the studio
AVENIR magazine
PILOT ISSUE BLOG 2018
4 But Where Are They My take on the Fermi paradox
8 A Week in Morocco with Fujifilm X-T2 An amazing trip with a great camera!
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But What Will I Eat Then? Why are we so scared of going vegan
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The Future Is Mirrorless Switching to Sony camera feels liberating
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the studio
AVENIR magazine
This is a pilot version of the magazine I have in mind. It would feature my blog posts, projects, behind the scenes photos and everything else connected to my work. I imagine it to come out every 4 months or so, but I’d be perfectly happy even if I manage two issues per year. For now just a few blog posts. ;)
Marjan Krebelj, 10th July 2018
But Where Are They FEBRUARY 5, 2018
This is my take on the famous Fermi paradox. For those who are not familiar with it, it goes like this: Our galaxy alone has billions of stars. We know that many (if not most) of them have planets orbiting around them. The number is so vast that even if only the tinies fraction developed intelligent life, there should be aliens everywhere and we could see them. Yet we’ve seen none to date. Where are they?
Lunjevica, 7th July 2018
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Books, blogs and youtube are packed with speculations but somehow I don’t find them convincing. If you break all of them down to the basic premises, you see that the vast majority of them (including SETI) are based on some really really naive assumptions. So what do I think? My feelings are split into two extremes and I give them 50/50 chances. In my opinion either one is true, and I don’t see much left for anything in between. It is either that: a) we are alone, this universe is our show completely, or, b) intelligent life is indeed everywhere, but it is our incompetence and naïveté that we fail to see it as such.
like you, me and all of the living creatures out there. Of course this does not exclude extraterrestrial organisms, but when one is actually having a mystical experience the general feel to it is rather centralised on the one having it. It feels like the whole universe is there to produce/support you and you alone. Almost like you are some kind of god or something (the so-called ego death can one easily interpret it that way). Therefore all the stars, galaxies, black holes, everything is just my - or in best case - our show. This is our playground, our own reality into which we infuse ourselves from a higher dimension in order to learn and grow, or perhaps just to pass the time. Eternity can be quite a bitch if you are alone. But at the end there is only one consciousness generating everything and we are the ones looking back at it, self reflecting and kicking each others asses for amusement and growth. We are not in the simulation, we are the simulation folded into itself. As St. John put it in 14:20: On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. The simulation and the simulated are one and the same thing (yes, it’s kinda fucked up, I know). Thus there is no need for aliens in this scenario, actually it works even better without them, so why bother. This universe is our show. If you find that so hard to grasp, consider the following example: every morning you wake up from your dreams. If you are anything like me, you interact with various people during your dream time. Sometimes they are weird, sometimes they have multiple personalities at once, but they are still recognisable as your family members, friends, strangers, etc. Right? These people not only have a personality of their own, they also have the ability to make you laugh, to make you cry, to insult you, to scare and surprise you or invoke any feelings they would normally do. Right? More often than not these dream characters act act consistently to their originals from flesh and blood. Right? The act is so perfect that when you wake up from your dream you cannot but regard them as separate individuals. Right? Yet it is YOU who is behind them. It is your brain simulating them, their actions and their words, and the dream-you can’t do anything about it! You are just thrown into that mess to experience it all. And not just people, every tree, every rock, every cliff you hang from, every grain of sand you walk over... The show is so elaborate, that you genuinely get scared, fall in love, feel insulted or get amused, even though behind the appearances it is always just your one an only brain as this perfect puppeteer, who is playing with itself and keeping its puppets in oblivion. Otherwise the act wouldn’t work and would have no point at all. Although it is obvious, it is very hard to realise, that IT WAS YOU, ALL ALONG! It was always just you! Is that the final joke or what!
A) We Are Alone This could be based on a premise of just how many physical constants and laws must be exactly right in order to produce us (it is not, just give me a minute, OK?). And not just physical; there are coincidences in Earth history that are extremely unique (like having a orbit stabilising Moon, tectonic plates, etc) and all contribute for stable enough conditions for us to emerge. The same hypothesis (called Rare Earth) recognises that microbial life indeed developed very early in the geological time, but failed to produce multicellular organisms for another 3 billion years. So there’s your filter. The universe should be swarming with microbes on one side, but rare in multicellular life forms, or even rarer with intelligent life on the other. However compelling this sounds, I am not taking this direction now simply for the fact that we don’t know yet just how rare these events really are and wether or not are they crucial for life as such. It is not that hard to imagine life under completely different conditions (like floating balloon like creatures in Jupiter’s atmosphere). I would rather take a completely different path and explore eastern mysticism which only recently got its implementation in a form of simulation hypothesis. This is a very hot topic now so if you want to appear smart you better know it. The basic idea in both cases simply states that we are not living in a physical universe as perceived, but we are rather just characters in a computer simulation or whatever. That formulation leaves me somewhat unsatisfied because every culture had its own contemporary metaphor on how to see the world; first there were myths of earth lying on elephants, turtles, then with industrial revoliution wheels and gears, later on the world seemed to be made of steam engines, later still a giant computer was the leading metaphor for reality, and now on the verge of true virtual reality and artificial intelligence we like to see it as a computer game. However, the mystical take on this was much more subtle. To them it is all one consciousness that is split into working parts - or better yet - incarnated within various different individuals
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other humans wouldn’t find easy to encode. Text SETI code to your mother and see what happens. We assume aliens are MIT students. Well, what if they’re not! What if - you know - just for an exercise, we actually tried to communicate with intelligences that are much closer to us. My list would go something like this: 1) other great apes (chimpanzees) 2) other mammals (whales, elephants, mice...) 3) other vertebrates (birds) 4) other animals (molluscs, especially octopuses) 5) other multicellular organisms 7) insects (ants?) 6) plants (you pick).
