The coming solstice

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Diffuse light, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Diffuse light, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Well, here we are December 11, 2013 and the earliest sunsets of the year in Boston.  That is something I really hate!  It has been grey and gloomy, and the solstice is very near.  There has already been snow and ice.  I am refusing to let it get me down.  People are dressed in bright seasonal clothes.  I spent a half an hour on Sunday watching the children and parents in line at the Mall, waiting for Santa Claus.  I was going to take a few pictures, but he apparently was running late.  Too many reindeer to feed?

There are pictures to be taken – even in the seemingly drabbest light and most mundane things.  I amused myself taking this IPhone image of the sun bravely trying to break through thick December clouds and then through a tightly woven pull-curtain.  It is, I think, a tribute to the beauty of diffuse light. I’ll take the Moiré pattern as an added bonus.

Two photographs – two wars

Posted on by

As I am writing today’s blog the world is mourning, or more accurately, celebrating the life of Nelson Mandella.  Needless-to-say the news media is bombarding us with historic images – some of them very difficult to digest.  They were always difficult to digest, always difficult to understand.  None-the-less they are iconic.

The most striking image is of the Soweto Uprising on 16 June 1976, when over 500 people were shot dead by the security forces of the apartheid state.  It was an uprising of high school students, who were protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in township schools. One of the first to be killed was 12 year old Hector Pieterson.  In a famous image by Sam Nzima he is carried away by a stranger, while his sister screams in combined terror and grief beside him.  How do you relate to such a photographer?  Is it a scene of martyrdom – a last deposition of Christ?  Let me tell you that no mother raises her child to be a martyr.  And it is on that level that we relate to such an image.  It is symbolic of unbridled and intolerable oppression, where the victims are the walking dead, and there is really nothing left to lose.

Beyond that, I am struck by the similarity of the emotions that the Nzima’s photograph evokes in me and the emotion raised by a picture taken almost four years earlier to the day of the Hector Pieterson image (June 8, 1972).  It shows a nine year old girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a road near Trảng Bàng, Vietnam, after a napalm bomb was dropped on the village of Trảng Bàng by a plane of the Vietnam Air Force. That picture was by famous war photographer Nick Ut.

How are we meant to relate to that?  How are we meant to relate to any of this?  We have two pictures from separate wars.  Both depict the suffering of children.  This is why coming of age in the sixties and seventies was so painful.  This is why coming of age today is so painful.  The images are so powerful that they are numbing and drain you completely.

Imagined worlds and childhood dreams

Posted on by

I remember having a dream once, when I was a child that was so happy that when I woke up I wished that I could go back to sleep and reenter the dream.  As a child, I always knew when I was dreaming and usually if I didn’t like where I was, I could “switch” the channel.  So then you grow up and as Joni Mitchell sang in “The Circle Game:” “Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true.”

Dreams and imagination are important.  That’s why we love science fiction or vampire movies.  That’s why we imagine that we could recreate dinosaurs.  Indeed, artists and writers are really dreamers.

This afternoon I was starting to pour through the many “this year’s best photographs” and I was in a mood.  I was looking for something upbeat and happy.  And I came upon this wonderful picture from Rex Features showing showing delighted children, visitors to Blue Planet Aquarium in Cheshire Oaks, UK gleefully waving at a mermaid in the shark tank.  The mermaid in question is aqua-veterinarian (a sturgeon surgeon?) Dr. Daniela Rodler.

This is really a wonderful image on many levels.  It makes us happy, first because of the smiling children and second because of the mermaid that reminds us all of childhood – a time when while we knew there weren’t really merpeople, it didn’t really hurt to believe in them just a little.  We see the incongruity of the picture, but it really doesn’t bother us.  We were all children once.  We still believe just a little.  Oh, and I like the fact that these are English children.  English children are the children of Peter Pan and of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Reading the soul of Abraham Lincoln – “his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?”

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Andre Gardners February 5, 1865 photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Image from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Alexander Gardner’s February 5, 1865 photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Image from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

The Opinionator Section of the New York Times has been carrying an intriguing four part commentary by Errol Morris on Lincoln and photography, “The Interminable, Everlasting Lincolns.” I was particularly struck by part three because it resonates with what we have talking about in regard to nineteenth century photographs.  Indeed, I think that it takes the subject a step further in recognizing the special quality of “the photograph” to reveal the human soul in a way that painting never will.  I know that’s a very strong statement.  But the point is that an artist can draw what (s)he wants, a photographer captures – and then Photoshops.  The last part is cynical David talking.

