The 125th Anniversary of the National Geographic

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Figure 1 - A 1917 Photograph by from the National Geographic Magazine of an Inuit family. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – A 1917 Photograph by George R. King from the National Geographic Magazine of an Inuit family. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

National Geographic Magazine is celebrating its 125th anniversary.  That means that for at least three generations the great geographic discoveries were photographically documented and brought to the world through the National Geographic Magazine.    It is truly the case that this was not just any magazine.  It visually defined our world for over a century and many of the iconic images and the visual memes that we have spoken about were born and preserved by the National Geographic, first in black and white then, subsequently, in color.

National Geographic continues this tradition today by sponsoring and publishing the photographic results of its expeditions.  In addition to its print version, National Geographic has come to be associated with stunning televisions specials that “take you there.  And sometimes the “there” deep in truly breath taking: untouched caverns and unexplored jungles.  We have a real sense that we went with the early astronauts to space and the moon and with Ballard to the Titanic.  There is a stunning retrospective selection of National Geographic photographs and even more images to be found on the National Geographic Website.  As for personal favorites: who can forget Steve McCurry’s photograph of camels foraging desperately amidst the oil fires of Kuwait a blaze after the First Gulf War or Michael Nichols image of Jou Jou, a captive chimpanzee reaching out to touch Jane Goodall’s golden hair.

Astronomy photographs of the year

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I don’t know about you, but I am getting pretty sick and disturbed about all of the world’s bad news.  It’s time to look for something else, maybe something “out of this world.”  So I am turning today to The Royal Greenwich Observatory’s 2013 Annual Astronomy Photographers competition.  Some of these pictures are absolutely stunning and, well you know, out of this world.

Among my favorite is the wired angle shot “Quadruple Lunar Halo” taken by Spanish photographer Dani Caxete.  Then there is “Snowy Range Perseid Meteor Shower” by US photographer David Kingham.  Kingham combined twenty-three individual frames to capture all of the splendor and excitement of this past August’s Perseid meteor shower.  From a physics point of view this image does an excellent job of illustrating how all the meteors come from a single locus in the sky – an guess what those of you who know your stars will recognize that this locus is in the constellation of Perseus.  And finally I just love the “Ring of Fire Sequence” by Jia Hao of Singapore. This composite image shows the progression of an annular solar eclipse in May 2013. It is a curious fact of nature that the moon and the sun are both 110 times their diameters away from the Earth.  As a result during most solar eclipses the moon perflectly occludes the sun.  However, in some cases the moon is just a bit farther away and the occlusion is shy of complete.  The effect is the “ring of fire” of what is referred to as an annular eclipse.  Here the effect is made just a bit more dramatic by atmospheric distortions that occur as the sun/moon near the horizon.  Ain’t nature wonderful?

The first touches of autumn

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Figure 1 - First touches of fall, (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 1 – First touches of fall, (c) DE Wolf 2013

I tend to write my blog a week or so ahead.  So this picture was taken in late September.  Some of my readers may have seen it already on Facebook, but I wanted to share it with all of my readers.  Fall is a poetic time for New England photographers.  There is rich golden morning light and slowly the beautiful colors evolve.  This picture was taken along the Charles River Reservation below the Watertown Center Bridge and shows “the first touches of autumn.”  I was taken by the pastel beauty of that particular afternoon:  The fading summer lily pads, the leaves starting to turn, the wonderfully blue shy reflected in the water, and the dull brown tones of the rocks beneath the surface.

In processing I allowed myself a little bit more color saturation than I would usually use.  In general when toning a black and white or adjusting color in a color image I cut back a bit from what strikes my eye, in fear of the color looking artificial.  Here I liked the effect.  The image seems to me to be more a painting than a photograph, or maybe a tribute to Claude Monet andmodern impressionist Debra Gold.

The good and the bad

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I know that I have been accused of being a naysayer here for featuring so many grim heart-wrenching photographs of terrible events.  And certainly the news has no shortage of both natural and man-inflicted suffering.  So I am hoping that my recent posting of cute cuddly animals buys me some latitude, because this week I came across this riveting and very moving photograph by Bernandino Hernandez  of the AP showing a little boy sleeping and hugging his dog in a Acapulco shelter on September 17, during the recent hurricanes that have devastated Mexico.  This is really one of those cases where the picture is worth a thousand words and tells the entire story.

