Because of this things like lens sharpness and film grain were not such a huge deal. The films and papers of the day were not super high resolution, and nothing was being greatly enlarged, so as long as the lens was good enough for the paper for the print, it was good enough for the job. If you read old school books by early photographers you find very little discussion about lenses beyond focal length and depth of field. Lenses were considered fairly interchangeable creatures as most any one would do the job.

There were plenty of attempts at smaller ‘consumer’ cameras, the Kodak Brownie for example but eventually we settled on 35mm as the standard consumer film format. Still, the 35mm you hear so many photo luddites was poetic about was very much a compromise. There was this guy, Oskar Barnack , who worked for a German optics company called Leitz. Oskar loved to take pictures, and Oskar loved to hike. Oskar was also asthmatic and generally not the heartiest fellow, so hauling around a big view camera wasn’t really an option for him. So Oskar, being an enterprising engineering type stuck a lens in front of a ‘shoots across the focal plane’ paper shutter and used a two frames of Edison motion picture film stock. Thus Oskar made him a teensy little camera he could take on his hikes.

His camera eventually became the Leica III which, if you’ve been lucky enough to see one, is a work of pre-battery engineering art in itself. So exquisitely was it designed that it was made with trifling changes from 1933 until 1960, a run that has to be unequaled in the history of photography. Some mountaineers still swear by them because they don’t need batteries and if bash most of the ice of the damm things they’ll usually work. Not that they were perfect, if you’ve ever used one, you’ve also wondered if Oskar had nine tiny double jointed fingers on each hand to load film into the little bastard, but that is another story.

The Leica III and its various copies made the popular photography revolution in the 35mm format. In addition, war photographers from the 40s on LOVED the things. Two Leicas and ten rolls of film gave the photographer a number of frames that in the old view camera would would have called for a squad of sherpas to move and a genius to shoot fast enough. And again, the resolution was good enough to go onto the grainy front page top of the fold snapshot of the day. There are some wonderfully Rudyard Kipling-esque pictures of war photography legend David Douglas Duncan, two Leicas around his neck, and he still had room to carry a combat rifle. They just scream, ‘All right, I’m ready to take pictures, let’s go kill some Koreans,’ because that’s how they talked in those days.

35mm also spurred the development of better lenses, film stocks, and papers. Whereas Ansel would print his ginormous negatives with little or no enlargement, getting a lens/film/paper combination to print passably at 8×10 from a 35mm negative was no small task. Eventually, humans being humans, we managed to do it, but 35mm was always a compromise format, a ‘good enough’ format.

To make photography even MORE portable, various teensy teensy negative formats were also developed. The original Olympus Pen cameras cut the 35mm frame in half, meaning your pictures really looked like crap but the thing was tiny. Kodak came up with the Instamatic series, which used even crappier 110 film but the film came in a cartridge so anyone with a thumb could load it. Some genius eventually decided to leave one or two of these sitting at each table of a wedding, and thus left to us photo documentation of excess alcohol consumption of a quantity that truly makes the mind reel. Still, for your amateur enthusiast, 35mm remained the standard from the 30’s until the end of film itself.

The iron-fisted reign of 35mm ended, well, it depends on when you want to say it ended, but whenever it ended it was digital that killed it. Early digital cameras, like early digital audio recordings, were truly awful compared to their analog predecessors. Serious amateurs even scorned them at first, but once the sensors got big enough, and once the pixel count got high enough, the advantages of digital photography and software manipulation became obvious. From there on it was just a matter of time.

I can’t remember his name, but some famous photographer once gave an interview in a magazine I used to read. (BTW – for you younger people, a ‘magazine’ was a physical object brought to you weekly or monthly by the ‘mailman’ who would be routinely menaced by your dog. Getting your weekly or monthly copy of your ‘magazine’ was a day of great happiness and joy). In the interview he made one of those should-be-famous quotes that, ‘I don’t think anyone will ever have any use for more than 3.1 megapixels.’

