This gallery contains 1 photo.
The Minnesota Twins and the Lund Boys (Guest essay from Steven Lund, honest!) Today May 17th the Associated Press reported: Harmon Killebrew, the affable, big-swinging Hall of Famer whose tape-measure home runs made him the cornerstone of the Minnesota Twins, … Continue reading
America's Town: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago
Sometimes I just have to play around to make ideas better. I often find that a good catch phrase or theme guides creativity. But sometimes creativity is driven by more than words – like music or images. Almost all sensory perceptions, really. We tend to harness those we know. Don’t ask me to make a perfume or a control gadget. Olfactory and tactile are two skills that are strangers to me. Let me relate a story or two to explain.
Back in 2001 my friend Akira Yoshimura asked me to make a new translite for the Tonight Show. We took a meeting with Debbie Vickers to go over concepts. What came out of that meeting was “America’s Town.” Akira wanted to combine elements from lots of cities to make a new skyline. In the end, I used New York on the left, Los Angeles in the center, and Chicago on the right. We put up several little duratrans “statues” of some other iconic elements of America. I ended up taking some time to do the work, driving 7500 miles in my old Mercedes 300 SEL to shoot several things. (I miss that car. Very steady at 80mph.) The Space Needle, Mount Rushmore, Wrigley Field, the Gateway Arch, the Alamo, and the Las Vegas Sign were my stops on the trip. The elements for the vinyl backing came from my stock and a shoot at USC. All were guided by the phrase “America’s Town.”
Back to cookies.
My little inspirational moments. Yum.
When I was shooting the pictures for the cookies, we shot some pictures of cookies on a cookie sheet. Nina wanted to make one with a cookie missing. I liked the idea. As we shot, I decided to add a shot with a cookie replacing the one that was gone. Somewhere in my little pea brain was the idea of that cookie being snatched away. So I shot it, figuring out what might come at a later time. Yesterday I had worked on a little video for the web using this pair of images. At first, I thought about making the image move along slowly, like the big ship in Star Wars, and at the last minute, having a zap and seeing the cookie disappear. I took some time to find some music to go along with it. I have some licensed music from music2hues in my library and wondered what I would find. I finally found a 60 second cut that would work, ethereal, sort of spacey, mysterious. I laid it into my video program. And I put the first cookie tray in and programmed in the move on the still image. It would slowly move to camera right.
This type of move is called the Ken Burns effect. Named after Ken Burns, the very highly regarded filmmaker known for his documentary series on historical and fascinating subjects, like the Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and soon Vietnam, I read. I met him just one time in my life at a taping of the Tavis Smiley Show in New York City at WNET. Have a look at my youtube channel. I was there because Tavis was making some interviews in the city and wanted to use one of my pictures for his background, suggested by my friend John Retsek. In particular, I was there because we had been experimenting with a new printing technology from Sweden that was more environmentally friendly. I wanted to see it for myself and to help with the setup and lighting as a consultant. The day that Ken Burns came to the set, he complimented Tavis on the background that I had provided. Had to say that I was proud. (What was that about pride coming before something?)
So I had met the legend. And he liked my work. And now, with Good Habit’s project, I was imitating him with the videos I was making from still pictures.
I played around with the timing of the two shots and the final product shot, fitting them into the time allotted. I used the music and also added an undertone for suspense. I had noticed a cute little laugh in my files and put it in. Seemed much better than a zap. But my first pass was titled “Space Aliens want Good Habits too.” As soon as I thought I was done and I rendered it, the sense of it came to me. The picture was not dark and foreboding. It was high key, meaning that it was white and ligher shades. And the laugh, not alien. And, really, who would want to compete with aliens for cookies? Maybe with a pink bunny for batteries, but not for cookies. It was a little angel. At heaven’s bakery. The words just jumped out, “Even little angels want good habits.” It was my “America’s Town” moment. It came at the end, but there it was. Yes.
Have a look at it on my channel at youtube.com.
My other effort is for the granola from Good Habit. Here you see more of the classic Ken Burns look. Remember, I began with the idea of portraits of food, and a desire to reveal the roughness and beauty with a combination of soft and hard light. You really see the honey glaze and feel the shape of the grain, nuts, and berries on the second shot. I like this shot the best.
Good Habit Granola vid at my youtube channel.
I see that Good Habit is on twitter. @GoodHabitFood
Thanks for taking time to visit. I appreciate it.
Roughness brought to light with hard/soft light combination
Selling stuff requires desire, even if it is good for you. So my young friends at Good Habit took a chance and roped me into making you want some. To eat. Cookies. (And granola. More on that later.) They gave me some ideas from the work of others that they liked and we got to work. I stuck to the tried and true of my youth and also tried to make pictures that made sure that people would want them.
As the Good Book says, “the lust of the eyes.” Desire is another name for lust. English has it right when it gives us the word desire. Could be good or bad. Lust in English tends to be on the side of bad, of course. But bad can be good. Just ask someone under the age of 20. Or refer to my post about the maps…
Depth cues from soft background and hard edge cookies create desire
Anyway, I took the idea of portraits, put in the big soft top light of a Diva Light and kissed the cookies or granola with a small source hard light so that the texture would sing. A little added magic from good old Photoshop, (Thanks, Knoll brothers) either blending a lighter exposure with a soft brush or using a layer adjustment with that same layer mask soft brush helped to add just the right touch of highlight.
