Eoghann Irving's Blog

Gaining the respect of your team should be one of the highest priorities for any manager. Respect leads to a more positive work environment, increased employee engagement, productivity and retention, all things that any good manager wants.

However, if you’re looking for respect from your employees, you’re going to need to focus on your team rather than yourself. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that titles have some sort of inherent meaning or representation of your value.

While a grandiose title can feel quite nice, it is ultimately a hollow thing as there is very little standardization of levels and roles, and the cross-functional and cross-divisional management structures in most corporations result in people with similar titles but distinctly different jobs. At various times and places, I have held both manager and director positions. One sounds more impressive, however, I had greater responsibilities as a manager than a director.

Titles change a lot too. While working as a Subcontracts Administrator, I had three different titles (for the same role) within 4 years. The job didn’t change, my satisfaction and/or frustrations did not change, only the words below my name on my email signature.

Don’t assume that with a title, and the authority associated with it, comes automatic respect. Your title lets you tell people what to do. It doesn’t make them want to work with you or agree with you. Respect must be earned. It’s not something that you are entitled to, or part of your compensation package along with x hours of PTO and stock options. 

Take the time to reflect on your leadership style and consider how you can build genuine relationships with your employees. Remember that titles don’t automatically command respect, you earn it through your actions and behaviors. Prioritize listening to your team, prioritize their needs, and show authenticity in your interactions. By focusing on building a respectful and collaborative team environment, you can create a more productive and fulfilling workplace for everyone involved.

Communicating with clarity and transparency is your greatest asset as a manager. Most industries are cluttered with jargon and the business world is fond of what a former colleague of mine once referred to as “business puffery” so when challenged to explain something it is easy to fall back on the buzzwords and talking points. Don’t do it,  it is a mistake.

Instead focus on using plain language and specific examples to explain things clearly and concisely. Do not evade, if you can’t provide an answer, or do not have an answer, then simply say so. Always remember that you are dealing with people not statistics and show that you respect their intelligence.

By all means, focus on the positive aspects of the message that you need to convey, but if you attempt to tell someone that the sun is shining when the rain is clearly pouring down you are not only insulting their intelligence, you are telling them you do not respect them. Transparency builds trust and respect, two of the rarest and most valuable commodities in management which cannot be bought and once lost are hard to regain once lost. Both qualities are reciprocal, if you do not show trust and respect, you will never earn it.

In a market with high employment and rising salaries retaining your existing team has never been more important. Your employees will almost inevitably find a better offer once they start looking. Establishing a relationship of trust and respect with your team will not only benefit you as it enables them to in turn communicate back in a respectful but honest fashion, it will reduce turnover and save your company from costly knowledge loss.

This is probably one of the best received stories of the Chibnall/Whittaker era and for me at least it is easy to see why it might appeal to so many people. At its heart is is a very simple story, but one that I think any viewer could relate to on some level. There are some flaws still though, familiar ones at that.

This episode looks amazing to me. First off we have that cinematic style that this season has been using with the wide-screen shots, anamorphic lenses and the color grading. That’s amplified further here by the location footage which just looks stunning. Shooting this in Spain was worthwhile in that it definitely did not feel at all like Britain visually. Perhaps someone with more awareness of directors etc. will be able to spot flaws but if they are there they went unnoticed by me.

Family and the Past

I always enjoy seeing Yaz interact with her family and part of me wishes that we’d seen more of that over the seasons but at the same time I don’t want the show tied too heavily to one time and place so, it’s at trade-off. RTD is of course generally well regarded for his inclusion of “soap opera” family elements in his run but his take on it ran much more towards the comedic. As a result those families felt like, dare I say it, stereotypes to me. On the other hand the way Yaz and her family interact just feels natural and it’s great. Neither of those approaches is wrong, I just enjoy the latter more than the former.

It’s interesting to see how this particular Doctor approaches the issue of meddling with time. She knows it’s a bad idea, she tells them it’s a bad idea, but she’s curious. Throw on an eagerness to please her friends and of course she goes along with it. Even her lecturing seems a bit half-hearted. Of course as viewers we have been trained to know that meddling in your own past never goes well!

This is the first televised Doctor Who story set in India, and I’m not aware of very many extended universe stories set there either, so it’s definitely an under-utilized location. On top of that setting this during the partition is a brave choice. At least when I was at school, all those many moons ago, that was a bit of history that simply wasn’t taught. None of us like to admit our mistakes or misdeeds do we? Having those tensions in the background as the Doctor and companions arrive creates a simmering worry as the episode progresses.

They don’t shy away from the topic either or from what happened as a result of it. I particularly like that while putting blame, where it firmly belongs, on the British for enacting the partition the story highlights that it is local people who are doing most of the damage. There’s no shortage of villains here, speaking of which!

The Demons

We’re clearly primed to see the Thijarians as the antagonists of this story from their first appearance and before we know anything about them. They’re hovering around a dead body and their telepathy is so harsh it’s almost a mental attack. Of course we, like the Doctor and everyone else, will jump to conclusions. And those conclusions are reinforced when we get a little information on their background, Thijarians are bad, everyone knows they are bad! Though I’ve got to say they look incredibly cool and I feel like while I was being assassinated by them I’d probably be thinking, how come they look so cool? Bonus points to whoever did the design work on this one.

