the top. You then get a list of other cameras that your currently selected camera can be compared to. Not only that, but Snapsort even tells you in a nutshell what the differences between the cameras are and lists the important advantages and disadvantages of each model so that you can choose more easily. And all of this on a single page in just a few lines.

View competing cameras on Snapsort

If you want a more detailed comparison, you can click on a “Compare” link provided below each competing camera which will take you to another page with a more detailed comparison. Snapsort then provides all the relevant information you need in order to make a decision that will best suit your needs.

Compare cameras on Snapsort

But what I really like about this is that Snapsort also gives you a clear recommendation on which camera you should buy. This is a huge plus compared to other review websites and very helpful to users who can’t make a decision based on camera specifications alone (for example those who don’t know very much about photography or are new to photography). You’ve got to have huge balls to be able to specifically recommend a camera to the user above another model, and Snapsort does this. Remember the example I gave at the beginning of this post of the scores of the Nikon D7000 (80%) and the Canon EOS 60D (79%) on Dpreview? How difficult wouldn’t it have been for you to make a decision based on that? Instead, Snapsort clearly tells you what you should buy: The Nikon D7000. Also notice that the scores of these cameras on Snapsort differ a LOT more from each other compared to Dpreview, and this is very consistent with reality (check my review of the Canon EOS 60D for more on this).

Objective camera recommendations on Snapsort

I’ve tried a number of different possibilities and comparisons, and so far I found myself agreeing with all of the recommendations that Snapsort made. This will save many users a huge amount of time and will help them spend their money wisely. And speaking of spending your money wisely, a killer feature on Snapsort is the “Just tell me!” option, where you can simply enter the amount of money you want to spend on a camera and let Snapsort give you a number of possibilities to choose from. Depending on your needs (do you want an ultra-compact camera or, for example, a waterproof camera?) you can start to look at the possibilities in a category that makes sense to you.

Easily find a camera for your budget on Snapsort

Objectivity

It may not be apparent to many people, but these days it is very difficult to find objective information on the Internet on camera review sites. Most of the popular sites such as Dpreview accept money or favors from camera manufacturers in various ways (mostly through advertising and sponsorships) and can be biased as a result. Many people have had negative comments made on Dpreview forums deleted and got banned there for expressing criticism. As far as I can tell, right now all the information Snapsort provides to users is very objective and transparent. Even their scoring system is very transparent and shows you exactly how they calculate the scores of all the cameras. And I love their no-nonsense approach. Most important here is that Snapsort uses data from DXOMark for DSLR cameras to rate the image quality and low light sensitivity among other things. And this data is highly objective and highly reliable. One thing I can guarantee you is that if you’re looking for cameras with the best image quality, you can blindly trust the recommendations on Snapsort. As far as I know, Snapsort is one of the first websites to rate cameras based on a high importance of image quality and is the first to use this to directly influence buying decisions. Users are being educated on the fact that higher megapixel numbers on cameras don’t necessarily mean that the camera is better compared to others with less megapixels. So when you compare cameras on Snapsort for the best image quality, you can rest assured that Snapsort will always show you which one has the best image quality.

Room for Improvement

I’m sure the guys at Snapsort have a big list of features they want to add to the website. There’s always room for improvement but there’s not a lot you can tackle at the same time. One of the things that is missing right now on Snapsort and that I hope will get on there in the future is the ability to also compare cameras based on build quality and the level of weather sealing. Another option, which in my opinion is just as important as image quality on a camera, is the ability to compare cameras based on the accuracy, speed and level of sophistication of their autofocus systems. I know that to objectively gather this data for many camera models is not an easy task, but it would totally rock if this could be taken along with image quality and other criteria to help users make a better buying decision. In my opinion the most important features on any camera are the image quality and the autofocus capabilities, because if one of those has a problem, the quality of your images will surely suffer.

What about Lenses?

Lenshero

So now you have a camera recommendation from Snapsort, but in the case of a DSLR, which lenses should you buy? Well, the choice for lenses is almost as difficult to make as cameras these days. There are many options out there from various manufacturers and for various purposes. Some lenses may or may not (completely) work on your camera. So what to do? Fortunately you can get help with this on Lenshero.

