Farsi Friday

It's Friday today - the weekly holiday - and Farsi is on my mind.

Here is Afghanistan two languages dominate the sound-scape: Dari and Pashto. Last year, when I first landed at Kabul airport, I was amazed to hear the driver who came to pick me up, ask somebody, "Kujo ast?" - and I understood the meaning perfectly!

Then at my workplace, I heard a colleague asking for a "Kainchi" and I knew without looking up that he wanted a pair of scissors. As days went by the list of familiar words got longer and longer - Charkhi (rotate), Hal (solve), Kharid (buy), Khwaab (dream), Daan (gift), Giriftaar (arrest), Pasand (like), Mushkil (difficult), Khushi (joy)... Just about all the words I assumed to be Urdu actually belonged to Farsi!

It turns out that Dari is the same as Farsi, the language of Iran and much of the former Persian Empire which included not only Afghanistan but also Iraq, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and parts of southern Russia. It is spoken by no less than 110 million people! Countries that belonged to the former USSR stopped using the Farsi script and adopted the Russian script.

Now if the words sounded so familiar, how long would it take to make sense of the written Farsi script? The curls, dots and squiggles on banners, shops and books looked completely different from the 32 letters a friend wrote down for me. A search of lessons on YouTube followed, and I gradually learnt that the letters when written together take on completely different shapes.

I continue to be confused by letters that sound similar:
"A" can be آ or ع
"Ta" - ط  or  ت
"Se" - س or  ث
"He" - ح or ه
"Za" - 4 options (!) - ظ ض ز ذ
"Ga" - غ or  ق

It may take a while to get a hang of the written and spoken language but until then, we have music! Here is a sample of some amazing Farsi instrumentals by Mehdi Aminian -

Prime Lens - Back to Basics

A kit lens makes you lazy. This is the first thing you learn when you step out of your comfort zone in photography.

I have been photographing with an 18-105mm lens for more than 10 years now and thanks to the convenience of zooming in and out, I had all but forgotten the basics of photography. I knew I needed to get back to the basics, to detox, to relearn, and a fixed-focus 'prime lens' seemed the best way forward.

The ones I could afford were shortlisted to the Nikkor 50mm 1.8 lenses which came in two types 'D' and 'G'.  The 'D' was a older version without an inbuilt focusing motor, and it came for less than half the price of the 'G'. Since I was using a camera body that already had a motor the former seemed better value for money - especially when it came at an an extra discount during the recent Amazon Sale.

So last month, I set aside my kit lens for the first time, and twisted into its place a brand new 50mm 1.8D. The Nikon D90 now felt like a strange new animal - lighter, faster and sharper than ever before, and yet completely unfamiliar. Despite clocking nearly 50,000 'shutter actuations' on the D90, I realised that  knew very little about the nuts and bolts, the basics of photography: focal lengths, F-stops and apertures.

They say the 50mm lens shows you the world the way your eyes see it, by "rendering images that closely match the true perspective of the human eye". Sounds nice... but when you look through the 50mm lens for the first time you feel like a horse with blinkers plodding through a tunnel. The world shrinks. Instead of just zooming you now need to use your feet and composition becomes a bit of a struggle.

The 50mm lens is also a bit puzzling with all its numbers and dials packed into a tiny ring. So here is a collection of links that has helped me re-learn photography -

• Sudhir Shivaram tutorial - https://youtu.be/WXdAX0No2hM
• Mark Levoy - Lectures on Digital Photography - https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home
• Steele Training - DSLR focus tips - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4bQc36r5ek&feature=youtu.be
• Why wide-angle lens should not be used for portraits - https://www.diyphotography.net/gif-explains-changing-focal-length-impacts-portrait/

• Exposure Triangle - cheatsheet - https://www.hamburger-fotospots.de/kostenloser-download-foto-cheatcard-fuer-fotografen.html

Understanding Exposure and F-Stops:

• Expert Photography - https://expertphotography.com/understanding-fstops-stops-in-photography-exposure/
• Dylan Bennett (2012)- A Simple Explanation of F-Stop - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmNIouLByJQ

And just in case you too are weighing the pros and cons of a prime lens, these might help -

• Comparisons - The Nikon Guy -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU9YfNgoBLU
• https://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-50mm-f1-8g
• https://improvephotography.com/34639/nikon-50mm-1-8d-vs-1-8g/
• https://versus.com/en/nikon-af-nikkor-50mm-f-1-8d-vs-nikon-af-s-nikkor-50mm-f-1-8g