The mass extinction of television

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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

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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?

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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.

Heralding in the season or freezing my **** in NYC

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Figure 1 - Heralding in the Winter Season, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Heralding in the Winter Season, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

If you’re not from the United States the term “Black Friday” may conjure up an image of some kind of Satanic rite, or worse.  It is, in fact, a massive pilgrimage of shoppers to the stores in search of what are meant to be fantastic bargains.  I have never found these bargains, nor have I any interest in them.  They seem chimeras, hollow ghosts, delusions, and  fabled tributes to the age old say that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.  However, can be fun to plunge yourself into the midst of it all, especially if you happen to be in New York City.  Just don’t spend the usurious sales tax on your bargains!

So after a fine trip to the Metropolitan Museum, the Friday after Thanksgiving, my wife and I decided to check out the scene on Fifth Avenue in midtown.  Let’s be clear here, NYC is miserable in the cold – especially when winds kick up micro-tornadoes in the caverns between buildings.  Getting about is an art form, that requires striking a balance between drinking enough coffee to stay warm and making sure that you have left yourself enough time to get between acceptable restrooms.  The term acceptable is operative here.

There are about two and a half months in the Northeast when we almost envy the folks who live in Arizona and Nevada. But then we realize that, in principle at least, you can always don another layer of clothing to save yourself from imminent death from cold, whereas at the other extreme, living at the edge of temperature habitability, if the electricity and air conditioning fails there is nothing you can do to save yourself from roasting to death – and the water crisis is something else.

OK, so grin and bear it.  The only way to beat the cold is to embrace it!  Licking street poles however remains unwise – what your mother refers to as “risky behavior.”  I ponder the people crowding Rockefeller Plaza.  There is a little girl wrapped up in a ski-parka with earmuffs, clutching her mother’s hand – as in “Don’t leave me here!”  She has been lured out with promises of a trip to “American Girl” or perhaps to see Santa Claus.  Her cheeks are rosie – just short of frostbite.  There is the smell of hot pretzels and chestnuts.  My father used to take me here.  The vendors are a sight – their skin long dessicated by exposure.   There is an attractive women in a stylish wool coat and high leather boots.  She is on a mission from the future to assassinate the great grandfather of the murderous dictator of the world…  Oh no!  I think my brain is freezing into delirium.  More coffee!  Need more coffee!

I will leave you with Figure 1 that shows one of the giant toy soldiers that surround the Plaza.  He blares a silent trumpet to herald in the season.  Put on an extra layer.  Go out and take some pictures!  It is a glorious time.

Julia Margaret Cameron

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Figure 1 - Alice Liddell as Pomona the Roman Goddess of dardens and fruit. Image (1872) by Julia Margaret Cameron from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Alice Liddell as Pomona the Roman Goddess of gardens and fruit. Image (1872) by Julia Margaret Cameron from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I have just returned from a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with my son and his girlfriend in New York City.  All through the year, I follow the photography exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum and after discovering that the are not coming to Boston, I tend exhale a mournful sigh.  Well, I am happy to say that I did make it on Friday to a special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of the “Work of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879),” which runs through January 5, 2014.  So there is still time for you to get there.

Needless-to-say, this takes us back to a time when photography was new and image makers strived for the metaphorical and mystical.  For Cameron it tended to be a Christian mythology like her “Daughters of Jerulsalem, 1865”  or mythic themes drawing either on classic Greco-roman myths, such as “Casseopeia, 1866,” or those of the English Isles, such as “The Parting of Lancelot and Guineveirre, 1874.”  Almost always Cameron sought to portray the unique world of women.

I want to say that the space that the Metropolitan Museum has allotted to special exhibits, especially intimate ones like the Cameron exhibit is truly magnificent.  As you walk down the corridor to this exhibit space, past the ubiquitous special exhibits’ gift shop, your mind is suddenly flooded with memorizes of all of the previous exhibits that you have seen there.  The light is perfectly subdued to highlight what are mostly silver albumin prints.  Cameron was a perfectionist, and she worked hard for every iota of effect.  This included the choice of size for her pictures.  When commissioned by Tennyson to illustrate a book of his poems, she privately financed a folio size edition that would properly highlight her work.  Such was, and remains, the difficult translation from photograph to printed page.