And here we finally get to the ‘people are weird’ part of this. Today’s digital SLRs and Photoshop Elements are so good it’s almost comical. The optical performance of a Nikon D90 and a 50mm prime f/1.8 lens outstrips the photographic capability of 95% of the public, at least. It’s also quite difficult to screw up the settings so it does a bad job. A $300 autofocus pocket camera, in terms of pixel count and sensor quality, blows the doors off the digital cameras used to shoot the crowds pulling down Saddam’s statue in 2003. The high ISO performance of my Fuji X100 is so insanely good you can take good pictures of moving objects in a dark movie theater with no flash. And finally, the cameras that go into iPhones and better Android smart phones are of shockingly good quality. The only thing keeping them from competing with that $300 point and shoot is that the autofocus and shutter release are slow, so by the time the picture gets taken, whatever it was you were shooting might have already finished happening.

One would think, then, that we would see a positive outpouring of brilliant photography as these sharp, quality cameras are suddenly, literally in everyone’s pocket. And what happens? The most popular image manipulation tool in the world is an iPhone plug-in that takes that fantastic camera and makes it look like the image was taken with a vignetted, horribly lo-res 70’s instamatic. And college kids fish out Lomos and various other Eastern European photo-ephemera because it looks like crap, all while hoarding their 100 speed slide film in the freezer. People are just plain fucking weird.

Since I arrived just this past Sunday, I haven’t had a lot of time to explore and investigate. Spent a lot of time in the offices of the people who are my customers. The first impressions of Hong Kong are really about the scale and crowdedness. It’s really hard to explain, but it makes Manhattan seem a bit spacious and open and New Haven seem like prairie. For example, in the mornings the subway cars are more numerous and more spacious than NYC cars and they have no seats during rush hour. Even with that crush of humanity being transported I think the trains on the Island line (the one I take) have to come by every two minutes or less.

Nearly every office building of any size has skyways or flyovers to the train stations. Again, it’s hard to explain the scale, I should take some pictures but even doing that it will be hard to understand. Put another way, on Monday I was with a client in a fairly standard, nice office building. At about 12.30 it was announced we should maybe get lunch and we should hit the food court. I was expecting the usual mall food court in the US, some frozen pizzas tossed in on oven and maybe a noodle shop. Instead the basement of the building held what was essentially a small supermaket, 8-10 pretty decent places to get takeout, a butcher/seafood cooler, a fresh juice bar, and a tapas bar.

I’ve been thinking about what it’s like to be an expat again, but I’ll leave that discussion to another day. So far, so good.

Fun facts

Buses in HK have signs on the sides, public service announcements of sorts, stating that ‘Illegal sub-dividing of flats can lead to death!’ I assume this means if you sleep six in your 400 sq ft apartment, for heaven’s sake don’t push you luck with eight. The whole city in many ways looks like an elaborately crafted fire trap. I hope the fire department is well paid and well trained.

Zhang Ziyi, the actress who played jailbait super babe Jen in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, is advertising for Oil of Olay on Chinese TV. At a spinsterish 32 who looks like she’s maybe 20, a fine time to be pimping anti-aging creme, I guess. BTW, I looked her up on wikipedia and this picture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ziyi_at_Sogo.jpg) is of an intersection that’s about a five minute walk from my temporary apartment. I get on the subway under the sneaker billboard.

My first week in HK is BY FAR the longest time nobody has told me I look like Penn Jillette, the fat guy from Lost, Jack Osborne, or various other unsavory characters. Thanks Hong Kong! I won’t call you ugly either!

Or, again, to use the preferred nomenclature, the lingo of the day, I’m taking my talents to Hong Kong.

The timetable for this change is that I will begin with the new employer in early June and will pick up the white man’s burden as soon as the new boss thinks I’m ready. I am shooting for October, though that may be unduly ambitious.