The presence and apparent threat of the Thijarians does more than serve as a red-herring to the viewers though, they propel the plot forward, providing tension as we feel like the family is under threat of death from them. Their repeated appearance gives the Doctor a reason to stay and be an active protagonist as well as eventually providing us with foreknowledge that colors the final part of the story. This story could have been told without any aliens and I know some people would have liked to see that, but it would have been a significantly different story because you would need to introduce some additional characters to achieve the same goals. In addition part of the point here is the realization that the humans are the Demons.

What transpires is both inevitable and trivially avoidable at the same time. Manish and his extremism are present from the beginning although mostly going under the radar because of the Thijarian threat. There’s always the question of what could have been said or done and when would the action have made the difference. By the time Manish and Prem are standing on opposite sides of the gun it’s already too late.

All in all this is a very mature story with some subtlety and nuance in its presentation. It doesn’t give us easy answers, or even a clear win because that’s not really what life is about and this story is rooted in life. Even the fact that Umbreen goes on to have a full life and marries someone else rings so much more true to life to me and is so much more healthy than yet another story where love is instant and permanent and soul mates seem to mean the universe putting you together and there can’t ever be anyone else.

Once we know what is going to happen (if not all the specifics) there was a risk of it becoming incredibly angsty and blatantly pulling heart strings, but I think it largely steered clear of that trip. We feel the blow coming and we can see the upset on peoples faces. Graham struggles for words at one point, but overall it is nicely underplayed.

Checking in on the Fam

In an episode like this we’d obviously expect to see Yaz get more focus than the other two companions and sure enough she does. What she sees in the past really challenges her perspective of her grandmother. We haven’t had too many interactions between Graham and Yaz so I liked their conversation in this episode. Yes, what he had to say might have felt a little bit preachy but it also felt like the sort of thing someone of his age and with his life experience might say to a teenager who is discovering that life isn’t quite as simple as she thought.

Ryan gets less to work with here but I think both character and actor do great with what there is. Tosin’s acting when the Doctor delivers the news of what’s going to happen is on point. Even though Ryan is in the backgrounded since the focus is on Yaz, you can see his face processing the information and the glance at Graham, good detail work. Similarly Ryan is on point earlier on in the episode asking very astute questions about the demons.

I see it repeated a lot that three companions is too many, that their characters don’t get developed and that their screentime is uneven. The first two I just don’t see in re-watching these episodes and the third is irrelevant. If anything, to me, the interaction between the three of them and the Doctor is one of the strengths of the show.

It’s Brilliant Then?

Well I have been pretty complimentary so far haven’t I? However, the story does have its flaws. Let’s start with the inevitable which is that the Thijarian backstory is given to us in a pure info dump. I’m not sure how that could be avoided given time constraints and the structure of the episode, but it’s easily the least engaging part of the story, and of course it’s part of a larger pattern that has been noted (and will show up again).

The second issue I have is that some of the characters would have benefitted from being a bit more developed. Prem gets a good amount of attention and background, but Umbreen much less so and young Umbreen comes across pretty much as a “princess” without too much more depth. You can argue of course that the depth comes from what we see of her in her old age and that’s a fair point.

Manish is the one that suffers the most in that giving him just a little more time to express his anger and his resentments would have rounded him out further. I find the character believable enough as is, because this is a thing that happened then and still happens today, it would just have been nice to see a little more of how he got there.

All in all though, really good Doctor Who.

I’ve been doing some more experimentation with applying Generative AI to my existing images and thought I would share. I started with a base image of a photo of a Cardinal that I took this summer. Notice the watermark in the corner, that’s going to show up in a lot of the generated images and shows how heavily influenced they are by my original photo. As images go it’s fine, I was practicing with my telephoto lens and captured the cardinal in a pool of light, which is nice, but it’s nothing very exciting.

First off let’s see what happens if we just apply some common art styles to the photo. I used the same “seed” for all these prompts which reduces the randomness and makes for a closer comparison, so if you see a lot of common poses, that’s not a limitation of Midjourney, its deliberate on my part.

One in most of my prompts I do reinforce that the bird is a cardinal to avoid random other birds getting mixed into the images, one effect of that is that most of these images show a crest on the bird even though there isn’t one in my original photo. These are all pretty successful reinterpretations of the original image.

<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; comicbook cardinal<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; hungry cardinal, ink<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; hungry cardinal, pencil<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; hungry cardinal, thick oil paint, brushstrokes

Then I thought it was time to get a little more adventurous and push the image further from its default state. For the most part these worked quite well too, although to my eyes the sand sculpture looks like it’s made out of clay with sand around the base. I believe that’s the result of mixing the two images together. The light paiting one is an interesting case too in that I first had to generate an image of some light painting and then combined that as well to reinforce the style I was looking for. For all these images I didn’t attempt to change the feel, just the look. Another time I may experiment with using emotions in the prompts as well.

<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; <https://s.mj.run/Db67wglYvAU&gt; cardinal, light painting style<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; large drops of rain splashing on cardinal and ground, ink<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; origami cardinal<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; stained glass cardinal<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; cardinal sand sculpture

The final four images are my absolute favorites. Here I stopped worrying about reality at all and this is where in my mind the greatest potential lies for this sort of thing. Yes, it will be able to generate a pixel perfect “photo” but, why bother, we can already do that. Here it’s meshing my photo, my ideas and it’s learning together to create something different.