Unfortunately, a lot of bad things happen in the world.  So there really is a need for press photographers to document them.  Natural disasters like hurricanes need pictures to spawn public response.  Man-made suffering needs press photographers to document  and create collective outrage.

We have previously spoken about one of the most egregious of these outrages modern day slavery, particularly sex trafficking.  So I’d like to end on a small positive note, emphasis on the word small – a baby step in the right direction. The highest-ranking judge in New York state, Jonathan Lippman, announced on initiative Wednesday, September 25, that the state will begin treating most alleged prostitutes as victims rather than criminals, and seek to steer them toward medical treatment, job training and other social services to break the cycle of sex trafficking.  New York is establishing special courts to handle the cases and expects most of them to be set up by the end of next month.

 

 

 

Is the 3D printer the future of photography?

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Figure 1 - Miniature human faces printed with a 3d printer. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by S Zillayali and uploaded under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – Miniature human faces printed with a 3d printer. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by S Zillayali and uploaded under creative commons license.

I was looking at a picture by Dan Kitwood for Getty Images today on the BBC News showing two women staring in wonder and amazement at a 3D Model of Party Leader Nick Clegg created with a 3D printer at the Lib Dem autumn conference in Glasgow.  Your first reaction is probably well done photograph; but the 3D printing process still has a long way to go.  After all, the model shown in the picture took seven hours to print.  Well, it isn’t so long ago that we were working with low resolution 16 color printers in 2D and could go pretty much go off for lunch while they printed a picture.These were hardly up to the task of competing with film photography.  But look where we are really just a short while later.

3D Printing is a type of Rapid Prototyping Process that can produce full color 3D objects from a CAD input within hours.  It is relatively low cost compared to other rapid prototyping technologies.  It sounds impossible, but if you think about it we can print in 2D quite easily and a 3D object is really a set of very thin, typically 100 um, cross-sections or 2D prints.  There are a number of competing technologies at present to accomplish this magic.

Typically, the starting point or input is a CAD drawing, a computer aided design.  But as seen in Figure 1, human faces can be copied by 3D printing. The device is creating really complicated objects, as seen for instance in Figure 2.

The question then is whether 3D is the future of photography either via 3D printing or a 3D display technology such as holography.  I am seldom an early adopter.  However, I have recently found my laboratory using 3D printing to prototype our optical biosensing devices.  And, of course, there’s the Big Bang episode where Wolowitz and Koothrappali buy a 3D printer.  You imagine it; the machine prints it.  So hold your breath and prepare to be amazed.

Figure 2 - 3D printed model. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Axel Hindemith under creative commons license.

Figure 2 – 3D printed model. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Axel Hindemith under creative commons license.

 

The power of catch light

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Figure 1 - Witch without catchlight, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Witch without catchlight, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Recently I posted a series of Halloween photographs.  When I started this project, I took the image shown in Figure 1.  She is a happy witch, not menacing, but something seems wrong with the photograph.  Somehow the witch is listless and unlifelike.  The reason for this is that her eyes lack the phenomenon of “catch light,” which is, simply put, the reflection of the illuminating light off the cornea of the eyes.  The cornea is the clear, wet surrounding layer. Catch light is essentially the sparkle in one’s eyes. The most common form of catch light is that which forms from a flash.  Since flashes usually are, like the sun, point sources of light, the catch light often appears as a bright dot in the dark center of the eye, within the pupil.

Take a look at Figure 2, which a funerary portrait of a young Egyptian boy.  I chose this image because it is nearly two thousand years old.  So while it is not a photograph it is still pretty lifelike, and the two catch light bright spots in the eyes really brings the boy to life, or back to life.

Figure 2 - Funerary portrait of a young Egyptian boy, From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploaded by Juanmak and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Funerary portrait of a young Egyptian boy, From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploaded by Juanmak and in the public domain.

Catch light does not have to be bright spots.  This is shown in Figure 3.  Indeed, the eyes are portals to the soul and mirror whatever is in front of them.  This has been used to great effect in several mystery stories where the plot hinges on blowing up the catch light to reveal the “murderer” or other detail in the mystery,

Catch light has played an important role in the movies.  Directors often light up the sparkle in the eyes of starlets to make them more vibrant and glamorous, for instance Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.”  On the other hand, catch light is removed from the eyes of bad guys to create a sense, like our witch and others in my Halloween series, of the sinister and ominous.

