Documenting change with photography

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Figure 1 - A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013. Researchers used HiRISE to examine this site because the orbiter's Context Camera had revealed a change in appearance here between observations in July 2010 and May 2012, bracketing the formation of the crater between those observations.

Figure 1 – A dramatic, fresh impact crater photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013.  The last images of this region were taken in May 2012 and showed no crater.  Image from NASA and in the public domain.

My friend Howard, who is an astrophysicist, recently posted on his Facebook page the image of Figure 1. It was taken by NASA’s Mars Orbiter and shows a new impact crater on the surface of the Red Planet. By now you know that I am a lover of the art form of these space images. I cannot help but marvel at these robotic eyes. There is so much wonderful technology in building them, in getting them there, and even in the ability to transmit high resolution images using next to no power the 35 to 250 million miles to Earth. It’s truly a marvelous invention of Man. And yes there is man or woman subtly omnipresent in the image. The composition, the choice of coloration, the delicate debris stream that radiates outward from the crater all bear the signature of artistically sensitive man. Science reunites with humanism a hundred million miles from Earth.

But in this particular image, I think that there is something more.  The image is meant in this case to document change.  This crater has appeared as if out of nowhere between May 2012 and November 2013.  It is reminiscent of the jelly doughnut rock.  There is geology at play on Mars as on Earth.  The Martian terrain bears witness to the forces of change: water, ice, wind, and sun.  We have already spoken of how rocks seem to grow over the winter in our lawns, driven, in fact, to trhe surface by a frost heave effect – that is by the expansion of ice when it freezes.  Yes there are meteorite impacts that form craters that throw rocks, and there are volcanoes that spew rocks for hundreds of miles.  The point is that geology is not static but all about change.

And it is a curious thing that photography that is the most precisely instantaneous and immutable of media is used, in so many instances, to bear witness to change.  With the jelly doughnut rock and with this crater it is geological change that the photograph is documenting.  But think of how much you enjoy leafing through old family photograph albums.  The appeal is to see a precise sequence of insanely instantaneous moments that display the change in ourselves and in our families and friend.  They make us smile, laugh, and even cry.  “Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth…”

This is also, of course, part of the appeal of old photographs.  Being black and white adds to the magic.  Sepia toning is best at setting the mood of authenticity that “yes, this is an old object.”  We love to look at old pictures.  Our eyes strain to digest every instance of change.  But is it really change that we are looking for?  In old family photographs we gain satisfaction in familiarity.  No matter how much younger you or your parents were, in the end, they really look like you.  They really are you.  And in the case of old photographs the appeal is ultimately in consistency.  They were people like us.  The clothes have changed – fashion does.  I often focus on the neckties.  But the places are ultimately the same – add a touch of nostalgia for a moment in time that you otherwise never experienced. And magically through the power of the photograph we realize that in the end they were – even are – just like us.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Selfie delusions – the quest for good front-facing cameras on cell phones

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Figure 1 - IPhone 4S image taken with the low resolution front-facing camera. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – IPhone 4S image taken with the low resolution front-facing camera. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Why does the Nokia Lumina cellphone offer a honking 41 mega pixel camera on the back and only a 1.2 megapixel front facing camera.  That’s the one you use for all those important selfies.  Remember that the selfie is the new self-expression medium.  So this is important people.  And why is this what all the cell phone companies do?  Well you’re not going to get an answer.  It has become one of those great rhetorical questions like: what is the meaning of life and why is there air?

Fortunately, New York Times reporter Molly Wood has posted a very entertaining and informative video “Your Best Selfie” to answer the next best question: what cellphone gives you the best selfie?  And since she’s done a nice side by side, apples and apples comparison you can weigh in with your own opinion.  Ms. Wood compares the IPhone 5S with its 1.2 megapixel camera, the Nokia Lumina also 1.2 megapixels the Samsung Galaxy S4 at 2 megapixels, and the HTC One with its 2.1 megapixels.

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Figure 2 – IPhone image taken with higher resolution rear-facing camera. (c) DE Wolf 2014

Ms. Wood correctly points out that it’s not all about the number of megapixels.  This agrees with all that we have said here about image sharpness.  There’s also optics and sensor quality as well as focusing accuracy.  For my mind there’s also the ability of the camera to accurately judge the white balance.  I mean you can do it yourself, but who wants to do that.  I find that warm orange glow of incandescent light kind of soporific and yucky.