<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; emerging from swirl of paint<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; splashing water<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; emerging from spiral galaxy<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; ice crystals, wintry, frost

I’ve been doing some more experimentation with applying Generative AI to my existing images and thought I would share. I started with a base image of a photo of a Cardinal that I took this summer. Notice the watermark in the corner, that’s going to show up in a lot of the generated images and shows how heavily influenced they are by my original photo. As images go it’s fine, I was practicing with my telephoto lens and captured the cardinal in a pool of light, which is nice, but it’s nothing very exciting.

First off let’s see what happens if we just apply some common art styles to the photo. I used the same “seed” for all these prompts which reduces the randomness and makes for a closer comparison, so if you see a lot of common poses, that’s not a limitation of Midjourney, its deliberate on my part.

One in most of my prompts I do reinforce that the bird is a cardinal to avoid random other birds getting mixed into the images, one effect of that is that most of these images show a crest on the bird even though there isn’t one in my original photo. These are all pretty successful reinterpretations of the original image.

<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; comicbook cardinal<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; hungry cardinal, ink<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; hungry cardinal, pencil<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; hungry cardinal, thick oil paint, brushstrokes

Then I thought it was time to get a little more adventurous and push the image further from its default state. For the most part these worked quite well too, although to my eyes the sand sculpture looks like it’s made out of clay with sand around the base. I believe that’s the result of mixing the two images together. The light paiting one is an interesting case too in that I first had to generate an image of some light painting and then combined that as well to reinforce the style I was looking for. For all these images I didn’t attempt to change the feel, just the look. Another time I may experiment with using emotions in the prompts as well.

<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; <https://s.mj.run/Db67wglYvAU&gt; cardinal, light painting style<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; large drops of rain splashing on cardinal and ground, ink<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; origami cardinal<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; stained glass cardinal<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; cardinal sand sculpture

The final four images are my absolute favorites. Here I stopped worrying about reality at all and this is where in my mind the greatest potential lies for this sort of thing. Yes, it will be able to generate a pixel perfect “photo” but, why bother, we can already do that. Here it’s meshing my photo, my ideas and it’s learning together to create something different.

<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; emerging from swirl of paint<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; splashing water<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; emerging from spiral galaxy<https://s.mj.run/uqa45bbWyi4&gt; ice crystals, wintry, frost

I’m not a documentary style photographer and so, to the extent it deserves any sort of appellation, my photography is art. That makes me particularly interested in the use of Generative AI (in it’s current amazing but also highly limited form) to modify my own photography. There remain a lot of ethical questions around Generative AI for artwork, but it’s important to understand what it isn’t. It is not simply a matter of cutting and pasting bits of existing images, in fact the process is much closer to how humans learn the craft of composition etc.

Under current laws the following images cannot be copyrighted, and yet the underlying image and the prompt to create the derivative image are clearly mine, as is evident from the images themselves. Fortunately I’m not trying to make money of this, so lack of copyright is not much of an issue to me personally, but it’s going to be a thorny one as this develops.

I started with this image which I took a couple of years back and had previously processed quite heavily. Amongst other things I had done some color grading and applied an Orton effect to the RAW image. Already then, from my perspective, this has moved from the realm of documentary photography to artistic photography.

Using this initial image as part of the prompt I then added:

/imagine sunkissed, mosaic style --ar 16:9 --q 2

Which gave me the following image. It’s worth noting that Midjourney gives you four thumbnail images initially and allows you to create variations so I am skipping some steps in terms of picking the one I liked the most and finessing it a bit. You can see that the beach and color scheme here are heavily influenced by my original photo, but Midjourney has introduced an attractive woman, presumably based on the word “sunkissed” and the sort of images that it found in its database relating to that. I think it has quite effectively introduced mosaic like styling to the image, more strongly in the woman than else where, all in all it’s quite an attractive image and does match the prompt well.

Next up I gave Midjourney a different style prompt:

/imagine sundrenched, stained glass style --ar 16:9 --q 2

If you are wondering about the extra commands at the end –ar specifies an aspect resolution, in this case the classic widescreen of 16:9, but you could easily do a 5:4 or a 4:3 and by default it gives you a 1:1 square. Meanwhile –q 2 is a higher quality setting than the default at the cost of a bit more processing time (depending on your subscription you get a certain number of fast processing minutes per month).

The resulting image departs further from my source photo but you can still see many of the elements present and the color scheme is clearly taken from that photo. It’s added some lovely stained glass elements to the frame and taken “sundrenched” to heart by pumping up that sun.

For the last one I really wanted to push the image as far from my source photo as possible, while still being a beach scene, and see what Midjourney would do with it. So I gave it the following prompt:

/imagine storm surge, angry, shadows --ar 16:9 --q 2

It gave me this quite stunning scene which at first glance does seem very different to where we started, but then you look closer. Yes it’s still a beach scene of course; we’re looking diagonally along the shoreline; in the top right we still have buildings; the rocks are still present; the colors are darker because of that storm, but the storm is fighting that bright slightly pinkish/orangish sunlight from my photo (in the foreground and also on the building). It’s a picture in its own right, but you can see its origins.

