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?

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?

Sometimes the best way to take a dramatic photograph is to break all the rules, well maybe not all, the rules.  Take a look at Michael Meisnner of the AP’s wonderful picture showing Russia’s Iuliia Morozova and Ekaterina Pankova jumping to block the ball during the Women’s Volleyball European Championship quarter-final match against Turkey in Germany.  BTW, the Russian women did go on to win the tournament. This is one of those amazing wow pictures.  The subjects are facing away from us. There are no faces and no bodies, just hands and a ponytail.  The ponytail, of course, says it all about this anti-gravity moment.  Then your eyes start to wonder. You are intrigued by the finger nails, the matching hairband, and the bandaged pinky finger.  When you find yourself studying the detail that much in a picture, you just know that the photographer really succeed. I just love it! Bravo!

Here’s a paradox for you.  Can you take a photograph of something that’s invisible?  Sound like a rhetorical question?  Well maybe not.

The government of South Korea has approved a design for a skyscraper which has been described as “invisible”.  No, this is not the latest illusion by magician David Copperfield, who vanished the Statue of Liberty, and the building will not actually be transparent. Rather, the building is designed to reflect its surrounding area with a complex system of glass, LED lights and cameras. ‘Tower Infinity’ will project real-time images of its background onto its own surface. Three sections each with 500 rows of LED screens will – at full power – appear to merge the skyscraper into the horizon.  Designed by U.S.-based GDS Architects, the glass-encased Tower Infinity will top out at 450 meters (1,476 feet) and have the third highest observation deck in the world. Here is an artist’s conception of what the building will look like as the invisibility, aka “Romulan cloaking shield,” is turned on.

Us physics types really love paradoxes, and we have many to choose from, for instance “the twin paradox” from relativity theory, the “grandfather paradox” from (I don’t know time theory(?), and, of course “Schrödinger’s Cat,” from quantum theory.  But finally, we have something that the average everyday photographer will be able to point his lens at, or maybe not.

“A paradox!

A most ingenious paradox!

We’ve quips and quibbles heard in flocks,

But none to beat this paradox!”

Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Pirates of Penzance“

I have previously extolled the virtues of Kodak’s “Kodachrome” transparency film.  This is part of the mystique of the “Analogue Days,” of film-based photography.  I personally used three films: Kodachrome, High-speed Ektachrome, and Agfachrome.  There were others, of course,but these were the ones that I used.  The important point was that each of these transparency films provided the photographer with a unique set of aesthetic qualities.  They functioned like an artist’s palette, and you could choose between them depending upon your mood and what you were photographing.  Kodachrome was for warm pastels, Ektachrome for cool wintery scenes, and Agfachrome for vivid color.  The phrase “film’s aesthetic quality” uses “quality” in the same sense that it is used in music to connote the individual voice of an instrument, here a film.

So, now I’m thinking of shoe boxes everywhere in the closets of aged photographers full of Kodachrome slides.  National Geographic photographer Nathan Benn recently went through his closet, chose some of what he believed, were his finest slides and published them in a new book entitled “Kodachrome Memories.”  I found myself going through this series several times trying to figure out whether Mr. Benn had really captured the quality of this wonderful film.  Then I realized something.  I was going through this set of pictures over and over again, and there were several images, in fact more than several images,  that repeatedly made me smile.  Kodachrome was not just a film with certain visual properties.  More significantly, this film defines a period roughly in the center of the twentieth century, and our visual sense and collective memory of that period is inexorably intermingled with the aesthetic properties of Kodachrome – in the same sense that we think of the early twentieth century as black and white.

Let’s start with Benn’s 1973 photograph, “Vermont Barnyard,”  with its cows set against a huge barn with peeling paint, and the laundry hanging out to dry.  This is quintessential Kodachrome – Kodachrome at its best!  Then there is his 1974 “Woman in a New Haven, Vermont Doorway.”  The woman seems to define the back to basics mystique of the seventies.  She isn’t looking at the camera, which creates a need for a story.  She is young and beautiful and her bare dirty feet, charming. Then there is the 1984 image from South Memphis, TN capturing a couple kissing, because what tells a better story than a man and a woman kissing?  Well, maybe it’s the 1983 picture of a little girl in a white dress in New Orleans, LA.  And just as I found myself smiling at the Nanette hairstyle in Benn’s 1973 photograph from Cleveland, Mississippi of a young woman standing in front of a Coke machine,  I found the 1990 picture of a Pittsburgh, PA office worker.  God, were those hairstyles awful!

I wouldn’t say that I want to go back permanently, but I am grateful to Nathan Benn for taking me back for a short visit.  It’s always nice to remember where we have been.   The book is “Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990.”  It was around 1995 when a press photographer came into my lab and talk pictures with a very expensive digital SLR.  I was amazed and now Kodachrome is truly a memory!

Figure 1 – NASA moon rocket launch (September 12, 2013) from Wallops Island, VA, showing startled frog in the upper left. Picture from NASA and in the public domain.

I have a friend who told me about a cousin of hers who travels all around the world.  Let’s call the cousin “Robbie,” to protect the innocent.  Robbie carries with her a little Lego figure that she calls Lego Robbie, and Lego Robbie bears a striking resemblance to real Robbie.  Anyway, everywhere Real Robbie photographs Lego Robbie against the sights wherever she goes.  So you have for instance “Lego Robbie in Front of the Eiffel Tower” or “Lego Robbie” in front of the Great Pyramids.”  It’s really kind of delightful and, actually, from a technical viewpoint less than trivial for Real Robbie to achieve the depth of field required to photograph a two inch toy figure against full size grand architecture.  It is very reminiscent of the US television commercials about the guy who travels with a garden gnome figure.

I was thinking about the two Robbies the other day after seeing Figure 1. On September 12, 2013 NASA launched a rocket to the moon from Wallops Island, Virginia, and there captured in one of the launch frames is a startled frog leaping for his life.  The comment was made in one of the articles that I read about this that “we cannot guarantee that no frogs were hurt in the creation of this photograph.”  That would be very unfortunate.  We may also joke about “amphibious assaults.” However, I prefer this little children’s story that runs through my mind about a little frog (OK let’s call him “Robbie.”) who wanted to jump to the moon.  He was always trying, and all his erstwhile friends, his brother and sister frogs, even his parent laughed at him.  That is until one day when …