For many years of digital work, my soft brush favorite was a program called Live Picture. (I paid $3500, now its free.) I first heard about it while standing in a parking lot at night in Minneapolis while I was shooting the skyline. (Half coastal, remember!) A guy came up to me to chat. Kinda hard to be inconspicuous with an 8X10 camera on a tripod. I had begun to use the Mac for digital work. But I was somewhat hemmed in by the file sizes I used, pretty darn big. Photoshop used a scheme to handle large files called “virtual memory.” The amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) typically available for my Quadra 950 was about 64 megabytes. So if a file was larger than about a third of that size, the part of the file not needed for display on the screen at the time would be parked on a hard drive temporarily in “virtual memory.” I remember one time working on a file for Greg Kinnear’s late night talk show when I made a selection on one image, waited about 40 minutes for a second image to open, and then waited another 45 minutes for the image from it to “paste into” the first one. I had not learned to use the path tool or channels at that time, so the whole process had to be repeated if something went wrong. Live Picture had a revolutionary ideas of using layers, using just the part of an image needed to display on screen, and of holding everything until the end of the work without changing the original files until a last process of completing the changes all at once called “rendering” was completed to make a completely new file. That end process could also take hours sometimes, but that was not important, as I could go to sleep and see it later. Eventually I was able to work on files for some NBC news shows with Live Picture that had literally hundreds of layers. Photoshop came out with its version 3.0 later which had layers. I tried to do a job in Photoshop after it did, but had to stop two times while working on it to still buy more RAM. Each 16mb RAM module cost $700 in those days, so I spent $1400 for the first additional group and then did it again to bring it up to 128mb by the time the job was done. I ended up maxing that machine out to 200mb before I gave it a rest. Until Photoshop came out with CS 4, Live Picture was still better at soft brush work. The Knoll brothers software had finally arrived. Now with CS5, it will see more RAM than I can put into my MAC. Very happy news. Gets cranky around 24 GB of active file size, but who wouldn’t?
Back in the olden days of film, we would have used the Dedo light for these kinds of lighting challenges. I first used this light on the work with David Mitchell that I did on the EFX show for Vegas photos. They were reproduced as projections with a monster slide projector from Europe. (I remember the first time David talked to me about this – he spent forty-five minutes giving me the whole show in an phone call, play by play – amazing verbal description from David, perhaps one of the brightest men I have met to date except for perhaps the senior and junior John DeCuirs.) We had a scale model of a hillside. Pretty big, taller than me. It needed the play of light from nature’s peek-a-boo clouds, but we had to make our own on the sound stage over at Zoetrope or whatever they call it now. If I recall, the gaffer had to go back time and again to bring more dedos until we had every last one they had. The dedos were so cool because you could really control them and hit just what you wanted to hit. Terribly pricey, if I remember. But now, hey, Adobe does it better in post.
Here is the close-up.
Tight close-up reveals detail of roughness. I did the highlights in post.
Yummers!
Official DOD powerpoint slide rotated to show North
Taking a break from my own pictures, I have a confession to make. I am a news junkie. I am not sure if there is a 12 step group for that, but I have a hard time staying away from the news feeds. I did listen to the TV a week ago to hear the president, stayed with NBC for about an hour, and then I was back to the online sources. I don’t mind TV, but it is so BC. (Before Cable)
I know just a little about Pakistan. I have spent some time learning about the wild west areas in the north-i.e. Waziristan, and about Quetta, on the way to Afghanistan. And I guess I knew the name Islamabad. Some friends of mine used to spend time in Pakistan providing medical care. And I had a growing suspicion that the Pakistani leaders had very mixed feelings about what we wanted and what they wanted. I know that the Army runs things. And that they worry about India a lot more than they worry about the USA. And that the country has a lot of people who could do better in life if given some freedom and help. Not necessarily from the West.
But now, there was a new town to learn about. Abbottabad. Took me a while to even figure out how it was spelled, but I found it. Google is nice for stuff like that. But herein lies the rub.
I use Google maps a lot. And I went to my browser and found Abbottabad. I thought I wonder what we, the mere users of Google, might find. Like maybe that there would some clue as to what we could find looking at the aerial photos tied to the maps. I mean, the Feds had offered 25 million dollars reward for this particular most wanted person. For a long time, I had a fleeting fantasy- call it a story idea, sounds better- that if someone could get some funding, that person might go wandering Pakistan to see if UBL would show up somewhere. Very American approach. Maybe investing a couple of million in research, hardware, and body guards would bring a reward of ten fold. Not a typical startup, but who knew?
I listened to the description coming through the media to where the event happened. Something about Bilal Town, something about being close to a Military Academy. I looked over the map and started to scoot around with my mouse. Never really felt sure, but I did finally pick out one compound that looked like a candidate. Here it is.
First night, and oh, note the date of the data, lower left corner
So, I thought that the building near the top looked promising. I double checked through Google Earth. I thought maybe I could change the angle and see the building structure a bit more. Three story building was the description. And then I saw it. The date of the data. Really handy feature. “Imagery date 3/22/2001” A Big Oops. That aerial mapping pre-dated the attack on America. Time to go to bed. I did.
Next morning, I was interested in the story (of course). And the Department of Defense (DOD) had released a fairly low resolution picture as part of their powerpoint presentation of the raid. I got it on a news feed, but it was really just DOD pictures. But I saw something funny about the Reuter’s version of the picture. It was larger. And it had a different angle. But the same monochrome style and the same type of outline on it. But in the corner, a Reuter’s Copyright notice. Hah! So I went back to Google Earth to check the image. Found it. So was the house there in 2001? No. Google had updated the image overnight to one with a Imagery Date of 6/14/2005. Somebody was burning the midnight oil. But there was something odd. I opened both images in photoshop and rotated them to make North at the top and to match, but the arrow on the Reuter’s was off by 90 degrees. Have a look.