Ms. Wood disses the consistency of the IPhone 5S.  I’m not so hard on it.  But her winner for the best selfie sharpness and color is the HTC One, with the Nokia Lumina being the runner up.  Look at the pictures that she shows and I think that you will agree.

I also decided to do a little testing myself.  Figure 1 was taken with my IPhone 4S’s low resolution front-facing camera – not so great.  Figure 2 was taken with the rear-facing 8 megapixel camera – better but still less than I like.  I decided to leave the glare in the pictures.  It’s a common problem with my IPhone.  Yes, it’s due to the overhead lighting, but my Canon T2i would do a much netter job dealing with it.  And ultimately that’s why we sepend big bagels on cameras.  Both of these selfies could use a lot of improvement.  I have not yet tried out the newer versions of the IPhone or other cellphone cameras myself yet.  But Molly Wood does a pretty nice job in her video.

The thing is that a cellphone is becoming much more than a wireless on the go telephone. People use it to surf the web and take pictures.  A selfie photography with the front facing camera is becoming more and more a popular sport.  So the important question, of course, is when will the industry respond to the user.  I mean cellphones are already growing in size suggesting that two points: first that the initial read about the market that smaller and smaller would always be better and second that people just don’t like squinting at their cellphones.  Makes one wonder if we will retro-evolve (retrovolve?) back to the Maxwell Smart shoe-phone size cellphone all the way back to “Hey why don’t we put this baby on the desk?”

The Beatles in America

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Figure 1 - The Beatles waving to fans on their arrival at JFK Airport in New York City on Feb. 7, 1964. UPI photograph, photographer unknown, from the LOC via the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – The Beatles waving to fans on their arrival at JFK Airport in New York City on Feb. 7, 1964. UPI photograph, photographer unknown, from the LOC via the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

The problem with great moments in history is that soon enough your own lifetime encompasses so many of them, and your brain fills with images and olfactory remembrances.  Well, fifty years ago today on February 7, 1964 the Beatles arrived in America.  It was as much as any one cultural event, a truly defining moment.  We were moving rapidly from the age of the by then murdered John F. Kennedy to the age of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.  The early sixties were one world the ten years from say 1964 to 1974 quite another.  To my mind what we now refer to as “the sixties” really spanned that shifted decade, and the Beatles arrival was one place marker of its beginning.  Anyway, I remember it all too well!

Figure 1 shows the Beatles arriving at JFK airport in New York and waving to fans.  It is from the archives of the Library of Congress and was taken by an unknown UPI photographer. More significantly, I was reading John Estrin’s Lens Blog in the New York Times, which details the career of Bill Eppridge (1938-2013). He is, perhaps, best known for his 1968 image of busboy Juan Romero comforting the mortally wounded Robert F. Kennedy.  At age 26, Eppridge covered the Beatles’ arrival for Life Magazine.   Eppridge recognized the significance of the event and followed the Beatles for the six days of their US tour. He shot an amazing 90 rolls of film.  But with the exception of the four images published by Life these were unknown until this week when Eppridges work will be published by Rizzoli in a new book, “The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World.”

Of course, there’s nothing like seeing the real thing.  Bill Eppridge’s photographs of the Beatles’ tour will be on exhibit at the Museum at Bethel Woods in Bethel, N.Y., beginning on April 5, and at the Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, N.M., starting April 25.

 

Thinking about snow and the Donner party

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Figure 1 - Summit Peak, California in 1866 showing the tree stumps cut by the Donner Party in 1846 at the snow line. From the LOC via Wikimedipedia and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Summit Peak, California in 1866 showing the tree stumps cut by the Donner Party in 1846 at the snow line. From the LOC via Wikimedipedia and in the public domain.

It has been snowing like crazy here in Massachusetts today.  So it isn’t surprising that my thoughts today center around the white fluff.  I just made a dash to the mailbox and that was quite sufficient to bring to mind the ill fated Donner Party and some very memorable photographs.

The Donner Party was a group who set out in 1846 for California during the great western migration.  Arguably the hardest part of this journey was the perilous 100 mile trip across the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Nevada mountains contain 500 distinct peaks over 12,000 feet.  But more ominously because they are constantly bathed in the air currents that carry the moist vapors of the nearby Pacific Ocean they receive a huge amount of snow.  This year (2014) is a radical exception.  But for the early wagon trains of the California migration the key was making it to and crossing the Sierras before the snow fell. The Donner Party was delayed by a series of mishaps and didn’t reach the Sierras until early November of 1846.  They were forced to winter in the Sierra Nevada.  Snowbound, their food ran out and some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating those who had succumbed to the deprivations of a bitter winter.  Their story is legendary and considered to be one of the great tragedies of western history.