Morris relates a wonderful story.  It seems that in 1909 Count S. Stackelberg visited the estate of Leo Tolstory, Yasnaya Polyana, to try to convince him to write a piece about Abraham Lincoln for The New York World.  This was presumably for the centennial of Lincoln’s birth that year. (As an aside Lincoln was born on the same day as Charles Darwin – two men destined to change the world in very different ways). Tolstoy turned down the request but in doing so related a story to Stackelberg.

It seems that years before he (Tolstoy) had been traveling in the Caucasus and became the guest of a Caucasian Chief of the Circassians.  It seems the Chief wanted to hear stories of the great leaders and generals of the western world.  So Tolstoy, who just happened to be one of the world’s greatest story tellers, told him of the Czar, of Napoleon, and of  Frederick the Great. But it seems the Circassian Chief was dissatisfied. Something was missing. Count Tolstoy had failed to tell him of the greatest leader of all, a man called Lincoln.

So Tolstoy told the Chief all that he knew about Lincoln.  But still the Chief wasn’t satisfied.  Despite the Count’s great skills at story telling, he had failed to truly flesh out Lincoln.  The Chief wanted to see a photograph.  And so Tolstoy arranged for this to happen – remember late 19th century, you just don’t look that sort of thing up on your IPad.  Still Count Tolstoy knew someone in the next village whom he thought might have such a picture.  And now let me let Tolstoy tell the story in his own words (via Morris’ article):

“One of the riders agreed to accompany me to the town and get the promised picture, which I was now bound to secure at any price. I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend, and I handed it to the man with my greetings to his associates. It was interesting to witness the gravity of his face and the trembling of his hands when he received my present. He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer; his eyes filled with tears. He was deeply touched and I asked him why he became so sad. After pondering my question for a few moments he replied: ‘I am sad because I feel sorry that he had to die by the hand of a villain. Don’t you find, judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?’”

Morris likes to imagine (hope) that the picture shown to the Chief was the so-called broken glass photograph that was one of the very last photographs of Abraham Lincoln.  And you can read more about this is Mr. Morris’ series.  It was taken at the studio of Alexander Gardner (1821-1882) on February 5,1865.  It is often referred to as the last photograph of Lincoln – and may, in fact, be.  The story of Lincoln’s life, his trials and tribulations, his sorrows are indeed written on his face and contained in his eyes.  Both Tolstoy’s story and Gardner’s photograph, are in a very real sense, truly privileges to hear and see.  They bring us back more than a century and they admit us to the private recesses of a man’s soul.  We are enriched by them, and such is the magic of photography.

Abandoned cities

Posted on by

A favorite topic for pseudodocumentaries are abandoned cities.  The typical story is one of a great civilization and its striving metropolis and then it disappears – no one really knows why.  The list of such cities is pretty impressive.  There’s Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey; Palenque in Mexico; Cahokia across the Mississippi from modern day St. Louis; Derinkuyu in Turkey; Macchu Pichu in Peru; and Great Zimbabwe in Zimabwe.  And that’s only a partial list.  The stories of these places speaks to many points: the fragility of human memory,  the shortness of the time that we get to spend on the Earth, and the arrogance which is human greatness.

All of these thoughts flashed through my mind when I considered a brilliant portfolio by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre entitled “The Ruins of Detroit.”  Detroit was the great American automobile city that rose to see the nation covered in asphalt roads and then fell victim to globalization.  I have spent enough time in Brooklyn these past few years to have learned that it would be a mistake to say that it will never rise again.  But for now the portfolio is stunning.  It captures that strange world between striving and “in ruins.”  Several images stand out in my mind’s eye for the stories that they tell.  First there is “18th Floor Dentist’s Cabinet, David Broderick Tower.”  Then there is “Room 1504, Lee Plaza Hotel.”  Particularly interesting to me are the images that show people in the distance, an example being “Packard Motor Plant.”  Who are these people?  Are they real?  They seem more like ghosts than real people and I am reminded of the great post apocalyptic science ficton movie “Omega Man, 1971,” where the world is inhabited by mutant zombie like people.