So, what do I make of all this? I think there’s going to be a major shakeout in a variety of industries (not just artistic ones) as this type of machine learning develops and improves. I think society needs to start wrapping their head around it, rather than retreating to “computers bad, make it go away” because it’s not going away.

AND, from a personal perspective as a hobby photographer, I think it opens up a lot of very interesting artistic avenues for me. As with so many things in life, it’s not all one thing or all the other, but rather a complicated mix of good and bad.

My head hurt a lot.

There was a giant knot right above my temple which got progressively more painful every time I prodded it. My Supermart 13 shift was, well… have you ever been to Supermart 13? That’s what it was, only with a sore head and not enough sleep. I was really looking forward to getting home to my comfy bed and crashing for the evening. At least until I remembered Steven.

You remember Steven, right? He’s the guy who started all this. He’s also the one I blame for the fact that when I finally got home, my house was trashed.

The door, an admittedly flimsy thing, had been ripped off its hinges and then… jumped on? Inside was no better. My sofa had been slashed and ripped to shreds. I didn’t even want to look at the rest of the house. And there was Steven, standing in my driveway and looking bewildered. You can’t blame me for being a little cross.

“What happened?” He asked. I ground my teeth.

“Rough neighborhood.” Was all I said. And apparently he found that entirely credible because he dropped the subject and went straight on to what mattered to him.

“Have you found out anything?” He stared at me, thumb picking at the nails of the other hand. The intensity was rather unnerving. I glanced at my ruined home and sighed. There was no way to put this off for a more convenient time.

“Not a lot.” I admitted. “But enough to know that your girlfriend got mixed up with something.” Steven didn’t blink, still worrying at his fingernails. He didn’t say anything, just waited.

“But not enough to know what it is.” I continued, feeling the need to fill the silence. His face drew into a frown, obviously unsatisfied with the answer. He must have moved at some point because now he was uncomfortably close.

I resisted the temptation to point out that I was doing him a massive favor right now and to be grateful for anything he got. But my frustration must have shown because he stepped back and made a visible effort to calm himself. I guess I shouldn’t take up playing poker.

“Um… what will you do next?” His voice trembled a little as he battled his emotions.

“My research.”

It came out harsher than I intended. The boy seemed to be genuinely worried about his girlfriend. But I was tired, and sore and in truth more than a little angry at myself for walking into this mess without doing more background work.

“Ever heard of Armann Flosason?” I asked, making a conscious effort at a more neutral tone. Steven shook his head, there was no sign of recognition on his face. Well, it was a long shot.

The conversation dragged on for several more unproductive minutes. I finally persuaded Steven to go away and leave me in peace. Mainly by suggesting that he could help me tidy up the disaster that my house had become.

The mess was so bad that I wasn’t even sure where to start. The door would need to be replaced obviously and from the look of things the sofa was a lost cause. Yet more money I didn’t actually have.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened though. I certainly didn’t need magic to confirm it. My eyes told me everything I needed to know. The sofa pillows were ripped up by claws. The door had been smashed like it was made of balsa wood. No human could have done this. I still don’t know who they were or if it was the same one who had attacked me last night, but the wolves had visited.

First on my list of tasks was an emergency text to Mercedes asking her for everything she could dig up on Armann Flosason. I was praying that wouldn’t be a complete dead end because it was the only lead that I had.

For once luck was with me and they hadn’t touched my computer. Which meant that while I was waiting for Mercedes to work her personal brand of magic, it was time to try out my own research skills. The camouflage spell obviously wasn’t going to keep me safe from werewolves. I needed something more specialized for the task.

And yes, I was avoiding cleaning up. But wouldn’t you?

The answer, like most things in life, was simple. I needed a way to block the werewolves sense of smell. Turns out hunters have spent a lot of time coming up with ways to confuse animals sense of smell. But I didn’t feel like messing around with urine.

So, instead, I decided I would simply mask my own smell. Just a slight variation on my camouflage spell was all that was required. Even better I could layer it on top of the die and add it to my existing one.

With that problem solved and feeling like a top notch wizard, I turned my attention to ways that I could discourage wolves from coming anywhere near me. Looking at what they had done to my house and picturing those same creatures attacking me left me with cold sweats.

It hadn’t escaped my notice that tonight was a full moon. Apparently that wasn’t the only night they were active, but it figured so prominently in all the lore it had to be significant.

Since they knew where I lived, I needed something that would scare them off if they attacked. Unfortunately wizards don’t get to throw fireballs and lightning bolts. I remember feeling quite disappointed when I discovered that. We can, however, work with both fire and lightning in other ways.

It took several hours to figure out the specifics, but by the end I’d come up with a few different spells that might come in handy in a pinch. I just wished I had more time to test them out. You know what they say about playing with fire.

It was my phone that woke me. I peered at the screen until it came into focus. I didn’t recognize the number, but it looked like they had been trying to contact me for a while. I was ready to go back to sleep when it rang again. I can take a hint.

“Hello.” I mumbled around my strangely swollen tongue.

“Mr. Brodie?” The voice sounded young and vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. My brain still wasn’t awake enough to form a coherent response so I waited for more.