Intermezzo - Stay at Home Civilisations There is one more clue there that is worth exploring. We know that trees have strong ties to their soil and we are yet to figure out how profound that connection is. It is not just that tree sucks up nutrients through its roots, it is not just that the tree collaborates with mycelium networks for additional nutrients, communication and whoknowswhat - it actually has its own microbial nurseries of symbiotic microorganisms, which in return produce even more nutrients, medicine, and again whoknowswhat... It doesn’t end there; a healthy tree requires Earth’s magnetic field, Schumann resonance, winds, solar energy, solar whatever, it also requires a number of animals for reproduction, healing and even better growth. Did you know that bird’s songs are of a tonal frequencies that are beneficial to plant cells and the transport of nutrients thru the membranes? That is why music which resembles bird song (like Vivaldi or Mozart) indeed does help plants grow and that is just the beginning of it. My point is that being a tree is such an integral part of the whole biosphere that it is impossible for a tree to be healthy - let alone thrive - outside of it. And my hunch is we are no different, only that our ties are even more subtle and less visible, and that the majority of our diseases are caused exactly by the lack of that connection! We have strangled our umbilical cord that should connect us to Gaia and this is the price we have to pay for it. This is the original sin, our exodus from the Paradise into the glass-metal-concrete hell of modern cities (which for the majority of us promise so much but deliver so little)... So can we really venture further out into the even more hellish and alienating environment of outer space? Perhaps one day we will have the technology that could simulate an entire planet just to support one body, but can we really do it down to each molecule? Maybe the great plan is to sacrifice a few generations of sickly individuals in order for the further development of the space flight and terraforming technology so that the whole process could branch off another way? I don’t know, I’m kinda lost here. I am not comfortable in this argument, too many variables at once, so consider this an intermezzo. (If you are interested in this topic of interconnectedness I suggest you pick up books by Stephen Harrod Buhner)
There is very little doubt that at least great apes, whales, birds and octopuses demonstrate behaviour that is intelligent, conscious and sentient even by the most anthropocentric standards. These creatures can solve logical puzzles, memorise solutions, demonstrate self-awareness, and plan their actions with all of the impacts on their immediate environment. They communicate with their peers in complicated ways that we are yet to understand. So if we aspire to have any chance of sending an email to ET, we should first be able to have a decent chat with our cats, right? Yet we can’t even understand our closest relatives, at least not on rational-MITlevel (on a more organic level Jane Goodall has no problems). And even on the most mechanical level (!), we can hardly send a file from a Mac to a Windows machine without an error (or try with Linux for that matter). Further down the list there is mycelium which is a very wide array of mycorrhizal networks that under the microscope look a lot of like our brain. Which doesn’t mean it is the same thing, but it does pose some serious questions. For example, if one part of it senses toxins, another can already be developing antidotes in its cells. That means some very profound communication and computation must be going on. Recently I’ve came across a video which explains insects’ nervous system and argues that per cubic unit of neurons insects are much smarter than we are. Simply put; to perform the same task we need much larger brains than an ant. Plus their nervous system is much more decentralised and thus less sensitive to error. But that is just the first step; social insects like ants form colonies which in fact act as a giant organism (oh, how well did Orson Scott Card exploit that fact). And of course; plants! Plants are much more sentient than we give them credit for. They can inform each other via their root systems, sometimes they connect their roots to mycorrhizal networks and communicate through that (it seems like mushrooms are like an internet network of the forrest),
B) Intelligent Life Is Indeed Everywhere OK, if we take a bit more standard view on cosmology then the paradoxical nature of the Fermi paradox becomes more obvious, but the assumptions on which our expectations and search for it are based on are quite naive. Somehow all of our efforts in this direction are based on a very anthropomorphic illusion of (an alien) intelligence. We are sending them radio waves and codes that are uniquely human and that even
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but if that is not available, they spread chemicals through the air. These chemicals are usually very familiar ones; serotonin, DMT and other hormones/neurotransmitters based on tryptophan, basically the same ones we use within our own bodies and brains to perform internal communicational tasks. My hunch is plants had them first and only later did we [animals] internalised that same system for our purpose. But wait, you might yell. You are just relativizing intelligence. Push this further and even a rock can be called intelligent, so what’s the point! If we don’t have the basic criteria clear, how can we search! Well, my friend, that IS the point. We really don’t know what to look for, so it is much better to keep our minds open. For all its worth, alien life could be starring right at as and we wouldn’t see it with our current mindset. Perhaps what we see with our telescopes is exactly that. There is a lot of missing mass and even more missing energy within our standard models of the cosmos, so who knows, what if some of the the dark matter are actually Dyson spheres (just an idea). Think about it; if you imagine yourself as an ant, what would YOU then recognise as a marker of superior intelligence? Perhaps some beaver dams might strike you, perhaps you’d be astonished by the ways humans cultivate vegetables, mushrooms or harvest wood. Because that is what you would do on a larger scale. But would you be able to make sense of a calculator left on the MIT backyard? Would you see it for what it really is? To you that would be just another rock, albeit a weird one, but a rock nonetheless. You might start developing theories about it, maybe you’d call it a pulsar or something like that, but I don’t think you’d recognise it as for what it is to us. It is too far ahead so it might as well be a rock. The universe could be full of such rocks and we wouldn’t have a clue of what they really are. Anyhow, these are my two cent’s on the matter. I can hardly decide which one is more likely since there is no real basis for either one. The point which I actually wanted to make is not so much wether or not we are alone, but the childishness and naïveté with which these problems are generally discussed and argued. We are closer to ants than we think we are. The grounds for that are much more solid than anything else on this subject!