Lenshero has the same simplicity and user centric approach as Snapsort. If you open the Lenshero website, the first thing you get asked is the type of camera you own (this is important since each camera model uses specific lenses) and what your budget is. Then you can also choose what style of photography you want to use the lens for. No technical stuff whatsoever, just plain and simple questions complete with examples so that any user can understand.

Finding lenses for your DSLR camera on Lenshero

Once you’ve specified what you’re looking for and click on the big “GO” button, Lenshero gives you a list of possibilities in the lens explorer. There you can view all lenses and compare their features. Similar to Snapsort you can choose from a list of criteria to refine your search. You have the ability to make your own combinations of these criteria to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Exploring lenses on Lenshero

If you click on a lens in the explorer, you can view details for that lens such as compatibility information, pros and cons and lens specifications.

Review lenses on Lenshero

While Lenshero is already very good right now to help you go through the large amount of lenses that are available and help you to make a choice, what I’m missing is the ability to compare lenses similar to how you can compare cameras on Snapsort. Most importantly, the ability to see and compare the performance of these lenses, the build quality and the level of weather sealing. It would be very helpful to compare the sharpness (or resolution) of all these lenses as this is very important to image quality. DXOMark already has this capability, though their database currently only has the performance data for a relatively small amount of lenses. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why it’s not yet integrated into Lenshero. It may also be a feature that is on the to-do list of the developers at Lenshero. But I hope that in the future the lens performance data will also be available on Lenshero and that there will also be an objective rating system similar to the one on Snapsort that will help users choose the best lens for their camera. The lens performance data is important because, for example, a more expensive lens doesn’t neccessarily have to be a better performing lens. On DXOMark I found out that the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens was a lot better than the more expensive Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM lens when you consider the image quality you can get from it. Ofcourse the 50mm f/1.2 lens has a better build quality (more metal, weather sealing etc.) than the 50mm f/1.4 lens, but if image quality is important to you instead of build quality, then you could choose the cheaper lens in this case and have more money left to buy an additional lens.

Valuable tools

I think that Snapsort and Lenshero together form an excellent combination of tools to help people make a decision on what camera and lenses they should buy. For a while now I’ve been sending everyone who asks me about cameras and lenses to these two websites. Snapsort alone has the potential to become the Google of the digital camera industry. Together with Lenshero it could become THE destination on the Internet for quick and objective camera buying advice in the future.

In the second Matrix movie, “Matrix Reloaded,” the Architect says to Neo:

“Hope… it is the quintessential human delusion - simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.”

And he would know, because he had been abusing this weakness for the sixth time up to that point if you follow the story in the movie. In fact, Neo was part of the problem: An intentional creation by the Architect with the purpose of giving humans inside the Matrix hope so they could continue to be exploited for as long as possible. As explained by the Architect, he found out that humans would only “accept the program” if they were given a choice. By giving them a choice, not only do you make them feel in control (while in reality they have no control), but if the choice also promises a better future, you also give them hope. If there’s no choice and no hope, there’s no reason to continue and so the entire system comes to a halt and, as agent Smith put it in the first Matrix movie: “entire crops are lost.” To keep the system going and to have everyone accept their current situation, you have to give them something positive to look forward to, you have to give them a reason to make the choice to continue… you have to give them hope. And Neo served that purpose in the Matrix as the savior everyone was waiting for to help them escape from the Matrix and to bring them better times. And the “prophecy” of the coming of the One (Neo) kept everyone going and kept the system running.

The Matrix movies tell us a lot more about life than most people will realize. It is another one of those Hollywood movies that shows us how we are being controlled and manipulated while being disguised as entertainment. There’s a lot more to say on this subject, but I’ll leave that for another post. The important thing for now is that you realize that the story in the Matrix movies is based on real life.

In the same way that ”the machines” used Neo to give all the humans they were manipulating  a false hope, so too are people around the world being manipulated on a large scale with, for example, the many different religions. They are being manipulated to accept their current reality, or life, in the hope that things will be much better in the near future. For some it is until they die and “go to heaven/paradise”, for others it’s until their savior (Jesus, etc.) returns to earth whenever that may be, and there can be many more reasons. Whatever is needed to get people to believe and to give them hope. In the meantime, people choose to “accept the program” that’s forced upon them and continue to live life and keep the system going while hoping for better times. And this is of course exactly what those in control want everyone to do.