Funny how news organizations are so human.
So the pictures were coming in, first from GEO Television and then from Aljazeera and others. And the next day, still just the 3rd of May in Los Angeles, we were treated by Google to another update on Google Earth. Have a look. Imagery Date 5/8/2010.
Imagery Date 5/8/2010 showing the most up to date image
But that same day, we got the DOD version, actually done this year and showing the lot pre-construction. Here it is.
The Official Story, maybe we should take them at their word this time.
Now, what is the hook? If we depend on Google, we might not get the facts unless they are driven by money interests to update them. And can we look back to see when the house was not there? Well, no, not easily. Does it matter? We say that we want an independent media. But what they show us here is either straight from the DOD or doctored badly or out of date or who knows? The house that I had picked out the first night was identified by a major British news source as Bin Laden’s lair on 5/2. Guess they forgot to look. 🙂
But what does it matter?
Remember the Apple Computer 1984 advert? (Ridley Scott directed it. He also directed Blade Runner. Signature film, imho. I shot downtown Los Angeles to make real translites for this one. That is the black and white develop-in-a-bathtub film. Back to 1984, sorry.) Actually more than a great concept, it is a book by George Orwell, as you know. He was the British author who had a colorful life of fighting in Spain before World War 2. Funny thing about Spain. I know little about Spain as well. But I met a man from Spain a couple of decades ago when I was visiting my alma mater, who opened my mind just a crack. He opened the door of my mind to Catalonia, his homeland. I had learned Castillian Spanish in Miss Freeman’s class in fourth grade. I had no idea that Catalan was a different language. This stranger explained to me that Castilla had conquered Catalan. And that they had burned the books in Catalan. I knew that the winners of wars write history, but I forgot about the books. Words are in books. Not just in dictionaries, but in books. Get it? Of course, we speak words too. And we write them on keyboards and on paper once in a while and sometimes we print out the text from our screens. But we are moving away from paper. Where are we going?
I heard another great story on NPR this last week about the Google project to digitize all the books and put them on line. I could be wrong, but I think that the story said that they had done some millions in the teens, like 14 million, and that they had found about 120 million to do. I have made use of some online resources when I need to read authors like John Eadie or the Desert Fathers. And they are searchable and allow me to read far more than I could ever imagine being able to own. And they were explaining that after they use a book from a library to scan it, they return it. And that lots of digital copies are distributed to lots of hard drives, so that they will not be lost. A pretty practical application of the DARPA concept, by the way. We have the internet because the DOD wanted to have some way of communicating with its forces even if the headquarters got destroyed, as you may remember.
So, back to Google. We are hearing a lot about clouds. I use a couple, you may also as well, even if you don’t know what they are. Basically big server farms with lots of redundancy. Physically connected but found in many places so that if Los Angeles has a big earthquake, Denver can replace the data. Something like that.
But what about if things really go to pieces someday?
And the other thing that Orwell’s 1984 brings to mind is the meaning of words. How will we remember what they mean? Remember my joke, BC, Before Cable. It used to mean Before Christ. The time that preceded the birth of Jesus. And AD meant Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Baby Jesus was the hinge of history. Now, polite scholarly types are aware of CE (Current Era) and BCE (Before Current Era) as the proper methods of noting the year. Lincoln used to date letters by AD and the year of our Republic. And things do change.
But some words change nefariously. Here is where Orwell comes in. (His real name was Eric Arthur Blair) He introduced the term Newspeak in 1984. The idea of Newspeak was that the ideas of the time could be shaped by the words that were allowed to be used. And sometimes also by changing the meaning of the words. Now, a spirited young person might have thought that he was being particularly independent by using the F word or by saying that a song was “bad” when he liked it. Hey, I am sure that parents will always be kept in the dark. Not what I am talking about.
What I do mean to say is that as we enter into a new form of recorded thought and word storage and word usage, it is good to beware of what has gone before in the name of Truth.
I read that there was a book published after World War 2 that detailed how the Nazi regime had used words to shape public opinion. The book was called Lingua Tertii Imperii by Victor Klemperer. He was a professor who lost his job because of being Jewish. The linked article gives examples, like saying “special treatment” and meaning murder. “Increasing hearing” for torture.
We know now that “enhanced interrogation techniques” mean what any normal person would call torture. James Watson says in a video interview online that when he heard the name “Special Projects” in reference to a building on a military base, it meant that they had an assassination section.
Now, all political discussion uses words to the benefit of one side or the other. One can say he is pro-choice, or be called pro-abortion by his opponents. One can be said to be for health care reform or be called a socialist. You get the idea. We hear a lot about extremists and fanatics. Properly used in the world of baseball, we love fans. But in government, no fanatics allowed, please. Or extremists. But back in Extreme Sports…you get the meaning.
Anyway, have a look at 1984 when you can break away from the news cycles. Remember history and languages teach us important things. Buy an English major a coffee. Listen to NPR on the car radio when you don’t need to sing along. Sing loud when you do need to sing along. Don’t be afraid to buy a book and just stick it on the shelf for a couple of years. It will still be there, unchanged by Google, or the DOD, or Social Networks, or Big Brother, or the Next Big Thing. Be even scarier and memorize something. Learn it by heart, as we used to say. 🙂
View from Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overcrossing of Memorial
Alan Au invited me to shoot backgrounds for a movie in March of 2002. It had been my first motion picture assignment in the city since the attack of the year before. I had been there for Paula Zahn’s set photography and printing for CNN’s “American Morning” late in 2001, but this marked my return as a regular translite photographer. Paula began broadcasting live from a wooden platform on the roof of the old CNN headquarters on the morning of 9/11 and the show premiered the next day from the same spot. She went on outside until we finished her set in January and we used the same point of view for her show’s background.
