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Epic Diem was a local popculture convention where I exhibited, as well as participating in a talk.

Exhibited Works:

• Surfing The Deathline 1 – 3
• Blank
• Surrender
• Propaganda

Only the truly damned can know the suffering of those, for whom the perfect camera bag is a white whale obsession. Too big, too small, the wrong access, no hydration – we mutter this to ourselves, as those who love us climb the widow’s walk of Gear Acquisition Syndrome, and curse the sea for its cruel humour, for not just taking us and ending the pain.

Yes, buying a camera bag can be a fraught experience. This isn’t helped by the fact that the subject of this first look must be making its bags out of unicorn skin, with chickenteeth zippers, such is their rarity in retail outlets. I’ve just taken delivery of one of the first production run of the (now sold out) new F-Stop Lotus bags, so here’s an unboxing and first look.

Quick statistics – the Lotus is the smallest of F-Stop’s Mountain series packs. It’s a 32 litre shell with one main compartment, and side, front and top-of-lid compartments. Why would you get it? In my case – it’s compact enough to be a large daybag / everyday carry (with camera), but has a harness and numerous external attachment points, to enable it to be loaded up for lightweight overnighting.

Unboxing

The purchasing experience was, well, it was ordered & paid for on F-Stop’s website in late June, with a scheduled July delivery, and it arrived at the end of September. Once the delivery was scheduled, it arrived a few days earlier than forecast. As you can see by the photos, the delivered box isn’t exactly Apple-pristine in terms of packaging , but it did the job of protecting the contents. The drawstring F-Stop duffel bag, which an ICU I bought earlier also had, is a really nice packaging idea, rather than a plastic bag or similar.

My bag is the Anthracite colour. It’s black. VERY Black. Like “sucking all the light out of the room so you can only see it by its silhouette” black. All these pics were shot in daylight, metered with incident light, and colour meters, then shadow recovery in Aperture had to be turned up to the maximum to show the details. When you look carefully, you can see a checkered pattern, and it’s got this slightly rubbery texture.

The inside of the side and front pockets are of a lighter material, and don’t have the same rubberised feel to them. Given that the front pocket has a weep-hole, and is intended to be a place to stow wet outer layers, or snow tools, a question that arises is…

Moisture Ingress?

The best test I could think of was to get a bottle of water out of the fridge, run it under the tap, to simulate condensation, and then rotate it against the inside lining of the front pocket, while holding up a tissue to the other side, to see if any water wicked through. While the cold came across, as far as I can tell, the tissue itself is bone dry.

The inside of that front pocket is actually the pouch for an internal water bladder, so you might be wondering why I’m concerned – it’s mainly down to that pouch also being where an iPad or small laptop is supposed to sit, if you’re not carrying water internally. More on that later on.

ICU Fitting

What’s an ICU? F-Stop’s bag system is based around the camera being in a padded, removable bag, the Internal Camera Unit, which straps into the shell, to be accessed via the back panel. These ICUs come in numerous sizes, and styles. One of F-Stop’s weaknesses, however, is their pre-sale documentation. When I bought this pack, for example, there was nothing on their website to tell me which ICUs were suited to the pack. As a result, I made a best guess, and bought one which is listed as “compatible” but not “recommended”. The bag itself has a tag showing what they recommend, but this startlingly useful information is not available online.

In the Large Slope ICU, I can fit my full current kit, which comprises: Nikon d800, Nikkor 14-24g, 60g Micro, Spherical pano head, Manfrotto magnesium 3-way head, light meter, colour meter, some filters, and a few other cables, battery charger etc.

The way this is supposed to work, is you fold the top of the ICU under it, slip it into the bag, then attach the velcro tabs around the eyelets on the bag’s frame to hold the ICU against the back aperture. What I found is that the ICU didn’t naturally rest far enough into the bag for the tabs and eyelets to line up. Pulling the foam from the ICU lid went part way to alleviating the problem, but it still felt like I was forcing it to fit in place.

Now, it may be that this serves a purpose, ensuring the ICU is tensioned against the bottom of the bag.

The other problem is that when attached, the ICU is actually taller than the inside of the bag, so with the back unzipped, the ICU wedges the back open. Again, maybe there’s a logic to this, but my next ICU is going to be a shallow model.

There’s also a mystery eyelet at the top, which should be perfect for securing the top of a tall ICU, but there’s no matching velcro tab on mine.