Book Review: The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin JUNE 26, 2018
Last summer I was blown away by The Three Body trilogy and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this short story collection this year. It took me only three days to read it and I enjoyed every bit of it. All the great stuff which makes the Three Body so great is here too, but on a smaller scale. However, when it comes to destruction, Cixin is no minimalist. There are catastrophes of epic proportions; planets are being consumed for breakfast, civilisations are lost in a second, humanity is facing an enviable array of doomsday scenarios, and at the same time the most unlikely everyday people are not only coming to the surface of the situation, but also taking historical levers into their own hands. Styles slightly differ from story to story (but not nearly as much as in short stories by Ken Liu or Ted Chiang), but over all you can clearly sense Cixin’s recognisable writing. The most memorable stories to me were Devourer, With Her Eyes (which really moved me) and Cannonball. I also liked Wandering Earth and The Micro-Era, but I did have some trouble with Mountain. Somehow the pieces just didn’t fall together well for me in this one. Nevertheless, this is still an amazing collection. Chinese writers like Liu Cixin, Ken Liu or Ted Chiang and others have a special place on my shelf. Way above others.
EDIT (18th June 2018): just now I remembered that the second premise was to some degree exploited by a few SciFi writers. Fiasco by Stanislav Lem is one such example, and I am sure there are many more. But rarely anyone goes far enough with this. Even when those writers try to make alien life as alien as possible, it still remains just another version of our own biota. Again; it could be anything. Anything! Get it? Any-thing!!!
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A Week in Morocco with Fujifilm X-T2 MAY 10, 2018
This year I decided to spend my spring break in Morocco. It is a country that many of my friends have already visited so I kinda had to go there myself. And Infocona was kind enough to let me use their Fujifilm X-T2 camera with 1855 2.8-4 lens in exchange for an honest review. Since there are many technical reviews already on the web, I decided to write it in less technical manner and give more emphasis on the experience itself. So here it goes.
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The Camera For those of you who are here just for the camera or don’t want to bother with the long story, here is a review in a nutshell: the camera offers a great traveling experience. I don’t think you should regret buying it. It is light, handy and it looks great! I fell in love with the manual vintage dials on the top of the camera. Those are fast, reliable, and again, they look damn sweet. Autofocus is not on the level of professional press cameras (flagship Nikon & Canon) but it is good enough, even in low light situations. ISO performance also delivers fantastic results, way up to the highest 12.800 setting. Image quality is near-superb (again, not flagship, but enough for traveling), and uncompressed raw files will take about 50 MB of your SD card space, plus some additional 20 MB for the JPEG (in full-res). Auto WB is surprisingly correct, so are other automatic features. You can trust this camera with its built-in RAW-toJPEG conversion and let it use realtime simulations of Fuji’s legendary film emulsions (Provia, Velvia, etc). In my experience these work well enough so that you won’t need to bother with raw files or any kind of post processing (in most cases). But if you do there is plenty of detail waiting for you in the shadow & highlighted areas to be recovered, only noise & sharpness may need some work. But nothing a good PS action couldn’t solve in a batch (in my experience: smart sharpen, radius 2-3 pix, 30%). Photos that follow are thus straight from the camera, most of them using Velvia setting (or red filter when BW). The Flickr gallery at the end is edited from RAW files in Lightroom. But most importantly, the camera is light, handy and fast to use! There is only one con, but unfortunately a big one, and that is battery life. Even with all the energy saving features pushed to the maximum you can still barely squeeze out one day worth of shooting with one battery alone. To take pictures comfortably you need at least two which you’ll have to recharge in the evening. Having but one I needed to be really careful when shooting. Often I would recharge it on bus stops or during lunch breaks. Video? On one battery? Fugetaboutit.
