never forget: camera eats first
Honoka’s been in the OP/ED the whole time but this week she finally actually shows up, bringing an unnecessary amount of camera jargon (and some particular Eurobeat…) with her. Lovely episode, though I am missing Kaede.
Notes:
The Japanese have a thing for magic rocks (as well as astrology and blood types). Don’t ask me.
Yamada Noboru (山田昇, what a name for a climber) was a Japanese alpinist. Like Uemura Naomi, died on McKinley. Yamada ended up climbing nine of the fourteen eight-thousanders, which are the mountains with summits above 8,000 metres.
Lockheart Castle’s a real place, and you can actually go there for a fun time with your squad of high school girls. It is in fact a castle that’s been moved from Scotland, brick by brick across the Soviet Union, and reassembled in Japan. Why? God only knows.
I won’t go too deep into the camera business, but f/2 is a measure of the aperture size (as against the focal length). Lower number means bigger aperture means more light means no flash. And while Aoi’s disappointed about being the only one having a phone, in this day and age it probably takes better pictures.
“Lockheart Castle’s a real place, and you can actually go there for a fun time with your squad of high school girls. It is in fact a castle that’s been moved from Scotland, brick by brick across the Soviet Union, and reassembled in Japan. Why? God only knows.”
That was kinda my reaction as well.
Thanks for the episode! 🙂
Thanks for another charming episode!
Just a note on camera jargon – you have Honoka say that her camera “has a pretty bright lens”. A lens that can pull in a lot of light is called a fast lens, and Honoka would use that terminology in English – she’s obviously well versed in this stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed for reference on the terminology.
The rest of her jargon is spot on.
Aha, I actually looked this one up. Here we go. Yes, I was aware of the ‘fast’ terminology, and I consciously made the (perhaps poor) decision of using ‘bright’ instead. Let’s get it out the way that I am absolutely no photographer and don’t really know the terminology well from personal experience.
First and foremost, and by far the greatest part of the reasoning, is that it’s literally ‘bright’ (明るい) in Japanese, and that appears to be the established Japanese terminology for ‘low minimum f-stop’. Is this reasoning (‘literal’ translation) really sound in principle or in general? Absolutely not, but it can be specifically, and it happened to be somewhat so here.
The discussion in the show itself is sparked by the lighting, and so ‘bright’ has a more direct relationship to the setting. It’s possible (likely!) that the other three girls know nothing at all about cameras, but it happens to be the case that the Japanese ‘bright’ term is sufficiently self-explanatory that that isn’t the major hangup: they skip over asking what ‘bright’ means (presumably as they can guess) and instead ask about ‘f/2’.
This works its way into English a bit in that I, personally, as a not-photographer person, find ‘bright’ to be more intuitive (‘Ah, bright, takes in more light, doesn’t need flash, gotcha.’). ‘Fast’ probably would confuse me (‘So it’s fast, like shutter speed? Isn’t that separate from the lens…?’), though perhaps the line -should- be confusing to non-photographers, and that’s actually a fair point of consideration given what happens after they get Honoka started. The point, anyway, is that we can consider ‘fast’ pretty nontrivial jargon and presume that if Aoi and co. spoke English they wouldn’t get it, but that they -would- understand ‘bright’ (and appear to understand ‘明るい’).
I also looked both terms up, and while ‘bright’ (in English) appears rarer, it seems to be reasonably (or perhaps -sufficiently-) well established. Variations on ‘lens brightness’ give me the f-number Wikipedia article as the first hit, while a bit of digging and some exact quoting shows intermittent and interchangeable usage not uncommonly, and not just in random websites but also in magazines and on some camera manufacturers’ sites.
As a total aside for interest, and I don’t mean for this to constitute evidence (because it doesn’t), as far as I can tell (not speaking Kraut or Frog), German uses ‘dazzle number’ (‘Blendenzahl’, and light-related) and French uses ‘aperture number’ (‘nombre d’ouverture’, very boring) for the f-stop. More relevantly, the French (again, disclaimer, this is some low-level Googling business) appear to prefer ‘lumineux’ (‘bright’) over ‘rapide’ (‘fast lens’), while the German terminology appears to be ‘lichtstaerke’ (also ‘bright’). No bearing on English, but it seems that, as usual, we’re the odd ones out. I wouldn’t be surprised if the minority ‘fast’ usage in other languages (I’m guessing ‘rapide’, perhaps ‘schnelle’, and probably ‘速い’) was in fact due entirely to corrupting English influence.
In any case, I found ‘bright’ to be both A) more faithful, and B) more intuitive in context (both for the non-photographer English audience as well as Aoi, Hinata, and Kokona). It’s also C) sufficiently attested, if certainly less popular, for me to be OK with using it. That was my reasoning.
Thanks for bringing it up, though! I do like talking about the script and the decisions made, and of course it’s best to be corrected if I’m really in the wrong; I’d love to hear a response if you’re unconvinced by my argument, and if there’s anything else please don’t hesitate. As always, thanks for watching and commenting!
Great reply and arguments for why bright was used instead of fast
and then I read this
“not speaking Kraut or Frog”
and I’m surprised that in this age of political correctness and anti-racism, that such a racist slur would still be used by some.
Hello, thanks for your concerns. I don’t personally view either of those as actually being slurs, as it were, in the sort of offensive capacity. I consider them humorous terms, and they were intended as such. Pejorative or derogatory? Of course, but offensive? No.
