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.

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).

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.

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

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!

Well, I’m not sure whether this violates my no cute cuddly baby animal rule or not, but I was struck today by an image from the Oklahoma City Zoo showing a baby elephant in utero.  This is, of course, an ultrasound image taken of an eighteen year old female elephant Asha at the Zoo.  Zoo officials announced on Tuesday, October 8 that Asha is with calf.  She is seven months pregnant which means, given the elephant’s gestational period of pachyderms, that she isn’t due until December of 2014.

There are a number of important points to be made here.  First, is that sound waves can be used to produce images just like light waves, and the laws of physics regarding resolution etc. are pretty much the same.  You may ask whether this is really a photograph.  I would argue that it is.  The wonder of all of the amazing medical imaging modalities (CT, PET, MRI, ultrasound etc.) is that they enable us to see the previously unseen and like a good photograph they make us wonder, to think about, and to see in new ways.  Right now I am marveling that I never thought that I would see a photograph of an unborn baby elephant, whose trunk is clearly visible.

A while back I discussed the magical worlds in toilet paper rolls of French artists Anastassia Elias.  I find paper sculpture art very appealing.  There is tremendous delicacy about it.  It also opens up an infinity of possibilities for tone-on-tone photography, particularly white tones on white tones.

Tone-on-tone is, to me, a very intriguing form of photography.  You’ve got to very carefully choose the tonal range.  It is way too easy to “equalize the histogram,” setting the darkest tone to black and the lightest tone to white.  When you do that you can lose the very essence of the tone-on-tone.

With all these reasons in mind, I was delighted last night to discover the wonderful laser cut paper sculptures of British/Irish artist Rogan Brown.  Brown finds inspiration in nature and inspiration, in part, from the great tradition of scientific drawing and model making, from such artist-scientists as Ernst Haeckel.  The natural inspiration spans from the microcosm of biology to the macrocosm of geology: a zygote, a seed pod, the ocean, or a mountain range.

I love the sculptures.  Many of the tone-on-tone photographs, to my taste, could use a bit of work.  They seem to follow, for the most part, a simple side lighting approach, and I think that there is room to explore greater drama with more complex light set ups.

Art is inevitably a matter of vision, and Brown’s vision is superb.  It is far from merely copying nature like a draughtsman. It is the difference being merely seeing and truly seeing.  Brown quotes William Blake, and I think the point apropos of all that we discuss here, and of all the photographs taken for arts sake.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of a man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.”

William Blake, Letter to Revd. Dr. Trusler (1799)

If you have ever tried to photograph a bee on a flower in crystal clarity and sharpness, you will definitely appreciate this wonderful macrophotograph by showing a lady bug hitching a ride and sailing through the air on a dandelion seed.  It truly brings to life the phrase “on a wing and a prayer.” This image is really quite amazing and was taken by nineteen year old polish photographer Jagoda Cholacinska.  She spotted it in  a poppy field near her home.  Jagoda said, that “I was walking in a poppy field when I noticed a ladybird imitating a witch on the pollen of a dandelion.”

I am going to think about this picture every time I take a tricky macroshot only to come home and conclude that it is out of focus or not entirely in focus.  Maybe it is truly magic!

Figure 1 – A replica of the “The Turk,” a fraudulent eighteenth century chess playing machine. From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploladed by Carafe and in the public domain under creative commons license.

I have to apologize because I feel the need today to deviate a bit off topic – never one hundred percent.  I am incensed.  Yesterday in the groggy hours of morning, you know when that is.  It is when there is no choice on television except  between reruns of “Frasier” and “I Love Lucy,” and when you are sitting in a stupor, sipping your coffee, I was confronted with a television commercial for “Perfect Polly.”  Perfect Polly is a mechanical parakeet that has a motion detector in her chest that causes her to move her head from side to side and to chirp incessantly.  I am pretty sure that my cat would be wholly unconvinced.  She knows full well that her “Squeeky Mouse” is a fraud.  Still she happily disembowels him of his squeaker and drops his lifeless carcass, like so much carrion, in her water bowl.

We have  spoken at length in this blog about the human machine interface, about the intelligent camera, and about the coming of The Singularity and a new bionic age.  I was encouraged by a recent news clip showing a truly bionic leg prosthesis in operation.  The Singularity is near, people.  But a mechanical parakeet?  Come on! It is an insult to parakeets everywhere, including my friend Wendy’s little bird MJ.  I never tire of Wendy’s photos of MJ sharing her Cheerios.  That is cross-species bonding.  But a mechanical parakeet.  This is not what we have been talking about, and it joins robot dogs (remember those?) in the dredge heap of useless things.  Perfect Polly is of the genre of mechanical people and animals in ancient clockworks.

And Perfect Polly is reminiscint of “The Turk.”  The Turk at least has an interesting story and is closely related to the Turing Test of whether a machine is a machine or a human and how would you test it to know. The Turk was  a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. Between 1770 and 1854, when it was destroyed by fire, it was repeatedly exhibited as an automatron, even after it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, The Turk appeared to play a mean game of chess chess against a human opponent.

The Turk was, in fact, a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the mechanism. Over the course of 84 years, The Turk won most of the games it played during its demonstrations and defeated many challengers including: Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Probably the most famous analysis of The Turk and whether it was a fraud or an actual automatron was by Edgar Alan Poe and entitled “Maelzel’s Chess Player.”  Many of Poe’s arguements are incorrect.  Yet, in a sense, the essay is significant in that it anticipates “The Turing Test.”

So a big hurrumph for Perfect Polly.  As for The Turk, I should point out that on May 11, 1997, a chess playing machine developed by IBM defeated then world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match.  The age of “thinking” machines is upon us as witnessed by Deep Blue and our modern digital cameras.  It just has nothing to do with Perfect Polly!