Pagans the Christmas

Someone posted this photo on Facebook. Through the years I have read a bit about Christmas an I’m fully aware of how un-Christian Christmas really is, and how the “clean” version we see today is just over a century old. Yet, I have never head of Krampus. I went looking for information. The first thing I found was a Wikipedia article. It mentioned the Czech Republic and by a happy coincidence my Czech friend was online. I asked her if she knows this character and she replied with a video from her home village

The clip Banka sent me. Weirdos! Next they will have fat men wearing red outfits.

Reading a bit more about Christmas I found that 25 December was already establish asthe date by the mid 4th century already. That gives us 1500 years or 25ths. Possible reasons for this date include it being 9 months after the day thought of as conception, connections with Jesus to the sun saving the world from darkness and taking advantage of the normal holiday season that was already used by many cultures. Many people argue that it was chosen to override other religions. This may well be, but how is that different from what so many other religions do?

The Christmas traditions we know today were adopted when pagan cultured converted were pulled into Christianity. People would convert and would worship the new god, but they pretty much continued with their former ways and traditions with little immediate change. The “pure” forms of Christianity we know today did not exist until rather recently.

I have heard and read many claims that the timing and traditions we have for Christmas were intentional taken to try  and draw attention away from Pagan worship, but from what I read it seem to have been a more organic process, where dates and traditions were “chosen” because that is just what you do at this time of the year.

I am all for dissing Christmas and pointing at the Oh-So-Holy celebration, but don’t throw rubbish like this around and just say: “THAT is what Christmas is all about.” Get your facts straight. You don’t like it, then don’t celebrate it, or just celebrate it the way you want. It is not as if it’s the same all over the world anyway. Mexicans writing to the Three Wise Men instead of Santa, anyone?

Side note: The people who attack Christmas, waging a “War on Christmas” likely know more about the holiday than 99% of Christians. If they wanted to wage a war then it would be on Easter, the celebration of the reason Jesus came to earth, not the silly later created celebration of his birthday on the date that he was not born on with traditions that have nothing to do with Jesus. All they have to do for Christmas is point at it and say: “You idiots don’t even know what you are doing”

Aiins World at night, planning.

On Saturday I want to go to Aiins World to take night photos. I seem to remember someone telling me that you don’t shoot night scapes in full night, but at dusk. This way you will have nice sparkly lights, but still a bit of natural light to show you the outlines of buildings. That means you need to know the time of sunset. According to my Google Calendar sunset is:

17:17 Sunset
17:46 End of civil twilight
18:19 End of nautical twilight
18:50 End of astronomical twilight

Say what?!

From what I can figure out Twilight (not the sad excuse for a film) is a period of time, while Dusk is the end of said period. For example, Sunset starts Civil Twilight and it is ended with Civil Dusk.

So, it would seem Sunset is the moment that the sun dips under the true horizon. I say true horizon, because we are able to see the sun even though it is not strictly speaking there any more. This is due to the bending of light by the earth’s atmosphere.I could be wrong about the definition of sunset here, but it will be only a few minutes difference.

After sunset come the periods when light starts to shift. From what I understand Civil Twilight is when light starts fading, but we can still see everything. Nautical Twilight is when you are able to see the stars for navigation, and Astronomical Twilight is when you can start making astronomical observations. After that it is fully night.

Since I have never really gone out to do nightscapes, I am figuring that either Nautical or Astronomical Twilight will be the periods I want to shoot in, thus about 17:45 to 18:30.

Photo of Prague Castle at Night linked from Wikimedia commons.

Winter Wipeout

I spend a large part of my evening, rather I wasted a large part of the evening, watching the first few episodes of Wipeout Season 5. (Apparently there are seven complete seasons already and I haven’t even seen Season 4 yet)

Episode 1 (Christmas Special) Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 (Family Edition) Episode 5 Episode 6 (Valentines Day) Episode 7

Episode 8 Episode 9 (Hotties vs. Nerds) Episode 10 (Armed Forces) Episode 11 (Boss & Employees) Episode 12 Episode 13 Episode 14

.

Home, Santa, and don’t spare the reindeer.

Snow came yesterday. Snow came down hard yesterday.  At least, for Korea it was a lot of snow. Looking at cars I estimate that there was about 10cm (3in) of snow in just a few hours. Korea is not set up for show like this. There is little along the lines of equipment to clean the roads and cars do not have special tires to get better traction. My scooter too, does not have special tires.

The initial scenes at school after about two hours of snow.

The snow started falling mid-afternoon and this prompted many schools to send students home early. Our school cancelled the last class of the day and gone were the students. Interestingly enough, the teachers were not sent home.

