Sweating in the eye of Phoebus and sleeping in Elysium

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Edward Steichen, "Sailors Sleeping on the Deck of the USS Lexington," 1943, from US NARA and in the public domain,

Figure 1 – Edward Steichen, “Sailors Sleeping on the Deck of the USS Lexington,” 1943, from US NARA and in the public domain,

Today is Saint Crispin’s day and 598 years ago on October 25, 1415 there took place one of the great epic battles of the Middle Ages, the Battle of Agincourt.  This battle is highlighted in Shakespeare’s epic history “Henry V.”  I point this out because one of the great soliloquies of that drama is Henry bemoaning the fact that slaves may sleep while kings pace the night sleeplessly.

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium…

You may ask what is my point.  Well, reader Megan has shared with me a wonderful portfolio of images by Dutch photographer Paul Schneggenburger, which are night long exposures of couples sleeping.  They seem to be more like intricate dances – dances of sleep.   The couple sleeps in Schneggenburger’s studio apartment, obviously black sheets.  The room is lit with candles and the camera hangs over the bed and takes a six hour exposure.  There is something sweet and wonderful here, maybe an ounce of voyeurism, perhaps reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s five hour and twenty minute film entitled “Sleep,” showing his friend John Giorno sleeping.  But in the end, I think what strikes one the most is the sense of joyous peacefulness.  Henry V was right.  There are no kings here.

BBC News “Your Shoes”

Posted on by

The BBC is featuring a gallery of readers images entitled “You Shoes.”  There are some interesting photographs, but I am particularly intrigued by a multiexposure stroboscopic photograph by Brandon Klein, showing someone’s basketball sneakers performing an aerial dance (You should be able to go from this image to the others in the series).  There is nothing else of the player save the shows and the background is perfect.  The image is quite whimsical and I am very much intrugued by how it was taken.  No details are given.  I suspect it is some kind of green screen with Photoshop layers subsequently reassembled.

Sometimes a good photograph is easy or at least straightforward to create.  AT other times there is a lot of technical setup and skill involved.  I think that Klein’s picture falls into the latter group. In any event it is a gorgeous image.

Not paying for anything

Posted on by
Figure 1 - The internet 1910, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – The internet 1910, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I received two interesting comments today.  The first was from my son pointing out that my wife and I had paid for information that we could have gotten free on the internet.  The second was from a reader in response to my post about the demise of the International Herald asking why anyone would want to shell out two euros for a twenty page newspaper, when the same information could be obtained for free on the internet.  See there’s a common thread here.

Let’s ignore that fact that nothings really free. I pay a lot for my Verizon FIOS internet service at home and for four smart phones.  The common theme is the belief that information both text and image should be free.  It’s part of the democratization of the internet that we have often spoken about.  And it goes way beyond newspapers.  In the dinosaur ages, when I was a boy, you had to send photo-prints to your family and friends, if you want to distribute them.  Now you create them, for free, send them to your friends, for free, and store them on The Cloud for free.

Anybody can write, opine, and post for free.  Indeed, a lot of the opinions that I see on social media I wish that I had to pay for, because I wouldn’t and, therefore, wouldn’t be subjected to.  This, I guess, is that old adage that you get what you pay for returning like reflux at a chili fest.

Efforts like those of the NY Times, as an example, to charge for content or webstorage services are, I suspect, doomed to failure.  I expect that they will be “gone with the wind.”  And don’t give me the old quality of information argument.  Ever read the NY Post?  These vendors need to invent new ways of making money from their content otherwise their consumers will retreat.

So then you’re probably going to point out that all this Cloud Cruisin’ leaves you oh so open and vulnerable to cyber attack – to tracking, to directed ads, and to even more evil acts like identity theft.  Of course it does all of that.  Remember that I said that ultimately nothing is free!

We’re paying a big price. So the perception of being free is a chimera.  The value that you are getting is accessibility, downloadability, and indexing.  Whenever I want to sound erudite and post a quote here, I just type a few remembered lines into Google and out it pops.  Or if I want to see a photograph, I can almost always find it somewhere on the web – more often than not having been posted with complete disregard for copyright – another price of civilization.  This kind of rapid accessibility is however, worth quite a lot – another old adage “time is money.”

I always seem to get to this point in a blog about the internet or social media which begs a pithy conclusion.  The conclusion is ultimately always the same.  You don’t need to embrace change.  It doesn’t care about you.  It will be happy to leave you behind.  Technology is progressing without retreat – always has been; it’s only faster now (psst,  because the singularity is approaching).

