Death by selfie

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You have probably heard that life imitates art. Most notable is Oscar Wilde’s comment that:

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life“

I mention this because in the play and movie Auntie Mame, Mame’s husband, Beauregard Burnside, dies when they are on the Matterhorn, and he falls to his death trying to take a photograph of Mame on the mountain. That is “death by photography,” and today we have the subset “death by selfie.” This came to mind this week when a woman in India was rescued from a thirty foot deep well in which she had fallen while trying to take a selfie.

Not surprisingly there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to death and injuries by selfie. The most common accidents, like the woman in India, is leaning too far off  bridges, buildings, and mountains – like the Matterhorn. Another common theme is being killed by trains while taking a selfie standing on a railroad track.  I am suspicious that this is an attempt to have a train in the photo barreling down on one. Hello, people – not so smart! This certainly seems a variant on the Darwin Awards.

It appears unlikely that “death by selfie” has increased the number of “deaths by photography,” except in that there are more people taking photographs with cell phones than in “olden days” with “conventional” cameras. More significant, I suspect, is the danger of abstractedness. While the cell-phone and the taking of selfies increases connectedness with one’s greater community, it certainly abstracts the individual from his/her surroundings. “Death by selfie” is a small problem compared to the greater problem of “death by cell phone.” In 2012, 3,328 people were killed in automobile crashes in the United States, involving a distracted driver. An additional, 421,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving a distracted driver in 2012. There’s the epidemic.

And it also represents a clash between our hunger for technology and our ability to adapt and intercolate this technology into our conscious lives – emphasis on the word conscious. As we rocket towards the singularity, we are the weak link, and what we see is the need to automate cars more and more to compensate for distracted humans.

We will never forget them

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Figure 1 - Challenger explosion January 28, 1986 11:39 EST. From NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Challenger explosion January 28, 1986 11:39 EST. From NASA and in the public domain.

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'”

President Ronald Reagan – January 28, 1986

Spike in the snow

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Figure 1 - Spike in the snow, Nine Acres, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Spike in the snow, Nine Acres, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

It is always fun after a fresh snow to poke around and see what kind of interesting geometrics you can find. I especially love the patterns that blowing wind makes on fresh pliable snow.The key is the intense contrasts broken by little bits of plants poking free. On Sunday I came upon the spike in the snow shown in Figure1. The spike was there to hold cords that helped a young specimen sapling survive the relentless onslaught of wind. I was intrigued by the starkness of the white contrasted with the red of the rusty spike as well as the perfectly straight line of the cord contrasted with the curve of its shadow. And, of course, the fundamental minimalism of the composition appeals to me.

There is always the question with soundscapes in color as to how to deal with the blue. It is a real physical phenomenon but your eye tends to correct for it. Here I decided to leave it. Surprisingly, my preferred exposure called for no exposure compensation. Usually you have to over expose to get the snow properly white.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 94 mm, ISO 200, Aperture priority AE Mode 1/800th sec at f/10 with no exposure compensation.

Thunder snow from space

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Figure 1 - A massive snowstorm churns over the East Coast of the United States on Jan. 23. Scott Kelly / NASA

Figure 1 – A massive snowstorm churns over the East Coast of the United States on Jan. 23. Scott Kelly / NASA

The recent east coast snow storm brought us another great image from space that I cannot resist. Astronaut Scott Kelly who recently marked 300 days on the International Space Station tweeted: “Rare #thundersnow visible from @Space_Station” along with the awe-inspiring image of Figure 1.

Thundersnow is as you might expect snow accompanied by thunder and lightning. It happens when the atmosphere is especially unstable. That is like a monster storm spanning most of the east coast of the United States.

 

The black hole

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Figure 1 - The Black Hole. (cv) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – The Black Hole. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I have always loved and related to Hamlet’s statement:

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

It is, of course, a statement of Hamlet’s contemplative nature. But I think also that it points out the infinite in the miniature, the view that the structures of the universe are everywhere repeated. This is, of course, the whole concept or definition of a fractal, a random process creating order out of apparent disorder, but the same on all scales. The other geometry that seems ubiquitous is the spiral. We have the golden spiral ( a so-called logarithmic spiral) and the Archimedes spiral (a linear spiral): the spiral of the ram’s horn, the spiral of cream in a cup of coffee, and the spiral of the galaxies.