Figure 1 is an example of one of the photographs that I was speaking about. It was taken twenty years after the tragedy and shows the “Stumps of trees cut by the Donner Party in Summit Valley, Placer County.”  The cut line towers over the man in the photograph, illustrating just how high the snow pack was in 1846 – just how hopeless the plight of these people was.  The image is a gray-scaled albumen print, half of a stereograph. It is from the Library of Congress and was originally published as “Gems of California scenery, no. 778 (1866).”

I think that it is significant to note that the photograph does not show any of the horrors and deprivations that the Donner Party endured.  Rather it accomplishes the same effect by allusion and association.  You look at the man and then at the tree stumps and the whole story floods back into your mind.  Photographs do not always need to depict terrible events graphically.  Sometimes the associations is enough.

I once saw a British Documentary about the holocaust that followed the return of a woman, who was a physician, to Auschwitz.  The documentary showed nothing graphic.  It didn’t wrench you away with vividness. Rather it was defined by a moment when the woman entered a rooms, started to point out what was what, and then started to cry uncontrollably.  It was that association which made this the most effective such documentary that I have ever seen.

Mars rock is back in the news

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When I posted last Wednesday about the now famous Mars rock, I thought that was it.  But, the plot thickens, as they say.  So I could not resist picking up the story.  Astrobiologist, Dr. Rhawn Joseph, is no suing NASA and its administrator Charles Bolden in the hope of compelling them to look into this rock further.  He believes that there is a biological explanation and wants that pursued.

According to NASA’s Principal Investigator on the Rover Mission, Steve Squyres, it is a rock.  But Joseph suggests that the object resembles a “mushroom-like fungus” known as an apothecium. He also presents evidence that far from just appearing mysteriously in the NASA photograph, the object actually was present in the earlier picture and essentially grew in the field of view.  Joseph suggests that:

[S]pores were exposed to moisture due to changing weathering conditions on Mars. Over the next 12 days these spores grew and developed into the structure depicted… The evidence is consistent with biological activity and suggests that life on Mars may have been discovered. However, in the absence of moisture, biological specimens such as Apothecium will dry out, turn brittle and break apart and this appears to be the condition of the structure as depicted.

NASA says that they are continuing to investigate the phenomenon and point out that they would be more excited about finding definitive evidence of life on Mars than just about anyone.  But the evidence would need to be definitive.

I am not quite certain what the photography moral to this story is.  Photography has caused this controversy.  Does it merely tie in with the concept of imagined similarities  aka pareidolia, or is there something more.  Photography invariable presents only limited information and only part of a story. One thing for certain is that NASA has the instrumentation, spectrographs etc, to definitively determine whether this is animal or vegetable

Camera optics – lens inversion

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Figure 1 - A floating blob of water passes in front of Astronaut Chris Hadfield's face on the International Space Station on January 27, 2014, showing how a lens inverts or roates an image by 90 deg.. Note also the demagnification. Image from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – A floating blob of water passes in front of Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s face on the International Space Station on January 27, 2014, showing how a lens inverts or rotates an image by 180 deg.. Note also the demagnification. Image from NASA and in the public domain.

The next camera optical element to consider is the lens.  Figure 1 is an image of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s floating in the International Space Station on January 27, when a spherical blob of water passes in front of him and acts like a lens.  His image is inverted and demagnified as a result of refraction. Right and left are flipped as we see them, which is to say they are preserved for the inverted image.  It is as if Hadfield’s face was rotated by 180 degrees.

From my point of view this image, posted by Hadfield on Twitter, is both whimsical and genius.  In the spirit of a picture is worth a thousand words, Figure 1 pretty much says it all!

Camera optics – mirror images

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MirroredSelfie

Figure 1 – Mirrored selfie, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I wanted to talk a bit about what I call “camera angles.”  Why do we hold different types of cameras the way we do? And what exactly is going on inside the different types of camera viewfinders. Curiously, what got me interested in this subject is that I was shaving this morning in front of the bathroom mirror and started to play around with self images (selfies) of myself and my mirrored reflection.  One of these experiments is shown in Figure 1. That’s me on the right looking at the camera and alter me on the left looking disdainfully away from the camera.