Back to Alan’s invitation… We shot day and night pictures for a big pair of vinyl backings from a place in DUMBO. Should you not be familiar, DUMBO stands for Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It is in Brooklyn, being across the East River from “the City”, as Manhattanites often refer to their borough. From there you can see both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. The movie was Anger Management, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler. I should not forget to mention Marisa Tomei, but only because I am a fan. Not material to my story, of course. None of these people ever call me or do lunch with me, but this particular movie might not be familiar to all. Hey, they all still need fans…
So we had noticed that there were lights on in Lower Manhattan that shot up into the sky. I found out that they were going to be on for a while, so I had to shoot them and retouch later. The story was that they were a symbolic replacement of the twin towers. And they did the job. In total, they were on for a about a month. I also read that they had to be turned off for short periods because birds became confused by them. But when we shot, they remained on.
For the translite shot, I was shooting with three 8X10 cameras, creating the pan that I needed. Once I set the day shot up and exposed film, I made it my practice to leave everything in place until after the night shoot was done. We had a bit of rain intermittently, as I recall. But we did finish that night. I had a little film left. So I changed out one camera to a wide angle lens -thinking it was my 90mm Schneider- rotated the back to vertical, and tipped the camera upwards. While view cameras do allow viewing through the lens on the ground glass, I really did not know for sure if I would get the top of the lights until I made a Polaroid. It was clear from that that I had it. And so I shot either one or two sheets. Exposure times at night would often range into more than 10 minutes at full night and I imagine that the whole process took me a half hour or so of extra time to complete. Not a problem for folks who shoot for fun, but I had to keep in mind the time used by the assistant, the location person, and the fee for the building access.
Some time later I scanned the negative. From film, a good drum scanner can pick up most of what was captured. It requires interpretation, much like darkroom work did years ago. In time I decided that this image played well as a monochrome. The original color image did not add to the meaning.
In that season of my life, I liked to have the sheet film processed in New York. Then I went to a rental darkroom and made my contact prints of the work before I travelled back to Los Angeles where I live. A really laid back guy named Paul owned the darkroom. Wood slat floors and a big bay window made the rental darkroom feel real homey. Guess they are still there on 27th Street. I was close enough to the Indian food part of town to always have some when I did my work.
So I had a couple of additional days there. I seem to remember that I had a little time that last night in town. I wanted to visit Ground Zero again, as I had in the months before. But there were two things that were new. One is that the fire was finally out. The first time that I had come out of the subway late in 2011 at Canal Street, the closest I could ride, I smelled it. This memory of that fire is still clear in my mind as I write today. And the other change was that now there had been built a temporary walkway with a viewing platform so that visitors could get a good look. In the previous visit, we walked from Canal to the Church Street fence. We could see some things, but being street level, it was hard to tell really what had happened. The images that stuck with me from that first trip were the homemade posters and pictures put up on the fence. They were memorials to individuals who were lost. And families came. Some had lost someone close. Some had just made a pilgrimage. All were somber. Tears came easily that day to many and they do to me now even today as I write. All had lost their fellows who walked this earth before them. We were mourning together.
This was my New York. The favorite subject for my camera. The rich environment of visual roughness, contrasting wealth and poverty. The place where my grandmother had come into the world. The home where she was taken by the Sisters of Charity to play in Central Park while she was at the New York Foundling Home. I believe that she lived at their facility in the East 60’s. Marguerite Madeleine Rice was her birth name. In time, when she reached the age of five, she rode a train to the Dakotas for adoption by the Gauché family. But this City was her birthplace and original home.
I went to see the view from the platform that last night in town. When I got there, I found out that I needed to get a ticket. The ticket office was closed. No luck.
But I must have had someone looking out for me that night. I went back to the entrance. I hung around for a bit. I talked to the lady cop who was keeping watch. She looked the other way and let me go up. This is what I witnessed.
Tribute in Light seen from viewing platform of ground zero in 2002
Here we can see the crowd, see the Tribute in Light, and even a small scale model in cardboard of what the Twin Towers were. For more on the memorial lights, take a tour of the tribute.
I am glad that I saw more remembrances observed this week in New York and elsewhere. I hope that I can always take time to tell children of what happened and why. May we never forget. Let us tell this story as long as we live. It’s our story.
Gone, but not forgotten
In the hours and days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, I found myself numb with news. I needed to do something else. So I got to my computer and my files.
While this picture is simple, it was what I could make from what I had at the time. I had ridden the ferry back and forth from Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty some months before, taking stock pictures. In time I used Lady Liberty’s shot for a small cutout duratrans for the Tonight Show set. The theme of that backing and attending pieces was America’s Town. But in this period of time just after the attack that took so many lives, I thought that I should make a composite of a couple of the shots so that I could make a small statement from my little house in Van Nuys to join in the voices from all over. It was to remember what was gone. To remember those many lives who were lost. To remember the magnificent buildings in lower Manhattan that had served me as the tallest tripod I had ever used. And to give me a quick heads up any time I needed to navigate Manhattan because they were always visible and told me which direction was downtown. To remember the times before when we felt safe…
I felt like that day changed us all. We were no longer Americans in a way. We had become Israelis.