“It’s Julia… from Naomi’s apartment?” Okay, now I was awake. Even before this call I had been convinced that girl knew more about what was going on than she had told me. She was just too much of a nosey neighbor not to.

“Hey Julia. What can I do for you?” My voice cracked, throat clogged with phlegm. I held the phone away and hurriedly cleared my throat.

“Well… I wanted to talk to you… about Naomi.”Julie was either a really good actor or genuinely nervous about this conversation. Which raised all sorts of questions.

“Oh?” I played it cool. Well sort of.

“Could we… ah… meet somewhere?” She asked.

“Sure.” I said. “Tell me when and where, I’ll be there.”

And so off I set for one more trip to Shepherdstown. Which was starting to eat into my gas allowance for the week. Before leaving I had briefly struggled with how to secure my ransacked home before settling for propping the door against the frame and pushing the damaged sofa in front of it. It’s not like there was much inside that anyone would want to steal anyway.

Julia had suggested one of the bars in Shepherdstown that is popular with students. The very public location seemed like a good idea to me. It would hopefully reassure her that I had no dastardly plans and also I wasn’t likely to be savaged by werewolves there either.

It was early when I arrived and the bar was almost empty. Perfect for actually having a conversation, which is not always an easy thing in student hangouts. Julia was waiting for me, drink already in hand. Something to calm the nerves perhaps? I smiled in greeting as I walked towards where she sat and she returned it half heartedly. The way she was sitting, so stiff and upright… definitely nerves.

“So…” I said, leaning back to look at her after ordering myself a soda. “What was it you wanted to tell me about Naomi.” I’m not much for small talk, but I was trying to keep my body language open and friendly.

“Did you ever meet her?” Julie asked, her eyes not meeting mine as she avoided my question. I shook my head.

“She had some… odd… friends.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that. For a start, she apparently thought me odd enough that I might have been one of Naomi’s friends. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

“Odd how?” I asked, trying to get her to open up a bit more.

“Well. They weren’t students; I know that. One of them came to visit her just before she disappeared.”

I tried to control my excitement at that. Maybe I finally had a lead?

“What did he look like?”

“Older… A lot older. Long hair. Kind of greasy. I think he might have been Native American. He dressed like it anyway. But… that’s not why I called you. I saw him again last night.”

I really hoped my poker face was better than it had been with Steven earlier. I knew exactly where Julie had been last night. But she didn’t seem to know that I had been there. This was getting complicated. But also interesting.

“Where?” I asked. Hopefully not too eagerly.

“He broke into Naomi’s apartment.” Julia paused to drink from the glass she was cradling in her hand. “I called the cops.”

“Did they get him?”

“No.” She shook her head, fidgeting with her hair uncomfortably. “I don’t know how he got past them. I didn’t see him leave.”

Wolves probably don’t need to go through doors, I thought to myself. If only I’d had time to investigate after the police left. There might have been a trail of some sort to follow. I paused, drink raised to my mouth as it hit me.

Julia had described this man as Native American. There were Native American werewolves of a sort. Skin Walkers they were called. But that wasn’t the same thing as Lycanthropes. And, their powers had nothing to do with the moon. Realising that Julia was watching my expression closely I hurriedly turned my attention back to her.

“Do you have any idea what he was looking for?” I asked her.

“No… I thought… maybe you might?” Just then her phone rang. “Excuse me.” She apologized, stepping away from me for more privacy.

I watched her as she stood and talked on the phone. She had positioned herself safely out of listening range, but there was something about the way she held herself. Her head down, body drawn in on herself. It seemed to me that whoever was on the other end of that call was someone that she obeyed implicitly. Could it be she was more involved than she had let on?

As discretely as possible I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the pill bottle. This was going to look bad if anyone saw me. I removed the cap and made a pantomime of putting a pill in my hand and palming it into my mouth before putting the bottle away. Then, while Julia was still on the phone and no one seemed to be looking I dropped the aconite pill into her glass. It fizzed ever so softly and I fought the urge to duck and hide. But no one in the bar was paying me or the drink any attention.

Julia came back over a moment later, her conversation done. I smiled at her, trying to put her at ease although she seemed even more nervous now than she had before.

“So… this man. You don’t know his name?” I asked as though our conversation had never been interrupted. She shook her head then tucked her hair back behind her ear. She was either almost as in the dark as I was or lying with considerable skill.

“And the police didn’t find anything?”

“No.”

I made a show of drinking my soda as I tried to figure out what to do next. Almost by instinct her hand reached for her glass and she took a sip. The reaction was instantaneous.

Her nostrils flared and a growling sound came from her throat as she bared her teeth at me. Several of the bar’s patrons rose to their feet in concern so I hastily masked my self-satisfied smile as Julia ran for the door.

“Curiouser and curiouser said Alice.” I muttered to myself. Were there two groups of werewolves at play in this town?

The patrons were still giving me nasty looks so I made a show of acting like a bemused boyfriend. Hey I’m not that much older than the average student! Left a nice tip for the bartender and headed for my car.

On the way, I pulled out my phone and checked to see if Mercedes had left me any messages. There were several.

Mercedes: Armann Flosason was werewolf!

By this point that wasn’t a surprise, but the confirmation was nice. The second message was more alarming.

Mercedes:   Lived in Jefferson County from 1865 to 1884. Believed to be the alpha male!