A more blatantly obvious example was during the election campaign of Barack Obama. Obama got associated, even literally (how much more in your face can they get?), with the hope everyone in the USA and around the world needed. After all the devastation that was caused in the USA and around the world during President George W. Bush, everyone was hoping for a change and for better times. So Obama became the Neo everyone (especially those in the USA) was waiting for. Those in control knew exactly what they were doing when they associated Obama with “change” and “hope.” You could say that it was brilliant manipulation, but it’s not so brilliant when you consider the fact that this kind of manipulation is business as usual for those in the know. In fact, they have done this many times before, just like the Architect in the Matrix. And just like he says in the movie, they have become “exceedingly efficient at it.” You just have to look at how the world swallowed the message of hope from Obama hook, line and sinker to see just how efficient they’ve gotten at this game. What this means is that, apparently, you can cause all kinds of devastation to people and manipulate them as much as you want, as long as you give them a reason to go through all of that (at the same time the illusion of choice) and give them hope for a better future.

While everyone has accepted the message of hope and thinks that things will actually change soon, in reality and especially behind the scenes nothing at all changes and those in control continue with their own agenda. The manipulation continues while everyone “accepts the program.” Since Obama became president of the USA, has anything really changed? If you do even a little bit of research, you’ll find that nothing of any significance has really changed, and things have continued exactly as George W. Bush left them. Just watch the documentary “Obama Deception” by Alex Jones for more information on this.

So the reason why hope is humanity’s greatest weakness is simply because it can be used to deceive us and make us a passive herd of sheep, even if just for a while until we are given another reason to have hope again (thus continuing the cycle of manipulation). This is why it is important to be very critical of everything around you and not easily accept things without hard verifiable evidence, facts, and certainly not on blind faith as, for example, religion expects from you. If you have any hopes, always make sure they are based on realistic expectations, which themselves are based on verifiable facts and measurable progress. You have to be as objective as possible, very honest to yourself and very rigorous and ruthless when it comes to this.  Critical thinking is very valuable here and I cannot stress this enough. If you’re able to apply all of this in your daily life, then you will be capable of getting the most out of your hopes in life and you can really make having hope one of your greatest strengths instead of weaknesses. Yes, you can.

Canon EOS 60D

I’m going to be very short with my review of the Canon EOS 60D: IT SUCKS.

On second thought, let me elaborate on that.

The Canon EOS 60D is a step backwards in the xxD series on almost all levels. If you own a 20D, 30D, 40D or, heaven forbid, a 50D, then by getting a 60D you won’t really be upgrading. Well, maybe if you own a 20D and 30D you could consider it an upgrade but only because those cameras are now very old and outdated. But in the case of the 40D it is definitely a downgrade, and in the case of the 50D everything is a downgrade except for the image quality, which will be better on the 60D (but keep in mind that the image quality on the 50D was terrible compared to the 40D).

Why am I saying this? First because the imaging sensor used in the 60D is the same sensor that is used in the 7D. I have said a lot about the inferior image quality that the sensor in the 7D produces compared to the 40D. For details on this, please read my review of the EOS 7D. The same things I said there about image quality on the 7D apply to the 60D as well because both use the same 18MP sensor. Basically the images from the 60D will also contain more noise compared to images taken on the 40D at ISO values lower than ISO 3200. So if image quality is important to you, then the 60D is not the best choice right now, especially not when you also consider the competition, namely the Nikon D7000. A comparison between the EOS 7D, 60D and 40D models can be seen on DXOMark if you follow this link.

In the graph above taken from a comparison on DXOMark you can clearly see how the performance of the 7D and 60D are very similar, and how they both perform worse than the 40D with regards to noise levels on screen.

If you compare the 60D and 40D to the Nikon D7000 on DXOMark (follow this link) you get the results below:

In the graph above taken from a comparison on DXOMark you can see that the image quality on the Nikon D7000 comes close to the Canon EOS 40D as far as on screen noise is concerned. This is a great achievement for Nikon, as the D7000 has a 16MP sensor while the 40D has a 10MP sensor. The 60D performs worse than the new Nikon D7000 and worse than even the 3 year old 40D. This is a shame for Canon.