So much for art and the magic of mirrors mixed with cameras, what about the physics?  OK, look at yourself in the mirror, or flip you cell-phone camera so that you can see yourself on the LED screen.  The person in the mirror is right-side up.  Excellent!  Now raise your right hand.  What does the person in the mirror do? (S)He raises her/his left hand.  Hmm.  So we conclude that mirrors maintain up and down but flip right and left.

Well that is kinda cool!  Now try something else.  Point your finger at the mirror or camera and move it first up, then a bit to the left, then down, and right back to where you started.  You are moving your finger counter-clockwise.  What is the fella in the mirror doing? Let’s see, well first of all (s)he’s moving her/his left hand, first up, then right, then down, then left.  The mirror person sees his/her hand moving clockwise.  Oh my!  So clockwise and counterclockwise are also flipped.

Now here is where I’m going to confuse you, or take you out of the realm of nice little rules.  What I want you to do is keep your mirror as before or your camera still in the back-view (in your face) setting.  But now I want you to tip it at a forty-five degree angle downward towards the floor and look at the image of someone across the room. What you see is that the person is upside down and because right and left haven’t changed they are now correct for the inverted person.

So hopefully you find this is interesting.  If not, I hope you at least liked the selfie.  But significantly because cameras are essentially composed of three types of optical components: mirrors, lenses, and prisms, we have taken an important step towards understanding why they are constructed the way that they are.

Like they say on television: “to be continued.“

A crazy quilt from space

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Figure 1 - Central Russia in winter from the International Space Station, image by Cmdr. Harkings, from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Central Russia in winter from the International Space Station, image by Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, from NASA and in the public domain.

I often visit the galleries on the NASA website for the pure beauty that they offer and the site really never disappoints.  So today I’d like to share with you the image of Figure 1 showing snow-covered farmland in Central Asia looking like a wonderful and complex patchwork, perhaps a blanket.  It was taken last winter on February 25 from the International Space Station by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who calls it “a monochromatic 3-D hallucination in the snow.”

I think that part of the charm here is that it is a black and white photograph.  As a result it connects and is very reminiscent of the first areal photograph taken from a hot air balloon over Boston by John Black in 1858. We seem to never tire of photographs from above, where we essentially watch ourselves.  Perhaps it is an anser to the age old desire to soar like and eagle and look down at the strange inhabitants below , who are forced to cling precariously to the Earth.

Involuntary time warps

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Figure 1 - Hiroo Onoda in 1944 as a young Imperial Japanese officer. Image from the Wikipedia, originally taken by the governement of Japan and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Hiroo Onoda in 1944 as a young Imperial Japanese officer. Image from the Wikipedia, originally taken by the governement of Japan and in the public domain.

We have been talking at length about photography and time travel.  First, we discussed how photography gives us a glimpse into the lives of people from the past and how they almost seem to know that we are watching them.  Then we discussed how a set of snapshots of the same person from different points in their lives all laid out on a table unsticks that person in time, just like Kurt Vonnegut‘s “Billy Pilgrim.”  Then we considered people who voluntarily time  warp themselves.  All are favorite subjects for photographers: people who like the Amish or Hasidim prefer to live in isolated communities framed in anachronistic settings, or for that matter Revolutionary and Civil War reenactors and Renaissance Fare People. And yes we have the Up Helly Aa Vikings as well!

Well, today I’d like to tell the story of Hiroo Onoda who died on January 17th at age 91. Onoda was a Japanese soldier who spent 29 years “time-warped” in the Philippine jungle, refusing to believe that World War II had ended. In 1944, Onoda was sent to the  island of Lubang to spy on U.S. troops on the island.   For 29 years, he and a few companions survived by collecting food from the jungle or stealing it from local farmers.  It wasn’t until 1974 after all his companions had died was Onoda finally persuaded to come out from hiding.  But before he would do so his commanding officer had to travel to Lubang and release him from the orders he had given Onoda nearly three decades before.

This story of involuntary time-warp is reminiscent of so many old Twilight Zone episodes that still haunt my dreams.  The big issue, I suppose, is whether such people are truly involuntarily time-warped, or is it more a failure to accept reality and the truth.  We have to ask whether it isn’t just denial in the extreme.  Is there truly honor in slavish adherence to a superiors command against all reason?  I really don’t have an answer to these questions, but I do know that the answer certainly lies in The Twilight Zone.