In the 1970’s I had visited my brother Jerome while he was a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For me, the trip was an eye opener. We had our bags searched as we entered the supermarket or cinema. We needed to pick up a hitchhiking soldier when we drove to the north so that we could have a gun in the car for protection. Some old man walked the neighborhood at night with an old carbine so that no one could make trouble. We had a long interview in a private area with a security officer before going home on the airplane.
Ten years ago, when the men flew the planes into buildings, my world turned into something else. No one harmed me in my little house, but they changed my life and the lives of my fellows and my children and my children’s children. This Sunday night past I heard the news that the man behind this big change was dead, shot by a Navy Seal. I wrestle with knowing that that evil man succeeded in part. Every time we deviate from our plans because of what might happen if a bad guy does something, we give in to the terrorists. I no longer can be carefree in my world. I must always be vigilant. Maybe that fear should just be overcome. Maybe I need to be braver. Each day I live I must choose. Give in to fear or overcome it. Fight Bin Laden’s schemes for us I must. We all must.
Now Bin Laden is dead. Let us seize this moment. Let us face our enemy. This is the time when we become Americans again. In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Puff has cousins and they are our friends.
Dragons are our friends. No, I never used to think that, at least when I was young. I only knew that Dragons roared and fire came out from their mouths. Very big and scary. Monster movie scary. And I think that even today a lot of those creatures in films that we see are modeled after dragons. Even Dragonquest, the little direct to DVD film where I died in the first fifteen minutes, had a dragon as the enemy. (already pirated to youtube)
But what about Puff? the magic dragon. Commemorated in song made famous by Peter, Paul, and Mary? Seems that he was a friend, seen through the eyes of the authors. Apparently some scurrilous rumors have circulated about the story line of the song being about nefarious drug use and have recently been put to death, along with the notions about where President Obama came into the world. Gotta admit that blond WigHat guy, what’s his name?, looks to me like he has egg on his face just now, but he thinks that he is serving humanity by his talking trash to the press. Really can’t see him in office, not even as a mayor. But I digress. Imagine him making foreign policy or taking a meeting with our troops in theatre, or…you get it, I know…
Remember Puff. Peter Yarrow told about his friend who had written the poem about Puff and left the paper in the typewriter. (For my younger friends, this device was a very slow printer that only took one sheet of paper by manual feed, had no spell check-at least on most models- and required manual input. It usually did not have a USB cord and many times would be ergonomically designed to be powered by the human user’s muscle movements. And there was a bell. Yes. I once sat in the home of the original inventor of the typewriter bell in Beverly Hills. Not too shabby.
So this friend of Peter Yarrow did other things besides writing poems. We owe him high praise for a kind song about leaving childhood behind. And we should stand shoulder to shoulder to defend his work against those whose heads are too full of weed to notice. They won’t mind. I guess…as long as there are munchies.
So, Lenny Lipton wrote the words. And something else. A book I have been reading. About Stereo-Scopic Cinema. And it is free to download. Check out his site and get the link for Foundations of the Stereo-Scopic Cinema. He is a really cool guy it appears. Genuine genius, lots of recognition from his peers. Many breakthrough technical feats. Really. And I am working my way through it as part of my path of re-inventing Richard Lund. (Okay, so I need to do this from time to time)
Great story on page 26. Lipton relates the story of one of the pioneers in understanding stereo vision and what I will call depth cues. Depth cues make pictures more interesting to me. And to most, I would think. Now artists will debate this forever, but not having gone to art school, I might just take the simple approach of taking pictures that are more interesting and compelling to tell stories that more convincingly engage the emotions. Lenny introduces us to a man named Wheatstone. Wheatstone had come up with the mirror stereoscope in 1833. He and a man named Brewster had both been working on these sorts of devices. But, of course, this was before photography as we know it. I am glad they kept at it.
As Lipton relates the story, in 1849 Brewster had designed the first twin-lens stereo camera, based on the work of Talbot, Niepce, and Daguerre in photography. But nobody would make him one in England. But he had a bit more reception in France. An optician named Jules Duboscq agreed to make him one. Here came the weird part.
Lipton explained that a small number of us do not see stereo-optically. Those folks don’t use their brains to blend two slightly different pictures to see depth. Maybe around 8 percent of us have this problem. But Brewster ran into a really bad sample of people. He went to the fuzzywigs (my term) to show off his cool stuff. “Section de Physique of the Academie des Sciences” The first four guys he managed to corner and show his gear to were all stereoblind. A fifth did not get it for some unknown reason. But persistence paid off. The sixth fellow, Regnault, could see it. Yippee. (Lipton credits Linssen, 1972 and Cornwell-Clyne, 1954 and the original source of Clerc’s Photography: Theory and Practice.)
When I was much younger, I remember the term parallax. Back when we had film cameras, some had viewfinders that did not exactly show us what was seen by the “taking lens.” This resulted in some fun pictures, especially when taken by our family members. We might say things like, “Oh, I see that you cut off my head in the picture.” This was only because the viewfinder did not see the same as the other lens and it was easy to miss, particularly when close to the subject. The reverse was also true. Some pictures would show the people as small figures against enormous expanses of boring stuff. I will not go into it all, but even movie cameras had viewfinders and some work had to be done to ensure good composition. There was even a famous movie titled The Parallax View. Not sure if I remember the story, but I know that the work of Alan Pakula, director, Gordon Willis, cinematographer, and George Jenkins, production designer, is always instructive. I had the pleasure of meeting Jenkins in New York. He was gracious to me to give me some time to talk about translites. He introduced me to a progressive view of the subway in New York City. He was a subway rider because it was efficient. So I got over my ignorance, descended the stairs, and still use it frequently when I visit the City.