Yesterday was a gloomy day here in Massachusetts as we awaited the big snow, I had sought warmth, shelter, and amusement in the local indoor mall and while walking came across the spirals of Figure 1 – a spiral in a glass vase. My first thoughts were of the Twilight Zone hypnotic spiral, and the wonderful ambiguity of whether it features an inward or an outward spiral. Then my mind wandered to the the warp in space-time around a black hole, where everything is inexorably drawn in, even light, and where nothing escapes.  I don’t apologize for obscure associations.  All of our minds are set by random, that is fractal, associations. More accurately this is the path that you would see of an object trying to move perpendicular to the radius. This is the path of a planet circling a star – a decaying orbit drawn in the end to its doom. You may have seen shot marbles spiraling down a hemisphere at you local science center.

I took the image with my Iphone, and it proved exceedingly difficult to work-up to what I had visualized. In the end, I liked the distracting reflections mimicking galaxies and faint alternate spiral reflections. These seemed to add to the sense that I was looking at some giant scale astronomical phenomenon.

Snowzilla

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Figure 1 - Night image of blizzard bearing down on the East coast of the United States NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite snapped this image of the approaching blizzard around 2:35 a.m. EST on Jan. 22, 2016 using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument's Day-Night band. Credit NOAA/NASA.

Figure 1 – Night image of blizzard bearing down on the East coast of the United States NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite snapped this image of the approaching blizzard around 2:35 a.m. EST on Jan. 22, 2016 using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument’s Day-Night band. Credit NOAA/NASA.

As Hati and Skoll goes to press – so to speak, people along the East coast of the United States are awaiting Snowzilla 2, which is already hitting the southern states and threatens to dump as much as three feet of snow in Washington, DC. The Boston area happily, is not expecting for than a dusting.

But significantly the NOAA and NASA have just released the spectacular image of Figure 1 showing the massive storm ominously hovering over beautifully illuminated cities. I could not resist the post.  Stay safe and warm eastern readers and have fun in the snow – just remember to use a little positive exposure compensation if you take photographs.

 

The earliest daguerreotype cameras

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Figure 1 - Susse Frére camera in the collection of the Westlicht Photography Museum in Vienna, Austria. From the Wikipedia, image by Liudmila & Nelson and put into the public domain without restrictions.

Figure 1 – Susse Frére camera in the collection of the Westlicht Photography Museum in Vienna, Austria. From the Wikipedia, image by Liudmila & Nelson and put into the public domain without restrictions.

Today I’d like to pick up on the story of the earliest cameras’s. The great french physicist François Arago revealed publicly the details of the daguerreotype process on August 19, 1839. Daguerre was a business man determined, much like technology entrepreneurs of today, to make a public success of his process. Two months earlier he had signed contracts with two manufacturers, Alphonse Giroux and Maison Susse Frères.  Both of the manufacturers were granted exclusive rights to sell the modified  camera obscura designed by Daguerre.  Today only one Susse Frères daguerreotype camera, made in 1839, remains, or at least is known to remain, and is on display in the camera museum of the WestLicht auction house in Vienna, Austria. It is shown in Figure 1. The cameras made by the Alphonse Giroux et Compagnie, are almost identical.

The brass-mounted lens was produced by optician Charles Chevalier. It contains an 81 mm diameter meniscus achromatic doublet, (concave surface facing the front) and has a 382 mm focal length. In front of the lens is a  fixed 27 mm diameter aperture and a manual picoting brass shutter.  As a result the lens is approximately f/14.

The Giroux camera sold for 400 francs and the Susse Frères cameras for 350 francs. What does this translate to? There is a delightful link that describes the cost of things in Daumier’s time. It tells us that in 1838 the monthly salary of an unskilled laborer was 30 francs. Today we are told that is about $3,200. So we can estimate these early camera’s to have cost the equivalent of something on the order of $40,000!

Hilarious wildlife awards

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Hmm. Is it really possible that there are Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. Well, it is apparently so. They were founded by wildlife photographer Paul Joynson-Hicks, and if you are in the mood for something a bit different, something on the verge, of the forbidden “Cute and Cuddly” check out their website. Yes, of course they have a website and even the animals are laughing! Or so it would seem.