Camera optics – mirror images

Posted on February 3, 2014 by David

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

Posted on February 2, 2014 by David

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

Posted on February 1, 2014 by David

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.

The Year of the Horse

Posted on January 31, 2014 by David

Figure 1 – The Year of the Horse, 2004 celebration in Belmore Park, Sydney, Australia. Picture by J Bar from the Wikimedia Commons and published under GNU Free Documentation License.

I want to wish all of our friends and readers who celebrate Chinese New Year, Happy Year of the Horse. If you have the opportunity to visit a Chinese New Year celebration, I recommend that you bring camera in hand. These are exciting, color, and motion filled events. A number of places on the web are offering up stunning photoessays of New Year celebrations around the world, see for instance this one from the BBC. I am particularly taken by an AP image of the underwater festivities at Singapore’s South East Asia Aquarium.

Back in the sixties my father was a popular science teacher at Charles Sumner Junior Hight School (JHS 65) in New York City, which served New York’s Chinatown area. On Chinese New Year, we would go down and watch the parades and dancing dragons. It was insane. Firecrackers were everywhere, and a particular sport was exploding them within inches of Mr. Wolf’s face. Ah, those were the days. I always think of that on the Fourth of July during our local parade, when the staff of our neighborhood restaurant “Lotus Blossom” come by dressed as a giant dragon.

So Happy New Year everyone!

The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival

Posted on January 30, 2014 by David

Figure 1 - Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, 1973. Picture by Ann Burgess via the Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

Figure 1 – Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, 1973. Picture by Anne Burgess via the Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

Enough with the bad weather already, he exclaimed. Most of the United States is currently suffering from some sort of miserable weather difficulties, and I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, R3, to the cognoscenti,

“Now is the winter of our discontent…”

So, I was looking for inspiration this afternoon and found this great portfolio of pictures from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. The Shetland Islands are described as being a subarctic archipelago of Scotland. Subarctic archipelago? Doesn’t that sound cold?

And you would expect the people that live there to know how to deal with winter’s rude bite. And they do. Hence, The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival. Check these pictures from the BBC out. The videos at this site are worth watch as well. Yes, you’re seeing correctly. Everyone is dressed as a Viking and, yes, they are setting a Viking longboat on fire. Puts winter in a whole new perspective. I want to be there! I want to be a Viking! “Pillaging hours 9 am to 5 pm M-F.”

The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival began in the 1880s. The current Lerwick festival evolved from a Christmas tradition of dragging burning tar barrels through the town on sledges. Doesn’t everyone do that? When this was banned the festival slowly evolved into a Viking theme and also moved into January. Yes, you guessed it when everyone is miserable and fed up with the dark and cold and really need a lift. So grab you ski parkas, put on your Viking “quize,” and head to Lerwick. You are sure to find your inner Viking not to mention some wonderful photo opps. Yes, of course, there is a website.

The mystery of the mill girl

Posted on January 29, 2014 by David

Figure 1 – Unknown spinner, Lewis Hine, c1908, from the LOC and in the public domain.

I’d like to start today with the image of Figure 1. Taken between 1908-1912 it shows a young girl, who at age eleven had already been working for a year in a mill owned by the Rhodes Manufacturing Company in Lincolnton, North Carolina. The picture was taken by social reformer and photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who documented mill life and child labor in the mills. It was one of five thousand photographs taken by Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, documenting abuses of child labor laws in textiles and other industries. These photographs are now housed as an important social record in the Library of Congress.

Children were prized as laborers in the mills, since their small hands and bodies enabled them to reach inside the intricate machines. The results were often disastrous. Hine’s photographs were three decades later instrumental in the establishment of the Federal regulation of child labor began with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which for the first time set minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children. We can pat ourselves on the back, until we realize that all that has really happened is that child labor of this sort has mere been exported.

The picture itself is compositionally wonderful. The girl stands gazing out the window, symbolic perhaps of lost childhood. At any rate there is an outside, but pushing up and ready to devour her are the huge looms. And these stretch on infinitely in the photograph. The picture not only represents the life of the little girl and her loss of innocence, but also of the greater loss of national innocence brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

For over a century the name of that young girl has remained a mystery, as if industrialism had swallowed up her identity. She was identified in the picture as only as a “spinner” at the Rhodes Manufacturing Co.