Parallax refers to the differences seen by each eye or each camera in a stereo pair. Since I am still a student of the subject, I will delay saying much more than that. But there are some things which do suggest depth in my two dimensional pictures, so let’s have a look. Depth cues are what we call them.
Warm foreground and cool background give feeling of depth
This is one- warm foreground and cool background. Sort of an art class way of thinking.
Yellow Rose stands out from softer background
Here we depend on the relative sharpness of the near flower and feel depth because the others are blurry. This is called shallow depth of field, as many of you know.
Single Yellow Rose, no hints except blurred background
This extreme close-up view exaggerates the blur of the background. In some ways it shows less depth, but can be helpful in isolating a subject. We used this technique on Dateline many years ago when I did a background of the monitor wall and we intentionally blurred it. Although the image was only 8 feet behind the presenter, it felt more like the room extended back 25 feet. Guy Pepper and Neal Shapiro were in control of that show during that season. It grew to take up four primetime hours on NBC. Guy could be heard at the end of the show saying, “Great job, everybody, let’s do it all again on Thursday.” Or whatever night was next coming. I have lost track of Guy. He took a spot with CNN for a while after helping get MSNBC off the ground. I would enjoy working with him again. Production Design Group with Jim Fenhagen and Erik Ulfers were the design team in place. Jim has recently done the new Piers Morgan set. Erik is the principal at Clickspring Design.
Foreground subjects with deeper tones and light background
Here soft light wraps around the two young women in the foreground. It is even softer in the background, revealing depth. Having a more full range to tone in the foreground tells us that these objects are fully apprehended by our senses. We also benefit by knowing that the human face is of a certain scale, so the buildings or trees behind must be far away. I recently welcomed another grandchild who is just learning to interpret depth cues. I wonder what is going on each day as he learns to relate to his world. His cousin, a bit older, still investigates with her mouth. So I would suppose that depth cues take a while to sink in…
Soft light still allows for depth cue through a gradient
Greys yielding to other greys can still reveal depth. The darker foreground gives meaning to the distant scene. This would be very useful if we put some actors in front of this scene made as a translite. The greys would play to enhance the strength of the skin tone of the actors as well, making them more interesting. Richard Sylbert used this type of approach to give his actors life.
I have come to believe that our sense of color is associative. We process the scene before our eyes by comparing near elements with each other. Famous directors of photography always know how to light the actresses. I suspect that the better production designers also give their actresses and actors more by their set designs. Today’s television has seen a run toward screaming colors, but may be moving back to the palettes of yesterday by the new location based series. I took in four hours of “The Killing” the other day and was struck by the rain of Seattle and its effects. Has a bit of a slow pace, not unlike “Prime Suspect.”
But, to go back to the grey mists from the music of my youth…
“Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mists in a land called Honalee…”
One thing that is generally true about Americans is that they pay attention to things. Yes, you heard right. Only their range of inquiry can be rather limited. I will delay my judgement on this trait or let you imagine what it is for now. But it is fun to see how things can sometimes connect.
What do I remember about Russia? Maybe the first time I heard about it was from my parents and the TV in 1957. I did not keep a diary, so I may be a bit off in telling you what I saw. I remember going outside at night and looking up into the night sky. It was cold outside and there must not have been a moon visible. But I remember looking up and seeing something slowly traveling the dark sky. I was told it was Sputnik. Many years later I saw a model of Sputnik, as far as I know in full scale. Pretty darn small, if I remember. Why do I bring this up? Because last week NPR was running a story about seeing the International Space Station with the naked eye. They said it would be visible just after sunset or before sunrise. The presenter mentioned a web site where the best viewing times for seeing it would be listed. I actually went to the site, but could not figure out how to find the times. So I gave up. Maybe LA would have too much junk in the air anyway. Why do I mention this? Because the presenter said that we could see it because it was so big now, being complete. It was said to be the size of a football field. (Remember I am an American and we call it football here and leave the round ball version to the rest of the world.)
What did I see in the sky as a boy? Can’t really say I now know. But I saw something up there. So, anyway, this week past also marked the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit of the earth. April 12th, 1961. We heard about it at school in Miss Carol Freeman’s fourth grade classroom. Our school was progressive. We had a TV in the front of the room that was connected to the educational channel three days a week. From it we had Spanish class with Don Miguel. He would talk to us and we would learn a few words in Spanish and respond to his instructions. When he said, “Carlos, levántate” I would stand and answer back, “Si, me levanto.” There were too many Richards and I lost the competition to get Ricardo, so I ended up with Charles. But I digress.
I later cheered on Alan Shepard as he made his suborbital flight. And later rooted for John Glenn as he orbited three times. But, in fact, our team was behind the Russians. The television presenters did not have to tell us. And within months our new president would challenge all of us Americans to beat the Russians to the moon. And so we did. (There are some who say we just did it on a sound stage, of course.) But many years later we did finally come to the truth that Gagarin actually parachuted apart from his space vehicle, making the accomplishment a cheat. But the Soviets controlled the media pretty well and so we never knew. In my humble opinion, I still say the Russians won.
So, back to Alexey Grigoryevich Stakhanov. Wiki tells us that he was a really good coal-miner. Personally dug out 102 tons of coal in 5 hours and 45 minutes. According to Wiki, he did it on the last day of August, 1935. He literally became the poster boy for the Socialist Economic cause. Later, there was a lot of talk about how many others had helped him do the work and that it was just propaganda. Sort of like the latter Gagarin feat. And it was done to praise the system. I suppose we also felt controlled by the news about the Soviet’s space success as others may have felt about coal mining in Russia in the days before World War II.