 

The porky American

Posted on by

A while back in the office, we were working on a slide to illustrate one of our biomedical device concepts and our genius artist-in-residence came up with this wonderful drawing that featured the head of the “Average Woman” based on a composite of some thirty or so actual faces.  I like to refer to this as the “Jederfrau.”  As a result I was delighted this morning to come upon an article about the work of 3D artist Nickolay Lamm featuring computer simulations of the average nineteen year old man in the United States, Holland, France, and Japan that are based on CDC published figures for weight, height, and body Mass index (BMI).  The average American man has a BMI of 28.6; the average Japanese man has a BMI of 23.7; the average man from the Netherlands has a BMI of 25.2; and the average French man has a BMI of 25.5.  So the message is obvious “too many cookies, Corduroy,” and clearly fits in well with the recent Connecticut College study showing that Oreo cookies can be as addictive as cocaine to rats. 

Lamm recently featured similar 3D renderings of the average nineteen year old American teenage girls as Barbie.  The story there is pretty much the same.  Poor Barbie keeps getting slammed for creating unrealistic body image for teenage girls. 

A missing point in all of this is our growing ability to create realistic looking 3D avatars.  Indeed, until the advent of otherworld video games and the 2009 James Cameron movie “Avatar” the word avatar referred to the descent to the Earth of incarnations of the deity, predominately in Hinduism.  This fits in well with Joseph Campbell’s view of “Creative Mythology.” Photography, movies, television, and video games represent creations of fictional realities, and our massive computing power is opening up whole new vistas of creation.

Just remember this, a kiss is just a kiss

Posted on by

Each year the British Army runs a photography contest and this year’s winners have recently been announced. There are a lot of intriguing and fun photos among the winners.  But I am particularly taken with this one by Sgt Adrian Harlen RLC that really raises once again the question whether it is always true that “a kiss is just a kiss.”

“You must remember this

A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.”

From “As time goes by,” music and words by Herman Hupfeld

It was a monster mash

Posted on by

I guess that you have figured out by now that I am a Halloween lover.   October is a frenzy.  People are running around snapping foliage shots and people are getting ready for Halloween.  Yesterday at lunch we saw all these cute little children in Halloween costumes.  You start to realize that the key here is that people are just lovin’ it all and having fun.  They’re celebrating, first the magic of October and then the promise of the holidays.

With that in mind, I’ve done my usual survey of various “The Week in Pictures” columns and I want to share two today.  The first is a little ghoulish.  It is Carlo Allegri of Reuters picture from Oct. 10, 2013 at the New York Comic Con showing makeup artists Kamila Wysocka and Alexis Jackson from Florida in well, half zombie makeup – beautiful women looking, well, only half so good.  They are admiring someone else’s costume as they, and this is what makes the picture for me eat French fries and drink Starbuck’s concoctions. 

The second reminds us of what is coming – more fun down the line, as it were. It is Shannon Stapleton’s, again of Reuters, picture from October 9 showing an instructor at the Radio City Music Hall demonstrating pose for dancers from the Radio City Rockettes during a rehearsal for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.  It is a wonderful example of the back to you genre of photograph, yet what an expressive back with its flexing muscles! At the same time the image leaves just a bit ambiguous what is the subject and what is the background.  The dancers facing us, and facing us would normally be dominant, are just out of focus, thus drawing our attention back to the instructor.  I love it!

 

The Agony and the Ecstasy in a digital age

Posted on by

I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie “The Agony and the Ecstasy” about Michaelangelo (1475-1564). Pope Julius II (1443-1513), played by Rex Harrison (1908-1990), keeps asking Michaelangelo, played by Charlton Heston (1923-2008), “When will you make an end of it [ the painting of the Sistine Chapel]?” To which Michaelangelo replys, “When I am done.” I have long marveled at the artists of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries who could spend seven or more years on a single painting or sculpture, or the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages who took on a task that would take longer than their lifetimes.  They were all working for the ages.  And let me offer, as a final example, the fact that Edmond Halley (1656-1742), of Halley’s comet fame, near the end of his long life, began a new sky survey that would have taken him seventy-five years to complete.

In what context then should we view the world of digital photography, a world of instant gratification, that fits in so well with all of the other hurried aspect of our lives?  I have huge respect for the modern day practitioners of large format photography.  The entire art is a time consuming labor of love, where the end is only accomplished when it is finished.  Back when I was taking analogue photographs, albeit in 35 mm, the dark room was ultimately the rate limiting element.  Achievement a single decent print might be a studied two hour plus process.  The darkroom had to be setup, finally cleaned up, and you were thrilled and satisfied if the evening’s labors produced a single good print.  Printing negatives was always is, but never to be printed.  And I haven’t even mentioned the cost.  Printing was costly, and still is.  All of this, for me anyway, conspired in the picture taking process.  Do you really want to take that picture?  Will you ever print it? Will it be worth the effort and the money?