What first grabbed me as I entered the exhibit was a photograph not by Cameron but by Oscar Reijlander(1813-1875) entitled “Mr. and MIss Constable, 1866.” It depicts the Constable children in a touching and fond embrace.  It ingeniously poses them obliquely staring into a fire.  Reijlander was a master of pose and he built a special studio behind his home with five oddly shaped, judiciously placed windows.  These gave him complete control over illumination.  This image is striking in its theatricality and even seems to be a still promo for a movie.  Of course, movies were thirty years away.  What is most striking to me, the element that makes the image so human and special is the freckles on Miss Constable’s face.

There is also a truly wonderful portrait by Reijlander of “Cicely Hamiltion, 1863-1867.”  The way in which the girl wraps her arms self consciously around herself an the upward stare of her eyes are both enigmatically and defining of this great photograph. Unfortunately it also evokes the darker and controversial side of Victorian photographs of young girls.

Studying the exhibit was like a visit to so see so many old friends. And with photography, it is invariably significant to see the prints the way the photographer mean them to be seen.  Neither digital display on a computer or printing in the best photography books ever truly captures the image.

Among the “old friends” was Cameron’s portrait of astronomer “Sir John Herschel, 1867,” which we have had the opportunity to speak about before.  And there was Cameron’s portrait of Alice Liddell (1852-1934) the inspiration of Sir Charles Dodgson’s “Alice in Wondereland.”  This is shown in Figure 1, where Liddell is posed (1872) as Pomona the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees.  But then I came upon something really striking that I had never seen before, or more likely had seen before my mind was ready to see it.  This is Cameron’s allegorical image of “King Lear Allotting his Kingdom to his Three Daughters, 1872.” A Shakespeare story was rare for Cameron.  And I have to say that to my mind King Lear is the ultimate Shakespearean tragedy.  I comes closest to a Greek tragedy in that daughter Cordelia knows full well both her familial and her marital responsibilities and, in the end, she goes to her fate knowing it full well and facing it because it is her destiny to face it.  This image shows what a true master craftswoman Cameron was.  The entire story is told in a single picture.  The three Liddell sisters pose as Lear’s daughters.  Cameron’s husband poses as Lear.  On the left, daughters Regan (Lorina Liddell) and Goneril (Elizabeth Liddell) whisper flatteries in their father’s ear.  Note the brilliant gesture of Lorina’s pointed finger.  While Alice as Cordelia stands with demure resignation on the right enduring her father’s wrath.

“What shall Cordelia do?
Love, and be silent…

Then poor Cordelia!
And yet not so; since, I am sure, my love’s
More richer than my tongue.”

A certain crispness of image

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I was thinking a bit more this morning about the photograph from 1918 that I posted on Thanksgiving of a sailor and a soldier being feted in 1918 by the City of New York.  It strikes me that one of the reasons that we can relate so closely to an image like that is the crispness.  Despite the fact that it is in black and white, because it is so crisp, sharp, and vibrant, we can relate to it as if it were in color.  That could be any of us.  We can relate to the happy feeling of the image.  Therein, of course,  lies part of the magic of photography in knocking down the barriers not only of space, but of time.

I was similarly struck this week by a photograph by Dita Alangkara of the AP showing “A Mother’s Relief,” a Typhoon Haiyan survivor kissing her baby as she waits to board an evacuation flight at the airport in Tacloban, Philippines, on November 22.  The image evokes such empathy, conjuring up a complex set of emotions.  We relate to the desperation to save herself and her child.  We react to an overwhelming sense of relief.

I think that ultimately we have to also deal with the safe separation that photographs give us.  We are not standing with that woman.  There is an abstraction, which in itself is upsetting.  We might watch a news-clip on the evening news of some terrible event and then go about our business – because its seems to have noting to so with us.  This is more than the enuring effect of terrible pictures.  It has also to do with the rectangular image frame.  That is where these people are.  They do not surround us in a vivid three-D, complete with sounds and smells.  They disappear – or at best remain as a little scar on our brains – after we go back to eating.  In a real sense this abstracting aspect of the image has not enhanced, but rather diminished, our fundamental humanity.

 

A few odds and ends

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It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I find myself with a few odds and ends that I’d like to share with you.