This is, of course, quite terrifying in many ways. I have been doing extensive research about Hong Kong and have uncovered some disconcerting news. For example, in Hong Kong the local population speak a language called ‘Cantonese’ that apparently is quite different from American English, and beyond that presents significant obstacles for a non-native speaker wishing to learn it. The weather there varies from quite warn to unspeakably hot, and the locals are accustomed to the regular occurrence of something called a ‘typhoon,’ which looks suspiciously like what we Americans might call a ‘hurricane.’ Perhaps, again, this is part of the language barrier.

Beyond those discoveries, I have also been looking at Hong Kong real estate from afar, on the reasonable assumption that as the (soon to be only) in-Asia-representative of a professional software company I ought not live on a park bench. Having visited real estate brokers and forums for real estate seekers I have come across photographs of things apparently called a ‘living room’ that an American might call a ‘foyer’ or perhaps a ‘very short hallway.’ In addition, these ‘apartments’ have things called ‘bedrooms’ that you or I might refer to as ‘that tiny elevator sized closet.’ Despite these apparent ‘mistranslations’ the numbers describing the ‘rent’ are heartbreakingly familiar Arabic numerals, the kind any American schoolchild could decode. And, after bring provided with the current HKD to USD exchange rate, that same schoolchild could inform that I will be paying gut punch amounts of money for one of these ‘hallways’ with an ‘tiny elevator sized closet.’ In fact, the ‘tiny elevator sized closet’ may prove an unnecessary luxury.

However, all news, of course, is not bad. I am very excited for the opportunity to live in Asia, something I have wanted to do for years. The fine people at the company I will be working with are exceptionally capable programmers, support techs, and salespeople as the past years working with them on this side of the deal have shown. I know I’m taking a great piece of software that should sell itself, and considering my experience in sales it might have to shoulder it’s share of the burden. Travel to other locations in Asia, where lodging is available for a much more reasonable tariff than in Hong Kong, is cheap and quick. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Bali, Fiji, Indonesia, Thailand, Macau, Philippines, and many other countries that Google’s spell checker knows nothing about are in easy range. Also, I hear these ‘Cantonese’ people make excellent spicy food.

It will, of course, be a bittersweet thing to leave my current job, and the many people there I have come to adore. And it will be a jolt to my New Haven self even greater than my last volley overseas to Austria. But this is simply too good of a deal, and too exciting a chance, for me to pass up.

Now then. Some housekeeping. My Yale email address will have some life left in it, but like all of us is still mortal. In addition, I have come to believe that Facebook, though dauntingly convenient and fun, is deeply and profoundly evil. This is for a host of reasons, but to put them briefly. It is an organization that has what is perhaps a commonplace, in these advanced internet days, disregard for privacy and and anonymity, but is still one I find disturbing. Second, it has come to my attention that one Mark Zuckerberg, head honcho of Facebook, has already accumulated a vast fortune, and he should no longer need my help. I no longer need encourage people to visit his company website where I very occasionally might say something clever, such that one of you, my friends, could in a moment of sudden intellectual weakness and distress, think, ‘You know, I think I should check out that Farmville, everybody seem to like it these days.’

There are other reasons, but those are for another day. The upshot is that I will be tapering my Facebook attention down over time and will eventually post nothing except perhaps links to my web site and twitter feed. And then, eventually, nothing at all. So, my yale.edu address and FB messaging are officially deprecated ways of contacting me (‘deprecated’ is nerd-speak for ‘It might work now, and it might even work for a while, but when it doesn’t work we’re not going to do anything about it so it will be your problem). In addition, I will be revamping and retooling my blog, www.thadbrown.com to be largely, or even wholly, about making this move and living in HK. Really. Promise. I’ll get on it.

I do hope you will all keep in touch.

TCB

This concludes this test of the Emergency International Employment Relocation System.

Check back soon, folks.

TCB