Presumably descendants of his pack were still in the area. Probably the same pack that Julia belonged to. The same Julia I had just spiked with aconite. Possibly the same pack that had destroyed my house. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. I started walking faster but on turning the corner to get to my car I came to a halt.

There were eight men lounging around my car. Seven of them wore the state uniform of jeans, t-shirt and a cap. The eighth was wearing a suit and tie. This wasn’t going to be good.

For the majority of its running time there is remarkably little death in City of Death, that does leave me wondering if there’s a deeper meaning I missed or they just thought it was a cool title. There is some eventually, but for the majority of its running time this is more of a comedy of manners than anything else. City of Death has something of a reputation amongst Doctor Who fans. One of its episodes holds the highest audience ever for an episode of the show although frankly, it’s a meaningless boast as the ratings were artificially boosted by an ITV strike, but more importantly it’s considered to be very, very good. It’s certainly one I have strong childhood memories of, but how does it stand up to a recent rewatch?

The opening scene has some good model work as we see the Jagaroth space ship explode. I mention this because it’s important to remember that courtesy of rampant inflation the shows budgets were even more pathetic than usual so the show frequently looked bad. This fed into a perception at the time that the show looked cheap and had become a joke. Here, despite the location shooting (first time out of the UK I believe), perhaps because it is so heavily Earth based, they did a great job. The episode may well be heavily comedic but I don’t think it is a joke.

We get a pretty good idea of what this story is going to feel like the moment the Fourth Doctor and Romana show up, standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower. The banter is witty and also very aware of how clever it’s being. Technically this episode is written by the fictitious David Agnew because it’s an amalgamation of three people’s work, but Adams’ influence is overwhelming and its right there in this early dialogue. The whole sequence about flying down rather than walking is wonderfully silly for example, although likely someone has turned that into a twenty page treatise on how Time Lords fly.

Apparently since this was the first time they’d got to shoot abroad they really wanted people to know it, which means there are a lot of sequences of various people running around Paris, most of which are entirely superfluous. The first episode suffers particularly badly from this with close to 5 minutes of people wandering around out of a 24 minute episode. The remaining episodes don’t suffer as much but it’s still there and it’s pretty egregious padding really, it’s not even very interesting to watch; just random streets in France. Padding is an inevitability with Classic Who and in part exists to stretch budgets, which as we’ve already discussed were particularly thin at this time.

One thing that is comparatively unusual about this story (though much less so for Douglas Adams) is that it’s a story where time and travel through time is integral to the plot. While that’s not completely unheard of in Classic Who, the majority of stories treat the TARDIS more as a vehicle to get to the place where the story will happen so this makes for a pleasant change of pace as well as the perfect hook to get the Doctor involved as he and Romana experience a Timequake. Interesting to note that the Doctor is more aware of it and attributes that to having travelled through time more. Whether it’s an innate Time Lord thing or related to travel probably depends on the story you are watching. Adams would, of course, happily return to this type of story first with the unbroadcast Shada and then later re-working that into his first Dirk Gently story.

Essentially by the end of the first part if you’ve ever watched a Doctor Who story before you know roughly how this is going to play out, except for one major twist. The reveal of Scaroth’s face is burned into my brain from watching it as a 7 year old. Yeah by modern standards the mask is not stunning, but it was creepy as hell to me at that age. While certainly the cliffhanger I remember best from this story, it’s not the best one which clearly is the cliffhanger from episode 2 where we discover that Captain Tancredi is also Count Scarlioni, how can this be possible? This is a clever story and you do have to pay some attention for the plot to make sense. It has the basic elements we expect from Who, but it is really more interested in other things.

Despite the Paris location shooting, I suspect that the budget for this episode was pretty small. It’s not a base under siege or bottle episode and yet the number of locations used is very low. They spend half their time in Scarlioni’s chateau either upstairs or in the laboratory, and multiple uses are made of the Louvre set and a café location. It does the job of making the story feel bigger than it really is.

The thing is, while I’m entertained by this story (walking around Paris scenes excepted), I feel no tension at any point. We’re firmly in the “Tom Baker Show” era where the Doctor has just become his personality and on top of that Adams propensity for not taking things seriously shows throughout. Fortunately Adams was very good at that which is why it’s so entertaining, but the casualty is any sense of actual threat. The Doctor and Scarlioni exchange quips and barbs that would make Oscar Wilde nod and Julian Glover oozes sophisticated smarm, but at no point does he actually feel dangerous to me. At the very least that’s an unusual approach for a sci-fi adventure show known for ending on cliffhangers.

Another example of this is Duggan who is demonstrated to not be dumb, he even figures out the significance of the 7 Mona Lisas, and yet for most of the time does dumb things because he’s an increasingly ridiculous stereotype of a hardboiled detective. It’s not bad writing, it’s entirely deliberate and an effective parody of the character type, but I can’t take him seriously and so I can’t take any threat to him seriously either. And then we get the random cameo by Eleanor Bron and John Cleese which, while funny, does nothing to move the plot forward, doesn’t relate to any themes in the episode and basically seems to exist because… had a funny idea.

