#am learning

HAHAHAHAH WOW IM A FUCKING IDIOT

‘The  Arabic basically says "butchered chickens for sale". I don't think that's the message that comes across in English...’

Just coming off another great session with my Arabic language partner Yara. Aleppo is relatively peaceful these days, and that reflects in Yara’s voice, evidently calmer than some of our earlier sessions. While learning plural forms of verbs today, we came across the word ‘baHr’, which Yara was surprised to know I knew the meaning of. It’s ‘sea’, and I know because I love the old Arabic song ‘Ana Bacha El Bahr’ by Nighat Al Saghir. Yara told me she loves it too, and has been listening to Nighat’s songs for years. 

There’s barely any information on the singer on the English language web, maybe there is in Arabic, so I wanted to know more about the singer from Yara. She said Nighat is Syrian, but has been singing mainly in colloquial Egyptian dialect since she moved to Egypt as a teenager. In the song ‘Ana Bacha El Bahr’, which means ‘I Love the Sea’, the Modern Standard Arabic (or fusHa) word for ‘love’ or ‘adore’ is ‘bashaq’, but the ‘q’ is not pronounced in colloquial Syrian or Egyptian dialect, apparently. 

I always thought it was strange that Nighat’s last name was ‘Al Saghir’, as ‘saghir’ means little or small in Arabic. Yara said that’s actually not her last name, but she’s come to be known as Nighat Al Saghir because she has a small frame. So she’s known as ‘Nighat, the little one’. (Strange and kinda amusing.)

Nighat is over 70 years old now. Yara, who’s been listening to her since her early days, said that in a recent interview of Nighat, the interviewer said to her, “You know, your fans should stop calling you Nighat Al Saghir now. They should call you Nighat Al Kabir.” ‘Kabir’ means old, or big, in Arabic. He didn’t mean to say that because of her age though. 

He was referring to how big an icon she’s become in the Arabic music world.

I adore the sea It's gentle like you, my love And sometimes it's crazy like you And migrant and traveler And sometimes it's confused like you And sometimes it's upset like you And sometimes it's filled with patience like you I adore the sea

I adore the sky Because it's tolerant like you Sown with stars and happiness And beloved and strange Because it's far like you And sometimes it's near like you With melodic eyes I adore the sky

I adore the road Because our meetings are in it And our happiness and our misery Our friends and our youth And our tears laughed in it And our candles cried in it And the friend was lost in it I adore the road

I mean, the reason why I got into this was to learn, but I did not expect to make SO many mistakes. So.

First, the SSD disk I bought, or the cable, betrayed me. Apparently the disk can write 2GB/s, and the camera only has USB 3.1, so maxing out around 600MB/s, but the quality I chose should be up to 180MB/s, so I’m going to just blame the stock cable that came with the disk. THANKS, KINGSTON. So because I shot BRAW, the moment a frame drops, the rest of that clip is unusable. Luckily, I had an hour of footage in 70+ clips, which was already too much to cut and edit, so, a mixed blessing.

First and a half-th: Also, 137GB of footage just for a trip to zoo???? What am I, made of hard disks?

Second: uhhhhh 70 clips. Luckily I chose the cheap way out and just applied the built-in LUTs en masse, and white balance was OK in most shots, so the color grading was minimal, but still, I had to apply image stabilization to 70 clips one by one.

Third: OH MY HANDS. Honestly, it’s not that 2.9kg is too much, but. It’s not... uh, too little either. Like of course I can lift 3kg dumbells, but try to hold those dumbells in a few fingers, keeping them stable, raising them above your head, pressing the white balance button, confirming, still keeping them stable. Uhhhh no. That’s not how my hands work at this point. Sure appreciate the workout tho.

Fourth: camera strap. Bye-bye, painless back.

Fifth: Battery grip. I was greedy to think I need to shoot SO MUCH, and I mean I did wear out most of the batteries by the end of the day, but I’m p sure next time I’ll just swap the batteries one by one as they run out.

Sixth: no telephoto lenses. Quite a lot of the animals were, uh, not close. The only ones I have now are 18-35 and 50, and I haven’t even bothered to swap lenses while it’s snowing. Also, don’t want to know how heavy the 80-200 lenses are.

Seventh: I brought a tripod, and haven’t used it. Why did I think animals would pose for me in one place? In winter? While it’s snowing???

Eighth: Oh my brain, how dumb I feel now that I realize how much I misunderstood the dual framerate feature. What I thought is that there’s a convenient button to switch to a different framerate. What the camera does, is that it keeps the project, and the sound at a given “primary” framerate (in my case, 50fps), and when you switch to the alternative framerate, which I set to 25fps, it will record two seconds of video into one second of footage. Aaaaand it will keep recording audio to align with 50fps.

So when I wanted to recover the 25fps footage, which, spoiler alert, was 90% of what I shot today, it means I have to audio-stretch the audio - not that there was anything important going on besides estonian and russian children getting excited, but still it kinda sucks to have the audio mangled by the lame stretching algorithm, and also NO I don’t have energy to make an ambient track to put in the background today.