With the snow still falling I was getting worried about getting my scooter home. I didn’t want to leave it at school and take the bus, so I asked my vice principal who agreed to let me go early.

From the moment I left the indoor warmth things were not looking up for me. Snow was thick on the frozen water from the previous day and just getting my scooter into a moving state was an effort. When I did get moving it as only for about 100m, because that was about the only flat piece of road I had before hitting the first hill. This is Korea, after all.

I had just started the hill when I realised I did not have the weight to keep my tyres on the road for proper traction, so I got off and started pushing. Next I realised that, despite the lack of traffic, I could not keep pushing in the road itself, so I moved over to the walkway. My brain was working slowly, but it was working. Once on the sidewalk I restarted the bike and kept the throttle open just a tad to help me push. Without the assistance of the bike itself I found myself spinning in place like a cartoon character more often than was proper. In this way I was making steady progress up the hill, but things were going too well for Ullr’s liking

Half way up the hill and cars were passing, slowly.

I knew I needed to get some petrol in the bike, but did not know I needed it so soon. It’s not normally a problem because I flatten out often enough to  ride with very little petrol, but I didn’t consider that I would be on an incline for minutes at a time instead of mere seconds. This let all the petrol flowing to the back of the tank and away from the feeder hole. Scooter went BRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr……. (silence)

There I was, stuck a third of the way up the hill with a decision to make. Would I take the scooter back to the school and get a bus or tough it out and start pushing? I decided to push.

What was I thinking? Between me cartoonishly spinning I place and the bike going sideways because of the direction of pressure on it, things were going painfully slow.

When I finally reached the top I was able to free downhill, but with idiot high school students who see you and then somehow things you disappear when they look down, I was almost in two crashes, both of which would have turned out worse for the morons.

The process of going up and down was repeated twice more. At one point I had to back up and get a run going to get myself up a small incline onto a walkway. Oh, the fun. If the whole situation was not as ridiculously funny as it was I would have been swearing like a pirate.

All turned out well though. I managed to get petrol about two thirds of the way home, but still ended up walking into the apartment sweat soaked and exhausted. Needless to say I did not go to the gym last night.

Photo I shot on the way home

On a happier note, our guild killed not just the first boss, but the second raid boss of the expansion. We are finally a raiding guild again, with our names on the scoreboard.

Deoksugung Project

My quest to give my live a bit of meaning beyond gaming and a few scattered photos have been gaining steam. At one point I had been in 6 cities in the span of 2 months. Granted, two were my own city and Seoul, but that still leaves, Ansan, Daegu, Busan and Andong.

Keeping myself this busy does have its drawbacks. I crave days when I can do nothing but play World of Warcraft and sleep, with a bit of eating in between. I’m forever looking for things to do and then trying to fit people in to these plans. Being this busy is also making me put things of that can be done later. Sometimes, however, I put them off for 6 months and then have to rush to do whatever it was I wanted to do.

The Deoksugung Project is one of the things I kept on putting off. I had it on my calendar for months, and somehow managed to only visit it on the second last evening. It was an “exhibition” by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in which they lit up the buildings in Deoksu Palace. I admit that I was a little disappointed by what I saw, but at least some decent photos came out of it, and in the end that is why I was there, right?

All the photos were shot in manual mode, usually at f/8.0 and shutter speeds as high as 10 seconds. More often than not I had my focal length as wide as it would go, 24mm

Portrait photography

On Sunday I went for my first solo off-camera photo session. It just so happens that it was also my first time going with the intention of getting portrait photos.

A young woman from my town volunteered to let me abuse her time in the hope of getting a good photo of herself out of it. I think I convinced her when, out of all the people at the Language Exchange I walked up to her and asked her personally, saying that I have seen many of her Facebook photos and know that she is quite photogenic.

We met close to my apartment because we live only a block from each other and made out way to a park which I thought might be nice for photograph.

When we arrived I set up my stand and umbrella for only the second time ever, and changed to setting on my flash to something I that I forgot the meaning of. All that was left was for just have Miss Joo to sit and pose in a natural way.

Turns out this photography things is not so difficult to do. Sure, I look at the photos and see how I can improve, but for the most part the photos are still much better than I would have done with no flash or with a phone.

By far my favourite photo of the day was this one. Shot with the flash at full power (apparently not the way to do it), shutter at 1/250, aperture at f8 and focal length at a fully extended 250mm. It looks rather good in colour as well, but Black and White is still where my heart is drawn to.

Looking at this photo I think a back light and the front flash with a little less power would have been great.