Celebrity pig wrangling and documentaries

click photo to enlarge
It wasn't my intention to bang on about television again - I had something much more uplifting and positive in mind - but my breakfast table reading gives me no choice. Skimming the TV listings section today I noticed a picture advertising "Jimmy's Global Harvest" on BBC2. It showed a youngish, rather unkempt looking man squatting in a field holding a piece of grass. "Who", I thought, "is Jimmy?" A short synopsis revealed all. Apparently he is Jimmy Doherty, a celebrity pig wrangler, and he's going to discover "how the world's farmers will cope with feeding a growing population." Tonight, in the first of his four programmes he looks at the transformations that have taken place in Brazilian agriculture.

It's amazing how so little writing can provoke so many questions. The first is, "What is a celebrity pig wrangler?", and the second is "Should I care?" Then there's, "Why has Jimmy, out of all the potential agricultural experts, been chosen to present these programmes?" It couldn't be because the target audience knows Jimmy and the people who conceived the series think viewers are such saps that they can't give their attention to anything that isn't fronted by a celebrity? No, that coudn't possibly be the reason. There are more questions that come to mind about the dumbing down of television documentaries, but I'll spare you them, and say that I shan't be tuning in this evening. But then you guessed that didn't you? It's not that the subject isn't sufficiently serious and important. No, I shall give it a miss because for the progamme makers world food production isn't important enough to warrant serious treatment and be introduced by someone who is an expert in the field. Or perhaps I misjudge them: maybe, having watched Jimmy wrangling his pigs in a field, they imagine him an expert in every field of agriculture.

All of which has nothing to do with today's photograph of St Mary and the Holy Rood at Donington, Lincolnshire. On a brief shopping trip I stopped and snapped this late afternoon shot as the sun descended through the churchyard trees. Donington church is one of those that is extremely difficult to photograph from nearby. It suffers - from the photographer's point of view - by having large trees nearby. It also has a tower that acts as a porch and is attached to the south aisle. This is an unusual, but attractive, arrangement that Victorian Gothic architects sometimes copied. However, it makes it quite difficult to achieve a satisfactory photographic composition given the churchyard constraints. On this image I placed the church on the right, a row of trees at the left, and moved so that part of the sun was visible at the edge of the near trunk. I wanted it to add a warm note to a cold scene, and give something of a starburst effect, which it does, more or less.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 6.3mm (30mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/800
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Knowledge and power

click photo to enlarge
"Knowledge is power"
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher and author

In his book, "Powershift", Alvin Toffler maintains that there are three routes to power - violence, wealth and knowledge. He argues that in the distant past violence was used to achieve power and amass wealth, that the Industrial Revolution saw the middle classes produce wealth and use it to take power from the nobility, and that today power increasingly flows from the acquisition and use of knowledge.

And he may well be right (though plenty of governments and the wealthy find that bombs and dollars still do the trick.) But, here's the paradox. Whilst countries and companies might benefit from a knowledge economy, the extent to which the individual can become more powerful through knowledge is highly questionable. Many will disagree with that statement citing the internet, broadcasting and publishing as the means by which more knowledge than ever before is available. But therein lies the problem. Whatever your point of view you can find support for it somewhere; and today people are increasingly encouraged to consume the knowledge that they choose or that is sold to them. Consequently, despite the plethora of information, many are less exposed to a wide range of subjects and viewpoints than formerly, when information was less widely available. The post-modern idea that truth depends on context is also rampant. It's not that there isn't objectivity in the fund of available knowledge, it's that it is so much harder to find and discern. If you want knowledge about global warming the arguments are there, for and against, equally vehemently expressed, with interest groups lining up on either side. Try to find knowledge about, say, crime in society, and you'll find different versions massaged by the media, politicians and the police to support their respective agendas. Many newspapers bend the truth to sell copy, and increasingly report as news mindless trivia about television, celebrities and the like. I'm sure that if Karl Marx was alive today he would change his famous dictum to "Celebrity is the opium of the people." Some may not see a problem with this sort of "fun" reportage, but it displaces the kind of important and democratically useful news that the media traditionally purveyed, and without that knowledge we are less free and more easily manipulated - we have less power.

This photograph, that inspired today's ramblings, shows the blue on/off button (and the red hard drive activity LED) on my computer case. I decided to capture the electric blue and glowing red with a hand-held shot where I deliberately moved the camera during the long exposure in order to produce blur. The shot was taken in the evening in my study so the exposure was slightly longer than I envisaged - 8 seconds! Still, I quite liked the 3D effects that were produced.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 8 seconds
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off