Hydration

Hydration was one of the features which really caused headaches for me while looking around for bags. My previous (non-camera) bag, by Camelbak, is more of less the gold standard for this. The bladder is kept in a sealed, insulated compartment, centred on your spine. Looking around at camera bags, hydration was either absent, or fixed on one side. I wanted the freedom to shift water-weight depending on whether I had a tripod strapped to the side of the bag or not.

The Lotus’ external pockets are large enough that you can put a 2 litre bladder in any of them. There’s an internal pocket to hang a bladder in, but it shares duty as the laptop sleeve. I also can’t quite trust the idea of keeping water inside the pack with my electronics.

If there’s a criticism I can level here, and an improvement for the next version of the pack, it’s that hanging loops in the side and front pockets would provide a huge utility and flexibility boost, with no appreciable downside.

Compatibility

One of my favourite accessories, Thinktank’s Camera Support Straps, rely on the webbing rails on the shoulder straps of most packs. The Lotus lacks these, but thankfully, the webbing loop used for the built-in D rings is large enough that the clip for the strap can thread through it. As an added bonus, by rethreading the tag end back through, and up under the snack trampoline (there’s a springy pocket in the shoulder strap for snacks – I think that term is as good as any), it’s neater than on my previous pack.

The other great compatibility feature is the molle webbing on the inside of the back panel. This gives you the flexibility to mount other bags inside the Lotus, as shown here, a Lowepro holster bag attached with carabenas (which I’m doing while I wait for a local dealer to get stock of the shallow ICUs). It’s not quite as elegant as an ICU, but it still means the camera can be accessed separately from the contents of the top of the bag.

Conclusion?

It’s been a couple of days of carrying this around all the time. The Lotus is a bigger bag than I’m used to, but small enough that I can adjust to that, for the freedom to have a well designed bag to constant carry a couple of kilos of camera and lens. Also worth mentioning, the pockets in the lid, one accessible from the outside, one from inside, are spacious and majorly convenient for getting access to a lot of stuff without disturbing the inside of the bag. Further on the topic of the lid, it’s attached to open away from you when the pack on on your back, which means the zips can sit near your neck, away from potential pick-pocketing.

So, overall, my initial impressions are that this is going to be a serious piece of kit. It’s got its quirks (like the 14-24), but my gut feeling is that it’s going to be a tremendously enabling piece of gear.

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Back in the late 1990s I worked in tech support for OzEmail, a company owned & managed to varying degrees by the man who is now Prime Minister of Australia.

Back in those days, Internet access was dialup, and sold based on time connected. Every time you connected to the internet, you also incurred a local phone call with Telstra, who were the dominant local telephony provider, as a part of the process.

So eventually, the economics arrived at a point where we could offer a product that provided for unlimited time dialup – an “always on” internet, provided you could dedicate a phone line to it. The name of this product (from memory) was OzMegaSaver.

Well, there was a problem with OzMegaSaver that soon became apparent – dropouts. People were having huge numbers of disconnections, even after we went through optimising their modem’s initialisation strings, and running up huge phone bills in the process. Thirty cents a call adds up when you’re having multiple disconnects every day. We were instructed, by higher levels of management, to tell customers that at the end of the day, the problem was that their modems were letting go of the connection because their phone line couldn’t sustain the high speed connection.

We certainly didn’t tell them what was common knowledge within the support department – that it was OUR Bay Networks dialup equipment that was disconnecting the customers, and that the problem was so endemic, that Bay Networks had sent staff out from America to try and make the gear they’d sold us work correctly.

You can imagine the outcry, if all those customers knew their massive phone bills were a result of their ISP dumping their connection.

It’s just one anecdote, and Turnbull’s involvement in the company may have been completely incidental to the problems, and subsequent coverup. However, let’s say that when people argued Turnbull’s “experience” in telecommunications counted positively towards his plans for the NBN, that just sounded like a tsunami of fail and farce.

Introduction.

“Poor artists copy, great artists steal”

This quote, in various forms, including the less judgemental “Immature artists copy, developed artists steal”, has been (mis)attributed to many artists throughout history. It expresses a fundamental truth within any artist’s practice – that all technique is learned through imitation, but that imitation is only the first part of the process.