Long way around the barn, as they say. All to tell you about my brother Jerry. Known as Jerome A. Lund, PhD. He is one of the leading scholars in Aramaic, the language in common use in the Holy Land and other nearby places during the first century AD.
Jerry is the one standing close to the TV. Obviously we had loot on our minds more than the Baby Jesus.
So, what about Jerry? I was reading a review of one of his publications. In the first paragraph, the reviewer of The Old Syriac Gospel of the Distinct Evangelists: A Key-Word-in-Context Concordance made this comparison, “The latest addition to these ranks of essential research tools is Jerry Lund’s impressive concordance of the Curetonian and Sinaitic Old Syriac Gospel manuscripts, which at just under 2500 pages in length is a work of truly stakhanovite proportions!” (citation is Ephrem Van den Johnson, “Article Title,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies [http://syrcom.cua.edu/syrcom/Hugoye] vol. 1, no. 1 (1998), pars. 3-5.) Now this may sound a little mundane, or even nonsensical. But if you really compare his allusion, Jerome stands out. 102 tons of coal a day. At the end, the author references that he has found issue with 73 lines out to 170,000 written. I guess this might be a good example of scholarly nitpicking. Oh, those Oxford guys…
So, this month we have been hearing about people dying in Syria. The army is not siding with the people, but with the regime. Hundreds are losing their lives. Home of a dictatorial rule. Home of Damascus, where Christians first were called by that name. Where Paul the Apostle was re-educated. Home of the Syriac language originally. Arabic now is used, but even in the churches that sprung for this area, Syriac in some form is still used in worship. Could we even find Syria on a map?
Christians lost the wars years ago. The victors write the history books and control the libraries. But there are still some speaking Syriac today. For some of us who have an interest in Church History and the history of Christian thought, I am grateful for scholars like Jerome. He invested 14 years of his life in Jerusalem (Al Quds to a billion+ people, meaning the Holy City) at Hebrew University to prepare for his life’s work. Having finished the major effort as a contributor for a massive Key Word in Context Dictionary/Concordance for the Aramaic Language at Hebrew Union in Cincinnati, he recently relocated to his wife’s Norway. One son is in school in the US, one is guarding the King of Norway, and the other is completing high school at the ski area where they live.
Maybe you are wondering if I had a point in my meanderings. Well, yes…While we Americans ponder just how just a sentence is meted out to Ms. Lohan for the necklace thing, or if X-Factor US will bring back Paula Abdul, we can relax, knowing that the good folks in North Korea have “our best interests at heart.” I find their news site to be a reminder that while Pravda has changed, not all have decided to join in telling the truth. Hope you find their point of view educational. DPRK’s site.
And we should pay more attention to what is happening abroad. Travel more overseas. Learn a new language. Interact with those from other places who are already here. And stop hogging the name “football.” (or not) We don’t all need to be experts in everything, but when we do take on a task of mastering some area of study, it does not hurt to be “Jeromian” in our efforts. So use that word in a sentence this week. Impress your friends.
Tom Walsh invited me to make a backing for his show Desperate Housewives. I used as much top light as I could to break the light across the surface of the leaves to maximize texture. I guess we could have used some clouds to make the scene better. Oh, well…
I met Tom on “The Clinic” many years ago. We rode with David Mitchell, the production designer, out to East Islip, New York one cold winter day. Tom has always had an energetic approach to his work, whether striding across Midtown from Grand Central to Times Square or driving from Los Angeles almost all the way to San Diego to shoot the paintings of Theodor Suess Geisel with me for television. He also introduced me to Sapporo. Midtown affordable. Yummers. But I should get back to the roughness part.
Remember Benoit Mandelbrot. He is the one who pointed out that we humans crave irregularity in our definition of beauty. “Don’t make things perfect”, if you will. The most perfectly drawn model in a computer, rendered with the best description of its surfaces and lighting just does not move our hearts like the real things do. Let’s look at a few illustrations together.
Meat Packing District
Remember Hogs and Heifers? It was the bar in the meat-packing district that was the inspiration for Coyote Ugly. I shot this scene for the movie in the neighborhood. We carefully planned this shot to have the light glancing over the surfaces. The director of photography, Amir Mokri, was so good that he predicted accurately when the light would be right. Lots of texture. Lots of roughness. My inspiration for texture lighting is from Andreas Feininger. His book, Total Picture Control, both informed my darkroom work, and gave me a love for large format photography of New York City. One of the giants, in my view.
1955 Packard Dashboard view
For a different subject, one might think that the chrome and plastic of a 1950’s American car design would not follow the same pattern. But it does. Certainly in the plans, this dash would not have been truly beautiful, but in the execution of the making of it, wow. Completely different. Even the slight aging of this well preserved convertible adds to the eye’s pleasure.
Textures of string, cloth, and hair blend beautifully with the soft, smooth skin of this young musician.
Soft music does not emanate from this still image, but the string, wood, fabric, and natural elements all stand as touches to contrast with the tender youthful nature of this young musician’s skin. One type of beauty is that of the young.
Chairman Mao does not compare to the textured beauty above him.
As you compare this picture, note how flat and uninteresting I find the wall and the portrait of Mao, lacking in irregularity. Above him, the ancient architecture of the Forbidden City grants us its beauty by showing its imperfections. The Emperor had good designers and builders.