In that way this feels far more like a Douglas Adams story to me than a Doctor Who story because there’s not much in the way of thrills or tension here. I’m not sure how much that actually matters because Adams was very good at the sort of humor he liked to write and also had a knack for taking complicated ideas and spinning them around in clever ways. If I seem a little wishy-washy it’s because I see what people like about the episode, but, in the end I like my Doctor Who a little more serious than this and I’d rather read Dirk Gently when I want this type of comedy.

Okay, we’ve finally waded through enough of the boring technical aspects of photography and can get to the meat of things. It’s not that the technology doesn’t matter starting with some photography composition rules, but I want it to fade into the background so when you’re taking a photo you aren’t spending all of your time worrying about f-stops but instead are thinking about how the shot looks, whether it’s dynamic, what emotions it is capturing.

Today I’m going to talk about some of the most basic composition rules. As with all rules in photography, they are guides and can be ignored at times but they make a great starting point and if you’re not sure what to do with an image, you can’t go too far wrong by falling back on these. There are lots of other techniques you can use as well, or modifications of these ones once you’ve got the basics down.

Photography Composition Rule #1 – The Rule of ThirdsPhotography Composition Rule #2 – Leading LinesS-Curves – A Leading Line VariantPhotography Composition Rule #3 – SimplifyCrop to Eliminate Dead SpacePhotography Composition Rule #4 – FramesPhotography Composition Rule #5 – Patterns and RepetitionFinal ThoughtsPhotography Composition Rule #1 – The Rule of Thirds

The Rule of thirds is by far the best know photographic composition rule and also one of the easiest to apply. Most cameras now come with a grid that can superimpose over your image and most photo editing tools have a similar ability when you use their crop function.

Even if you don’t have a grid super-imposed the rule of thirds is very easy to picture in your head. Just imaging the image you are looking at cut up into 9 equally sized rectangles in 3 rows of 3. This can be used a number of ways to adjust your composition.

The simplest thing to do is to line up the focal point of your whole image (say for example a person’s eye) on one of the four points where two of the lines in the rule of thirds bisect. Another option that works well is to line any prominent vertical object up with one of the vertical lines in the grid. Or alternatively for landscape photography putting the horizon on either the top or lower line of the grid rather than having the landscape cut across the middle of the image.

The Rule of Thirds is not infallible and there are some cases where you will get a more pleasing image by ignoring this rule, but it’s a great starting point since it’s so easy to apply, and once you have composed with it in mind you can then adjust until the image balances properly.

Photography Composition Rule #2 – Leading Lines

One of the things that can distinguish a photograph from a snapshot is that a photograph invites the viewer in to explore it. That effect is achieved in various ways, but one photography composition rule that can be used to bring the viewer in is leading lines. These lines can take various different forms, sometimes they are a literal line like say a railroad track and other times they are a gap in the image which creates a sort of line.

In the case of this first example, the path through the trees creates a diagonal leading line from left to right through the image that the eye is just naturally inclined to follow. Leading lines generally work best if they aren’t purely vertical or horizontal but angled and create depth in the photo.

S-Curves – A Leading Line Variant

An S-Curve is a particular type of leading line that is very pleasing to the human eye. In my example photo, you can see a reverse S created by the path which leads you from the front of the image back past the tree on the right and then all the way back to the horizon. S-Curves are very good at creating depth in an image This particular image benefits from not only the s-curve but also the rule of 3.

Photography Composition Rule #3 – Simplify

When composing a photograph one of the questions you should always ask yourself is what is the focus? What do you want your audience to see when they look at your photo? Once you’ve figured that out you should simplify your image to remove anything that doesn’t relate to that focus.. This is easier for certain types of photography than others. Macro shots lend themselves to minimalism, while shots of woodland can be challenging to simplify.

Crop to Eliminate Dead SpaceThis image was cropped so that the focus (the bird)
took up a large part of the image

Related to the notion of simplification is cropping and filling the frame to eliminate any dead space. If the focus of your image is intended to be a piper, then crop your image so that the piper dominates the image. There are exceptions to this depending on the message and mood you want to convey. For example, you might want the piper to seem small compared to the castle he is standing in.

Photography composition can occur both during and in post-production. Ideally, you will get as tightly framed as possible in-camera, but there you are limited by the sensor shape. In Post-production, you can switch your rectangular image to a square one for example and that gives you further opportunities for cropping simplifying.

Photography Composition Rule #4 – Frames

Another technique to help draw your viewer’s eye to the focal point of your image is to use a frame. I don’t mean putting a frame around your photo, I mean using elements in your photo to create a frame. Taking a picture through a window, or using the limb of a tree to create an edge around your focal spot can encourage the viewer’s eye to go where you want it.

This rule is heavily related to the previous one about simplifying. By creating or utilizing a frame you are removing distractions from the viewer so that they key in on what you think is important in your shot. The sample image here shows this photography composition rule in practice. The train yard and mountains are framed by the fence which I was shooting through. This has the effect of leading the viewer’s eye into the photo rather than just scanning the surface of it.

Photography Composition Rule #5 – Patterns and Repetition

Nature is full of patterns as is the man-made world. If you can identify one of those patterns in your photography composition then you can use it either to draw focus or to highlight a difference.

A human mind is a pattern-matching machine of unrivaled skill. We home in on patterns subconsciously. Taking advantage of that can be a really powerful tool in photography. Anything that breaks the pattern our brains see will immediately pop out in the image and become the focal point. Some patterns can also lead the eye across the image in the same way that leading lines do.