The difference between copied and stolen techniques comes down, in my opinion, to understanding not only the how (copying), but more importantly the why of a technique. To steal in art, is to take an idea, and be able to pull it apart and rework it to suit your own needs, without breaking the things that made the idea valid in the first place.

What does this have to do with comics? Well, comics is an artform which is not only built upon copying – witness the plethora of “how to draw (style) comics” manuals, but is also practiced, frequently, by people who are not formally trained as artists. In my experience, academic training is where the why mindset is nurtured.

This brings us to the point – the often misunderstood theory of panel design, especially as it relates to Manga, and most especially as it relates to Manga-style comics produced by westerners.

In western comics, the order in which panels on a page are read is often expressed along the lines of “left to right, then down”, sometimes with the addition of a “look at what’s happening in the panels if there’s any confusion”.

In the world of western languages, this may seem self-evident, after all, western scripts are universally(?) written in a left-to-right horizontal direction. Given the popularity of Manga, and the number of westerners for whom the graphical style of Manga is the dominant influence, this requires a deeper consideration. Unlike western scripts, Japanese is written from right-to-left, and may be either horizontally or vertically aligned. When a western, english language “manga artist” tells you the rule is “top right to bottom left, and always horizontal before vertical”, it becomes apparent that there are some fundamental misunderstandings about the design theory behind Manga amongst western practitioners.

Left to right or right to left?

When published in Japanese, Manga employs a right-to-left reading order, and broadly a top right to bottom left page reading direction. This is obviously the opposite of the way a western book is laid out and typeset. Japanese books are read right-to-left, because the Japanese language is written right-to-left. Starting in the origin corner of the page, the text you read progresses in the same direction as the overall page. Likewise, western comics, and western languages are written and read in the same direction.

When Manga were first translated and released to western audiences in the 1980s, publishers like Eclipse Comics, and translators like Studio Proteus would mirror-image flip the pages, so they could be read left-to-right. This also required subtle re-writes of the script, to ensure that spatial references (characters noting on which side an eye-patch restricts vision, for example) are updated. In the 2000s a counter-trend emerged, of translating text, but not flipping pages. This often extended to not translating or retouching the sound effect text, and was claimed to be in aid of producing a more “authentic” translation of the original. A cynic, or perhaps a realist, might suggest that it’s a bit convenient for “authentic” to coincide with “less work” and “cheaper”, especially when it produces a product that reduces the ease with which the reader can access the work.

Mirror-flipped or not, however, remains a controversy for translated Manga. When it comes to Manga-esque comics written in english, or any other left-to-right script, there should be no controversy – your comic should be read in the same direction as your language. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, there seems to be a (sub)culture of creating right-to-left Manga-styled books amongst western comics artists.

This is a perfect example of the copying vs stealing dichotomy: The immature artist copies the right-to-left reading order because that’s what Japanese language Manga does, the developed artist steals the design methodology, and understands that the reading direction is a function of that language in which it’s written, and is a means to the end of communicating the story, not an end in of itself.

“Authentic” Manga.

I’ve seen a defence of using right-to-left direction for english language Manga-like comics expressed along the lines of claims to authenticity – that Japanese Manga is right-to-left, so doing western Manga-style comics right-to-left is more “authentic”, and presumably, more correct.

This is where we get into the fraught world of cultural appropriation (and potentially identity politics) – where is the line drawn between adopting elements of the style of another culture’s art, and attempting to pass oneself off as an “authentic” practitioner of another culture’s art? Manga itself is a result of the traditions of Japanese drawing encountering Disney’s cartoons during the postwar occupation of Japan by American troops. The big eyes, the animation style – that’s yet another example of stealing in the artistic sense. Something from one culture was so thoroughly adopted and coopted by another, that it is now synonymous with the thief.

What’s happening with Manga produced by westerners is often not that, however. If you’re a westerner, you’re not an “authentic” Manga artist. What you produce will never be “authentic” Manga. A white Australian could learn everything there is to know about Aboriginal art techniques, learn the cultural stories, live with local Aboriginal groups – they will never be able to sustain a challenge to the authenticity of calling themselves “Aboriginal Artists”. In the Aboriginal case there’s also post-colonial and socio-economic outrages involved – so not to suggest that these two analogies are of equal severity, merely that they are structurally equivalent.

We have a long and sordid history of white artists passing themselves off with fake Aboriginal names in Australia, and this is the thing with authenticity – it derives from the artist, not the art.

Get to the point!