And of course, color was pretty much out of the question.  Most photoprint shops did a lousy disappointing job.  The only way to get the color that you wanted was to take transparencies.  And then what?

There was a lot of adversity in the whole process.  The great thing about Ansel Adams’ books was that they provided a method that, if adhered to, could lead to a decent and satisfying photograph.  I still have several of these silver gelatin, selenium toned images hanging in my hallway and I still pause to contemplate them.  They still elicit the memory of their production, particularly the smell of the darkroom.

Here, then, is yet another consequence of the instantaneity of digital photography.  The process, while still time-consuming, fits more comfortably into our day.  There is no setup and cleanup.  You can experiment to your heart’s content.  Printing your own digital images can still be a bit costly.  But I have found that I do not print enough to justify this cost and choose a good printing service instead.  Indeed, and I say this with a twinge of guilt, I have stopped printing all of my finished work.  Of course, the eco-minded will probably applaud me for this.

We are left with the question of motive.  Are we creating for the ages?  I believe that social media has taught us that fame and notoriety are ever so fleeting.  I create for myself.  It’s nice, of course, to share and to be appreciated by the like-minded.  We are in no position to comprehend what access posterity will have to our labors or whether and in what ways they will even care.  So it is hardly worth worrying about.  People create because that is what people do.  It is an essential element of being human.  Digital photography has just made it more accessible.

590 nm to 620 nm

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Autumn comes to Dean Park, Shrewsbury, MA a few years back, (c) DE Wolf.

Figure 1 – Autumn comes to Dean Park, Shrewsbury, MA a few years back, (c) DE Wolf.

590 to 620 nm is that glorious region of the electromagnet (light) spectrum that we call the color “orange.”  It is autumn in New England like nowhere else that I have lived this is a time to rejoice, to rejoice in the colors and flavors of the season.  And the quintessential color of fall in New England is orange.  Orange is everywhere, all shades of orange.  Everyone is happy and everyone is snapping photographs.  So I thought that I would celebrate the season with you and with a short photoessay that, because I am quirky, I am going to call “590 nm to 620 nm.  What I was looking for was essentially tone-on-tone images, where the composition is dramatically enhanced by choosing a vibrant color for the image.  This is the first part of a greater series of tone-on-tones that I am working on, with the ultimate intent of spanning the entirety of the visible spectrum.

The consequences of instantaneity

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Informal picture of the photographer at Baltimore's Inner Harbor with "Giant Crab," (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Informal picture of the photographer at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor with “Giant Crab,” (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Photography is arguably the art of the instant, or at least it pretends to be.  And there are many consequences of instantaneity.  While I am not going to argue that before photography there never was an informal, candid, or comic portrait, we must conclude that photography has transformed portraiture and our concept of it.  The transformation began with the advent of the Daguerrean Parlor, when a man or woman could walk in, pay a relatively small price, and walk out with a little portrait.  As we have discussed it was the dawn of a new democratic age.  Indeed, we still wax poetically about these early portraits.  And then, of course, there was George Eastman and the revolution of the instantaneous, and often mediocre, that he created. Indeed, you could become quite impatient waiting for your prints to come back.  Hence we had the invention of both the 1 hour photoservice and of the Polaroid instant photographic system – more mediocrity for the most part.

And now we find ourselves, or have propelled ourselves, into the new age of the digital photograph, where gratification is truly instantaneous and were we, more often than not, do not even require prints.  The carbon-free age is upon us. You don’t really need to embrace any of this.  It will happily call you Minivar Cheevy and  leave you behind.

So I really encourage you to embrace it.  Lay out the years of family holiday portraits on your dining room table and marvel at the connected story and the transformation.  That’s your family, their history, their triumph.  The silly photographs of family and friends wearing bizarre hats and mugging for the camera are some of the best.  People are smiling and laughing, freed from the confines and strictures of formal portraiture – free to display their true selves.

My research group has gotten in the habit when out on scientific trips to find some kitschy icon, usually a silly statue, and photograph ourselves in front of it.  We’ve got, for instance, Big Bird at the University of Michigan’s Children’s Hospital and Snoopy from the Minneapolis Airport.  Figure 1 is our latest, yours truly sitting in front of a giant Chesapeake Crab at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

The selfie even frees you from needing someone else or a tripod and timer to take a self portrait.  Witness, of course, Pope Francis and the world’s first papal selfie. This is all lots of fun.  The only point that I would make is that I am a bit tired of seeing technically poor images on social media – flared images, out of focus images, improperly color corrected images.  There’s really no excuse for any of this and it is a downside of services like Instagram and of the perceived need to take the quest for instantaneity just a bit too far.  I guess that what I am suggesting is that you should strive for spontaneity but eschew mediocrity.   Digital photography, with all the automatic processing that it provides, is designed to create fabulous pictures, a little circumspection is the key.