Apart from the inferior image quality, the 60D is also a step backwards in the xxD series when you consider build quality. Older models like the 40D and 50D had a strong magnesium-alloy body whereas the 60D has a body that is made up of aluminum and plastic, putting it more in the entry level Digital Rebel (xxxD) category. Essentially the 60D became a Digital Rebel that’s a little more advanced than the EOS 550D. Perhaps Canon didn’t want the 60D to compete too much with the 7D, and I’m sure that in true Canon style they also wanted to save a couple of bucks on build quality so they could make even more money off of us. But the result is not worth the money they are asking for it in my opinion ($1100), and especially not when Nikon came out with a body in the same category that DOES have a magnesium-alloy body, namely the Nikon D7000 costing $1200. Canon is now slowly building up a history of wanting to sell products with inferior specs for a lot more than they are worth. In a similar way they priced the 5D Mark II at $2700 with a ridiculously underperforming autofocus system, while Nikon had their D700 also priced around $2700 with an advanced pro-level autofocus system. This time Nikon is one-upping Canon again with their D7000, as they have consistently done since the release of the D3.

As if scaling back the build quality on the 60D wasn’t enough Canon also removed some features such as autofocus micro-adjustment for lenses, an essential feature that was missing on the 40D, introduced with the 50D, and now taken away again with the 60D. When you’re familiar with all the autofocus issues with Canon cameras and lenses, you realize even more how important such a feature is on a camera. You only have to do a simple search on Google to find thousands of cases where people are complaining about their (often even brand new) lenses having front or back focus issues. In such a case the autofocus micro-adjustment feature is very handy to try and correct the issues yourself, or to fine-tune autofocus on your camera in combination with the lenses you own. But somehow Canon had to remove this from the 60D, I suspect to make it even more inferior to the 7D. But guess what? Nikon put this feature in their D7000, again one-upping Canon’s 60D.

And so it appears again that engineers and marketing people at Nikon have a much, much, MUCH better understanding of what photographers really want in a camera, and what combination of features make sense. While Nikon went a couple of steps forward with their D7000 compared to the D90, Canon actually went backwards on exactly the same steps from the 40D to the 60D. Nikon even equipped the $1200 costing D7000 with an advanced 39-point autofocus system. It may not be as good as the 51-point AF system in the D300s, for example, but it won’t surprise me one bit when it turns out to be A LOT better than the old 9-point AF system in the 60D that Canon has now been using ever since the 40D (!!!). It seems that Canon purposely holds back every time while Nikon is constantly innovating and pushing the envelope with each new DSLR model they release. It is incredible what Nikon has achieved with the D7000. The D7000 is so good that it can easily compete with the Canon EOS 7D ($1800 price range). Even the image quality of the D7000 is better compared to the EOS 60D and EOS 7D. If you look at the features of the D7000 and the 60D side by side, it becomes very clear that the D7000 is vastly more superior than the 60D while costing just $100 more. Some of the features on the D7000 include dual memory card slots, autofocus micro-adjustments, continuous AF in movie mode, magnesium-alloy body with weather sealing, 39-point autofocus system with 3D matrix metering and of course better image quality – all for almost the same price as the 60D.

So as far as I’m concerned, the 60D is another disappointment in the line of very disappointing camera bodies Canon has released in the last 4 years. Clearly Canon is trying to sell us inferior technology at a premium price, while the competition has a lot more to offer at the same price levels. If you’re looking for a DSLR in the $1000-$1200 price range, the Nikon D7000 is currently the best there is on the market. The D7000 is a better choice compared to the Canon 7D, 60D, 50D, 40D, the Nikon D90 and the Nikon D300(s). Depending on your needs, the D7000 is also a better choice compared to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (only if you really need 21MP and full-frame) and the Nikon D700 (only if you need full-frame).

President D. D. Bouterse of the Republic of Suriname

It’s not every day that you get asked to shoot the official portrait of the president of your country, or any other country for that matter So when that opportunity presents itself to you, you grab hold of it with both hands. And feet, if necessary. The call came in on Sunday August 15th 2010 late in the afternoon. I was at home fooling around behind my PC when my mobile phone rang. I answered and a female voice on the other side started explaining to me that I was speaking to the presidential cabinet office of Suriname and that they were looking for a photographer to make the official presidential portrait (the president had been inaugurated a week ago). She explained that I got recommended by a few people and that they had a look at my work. Then she asked if I was interested to do it. I got a little nervous on the phone and I started wondering if I would be able to pull it off. It may look like something simple, and perhaps it is for a lot of pros out there, but this wouldn’t be a photoshoot for some model. It’d be for the president! What if I screw up? Obviously there’s a lot of pressure involved in such a high profile photoshoot.