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The Story So Morocco it is. I’ve been to many European countries already, and perhaps because I also happen to live on one, they tend to become boring with time. Last year I have also spent a short week in Eilat, Israel, but since that is a highly tourist town, I don’t think that really counts as typical Israel... Or does it? So I felt like I was ready for some Islam. Even as a student of architecture I absolutely loved their highly ornamental styles of design, architecture and even their approaches to urban planning. It was my long time wish to see some of that in real life. However; since I was having a ton of work at home and I didn’t have time to obsess over traveling plans, I only booked the most crucial transfers & beds, and let everything else happen spontaneously. I also took a leap of faith and let a friend of a friend do a lot of that for me. At the end this turned out to be the best possible strategy and the trip became less and less about sights or architecture and more about people and encounters. Which is a good thing. I didn’t spend any time waiting in lines for tickets or duplicating photos from tourist guides, but I did have mint tea with locals
and other travellers. I did have a chance to dig deeper into their culture and experience a transformational shift of my prejudices. But best of all, I’ve made a bunch of new friends, both from Morocco and from all over the world. Prelude: Landing in Marrakech Jesus-fuckin-Christ, where am I? Airport shuttle dropped me off at the main square in medina and it was simply too much for me to process at once. If you have ever been there, you probably know what I mean. You wanted Morocco, so here you have it. Fuck. Before I even got in I already wished to get out. But on the other side, I kinda felt like that in other cities as well. To be specific; I felt like that in tourist parts of the cities. From Karl’s Bridge in Prague to Time’s Square in NYC - the overwhelming amount of people make me feel small and insignificant. I come from Slovenia and here we all know each other so it is really easy to feel somebody. But in Marrakech or NYC I am just another ant in the anthill. All of my dreams, ideas, creativity, all of my projects and victories are crushed into one tiny pixel that nobody cares about. I 12
into words, but I had a sense as if they hold the world together for us. They are keppin it real. They are living the lives that must be lived for the sake of the world being in balance. And since we, the spoiled westerners with our cheap flights and gadgets, take the best part of the materialist equation (or so we think), we should really be grateful and humble. But despite their hard lives, they looked much happier than us. I almost felt envy... Perhaps they don’t have the toys we do, but they have each other. Although their lives are often though, they appreciate it far more than we do and they radiate this inexplicable energy which makes them so incredibly beautiful. Just stop for a moment and look how beautiful these people really are! After one day worth of traveling and seeing quite many sites, we stopped at a hotel, had some food, had a cultural dispute with the owner (it was impossible to tell when he was joking or being serious about continuous series of extra things to be payed for), had some sleep, then some breakfast, and again another cultural dispute of the same kind. Then we left the place to travel some more, saw a few more sites and finally arrived to Merzuga in the evening. The situation with my camera battery was though but the pictures were kinda worth it.
could die right here and now and nobody would even notice. But on a deeper level, these places look fake. It seems like everything is one big theatrical set for the tourists. Thank god I wasn’t there for long. At 7AM next morning I was off to Sahara... Perhaps that will be more real. Act One: Over the Atlas to Merzuga And now for something completely different! There are agencies that will pick you up at your hostel, put you on a van and take you on 1-2 or 3 day trip to Sahara. My friend booked this one for me and it was great. The ride takes you immediately over Atlas mountains with stunning views and nice looking villages. That’s more like it! Country side suddenly becomes green, with trees and fields all over, then it becomes bare rock again, but this time due to high altitude. After you cross the mountains you are back to the desert. Why people keep living here? Then again, none of them looked unhappy. Bruised with scars of reality? For sure, but not fatigued like western-city folks, and still very much radiant and full of life. At that time I first sensed something that kept coming back at every step of the road; gratitude. I felt like this people are doing the hard work for us. What exactly that hard work is, I didn’t know or was unable to put
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Act Two: Sahara I know! I was traveling with the tourist agency so everything was polished and well organised. It wasn’t like I was going to the real Sahara, it was more like a simulation of it. Everything is a kind of a simulation for tourists. And by simulation I think of something that is by its nature closer to a movie set than to a real thing. The latter being defined by the absence of the former. Kind of. Still, the simulation was good enough this time. The camel looked real, though. After 90 minutes of riding over the dunes we arrived to a place with permanent tourist tent settlement. I somehow expected to be camping in the middle of nowhere. But again; it was good enough. After enjoying the sunset they cooked us a nice dinner and afterwords my friend Rusty and I decided to get some sleep immediately. After the sun went down strong winds began to blow so we took refuge in the tent. But after a while the sounds of blowing got accompanied by rhythmic music. We were tempted to get out. The Berber guides made a camp fire an people gathered  around it. The full moon illuminated the party as they sung their old songs and danced barefoot in the sand. Then it clicked to me. 14
Something about this whole situation suddenly made sense on a very deep level. Was it the sun during the day, the winds and the cold during the night, or the inescapable sand in every hole of my body, that made me understand why these people are the way they are, why they wear these clothes and even why their songs sound the way they sound? It was not so much an intellectual understanding, but rather an intuitive one. It just made sense! It is impossible for them to be it any other way. After a while the cold got deep into our bones and even the campfire wasn’t sufficient to keep us warm anymore. We retracted to tents and had some sleep. We woke up before sunrise (still cold) and rode on camels back to Merzuga where we had some breakfast and then simply took a van back to Marrakech with only a few necessary stops along the road. In the evening I was quite happy to be back in the hostel and surprisingly this time Marrakech didn’t look that scary anymore. In fact, I started to enjoy it! I was accompanied with some of the friends I’ve made on the Sahara tour. It was a great evening and the same streets that terrified me a few days earlier, now seemed teeming with life and cultural vibrance. Next morning another bus was waiting for me. 15