Final Thoughts

So what about you, what is your favorite or go-to photography composition rule? Do you have another composition trick that you think is really helpful? Tell me in the comments below.

With this episode we’re already halfway through Christ Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker’s first season and this will be the fourth writing credit for Chibnall, which does raise the obvious question “did he take on too much this season”? There have been some signs already of stories that maybe needed a few tweaks or one more go over, is Tsuranga another of them, I guess we’ll see.

I really like the name The Tsuranga Conundrum, it’s one of those names which really triggers my imagination and makes me wonder what it will all be about. Doctor Who often goes for the obvious title so it’s fun when we get something different.

It’s an interesting choice to open the story with everyone getting blown up, but I think it works well here both to set up the real story and also just reinforce that travelling with the Doctor can be dangerous without harping on about it too much.

We’re On A Ship But in a Universe

Why is Roy Kent not swearing? I think I’ve only seen Brett Goldstein in one other show so the reaction is inevitable I guess. This episode does a good job of weaving a futuristic society out of relatively few people, there are a lot of references dropped in that suggest a much larger world than this spaceship. It’s also fairly clear that this is or has been a hostile universe based on first the sonic mine and then the protective procedures in place on the ship itself.

The Doctor’s urgency to return to the TARDIS confused me a little but then I noticed that she seemed to be in worse shape than everyone else so perhaps I’m supposed to think that she took the brunt of the blast and is still disoriented? If so that didn’t come over clearly to me. I did like how Astos so efficiently talked her down though it established him as someone extremely competent at his job and able to manage stressful situations. Which of course made it that much more significant when we lose him.

The other thing having the Doctor try to leave did was give us a quick tour of the ship and introduction to the supporting cast for the episode, an introduction that’s speeded up by this Doctor’s now established character trait of blurting out facts in excitement about people she meets.

The Doctor Takes Charge

From the moment she wakes up the Doctor takes control of the situation and her companions follow her, then as soon as the danger starts on the ship she extends that to effectively take command of the whole ship. I mention this because one of the recurring criticisms of the 13th Doctor I see is that she is too passive and has no agency, and yet here we are half way through the first season and she has clearly been taking charge and solving things in each episode.

At first I was looking at this episode as a base under siege, but after thinking about it for a while I realize it’s actually a mini disaster movie. The Pting, as we eventually establish, isn’t a villain or even exactly a monster. It’s just a creature doing what is natural to it and eating everyone else just has to survive it. There’s even someone giving birth, which is pure disaster movie material.

And speaking of the Pting, I think it’s just ridiculous enough to work for me. It’s absurdly overpower of course but then they make it tiny and cute look and that just puts it over the top and into fun territory.

What doesn’t work for me is Astos speech to Mabli. The problem for me is we really hadn’t seen them interact so the whole believe in yourself thing, which she then essentially repeated later in the episode, feels particularly on the nose. Also, for the most part we don’t see her doubting herself, so it’s just odd to me.

Let’s Talk About Why Ryan Is So Great

Throughout this episode we get to see the progress of Ryan’s relationship with Graham, and it’s developing at a very natural pace even if he still won’t fist bump! We also get further movement on his relationship with his natural father, courtesy of the episodes comedy element. The two plot elements were dovetailed together nicely and I thought the way he reacted when Yoss talked about giving up his child fit perfectly with Ryan’s experiences. Where I think they did miss an opportunity was that they could have had one of the other characters be more supportive of the idea of adoption. This is the sort of thing that is’ much easier to spot after the fact or with a fresh pair of eyes.

For all that at times Chibnall leans to hard on expository dialogue there are multiple great conversations in this episode like the one between Yaz and Ryan which ended so naturally with Ryan’s shrug and dismissal of his own feelings or the way the Doctor and Eve Cicero were both so obviously capable and used to being in charge, the two of them just instinctively commandeering the room and solving the problems they had identified.

We don’t get too much insight into Yaz’s feelings in this story but there is a clear impression that she’s looks up to the Doctor and is always the one who wants to be there to help her. Given that it really seems like part of the remit for this season was to make each episode easy to approach without prior knowledge I think they’ve done really well building these character arcs in the background.

Resolutely Average

One thing I’m massively enjoying in this rewatch is just how happy the Doctor is most of the time, the energy and optimism is infectious. This is not the world weary time war survivor or the masks his darkness with jokes Doctor, the 13th Doctor is a much lighter person and I think much more aligned with what we saw in Classic Who than what we’ve seen to this point in NuWho. This is not a Doctor who make worlds tremble just by uttering her name. She’s smart, she’s extremely capable, but she’s not some sort of ominous superhuman force.

Shout out again to the sound track which I find I’m noticing more this time round than on first watch. It’s low key enough to not distract but it builds into a throbbing beat when things get tense. Also, I’ve mentioned before how the show looks different this season, notice the heavy use of teal and orange in the coloring of this episode, that’s a very cinematic look that they’re using.

When it comes down to it I think this is just a very average story. For the most part its… fine. It hits most of the right notes for a Doctor Who story, the secondary characters for the most part get some resolution on their arcs and I enjoyed it enough while watching it, but there’s nothing here that makes me itch to watch it again.