Meat Packing District with Roughness
I am sure that many of you have seen the Black Swan with Natalie Portman and have a lot to say about it. But I begin today with the other Black Swan and where it has led me. And maybe how it explains a lot to me and maybe it will to you as well.
The Black Swan was a book title. And one that I read. Nicholas Nassem Talib, author. He was talking about how some things just seem outside of our reality, our expectations. He spoke about how all swans were white. Until someone went to Australia and found that some were black. Hence the title. I found the book to be a very interesting read, helping to inform me and remind me that the folks on TV News, or in the political leadership, or in the Science journals, or the “Suits” in Hollywood, or many others to whom we look for guidance may not be ready for what is coming next. After something comes, like 9/11 or 3/11 or the Arab Spring, which we did not expect or if we did, had no realistic range in mind of its consequences, there are some who rush to explain that they saw it all along and now we should listen to them. Talib reminds us that nobody knew. And that we should not think that there will be another one. We might not know that an airliner attack would trigger two wars that would last a decade or more, that really big earthquakes can trigger really big problems with nuclear power, or that there could be a rapid end to dictators in many countries in the same year and who might come to rule next.
So, there I was reading along. And whose name should pop up? Someone I never knew and yet, without his ideas, my work would still be stuck in darkness and organic chemistry, the wet side. Talib introduced me to Benoit Mandelbrot, the multi-faceted math guy. And the father of Fractals. (Cute little guy with the double cowlick? No, you must be thinking of someone else.) No I mean Fractals. The idea that some things can be imagined that have repeating patterns of shape as one changes scale. Now, I am sure that is not the definition in his book. Or say that one can take something apart and the smaller parts resemble the larger ones. That is closer.
Some fractal beauty
Now, who cares? Really? Sometimes things just creep into our lives unnoticed. Remember the first Epson Color Stylus printer? We had inkjet printers before that one. But that one changed the way we looked at desktop printers. It made pictures on “plain paper.” They looked something like photos on photo paper. Not quite, but close. And Epson got better at making printers. I have a long list of Epson printers that I bought, longer than my list of cars that I have owned, certainly a lot longer than the list of girls I may have dated in High School. They all had something in common. (The printers!) They depended on fractals to make the little files into bigger, photorealistic ones. We did not know it at the time, but those little squirty print heads were spitting out an image that was using only a portion of the pixels from out digital pictures, maybe around 100 or so per inch, and were using special math formulas based on the fractal idea to invent the rest. Wow. At least that is what I think. So how did it change my work?
I began my career in the darkroom. Smelly chemicals, safe-lights or total darkness, handling film, paper, more film, holders, paper safes, roll easels, enlargers, and really big enlargers. I began my movie backdrop career in the biggest darkroom in the world. Over 20 feet high, about 30 feet wide and more than 60 feet long. The enlarger was on a track, sort of reminded me of a very narrow railroad with a loud, bright xenon light blasting through a negative held between two sheets of glass and zooming out through a lens to land dimly on a distant “board” that was really an oversized garage door coated with cork and canvas. Some of my readers remember slide projectors. Not a lot of difference, but only a much bigger scale. Over time things got more modern, but we still were projecting light. But one day, it all changed.
So, to replace this, we got a box with a three lasers inside. Pretty big box, but still a lot smaller. Maybe 8 by 8 by 8 feet or so. And it seemed to be the same idea. Light shining through the darkness from small to big. But actually it did not change size at all. It was a laser light. Coherent. And size stable. So, how did we get it bigger? How did we make it huge? Fractals. Yeah, the same thing that Epson did. Really elegantly. So much so that it made the inkjet seem a bit coarse. The sneaky folks who wrote the software that controlled this box used fractals to fill in the blanks between the pixels. The box printed at 200 pixels per inch. But in doing so, because the pixels actually landed perfectly, it was equivalent to the 2000 pixels from an inkjet. Not bad for a box from Northern Italy. The red, green, and blue lasers painted the film with pure light so well that we could make big pictures of clarity and beauty from our small digital files. Not tiny files, but they were often enlarged 10 times or so to print. That means that for every original pixel, nine more had to be created to make it to the next one. Ouch. But Mandelbrot’s Fractals could fill in the missing detail. And that is the point. Missing detail filled in. Not just grainy structures on a negative making a bigger image like in the first darkroom I used.
So, is this better? Or worse? And does it make me more important or less important as the photographer/ artiste? Does it just make me the loader and unloader since someone else wrote the program to fill in the blanks?
I wrapped up some work on a new film a few months ago. I can’t tell you which one yet, but you might be able to figure out what was shot in NYC this year and has had plenty of press. And I have seen a report that it is using the new tiny form factor camera from the Red folks, in fact a couple of them per tripod. But we will leave the rumors for another post.
I found myself testing the full resolution images on this one. I really did not have to. I mean, I showed pictures to the art department that had every pixel from my original work and they approved them. But was that the end of my responsibility to them? I decided that it was not. Why? Because the algorithm used to apply the fractal math to make the pictures bigger was acting on those pictures and sometimes, just sometimes, the autopilot function of the software saw too much and invented what I did not want to have invented. It filled in the missing space with the wrong interpretation. So I tested small areas, then I altered the files by painting or blurring or some other tweaking so that the big looked more like the little.
Was I perfect? No. But did I do my best? Yes. It might be just the right thing to trust your photographer/ artiste/ film loader/ printer. Because the eye is better than the algorithm. More about Talib and Mandelbrot later- on Roughness.