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Atlas Mountains, 2nd May 2018
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Act Three: Essaouira Even though my hostel provided a really nice breakfast (the attendant kindly woke up early for some of us) I felt like I was in a mood for something extra. So I went across the street of the bus station and found this a small local place where a lady was baking this flat looking bread on the iron cast grill. No tourists, just locals. I immediately gestured her for one. My god was it good! As I was looking for a place to sit, one guy kindly invited me to join him at his table and have a chat with him. He proudly explained that this kind of bread is called batbout. If you want some more in Essaouira, ask for batbout. I’ve been really impressed by the kindness and hospitality of this man. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I’d never expect that from a stranger here in Europe. It was kind, it was warm and it was REAL. I decided to gradually walk away from the tourist parts and search for more of that. The bus ride from Marrakech to Essaouira was again a show of different views. Dry flatlands around Marrakech quickly give way to more typically mediterranean landscapes. You know; small hills covered with wheat fields, olive trees, goats, birds and small rocky houses. Like Tuscany, Umbria, Sicily, Provence, or van Gogh. Arriving in Essaouira was a relief. Here I would rest from all of the commotion I’ve had durring the previous days. Or so I thought. I booked an AirBnB place purely based on their cover photo (and naively not much else). But something felt right about this place, and I was just hoping not to be wrong. 18
It turned out to be perfect. I had breakfasts with a view over the ocean (on the cover), I’ve had a quiet room to retreat into when everything was too much and I was still located in medina. Essauoira is much more windy than photos could give it credit for. After 10 AM the winds became stronger and it becomes impossible to lay out on the beach and read books (as I had planed for). It was actually impossible to stay still anywhere outside. Since laying around with books was out of the question I took a more active approach to spending my time there. Early in the morning I went running on the beach. I ran barefoot and it felt so liberating! After that I spent most of my time wondering the streets, bargaining prices, and just starring at these colours! My god, these colours! I have no idea why mediterranean places look so vibrant, but this is insane. I just couldn’t have enough of it. Everything looked like it was super photoshopped. I was just hoping my camera could do justice to the reality which was unfolding in front of my eyes. It did (to the extent that can be realistically expected). The second day I decided it was time to get some proper clothing. Even though I was tempted to get myself a jalabah, I knew I would look ridiculous in that and I would not have any use for it when I get home. So I purchased a set of more neutral looking linen clothing that will serve me well for European summers too. As I was bargaining the price, the merchant seemed genuinely interested in my religious beliefs. I told him I respect all religions but don’t consider myself a member 19
of any. Would you like to go to mosque with me? Well, again - why not! Another guy came. My friend... go to a mosque, see if this Islam thing is good for you, OK? Then you come back and have some couscuos with us. Well... OK, I guess. I felt like this situation was becoming a bit too serious for me, but I decided that what I can potentially learn could outweigh the risks so, I carefully went along with it. So this guy took me to the mosque. Just watch me and do what I do. It was clear that I was the only western guy in there and that the stakes were elevated for him as well. I am not sure just how much did he risk by bringing me there, but it did seem like he had at least something to loose. We started the ceremony by taking our shoes off at the entrance, then we commenced to the necessary cleaning procedure (hands, face, feet...) at the central fountain, and finally we found an unoccupied rug to take our places for prayer. After that there was about 20 minutes or so of bowing and doing the Muslim stuff. (needless to say, camera was out of the question in the mosque, so no pictures folks) I took it plainly as my own personal meditation during which I had some bonus time to observe these people and their culture. The washing procedure at the fountain was really thorough and well designed, and it made me realise just how much cleanliness means to them and how clean everything actually is. By that I
really mean everything. Even when I returned to the medina of Marrakech I noticed that streets are clean or at least much cleaner than in most of the western cities. Houses might be old and worn down, the dyes on the facade might be falling off, but the pavements are clean and devoid of any trash whatsoever! After the ceremony, we took our shoes back on and returned to the store for lunch. So how you like Islam? Well, it is a pleasant surprise, indeed! We should give you a muslim name now... how would you like to be called? You know, something like Aziz, Ali, Abdul... No idea, dude. I really don’t think I need one. Well, how about Murad, how you like that? Sounds good to me... Well then, Murad, sit down and have lunch with us. Two more guys appeared, one only spoke French (mine was improving as well), the other one spoke a little bit of English. The French speaking gentleman had a large handbag with a big ceramic plate full of couscous and 5 spoons. This dish was notably different to the ones you’d have in a restaurant. Not only was it bigger in size, but the proportion of vegetables (against chicken meat) was much more favourable to me. And most importantly; couscous wasn’t ruined by lots of fat, like in the restaurants, instead it was only lightly cooked in water and thus much more tasty. As we sat in a small circle around the plate I followed their lead of taking the food. Each of
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used one’s spoon to dig a small cavern into that tasty hillock of couscous and vegetables. My vegan soul was happy not to find any chunks of meat, clearly because they were so scarce. With that in mind it became curious to see what happened when someone eventually did find some. They shared it. If one found a piece of meat, he took a little bit for himself and the rest he put on the top of the plate, to be shared, or he dropped it into the neighbour’s cavern directly. Even though I politely refused this gift from the French-speakingguy on my left, I continued to observe how they shared pieces of precious meat among each other. They were doing it habitually, almost as if they were not aware of it, so it must have been a cultural thing. Sharing! As I was devising tactics how to be the first at the biggest piece of the carrot, they were sharing whatever little they have found. (I should point out the difference in value system - in my vegan eyes a carrot is much more valuable than a piece of chicken meat, but I still am aware of the fact, that in the older times of scarcity, when these habits were formed, meat was an important source of calories, so it held a higher value than vegetables). After we all had enough, the leftover couscous was carefully saved for later. Again, I was moved. I wasn’t looking to buy any more clothes, but I did pay 30 Durhams (about 3 EUR) for an extra scarf, just as a gesture to