So what about our witch.  Since I wanted a happy lifelike witch I use Adobe Photoshop to add two catch light spots to her eyes. I have also used the same trick when I remove red eye.  The process of removing red eye often simultaneously removes catch light and re-adding it with little bright spots adds to the

Figure 3 - Baby with sparkle or catch light in its eyes. From the Wikimedia Commons original by Christine B. Szeto and put into the public domain under creative commons license.

Figure 3 – Baby with sparkle or catch light in its eyes. From the Wikimedia Commons original by Christine B. Szeto and put into the public domain under creative commons license.

sense of vitality. In fact, if you think about it red eye is itself a kind of bad catch light.  It is a reflection of the light source off the retina.  This is particularly extreme in animals like cats that have a special layer called the tapetum lucidum which reflects light that passes through the retina back onto it, thus improving their night vision.  Of course, if you want your cat to look sinister and evil, real cats are never evil, leave the red eye.

As Figure 4, I show again the final image of the witch.  All of the processing is the same as Figure 1 now with catch light added.

Figure 4 - Witch of Figure 1 with catch light added. (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 4 – Witch of Figure 1 with catch light added. (c) DE Wolf 2013

 

Thirteen ghoulish photographs for Halloween

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It is October First and in New England that means that it is time to get excited about two things: fall color and Halloween.  I have prepared a photoessay entitled “Thirteen ghoulish photographs for Halloween.”  They are pictures of Halloween Wind Decorations.  All are fun.  Some are outright scary!  I’m inserting them as a slide show here, but you can also find them in a temporary gallery called “Halloween 2013.”

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Communicating with the past

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Figure 1 - Jacob A. Riis, "Bohemian Cigar Makers,1890." From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Jacob A. Riis, “Bohemian Cigar Makers,1890.” From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I have often stopped to wonder at the unique opportunity that looking at a daguerreotype or other nineteenth century photograph gives us to see for ourselves the people of that century, who would otherwise be lost to us completely.  Lost to us completely?  That statement expresses the bias that somehow a photograph is critical to establishing the reality of existence.  Ultimately, it isn’t really so.  We may laugh and cry with Shakespeare or Heloise, and there are no photographs of them.  Still photographs give us a unique perspective on the nineteenth century that we ultimately have of no predecessor century.

Ansel Adams wrote in his 1974 preface to the book “Jacob A. Riis” Photographer and citizen:”

“These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago. [no one hundred]… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows.  And they in turn seem to be aware of me.”

This two-way awareness is the result of the camera’s persona that we have been discussing.  The early camera was a presence. It had its own persona.  People were aware of it.  When captured in portrait they engaged the machine not the photographer, who may have seemed a disembodied voice.  We are not merely seeing the past, we are communicating with it.

When someone posed for a daguerreotype say for a loved one, perhaps far away, they were very deliberate in having their picture taken and were posing for that mystic entity called posterity as much as for someone in the present.  When the artist paints a picture, when the photographer takes a photograph, or when the author writes a book, the sense of posterity is ever present.  You hear that these are acts of ego,  vain attempts to gain immortality through fame.   I’m not so sure.  When someone plants a tree it is a selfless act for posterity.  The tree will be there.  You will not, and nobody will likely know that you planted it, still you take great pride in the loving act of planting.

This ties in profoundly with our discussion of the loss of the camera’s persona.  The cell phone and its kin make photography an impersonal act.  People become unaware of the camera, and even if they pose for it, the posing tends to be for the immediacy of moment, to be put up on someone’s Facebook page and then forgotten or retrieved with curiosity  a year or two later.

I think that we have to ask ourselves whether the cell phone camera creates a new paradox.  Does the device enlarge human communication immediately only to destroy the ability of the camera to communicate across greater expanses of time?  It is something to think about.

Sleeping with sharks

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So what with all the gloom and doom, we gotta smile sometime.  And sometimes I think that I was born too early.  When I was a boy there was no place that I liked better than the “American Museum of Natural History.”  OK, OK, we’ve already established my fundamental geekiness, which some people find endearing. Then came the movie “Night at the Museum,” which was followed by organized sleepovers in the museum.  Did I ever envy those kids!  So today I’d like to share a picture by Mikael Buck for Rex Features showing fifty-five cub scouts on a sleepover besides the big shark encounter tank in the London Aquarium on September 15, 2013.  Does it get any better?