They gave me a few hours to think about it and in the end I decided to do it. What was just another quiet Sunday became a day to start worrying about how I would do this photoshoot. The next day I went to check out the location at the presidential cabinet office where I’d have to do the photoshoot, and I decided to do it in one of the larger conference rooms. Meanwhile the date of the photoshoot had been decided and it would have to be done on the coming Friday which was just four days away. I didn’t know how I would do the photoshoot yet, but I did know that I wanted to do something a little different.

Flag of Suriname

As I was thinking about various ideas I decided that I wanted to do something with the colors of the flag of Suriname as the main theme. As you may know the colors in the flag all have their own meaning (Wikipedia: English and Dutch). I thought about using a red or green background and ultimately went with red. The reason why I went with red was because if you look at the flag of Suriname, you can see that there’s a yellow star in the red area. So since the president would be standing in front of the red background, I could light him with yellow light and then he could be the yellow star in the flag.

Now I had another problem and that was that I couldn’t just completely light the president with yellow light. Obviously that would make him look very strange. I quickly decided that I would have to rim-light him with yellow light. Not only would it then add some more meaning to the picture (meaning of the yellow color in the flag) but the yellow light would also help to separate the president from the background. But then I thought what if the yellow light would come from above? Obviously that could add some more meaning to the picture in a spiritual sense. During his campaign the president often talked about how his campaign and the formation of the current coalition was being directed by an invisible hand, and how a higher power was guiding the process of change in politics in Suriname, and I thought making the light come from above would make sense in that regard. By carefully positioning the flash I could also make the yellow light fall on just his head and shoulders.

And finally the president himself would be lit with a medium sized softbox on one side and a reflector on the other side. Two days before the photoshoot I experimented with the setup at home to see if I’d be able to pull it off and what equipment I would have to bring with me on location. Even for such a simple setup, planning and rehearsing is absolutely necessary to make sure you’re prepared and can make the most of out the short period of time you’ll be able to work with the subject. Once I was confident everything would work, I packed all the equipment I needed for the photoshoot.

On the day of the photoshoot I arrived on location an hour and a half before we were expecting the president. I had purposely planned it that way to allow for enough time for me to set up everything and test the lighting again before the president arrived. I knew that he would be very busy and I wouldn’t have time to fool around with the equipment while keeping him waiting. In fact, as I was setting up a TV crew was also preparing to set up their equipment in the same room and as soon as I was finished he sat down with them for their interview. That’s how tight his schedule was. So anyway, I’m glad I got on location an hour and a half earlier, it proved to have been just enough time to get access to the location, unpack, set up the equipment and test the lighting and have about 20 minutes to relax and wait for the president.

In the picture below, taken with my mobile phone, you can see how everything was set up.

Photoshoot Setup

As you can see there was no red background material, I decided to “paint” the white wall red by just placing a red gel on the background light (a Canon Speedlite 580 EX II). The distance between the subject and the wall is also big to make sure the wall would be out of focus and appear to be smooth in the pictures and also to minimize spill light from the softbox. I also didn’t use the tripod during the actual shoot with the president, it was easier to hold the camera and have the freedom to make quick changes in positioning and framing.

I used the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L lens for this shoot. I had the 35mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.2 with me, but I found that the 50mm gave me the best framing at my preferred working distance on the EOS 40D body. Before you write in to me mentioning how I bashed the 50mm f/1.2 lens before here on my blog and ask why I keep using it, let me say that, yes, the focusing issues this lens is known for were present, but that at f/5.6 the focusing errors are not very noticeable in the pictures that have them due to the larger depth of field (depending on the picture and subject). Not only does this lens backfocus, but it also is very inconsistent when using autofocus. You can place the camera on a tripod in a completely static scene with a subject that is completely still and autofocus 3 times on the subject and get a slightly different focus plane each time (a slight difference that’s not so slight at f/1.2. The 85mm f/1.2 lens is very consistent in comparison.) So I shot many extra frames to make sure I’d have pictures where the focus was just right. I guess we can only thank Canon for this marvelous $1600 piece of engineering. And I hope you realize I’m being sarcastic here.