Kraut belongs to a whole dustbin of ancient (well, World Wars-era) designations for Germans. You’ve got Jerry, Fritz, Hun, and kraut, none of which I would consider offensive in the present day. They’re so dated as to almost certainly be used ironically (see also: Chinaman, which I certainly can’t take seriously; compare ‘chink’, which I almost can (but still not quite)). For the likes of Fritz, there’s the British analogue of Tommy, which is certainly totally in the clear.
There are certainly slurs dating from that era that maintain a bit of sting (Jap comes immediately to mind) but I don’t think ‘kraut’ is one of them. Slurs that refer to people as items of food are inherently absurd, and I find it surprising that anybody takes them seriously. To elaborate a bit, the other food-based slurs that come to mind are ‘limey’ for Brits (the big one, but absolutely a zero on the scale), and (perhaps limited to Internet memeing) ‘burger’ (or the legendary Russian ‘gamburger’) for Americans and ‘kebab’ for Turks. ‘Beaner’ (for Mexicans) doesn’t quite fall into this category (‘bean’ would) because it’s derived more from ‘bean-eater’ or something along those lines, and the fact that the appellation refers to a thing a person can conceivably be (and stereotypically is) makes it rather more serious. It’s worth nothing, though, that ‘beaner’ is on the less offensive end of the Mexican scale, paling before the likes of ‘spic’ and ‘wetback’.
Frog is actually a bit different, and doesn’t derive from food. The origins are in contention, but it was possibly just a general term of abuse (not limited to the French) that was then extended, or used originally for the swamp-living Dutch, or a term the French themselves used for the revolutionary lower class (‘les grenouilles’) who were mostly countryside peasants, or something Queen Elizabeth just enjoyed calling the Duke of Anjou. The interesting thing is that ‘frog’ has a long tradition of being paired with its opposite, ‘le rosbif’ (‘roast beef’), which -is- a food slur. In any case, ‘rosbif’ certainly strikes me as a humorous and inoffensive, and so given ‘frog”s association with it, I don’t believe it to be too offensive either.
Of course that’s all just my personal view, but harder data was difficult to find (which likely speaks to the innocuity of the terms). Here’s one paper source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1360316/Germans-feel-sour-over-kraut-ruling.html The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority finds ‘kraut’ to be OK, in the context of ‘the krauts are coming’. In fairness, the German embassy raised a complaint, but their complaint was literally ‘that’s not very nice’ (quote from a BBC article on the same topic: ‘If you were called cabbage, you would not like it.’), which is the kind of perfunctory admonition a schoolteacher gives a kid when they call someone else a butthead. ‘Butthead’ is not a real insult, and neither is ‘cabbage’. In the same source it mentions a condemnation (by a different authority) for ‘frog’, but in the charged context of ‘stroopy little frog’. Context matters, and it’s not clear whether it was because ‘frog’ itself is racist (which I doubt) or because the guy was clearly being racist towards the French (which seems more likely to me).
There’s a difference between your WWII-veteran grandfather (or especially WWI, if any of those are still around) calling Germans ‘krauts’ with every bit of possible malice, and an offhand joke (especially when I actually care about those languages) made generations after the fact. The offensiveness is a function of speaker intent, listener sensibility, and the word itself, and I think that the combination of the three here isn’t really past the necessary threshold, though that perhaps isn’t entirely my call to make. It’s obvious to all, though, that neither term holds a candle to the real ethnic slur heavy-hitters (and it’s my view that neither ‘chink’ nor ‘Jap’ are really included in there anymore, though that’s rather more contentious). It’s an interesting and fairly complex topic, made worse by the difficulty inherent and delicacy required, but it’s my position that those two aren’t really worth being offended over, especially given the existence of far worse. The bottom line, of course, is that I personally don’t think them offensive, and whether that’s enough is up for debate.
Thanks as always for your comments, and it was an interesting bit of research.
Thankyou 🙂
First of all, a hearty thank you to the entire team.
I personally found the “bright” reference rather confusing, but because I grew up before cell phones had decent cameras, and the “fast lens” jargon was a *lot* more common than today, that’s probably the reason. (my sister’s first cell phone from 1989 was the size of, and at 2Kg was also the weight of, a brick. Her first phone that included a camera had only 95,200 pixels [340×280 image] or roughly what a 1/4 mm square of “Tri-X” black and white film could still resolve when pushed from its normal 400 ASA to 4000-ish during processing. [when pushed, the silver granules that create the image on the negative grow much larger than normal. When enlarged and printed, this results in a “grainy” image that looks like it’s constructed from course dark sand on a white background.])
It wasn’t until around 2005 when non-professional digital sensors finally exceeded the resolution that old-fashioned film could provide.
ps. almost all phones don’t have the 25 megapixel sensor that exceeding the resolution of 35mm 100 ASA film would require when exposed and developed properly. I know of only a single exception, and it’s extremely unlikely that high school aged girls that are into mountain climbing would be carrying around a $2,500 phone considering how easily smartphones get damaged, (seeing un-cracked screens when school-aged children pull them out is a rarity) and the amount of climbing gear they could get for that same quarter-million yen.
That’s interesting. On thinking about it, I guess it makes sense that an analogue medium would have a high resolution or quality if used properly / sufficiently advanced. Thanks for your comments, and about your impression on the bright/fast aspect as well.