Like a visit real or virtual to other abandoned cities, a trip through this portfolio leaves many questions unanswered.  Of course, Detroit is not fully abandoned.  So we are left to wonder what is next.  And of course, our throats are left dry and we are haunted by Shelly’s words in his poem Ozymandias,

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

From fuzzy to sharp – the dinosaur in the room

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Classic rabbit ear television antenna. By Bernd from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Classic rabbit ear television antenna. By Bernd from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

The evolution of broadcast television and its decline are closely related to the evolution and ascent of digital photography.  If you go back to the fifties and consider the images from these early televisions they were highly inferior to contemporary silver gelatin photography.  This is closely related to how they were made. Video cameras worked essentially on an image dissector principle.  Light was focused with a camera lens on a phosphor screen which emitted a beam of electrons out its back side.  These were tamed into reasonable focus with a magnetic field.  A small portion of this beam of electrons was allowed to pass through an aperture and onto a photocell.  This was accomplished either electronically or mechanically.  The entire stream was sequentially scanned.  The process was reversed on the tv monitor.  A beam of electrons was focused and scanned across a phosphor screen.

In the first demonstration of television in 1926 by John Logie Baird, the scanning was accomplished using a Nipkow disk, where the optical field is scanned using a spiral of points (see Figure 1). Aficionados will recognize the important role today played by Nipkow disks in confocal microscopy.

This whole process didn’t lend itself to either high resolution or high dynamic range images.  However it did lend itself very well to analogue image transmission first across wires and then wirelessly. Hence the images were fuzzy, and we preferred silver gelatin photographs.

So how did technology evolve to where it is today?  First the whole scanning process improved, which explains why television in the United States was inferior to television in Europe.  The US standardized before higher definition was technically possible.

And then something transitional happened.  In 1969 the CCD was invented by George Smith and Willard Boyle at Bell Labs.  Scanning was no longer necessary and resolution on the camera side was defined by how small and how many pixels you can pack into your sensor.  And of course, when the computer world moved away from cathode ray (scanning) tubes to solid-state pixel arrays of light emitting diodes (LEDs), the die was cast for high resolution digital television and digital.

I believe that the invention of the CCD and the LED diode array  were the key new species in the technological forest.  Home computers, video games, Facebook all owe their wide acceptance and technical dominance to these two inventions.  These in turn are rapidly consuming the broadcast television base.  Indeed, it seems likely that the only factor slowing down this process of technological evolution is the length of a human lifetime.  The older you get, generally the slower you are to adapt.  We, not the rabbit eared television, are the true, recalcitrant dinosaurs.

 

The mass extinction of television

Posted on by
Figure 1 - American family watching television in 1958. Imqage from US National Archives and posted by Dr. William J. Ball. From the Wikimedia Commons and believed to be in the public domain.

Figure 1 – American family watching television in 1958. Imqage from US National Archives and posted by Dr. William J. Ball. From the Wikimedia Commons and believed to be in the public domain.

Last Sunday my wife and I found ourselves in the “great channel flip.”  That is we flipped through 200 channels of moronic television in search of something worth watching.  Back in the dinosaur ages, we had three television channels: CBS, NBC, and ABC.  The addition of PBS was a godsend that increased our options by 33 % and at the same time enabled us to become media elitists.  I watch PBS! Glory be me!  Did anyone notice that most of the good stuff was coming out of the UK?  Hmm.  Well along came UHF (that’s ultrahigh frequency TV) and the sluice gates were supposed to be opening a whole new world for us.  It was to be a media revolution that would ultimately lead to customized and interactive TV.  Imagine that – interactive television!

What bothered me the most about Sunday was that our local NBC affiliate was carrying an infomercial.  I mean, they were able to make more money selling away all air time than they could make with a standard TV format.  Makes you wonder what this world is coming to.

The thing is that the millennials, people loosely born between 1980 and 2000, are watching far less television that us aging boomers.  While 76 % of boomers get their news and images principally from broadcast television, only 65 % of generation X does so, and this falls to a miserable 46 % for millenials.  34 %, that’s one in three millenials mostly watch on line video.

When I talk about, for instance, the Kennedy assassination our means of experiencing those images was on television.  Now not so much.  I spend most of my image transfer time online.  I don’t even read paper news media anymore.  It’s all online.

Is it sad?  Certainly not.  Broadcast TV is doing a miserable time of serving us.  In fact, they always have.  It’s just that fifty years ago they were the only game in town, save radio.  And radio, well is radio.  It lacks images.  It is telling that today, I’ll see a teaser on the television and the first thing that I do is get on the internet and look it up.