I’ve included a lighting diagram below where you can also see the equipment I used and some of the settings. You’ll note that I used a Cactus V4 wireless trigger and receivers to trigger the Canon Speedlites. I didn’t use the Canon ST-E2 because quite frankly it can be a pain in the ass to have to make sure every time that the infrared sensors on all the flashes are within line of sight with the ST-E2 trigger. And in this case the background light would be behind the subject so there would be no way for me to maintain line of sight with it. You would have thought that by now Canon would have already worked on a wireless flash solution based on a more reliable radio frequency technology. Fake Chuck recently wrote about this too, and one can only hope that Canon updates the old and overly expensive ST-E2 sometime soon with technology that’s worthy of the 21st century.

Lighting Setup (click for larger image)

The gels I used on the Speedlites were from the Rosco Strobist collection (very nice set). In the picture below you can see just the effect the yellow light had on the picture. The background and key light were turned off. Here I was trying to position the president in such a way that the light fell on his head and shoulders the way I wanted. I had to ask him to step back and sideways a few centimeters a couple of times.

Test shot with just the yellow light on top

And in the following picture taken after setting everything up you can see the effect that just the red background light and the yellow light had on the overall result. The flash with the red gel behind the model was pointed towards the white wall and made it completely red. There was some light from the yellow gelled flash hitting the flag and I tried to minimize that by repositioning the flash and zooming the head to give a narrower coverage. The black thing on the left is part of the softbox (turned off for this picture) and you can also see part of the reflector on the right. During the actual shoot with the president I had the softbox placed much closer to him and had him stand right next to the reflector.

Test shot using my assistant as the model, just the red background light and yellow light on top

And of course in the end it all came together to create the final picture:

President D. D. Bouterse of the Republic of Suriname

The makeup for this photoshoot was done by Gillian Calor, and she did a very nice job. There was very little I had to do in that area in post production.

As I mentioned before, there’s a reason why I chose to use the above setting for this picture and that is to add some meaning to the end result. The president is standing against a red background that’s supposed to resemble the red color from the flag. The meaning of the red color in the flag is love and progress. The president resembles the yellow star in the flag, which is why he is lit by yellow light shining from above. The meaning of the yellow star is unity of all ethnic groups and a golden future. Before his election the president often mentioned how it was his dream to bring together the people in Suriname, all the different ethnic groups, unite them and have them all work together for a much better (golden) future for everyone. So by making him resemble the yellow star I think that this portrait highlights one of his most important goals, and further communicates the idea that he’s the one who’ll lead the nation to achieve that goal. And he will do this against the background of love and progress for everyone (red color). In addition the yellow light is shining from above, which adds a spiritual meaning to it. During his campaign the president often mentioned how he was being assisted by an invisible hand, and how a higher power was guiding the process of change in politics in Suriname. So by making the yellow light shine from above and making it rest on his head and his shoulders it resembles the help and guidance he receives from above during his term as president of Suriname for the following 5 years. The president wore a purple tie that day and I decided not to modify the color in post production. Purple is the color of the National Democratic Party (NDP), which is the political party the president comes from. Although the overall picture is mostly about Suriname as a whole, the purple tie adds a hint to the NDP in the final result. So in summary this picture shows that president D. D. Bouterse, with the guidance he receives from above and against the background of love and progress for everyone, will further strengthen the unity of the people in Suriname and lead them closer to the promised golden future.

I’m glad that they trusted me enough to give me a lot of creative freedom to do what I wanted to do. I’m also glad I really got the expression on the president’s face that I was looking for. I was worried that I would not be able to get the expression I wanted from him. Usually the president looks serious, neutral or cheerful. But I managed to get this very friendly look from him after trying for about 30 shots. Two shots later I was done. This look was important to me because it portrays him as a nice and friendly person, and hopefully it will contribute to his image in a positive way.