Now, according to the Charlotte Observer, author and historian Joe Manning used the photograph to find her descendants and give her back her name. He feels confident that the girl was named Lalar Blanton and is the grandmother of Myra “Carol” Cook of Louisville, Ky. Thus, this image has served two powerful purposes: first, as a tool to bring about social change, and second, a hundred years later, to resurrect the life of the subject. Such is the power of the image.

Eyes on the homeless

Posted on January 28, 2014 by David

We have spoken before about the unseen crawlers – the people all around us, the poor, the homeless, the people we don’t want to see. The people that we look through. There is a very powerful recent image by the Jae C. Hong for the Associated Press that puts all of this in a new and very poignant perspective. It shows a homeless person in Los Angeles on January 14, 2014 sleeping beneath a mural painted by artist Ruben Soto. In Los Angeles homelessness has increased 15 percent from 2011 to 2013.

The picture functions on so many different levels. First there is the sense of seeing the unseen. But then you realize that the eyes themselves are really only a masquerade. It is as if we are faking the seeing. And for me there is just something strange about the face. I cannot quite place it. Maybe it’s because it is looking at us not the sleeping man. I also believe that there is a sense of imbalance. The face is huge, the man small. The figure of the man and his bundle of earthly possesions also is not quite dynamically balanced. All of this creates a wonderful sense of imbalance and of foreground-background switch. This is a wonderful and very telling image.

New exhibit of David Wolf’s photographs

Posted on January 27, 2014 by David

Figure 1 – New exhibit of David’s photographs at RMD in Watertown, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014

Hati and Skoll Gallery is pleased to announced that a permanent exhibit of David’s photographs has been installed in the Operations and Human Resources Department at Radiation Monitoring Devices at Watertown, Massachusetts. A photograph of the exhibit is shown in Figure 1. Several of the pictures may also be viewed on this website. The photographs on display are:

Top Row (L to R)

“Blind Cupid,” “Rodin and the creation of woman,” Nydia the Blind girl of Pompeii”

Middle Row (L to R)

“Neptune Fountain,” “Daniel Chester French memorial detail,” “Shaw Memorial”

Bottom Row (L to R)

“Pine Forest,”Boat house Old Manse,” Cormorant“

If you would like to visit the exhibit please call ahead to RMD.

John F. Kennedy and the Mars rock

Posted on January 26, 2014 by

Figure 1 - Images approximately two weeks apart from the Mars Rover. Left before the appearnce and right after the mysterious appearance of the "Jelly doughnut" rock. Images from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Images approximately two weeks apart from the Mars Rover. Left before the appearance and right after the mysterious appearance of the “Jelly doughnut” rock. Images from NASA and in the public domain.

Ten years ago NASA sent Mars Rover for a three month “robotic eyes” mission to the Red Planet, and now ten years later Rover is still sending back beautiful images and data. This past week it has spawned a great mystery. Comparing two images (see

As I write this, my cat has just knocked a container of bath salts into the bath tub – just sayin’… Also in New England each spring thaw brings a new crop of rocks to the surface of our lawns. We speak of our gardens growing stones. But this frost heave effect, does not appear to be at play in this case, and we are going to have to leave NASA scientists to figure it all out, which I am sure they will. I am reminded of a famous quote from physicist Sir Isaac Newton:

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

The amusing part of the Mars rock story is, of course, its supposed resemblance to a jelly doughty. It’s a pareidolia for sure. Honestly, I see it, but not so much! Fortunately, the Mars image did not cause me to run out and seek the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t need that, for sure. It did get me thinking however, funny how the mind works, of John F. Kennedy:

“Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum”. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Now it has been reported that what Kennedy actually meant to say was ‘Ich bin Berliner,’ meaning ‘I am from Berlin’ and what he actually said was “I am a jelly doughnut” – hence my brain’s connection with the Mars rock. However, and much to my relief, Wikipedia sets us straight on all of this. First of all, we learn that in Berlin a jelly doughnut is a “Pfannkuchen” (“pancake”). Only in northern ans western Germany is a jelly doughnut a “berliner.” The situation gets grammatically stickier, indeed, if Kennedy wanted to say “I am a person from Berlin”, he would have omitted the definite article. (I know this is getting complicated) But Kennedy meant that he was a Berliner in a figurative sense; so the statement is literally correct. Phew! Hopefully some of my German speaking readers will tell me that I am completely wrong and that Kennedy was indeed a jelly doughnut.

In the end neither Kennedy, who launched NASA and the American space program, nor the Mars rock are true jelly doughnuts. The speech and the video images are iconic and they still raise the Gänsehaut on the back of my neck.