Figure 1 - Aeropostale Diffraction, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Aeropostale Diffraction, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

First is a little IPhone image that I took this past weekend of a window display at Aeropostale.  The sunlight shining in was warm and winter bright and they had these vertical blinds designed to catch and diffract the light – very physicist appealing!

Second, I did just a little bit of sleuthing in follow-up to my post “The Transcendence of the vampire,” and I have found that the entirety of the movie “Le Manoir du Diable” – all three minutes of it – can be found on You Tube.  This should not be a surprise.  What is perhaps a bit more of a surprise is that it is fun to watch in a retro 1896 sort of way.

Third, and finally there is a very interesting and amusing column in the NY Times by Daniel Menaker (November 23, 2013) entitled “Taking our selfies seriously.”  The term “selfie” is getting a lot of press this year.  Although as Mr. Menaker points ou,t like all such phrases, it is likely to have its day and then die from selfie-immolation.

Thanksgiving 1918

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Figure 1 - Thanksgiving 1918, two servicemen being feted by the City of New York. Image by Underwood and Underwood for the War Department, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Thanksgiving 1918, two servicemen being feted by the City of New York. Image by Underwood and Underwood for the War Department, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States.  It is our great nonsectarian feast day and draws its roots from the first harvest feasts at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century.  So in celebration I thought that I would simply share with you this image from the United States National Archives showing “Thanksgiving cheer” being distributed by the City of New York to men in service, ca 1918.  The image is by Underwood and Underwood for the War Department.

November 1918 was, of course, a moment of true thanksgiving in the world, as it marked the end of the War to End all Wars.  Unfortunately we did not do so well with that resolution.  It seems such a naive phrase now.  But it does express a universal sentiment. and still it is a delightful picture.  It offers a glimpse into the lives of these two totally delighted men.

The Thanksgiving Comet 2013

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Figure 1 - From the Bayeux Tapestry (c 1070), the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1066 AD brings fear to the minds of the troops of William the Conquerer. Image uploaded by Mirabella to the Wikipedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – From the Bayeux Tapestry (c 1070), the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1066 AD brings fear to the hearts and minds of the troops of William the Conqueror. Image uploaded by Mirabella to the Wikipedia Commons and in the public domain.

Well here’s something unusual – a technical blog.  What can I say, I’ve gotten just a bit lazy.  But I do want to point out that on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 2013 comet ISON is going to whip around the sun, aka reach its perihelion.  If it doesn’t completely vaporize, which is pretty unlikely since this is what comets do, it may produce a truly spectacular show in December and January.  This means, of course, that you are going to want to photograph it, and I am going to tell you how.

First of all, I am going to assume that you do not have a telescope with celestial clock drive.  A celestial clock drive is a computer driven motor that enables you to point your telescope at a sky object, and it will follow the object as the sky moves.  BTW – they worked pretty well in the analogue days before computers – better living through physics.  If you have one of these, you probably don’t need me to tell you how to use it.  Second, this could turn into a pretty big object, in which case a telescope isn’t necessary.  It all depends, and that’s the key.  Nobody really knows what we are in for.  But it is likely that the best shots are going to be taken with a moderate telephoto or zoom lens.  I’m hesitant to conjecture, but maybe 200 to 400 mm.

So here you go:

1. Find a place away from city lights.  That’s the tricky part because these are going to be several second exposures, and you don’t want the background of the sky to outshine the comet.  This also makes just after perihelion a bear of a time to photograph.  At that point comet ISON is going to be in the early morning sky, hovering below the horizon.  Also at these early points, do I have to say this, DON’T LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN.  I have a feeling that the best times are going to be mid-December to early January.

2.Moderate zoom lens

3. Lens wide open aka smallest f-number

4. You need a tripod

5. Image stabilized lens recommended because of wind.

6. Manual focus preferred – despite the fact that the thing is at infinity

7. ISO of at least 800

8. Lock your mirror up to avoid shake

9. Exposure will be several seconds, depending on events again.  This is probably best done with manual shutter speed and bracketing.

This should be all you need to know.  Happy shooting.

Figure 2 - Comet ISON photographed by the robotic eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope on October 9, 2013. From NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Comet ISON photographed by the robotic eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope on October 9, 2013. From NASA and in the public domain.