And finally I thought it was nice to see how this portrait compares to official portraits of previous presidents of Suriname and other presidents in the region:

Presidential Portraits (click for larger image)

UPDATE September 17th, 2010:

Yesterday David Hobby from Strobist.com linked to this post on his website, and I’ve been receiving a lot of comments and exposure as a result of that. I don’t think I have to say what an honor it is for me to be mentioned on Strobist.com. It’s one of the most important websites on the Internet as far as off-camera lighting is concerned, and I have learned a lot from all the information there, some of which I’ve used in the shoot I wrote about above. I even used the Strobist filter kit. I appreciate all the comments, the positive ones and also the criticism, I can’t reply on each and every one of them with a “Thank you” but I want to let you all know that I value all the feedback. Thanks a lot

UPDATE January 8th, 2011:

Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (RNW) interviewed me about taking the official portrait of the president of Suriname last year, and I’ve now uploaded an MP3 of this radio interview which you can download here. There was also a newsitem on their site, and you can download a PDF copy of that here.

Picture of a deep part of the universe, taken by NASA.

The picture of the universe above shows us what is typical of such pictures: Little bits of light surrounded by a vast ocean of darkness. This picture tells us a lot more about the universe, about nature and about life in general, than most people will realize. One of the most important things to take away from this picture is that the universe is a LOT more about darkness than it is about light.

I wrote before about the fact that we’re living in a world of pain. Every day I look around me and I see lots of suffering and lots of pain. Sure, there are positive things happening here and there, but all of that is surrounded by and drowned in all the pain and suffering. It seems that anything positive doesn’t last for very long, and in fact, like I also wrote before, there can never really be lasting happiness in life. And if you look at the picture of the universe above, that is exactly what it is showing us. Small specks of light surrounded by an ocean of darkness. Small positive experiences surrounded by an ocean of negativity. Little bits of happiness surrounded by an ocean of pain and suffering. The little bits of happiness are like a small drop of water on a hot plate; in the end it really has no effect. This picture tells us what life in this universe is all about.

The universe is more about darkness than it is about light. It’s more about the dark experiences than it is about the pleasant experiences. It is more about the negative than it is about the positive. At its core, life is all about darkness, about pain and suffering, from the moment you’re born all the way up to the moment you die. You cry yourself into the world, you enter a constant struggle to stay alive in an environment filled with hostility and in the end you grow old and die anyway. In between you might experience moments of what most people refer to as “happiness,” but it will always be against the underlying purpose of constant struggle, pain and suffering. Again, a small drop of water on a hot plate. If there really is such a thing as a hell, the universe could certainly be classified as some kind of hell. It could be worse, but it’s pretty bad already as it is.

I’m not a religious person and I don’t think much of religion, but it’s interesting to note that even the bible mentions that in the beginning there was first total darkness until god created light. Darkness must have been the very first thing god created, for obvious reasons. And as you can see in the picture above, the light he supposedly created in the universe is almost nothing compared to the darkness that exists. In fact, all the light seems overwhelmed by darkness. It really doesn’t stand a chance. Stars come and go in this universe, but the darkness will always be there. Happy moments may enter your life to stay for a short period, but the only thing that always stays, whether you like to admit it or not, is the underlying purpose of pain and suffering.

And that sums up my experience with life nicely.

Picture taken for Uniqa Marketing Campaign

When you have to do an outdoor photoshoot during that time of the year when you can’t really rely on the weather to be good all the time it takes more time to prepare for and plan the photoshoot. And if your client has a deadline for delivery of the pictures that’s just a few days away, then you can probably imagine that it can get really stressful. Such was the case with a photoshoot I had to do last April for Uniqa, one of the three telecom service providers in Suriname.

I am happy to say that I did manage to deliver the pictures on time in the end but it wasn’t easy. I can still remember not being able to sleep the night before the photoshoot because it was raining outside and I was worried that it would keep raining until the morning which would ruin our chances of shooting outdoors. I had checked the weather forecasts and had chosen a day when the weather would be the nicest according to the forecast information, but as it turned out, you can’t always rely on weather forecasts, especially not when you’re planning a few days ahead.