show my appreciation for the meal. The trip was coming to a close so I needed to save some money nonetheless. What for? Well, I’d like to buy a tajine. How much you have left? Only these coins (again, about 30 Durhams). No problem, my friend... So he took my coins, disappeared into the crowd and came back 5 minutes later with a perfectly good tajine that would normally cost me at least 200 Durhams if I bought it myself (even on Amazon you can’t get it for less than 35 EUR). For you, my friend, a muslim price now. Jeez, I felt honoured, but I think this was a common theme there. If a local introduces you, you get a special treatment anywhere! There are little or no fixed prices, no receipts nor invoices, everything is negotiated in person. In the evening we have a prayer, maybe you could go with us again... we convert you fully then. Well, I don’t want to hurt your feelings guys, you’ve been so nice to me, but this IS a big decision and maybe I should learn some more first, read some books and think about it. No, my friend, don’t read too much, just feel in your heart. I agree, but really, it is too big a deal for the both of us. Perhaps I should go now. No problem, Murad, when you come back, maybe then, right? Yes, maybe then... Thank you for now and good bye. I was really anxious about this whole situation. For one, the westerner in me was still panicking about getting in trouble
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with people and culture I know nothing about. But a deeper me was also afraid of hurting these peoples’ feelings. So I felt like I was in this double bond situation in which I had to navigate carefully to find a balance. It was like walking on eggs as we would say in Slovenia. But at the end it was all good. These guys had no hidden agenda. They are just honest, simple people, working in their little shops and living their humble lives. They were probably more naive in their hopes for converting me to Islam than I give them credit for. Who knows. For me it was a really meaningful and interesting experience of having a glimpse of their world. I spent three days in Essauira, expecting it to be a typical seaside getaway, and at the end it was anything but that. And I am happy for it. Act Four: Back to Marrakech After everything I’ve learned I started noticing how clean everything is in Morocco. The highway was much better than most European ones, the bus was modern and spotless, everywhere I looked the standards of public cleanliness and infrastructure were on the highest level. Which is quite paradoxical in western eyes. With that financial anarchy on the streets, how does the government collect taxes for all of this? Slovenia is one of the most taxed and bureaucratically complex countries in the world, yet our politicians always lack money for public service of this kind, not to mention this level. Where do Moroccans get thismuch money? Better yet; what are the real costs of building roads and how is our money really spent!? Perhaps it is us who should have a moment of reflection. For the third time I was back at the same hostel and it felt great. I recharged my camera and went back to medina for a dinner. I have already scouted places I wanted to visit so I didn’t loose too much time wondering around (a little yes, but not too much). My main objective was to get as far away from tourist crowds as possible and find the real stuff. During the time I spent on a bus I had an opportunity to think and define what that real really means. Well, you can ask yourself if those people/places would still be there (as such) if there were no tourists around. If the answer is yes, then it’s real, if no, then fake. The Main Square in Marrakech or Karl’s Bridge in Prague must then be just elaborate simulations for the walking wallets. BTU WAIT! In a way, that too is just as real, simply for the fact that it actually exists. The reason why we perceive mountains as more real (or more authentic) then the Main Square has nothing to do with the nature of the two, but rather with the fact, that we let go our expectations more readily in the mountains than we do on the Main Square. Since we know that there is nothing we could do about it, we let the mountain be the mountain, while at the
Main Square we still feel like we could somehow shape it to our own expectations. At the end we potentially suffer for it. As we do in life. OK; enough philosophy, back to dinner. First I stopped for some vegetables and a nice chat with Aziz, the owner of the place, then I hopelessly searched for some batbout all over medina, and finally I sat down for a pica in a very remote street (where it costed me only 15 Durhams). It had a little bit of cheese on it, to which my inner vegan voice objected, but fuck it. I’m having this pizza in Marrakech, so shut up! As great as it was I was still hungry. So I returned to the street where I had the vegetables earlier (close to my hostel), still looking for batbout, but since I couldn’t find any, I asked Aziz if perhaps he could help me out with it. The prior insight of being introduced by a local worked! He waved his hand and I followed him around the corner in the most narrow and crooked street you can imagine, only to find a bakery in the cellar of the building that was at the end of it. Inside that dark hot place there were three men baking fresh bread and locals came by to buy it. This place looked like
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one giant furnace alltogether. At the same time it had some eternal quality to it. Time stops here. It could have been 15th century or 2018, it wouldn’t matter. Everything would look and function exactly the same it does now. One of them was baking the bread in a small pit at the opposite side of the room, the other two were collecting it in baskets and took care of costumers. The price was 1 Durham. 1 Durham, that is 0.08 cents! I immediately bought 5 and rushed back to the hostel to eat this fresh bread and recharge camera’s battery (again), because I really wanted to take pictures of this place. Anyhow, it is not so much about how this place looked, it is more about how it felt. As much as it sounds weird, the only way I could put it is that it felt like truth. To illustrate that I might have to use another episode from two years back. One evening I felt like I need to do some reading and I went to a local bar, ordered a cup of tea and opened up a book on zen philosophy. After a while two really giant men in overalls came in to have a beer. Their size alone made them look scary. Obviously they were working on a cow farm, you could smell them meters away. After a while we accidentally