We are undergoing a major shift in the way that we process images and news.  Such shifts are akin to the major extinctions in biological evolution.   I contrast this with what I’ve referred to as transitional technologies, which bridge a gap but are short lived.  Television has been around for a long time.  Then came UHF and after that digital TV and the interenet.  UHF was a transitional technology a short lived species of television.  Television had a very long run, like for instance the trilobites of biological evolution.  The telegraph had a long run.  Film-based analogue photography had a long run.  We didn’t even know that itr was wireless until digital photography was invented. The wired telephone had a long run.  Then came analog wireless telephony – a transitional technology. Now we have digital wireless.  Will that have a long run?

A lot of times it’s hard to imagine what comes next.  That’s because technology being what it is and the singularity being so near, we usually can create whatever we can imagine.  Some of you are probably thinking: “Beam me up, Scotty.”  So i have to ask you would you like to trust you cell phone company nit to drop the call while your molecules or this electroprint are being transported across space.  I’ve seen the movie “The Fly.” We’re playing with dangerous stuff here.

So three important points here:

1. Technologies are like biological species in the stream of technological eveolution

2. Some technological species are long-lived.  It takes a mass extinction, a eureka event to wipe them out.

3. Other technologies are transitional.  They are short lived because while they recognize a technological need they don’t quite fit the bill.

And yes, friend “it’s Howdy Doody time!”

Figure 2 - Howdy Doody gets a new face, January 1949. From the Wikimedia Commons and believed to be in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Howdy Doody gets a new face, January 1949. From the Wikimedia Commons originally from NBC Photo and believed to be in the public domain.

Accessories for IPhone and Android cameras

Posted on by

Recently I was discussing with a reader whether she could use her IPhone to photograph comet ISON.   This was back in the glory days when comet ISON still had promise.  Well those days appear to be gone, but tonight my wife brought to my attention some very interesting cell phone camera accessories.  So if there were a very bright comet one might just be able to take cool pictures of it with your cellphone.  I need to make two important points: 1. I have not tried any of these gadgets out.  So this is not a product endorsement.  But they are pretty cheap so I may try one or two of them. 2. You almost always get what you pay for; so they are probably crap.  But here goes.

First we have changeable lens for your IPhone or Android.  You can get a 2 x telephoto lens, a macrolens, a polarizer, and a wide angle fisheye lens –  all for around $20 a piece.  Then there is a turret that mounts to your phone; so that with a simple rotation you can select between lenses.  Weep your eyes out Leica owners.  Back in the dinosaur ages this was a coveted M series accessory!  There is also a film copier to digitize slide film onto your camera.  How many people want to do that? At $54 it’s a bit pricey.

Want to turn you smartphone into a microscope for about $25 – no problem.  How about a smartphone telescope?  This too is no problem. And for those of you who already have microscopes or telescopes finding an cell phone adapter is also not a problem.

Mostly we are talking gimmicks, toys, and science fair projects here.  But, the possibilities are definitely endless.  I have a colleague who launched a weather balloon armed with a cellphone.  It took pictures and beamed back its gps location.  Also, and luckily, it didn’t hit anyone on the way down.  Did I mention that the parachute failed to deploy?

I read today that Amazon is planning on delivering packages by drones to your doorstep in about five years.  So of course, David is thinking about two of his favorite blog themes: robotic eyes and the technological singularity.  Technical innovation is driven by cost and the availability of such “toys” for twenty dollars or so opens up a very exciting realm – not to mention a potentially very dangerous one.  Stay tuned.

Did Comet ISON survive?

Posted on by
Figure 1 Set of images taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite showing the remnants of Comet ISON surviving perihelion. Image from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 Set of images taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite showing the remnants of Comet ISON surviving perihelion. Image from NASA and in the public domain.

In followup to my post on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, it now appears that “yes, Virginia” comet ISON did survive its perilous journey to within a million miles of the sun.  It remains unclear how much of it survived and what kind of a display it will put on for the inhabitants of planets Earth.

Figure 1 is a still image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite showing the remnants of the comet as it comes around the sun.  This is unbelievably shown in the time lapse video from the observatory, which shows first the comet’s approach, then its disappearance behind the sun, and finally its reappearance on the other side.  Chalk this up to David’s fascination with “robotic eyes” giving us new ways to see and photograph.  The way these images were taken is by using a circular shield that attenuates the light from the sun allowing the surrounding stars and solar atmosphere to be see.  This only works well when you are above the Earth so that there is not a lot of light scattering by our own atmosphere.

So now we have to wait and see what happens next.  Will ISON be a weak fizzle or will it put on a great show as originally hoped.  December will tell.