Picture taken for Uniqa Marketing Campaign

So I had a plan B ready right from the start. I picked a location for the photoshoot where we’d be able to shoot indoors as an alternative in case we just couldn’t work outside. Cancelling the photoshoot because of bad weather could not be an option since everything was planned for that day and at least one of the models would only be available for that day and rescheduling would have been an issue. This photoshoot was done at Hotel Torarica. They have some really nice outdoor settings with lots of nature that can be used as a backdrop, and this was one of the requirements the client had. In addition they also had some nice indoor locations for us to fall back on in case of bad weather.

Fortunately the weather wasn’t very bad when we actually had to work outside. There was some very light rain in between longer dry periods and we were able to do the outdoor shoots we had planned. The sky was constantly grey so that wasn’t very nice, but on the other hand the sunlight was very soft which as far as I’m concerned is a big plus. All I had to do was to try not to include the sky in the frame when possible.

Picture taken for Uniqa Marketing Campaign

I teamed up again with Euvie Karijoredjo for the makeup and hair, and Taciana Soerodimedjo for wardrobe advice and styling. The model casting was done by the client in advance, and I have to say that the models were really wonderful and easy to work with. The only exception of course was the little boy. Working with children isn’t very easy as they tend to have very short attention spans and get impatient quickly. In this particular case though I think the cute little guy did pretty well and I was fortunate to have his attention for a good while before he started complaining about being tired.

I’m sad to say that I don’t have any behind the scenes pictures to share this time. Normally I take the time to take a couple of quick behind the scenes snaps when I’m working, but in this case I was constantly worrying about the weather among other things and totally forgot about it. It didn’t even cross my mind to ask my assistant to take a couple of snaps.

Picture taken for Uniqa Marketing Campaign

For those of you who’re interesting in the gear I used: I used two Canon EOS 40D bodies with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L and EF 85mm f/1.2 L lenses. I am in love with the Canon L primes; the results you can get are simply amazing.  For the lighting I used a couple of Canon 580 EX II Speedlights with some light modifiers such as umbrellas and reflectors. The speedlights were all triggered wirelessly. I tried to blend the additional lighting in with the available soft sunlight as much as possible as I was going for a more natural look in the photos instead of a stylized look where the use of strobes is obvious.

The above pictures are currently being used in various places such as in TV commercials and on billboards throughout Suriname. I’ve included a few pictures of billboards below.

Uniqa Billboard

Uniqa Billboard

Uniqa Billboard

United Magazine June 2010 Edition

About two months ago I was hired again by Global Publishing to shoot pictures for a feature article in the upcoming edition of United magazine. Global Publishing is the publisher of United magazine.

The article is about three succesfull business women and the editor of the magazine, Edward Lee, was looking for some nice looking portraits of these women to go along with it. He also needed a group shot that could be used to open the article with. In the end the editor was so happy with the results that one of the pictures, the group shot, also ended up being used on the cover of the magazine. So this is my 3rd time on the cover of United Magazine. You can read here on my blog about the first and second times too.

The photoshoot took place at Leader’s Group Conference Room. During the photoshoot I had about 15 minutes per person, and 15 minutes for the group shot. I tried to get as many possible poses and settings with each one of them in the time I had. I also got to know the women a little during the photoshoot and tried to get a feel for their personalities, and in the end I chose a picture for each one of them that I think matched the most with their personalities. And from the feedback I got so far I think the pictures really do go along well with their personalities.

You can see the images that were used below:

United Magazine Group Shot

Portrait of Angela Yang for United Magazine

Portrait of Matchameryll Felter for United Magazine

Portrait of Rishma Ratan for United Magazine

For those of you who are interested in the gear used, I used two Canon EOS 40D bodies with the EF 35mm f/1.4 L and EF 85mm f/1.2 L II lenses from Canon. For the lighting I used a couple of Canon 580 EX II speedlights, sometimes with umbrella’s and mixed with the available light.

In addition to the images above, my images are also featured in ads from two other clients of mine who advertised in United. Below are those two ads:

Double page Ad for Nado Computers in United using one of my images of the Independence Square in Paramaribo, Suriname. One of the cool things about this image is that you can see the clouds forming a hand in the upper left corner. This was really there when the picture was taken and was not digitally added.

Ad for Tropical Gem Tours in United using an image of mine

The picture used in the ad for Tropical Gem Tours above was taken a while ago and if you’re interested you can read about it and see some more images taken during that photoshoot here.