exchanged a few glances and these guys approached me. I wasn’t sure wether or not should I feel endangered, but again I just went along with it. A guy should never sit alone. We’ll keep you company! OK... Sit down gentlemen, welcome. (I put my book down) So we started with some small talk (it appeared they knew my father), moved on to what we do in life and finally ended up with lessons we’ve learned. All of that was repeatedly spiced up with male jokes and strong punchlines. These two men clearly had more than one beer behind their belts, but it didn’t matter. They were not only nice to me, they were also honest and truthful. But what shocked me at the end was that all that they said was actually exactly the same thing as I had been reading in the zen book earlier. How could this be? Two simple uneducated giants from the farm delivering a world’s history worth of philosophical knowledge in a series of strikingly sharp one-liners over a few beers? It couldn’t be clearer. You don’t need too much zen reading, and most certainly you don’t need any of that Descartes, Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard unreadable shit... All you really need is to have a close encounter with reality
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and as a result your two feet firmly on the ground. That’s it folks. Life understood is life lived (from Waking Life). Here in this Marrakech bakery I felt exactly the same kind of wisdom, despite the language barrier. It was there, hanging in the air with all its weight and all its beauty. I could only shut up, bow down, listen and learn... I came back an hour later, the guys were still there and with a help of a local boy serving as a translator we had some laughs. These people work there day in and day out, probably knowing very little beyond their job, they can only dream of the possibilities and freedom that I take for granted, yet they too are full of life and good humour. This theme repeats itself, doesn’t it. I tried to pay them some extra for the bread, but they wouldn’t accept it. If the bread costs 1 Durham, it is 1 Durham. They kept pushing the extra money back. I thanked for the experience and the bread, said goodbye and humbly left the place. It was 11PM as I enjoyed the bread on this empty street of Marrakech, feeling gratitude for the experience I just had. The bread was so hot I could barely hold it in my hands but it tasted like heaven. This was as real as it gets. Epilogue: Home Again Four hours later I was already on my way to the airport to catch an early flight. We landed at noon, and soon after a shower at home was the best possible way to conclude this trip. I also managed to smuggle that tajine through the Ryanair’s inspection and boy does it work well. After being quite bored with cookery for the last year or two this really brings fresh air into our kitchen. It is amazing how much taste vegetables keep with this way of cooking. Yesterday I had to return the camera, which despite of all the problems with battery life had been a good companion. Some extra batteries could really make a difference (it is hard to fall into the flow of shooting if you have to be mindful of such a nagging detail). Many times I was saving battery for later instead of capturing the present at hand, or I was merely too conscious about it. I ended up being much leess creative as I could have been, that is to say, many times I was merely reproducing the sights rather than shaping them into Photographs. A few times I actually did transcend the level of mere reproduction and some of the results are in the Flickr gallery for you to enjoy. These are processed from RAW files while the images above (within the text) are JPEG’s straight from the camera, to illustrate its point-andshoot capabilities.* * the photos on the printed edition are processed from RAW files.
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But What Will I Eat Then? JUNE 17, 2018
Over the past years I’ve spent way too much time thinking about food, nutrition and everything that goes along with it. In that time I’ve adopted a whole-foods-pland-based eating of mostly raw fruits and vegetables, which come from my own garden, at least when in season. I’ve experimented with different types of fasts, including prolonged water fasts (up to 14 days), intermittent fasting (one meal a day) and whatever is in between. On my own body I tested almost everything I’ve read in books and some things I kept, some I passed. I
could say my relationship with food is somewhat troubled; why would I otherwise bother with all this exploration, which takes so much of my time? But then again, when done right I’m abundantly rewarded with great health, energy levels which I haven’t experienced even in my most youthful years, mental clarity, emotional stability and I dare to say even spiritual progress. Not all of that is about food, I’ve also done meditation, yoga, marathon running and lots more, but these things work in concert and compliment each other. 26
With all this being said and done, certain conversations are unavoidable when I meet people and we often spend a lot of time talking about food [I know, I (sub)consciously provoke most of that]. When a person with more conventional eating habits hears about my current regimen (basically one rawvegan meal a day, sometimes two, but in a 6 hour feeding window) or especially when such a person asks for advice, to which I answer with a description my own habits, the most common response is: But what will I eat then!? For a lot of time I tried to answer to that question by listing all the delicious fruits and vegetables, or by explaining how to veganise meat dishes, etc. It took me really a lot of time to realise that behind the question of “What will I eat then” does not lie a fear of hunger, but something else, which can be rephrased into “How will I console myself then?!” Our conventional western meals have more to do with our emotional state than with nutrition. Let’s examine it: firstly we have a soup, then some meat with a starchy side dish, maybe an extra salad on the side, and lastly a desert followed
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the same way. As long as there is an emotional component present during the meal, broccoli or apples will hardly sound as a satisfying option. So when people are confronted with raw-vegan diet or god-forbid even fasting, their fearful response is not about hunger at all, it is rather about the emotional gap that is filled with food on daily basis. If my fasts taught me anything is that we eat most of our food for reasons of mere habit and compulsion (like Pavlov’s dogs, only that our bells are a bit more subtle), but more importantly, we eat our foods for reasons of emotional compensation and consolation. We expect our food to calm us down, to bring us joy and make us a little less lonely. We use (or abuse) food to save the day, to use it as means of consolation when everything goes down. This is why they say that you eat only one third of your food for yourself and two thirds for the doctor. The enjoyment is emotional, not physical and we eat out of fear and pain, rather than love and appreciation. Removing that component will not make food less enjoyable, quite the opposite. Buddhist
If one is balanced it does not mean one is also light!