What is the actual theory behind panel layout in Manga? Here it is, in it’s simplest form:

Scanning from Origin to Destination (top left to bottom right for western script, horizontally flipped for Japanese), find the first edge-to-edge gutter, and divide the page. Repeat recursively.

(Note: yes I appreciate the irony of a grid layout here, given my thesis is about the problems of grid layouts – read across then down.)

The Manga layout formula is inherent to the design. It’s a hierarchical rule, built on a consistent internal logic, independent of, and adaptable to any language. What this means, and what is a defining characteristic of Manga panel design, is that grid layouts, where edge-to-edge gutters intersect, are rare / forbidden.

Grid layouts are claimed to “work” (and I would argue they don’t actually work) in western comics because western script is always horizontal – it’s always across before down. That’s a problem as far as I’m concerned – the “rule” isn’t inherent to the design, it’s imposed from an external set of knowledge. Without the content of the panels, and without knowing that the language was written horizontally, there is nothing in the way western comics are designed which reveals the correct panel order.

It is only the fact that people in western society are raised in a horizontal text culture, that makes the idea of “horizontal before vertical” seem like a natural, intuitive rule. Worse still, most people who would argue for grid layouts have probably been reading comics for so long, that they are unaware of having internalised that arbitrary rule.

“I want equal sized panels to communicate the experience of equally spaced, equal-length moments in time.”

Ok, try this:

But what about an artist’s personal vision? What if an artist really likes the symmetry of the grid? Why should an artist follow these rules?

At the end of the day, a comic page is about communicating the events depicted in the panels. That is the ultimate goal. A panel layout is the user interface for that goal, and when the artist’s personal desire for aesthetic expression conflicts with clear, unambiguous readability, it is their responsibility to get over themselves, and put the reader first.

There’s an idea spreading around the Mac-using world at the moment that Apple should abandon iTunes, and start again from scratch with separate apps handling its various abilities.

There’s one problem with this which gives me pause.

Every change Apple has made to iTunes since version 10, has made the product worse. What has made it worse, is not the overloading of features, but the mindset behind the design of the new features.

UI elements no longer have tooltips. Podcasts have been screwed up, reoriented around streaming and breaking functionality for the download-and-keep model. Lets not forget the disastrous iTunes 11.2 “upgrade” which introduced a new “saved” podcasts feature, which allowed you to protect individual episodes from auto-deletion – and which the upgrade process told you would be applied to ALL of your previously downloaded podcast episodes. That function was faulty, and since iTunes had auto delete after listening defaulted to on, upto half the episodes in many of my stored podcasts disappeared in an instant. Not in the trash, no undo, just gone.

Can’t you just re-download them?

That presumes two things, firstly that bandwidth is free and uncapped, and secondly, that all podcasts keep every episode in their feed forever. Many don’t. Some of my subscriptions have gone offline entirely. The point is, user data is sacrosanct, and deleting it without an explicit command from a user, with an “are you sure” dialog is the greatest sin a piece of software can commit.

This is a symptom of a part of the larger problem Apple has, those who are in charge of the direction of its products are possessed of such immense bandwidth privilege, they seem incapable of designing products for an offline reality. The sheer insanity of using a server on one side of the world, to move a document between two devices a foot apart, or that two devices which can be physically cabled together, can’t share calendar reminders without an internet connection, is hard for me to wrap my head around.

So, given that all the things which are bad about iTunes, are post-version-10 changes to the product, what makes anyone think that an all-new music solution would be anything other than a reflection (and likely a magnification) of the philosophy which created all these ruinous changes?

What’s wrong with iTunes, are the new parts of iTunes, not the presence of what is increasingly becoming “legacy” functionality.

The Metaning was the exhibition, for my wall-scale graphic novel.

It has a dedicated site, where full details about the work, and the exhibition can be viewed.

The Metaning website.

Exhibited Works:

• The Metaning

These are from two years ago, but since I’m heading to the same location, having planned around the position of the sun and the stage of the tide to try to reshoot with a polarising lens to cut glare, I thought it was worth putting them up for a comparison.

The final proof of concept for my Little Planet production process. This is the image where everything clicked into place – camera, panoramic mount, and stitching software. Shooting before dawn in this location yielded a number of images. The other major finished piece – Dawn at The Serenghetto Waterhole, was entered into the Head-On photo competition.

Redback spider from outside my studio.