by coffee. It is very hard to deny that these foods have a huge impact on our minds. A soup is there to calm us down, it helps us to forget the daily worries and focus on the meal. Then we have the real thing; a big chunk of meat to fill us up, occupying the stomach for at least 6 to 8 hours, during which a large portion of our blood supply will rush to our intestines, leaving little left for other activities. Fats will cause that warm and fuzzy feeling in our tummy, and starches will induce a burst of insulin… All with an effect of slowing us down and effectively anesthesizing us. A salad is there just to fill the gap for something healthy. Then we are ready for a desert which brings back a little joy in our life and a coffee to put as back on our feet. So we have a succession of a mild sedative (soup), anesthetic (animal protein+fat+starch), antidepressant (desert) and finally a stimulat (coffee). Such a meal is hardly fit for our bodily nutritional benefits, it is rather there to balance the emotional pain of everyday life. It is a drug that is usually consumed by the working class after they get home from tedious work, for which our bodies and minds were never meant for. It is a balancing act. But if one is balanced it does not mean one is also light! We are destroying our souls and our bodies at the same time. The foods that we put daily on our plates have a very strong hormonal (and thus emotional) response, much stronger than broccoli or apples. You can nourish your body with apples and broccoli much better than with chicken nuggets, french fries and a piece of chocolate cake, you can even feel full after eating it, but you can hardly console yourself with it
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monks might eat quite simple and plain dishes, yet they also enjoy their meals with great zest, but the difference is that they don’t depend emotionally on it, whereas we cling to our foods in a very bad and unhealthy way. It is only when you stop clinging onto something that you create conditions to really enjoy it. You can appreciate the taste of food much better if you don’t abuse it for emotional compensation. Only then eating really becomes about food and about its taste (on top of plain nutrition). But when you reach that point, you realize that to enjoy the taste, you actually don’t need all that much, a few bites are usually enough. Stuffing oneself is always emotional, I can testify to that. So if you’re a vegan (or something similar) and you get confronted with such questions, please understand that we all still cling to something, we all depend on certain things and habits for our emotional compensations. For most of the time we differ only by our means, not by our ends. It is not that people want to eat unhealthy foods, it is also not that people are not aware of consequences of standard western diets (at least not on a rational level), it is more that they need a fix and it is that fix that they are afraid to let go. It is almost like they are walking on a tightrope with this all too familiar modern day psychological stress in one hand, and a lot of drugs/foods/bad-habits in the other. Their fear is justified; if they drop one bag, they’ll loose their balance. But in this life one should not be content by merely being balanced, it is much more rewarding also being light.
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JUNE 26, 2018
Not much more than a month ago I had a chance to test Fujifilm X-T2 and it was a wonderful experience with one tiny flaw: battery life. At that time I was still using Canon EOS 5D mk II as my primary camera and desperately waiting for Canon to release something new, something better than 5D mkIV, which is not a worthy upgrade in my view (4k as a crop image, with motion-jpg… blahh…). On the other hand Sony Alpha cameras seemed perfect but the fear of spending a ton of extra money on additional batteries kept me aback, and there was also possibility that my Canon lenses would not work well with adapters. Of course, I could switch to Nikon entirely, but please, give me a truckload of cash first, plus a Sherpa to carry that thing around. So again, problems, problems… But then a spark of mental clarity blinked through my mind. I realised that the only real thing holding me back was the fear of an extra battery. Seriously? One or two extra batteries? Is that all? Come on! If that is the only thing separating me from the camera and need then it is no cost at all. 28
After that everything was crystal clear. I purchased the camera the next day and it has been serving me well ever since. I’ve already shot a wedding and two youtube episodes at Vrt Obilja and all I can say is that my fears have been unsubstantiated. Canon lenses work fine with Sigma adapter and as for the batteries; on an 8-hour wedding I’ve barely came to 50% of the second one (so it was one and a half spent), which is exactly the same as I was doing with 5D mkII. As for the camera’s performance there are a gazillion reviews and tests already online so I won’t spare words. It has all of the qualities of X-T2 plus a lot more. I absolutely love it and I am not looking back. For the first few nights I almost took it to bed with me, like I was some child with a new favorite toy. Perhaps I am. :) It is just a lot more fun to work with it. This mirrorless technology really looks like it is becoming the next step of photography. If you think about it; aiming over the mirror like in SLR cameras makes a lot of sense when
you shoot on film, but once you are capturing images with a digital sensor the benefits of SLR dwarf as the software which is running that sensor progresses. Not only you now have algorithms that help you with colour temperature, exposure and sharpness, but also software tools that recognise peoples’ eyes, faces and knows to how to put the focus of the lens exactly where it is needed the most. If there are more faces on in the frame you simply get to pick which one matters to you the most. This might be only the beginning of what can be put to use by the fact that the sensor is always turned on. Simple cameras had this technology years ago but the snobbism of professional photography was keeping these things at bay for too long. Perhaps the algorithms were not good enough, I don’t know, but they surely are helpful, and I can imagine many more to come. Wildlife photographers could have pattern recognition tools to focus specifically on
bears, birds, insects‌ AI could be applied to further enhance photos and auto correct them (on site!). Imagine a machine learning software that scans through your Lightroom library and learns the way you select and correct photos. This thing would get smarter with every project and in short enough time most of us could leave the laborious editing assume the role of supervisor or I dare to say, an artistic director (work on it, Adobe!). I got carried away a little too far with that. What I wanted to say is that mirrorless cameras are more digital than DLSR cameras, no matter how sophisticated, because the latter are basically still just old film cameras with a sensor instead of a roll of Velvia. Every new technology starts by an analogy of the previous one before it moves further into its own realm. Cameras like X-T2 or Sony Alpha are much more at home within this digital paradigm. I am not going back.
Der Wiener Deewan, 8th June 2018
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Bike & Beer Festival ÄŒrne Njive MAY 19 & 20, 2018
A group of local enthusiasts that goes by the name #faktujetu organized a splendid 2-day event that was all about offroad biking during the day and a little bit of beer in the evening. The atmosphere was amazing and I’m glad I was there with my camera.
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Fotodiox Vizelex Rhinocam JUNE 30, 2018
Recently I upgraded my gear with Rhinocam adapter which allows me to use my new Sony as a digital back as the full size digital back for Hasselblad lenses. The resolution, sharpness and colours are just staggering!
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