Divided

Divided

Those of you who know me well may understand the significance of this image.

Peter, the father, the rock
turned to sand falling
slipping through fingers
dividing
what was one is now many

Jeff Gee

Jeff Gee

This is a photo of my good friend Jefferson Gee. He was my roommate freshman year, and we've managed to keep in touch since then, though we don't see each other as often as we'd like. Each time we do, it seems like an endless stream of good conversation. He's just one of those guys you click with, you know?

Well one place we did get to see each other was in Europe. Last summer, while I was in Oxford, Jeff was studying all summer at the Georgia Tech campus in France ("GT Lorraine"). We decided to take one weekend and meet up--in Switzerland. We thought it was wild that two kids, one from New Jersey and one from Alabama, could go to school together in Georgia, and then manage to meet up in Zürich. Fun times.

While we were bumming around Zürich, he would ask me questions about my camera gear and photography. I took this photo to demonstrate the difference between a wide-angle, close up shot and a shot with a long lens from further away (which quickly followed). I wanted to show him why the long lenses are preferred for portraits, but I ended up liking this photograph better. Sure, the telephoto shot captured his features more accurately, but I feel like this one better captures his personality: fun to be around, a little goofy at times.

See, the significance here is that you won't find a "HowTo" article on the Internet telling you to take portraits with wide lenses, and rarely will you find that advice in books. All the "rules" say portraits should be taken with long to normal-perspective lenses. And, if I had just been taking the shot without trying to demonstrate anything, I probably would have put on a 80 or 100 mm lens, backed up and composed, and captured his features well. But because I was prompted by Jeff to experiment--even though I already knew what the result would be technically--I discovered a new result aesthetically. It seems I need to be asking myself the question, "Well what would happen if ...?" a bit more.

Industry

Industry

Finally got around to taking another pic for the GT Photo Club. This week's theme was "Industry." I took a picture of some scaffolding at a construction site close to the house. I had to set up the tripod (love the new tripod) on a small strip of land right next to an Atlanta highway. Exciting photographic danger.

MSE Magic

GT MSE

I recently had the opportunity to photograph the Materials Science and Engineering booth at Georgia Tech's Engineers Week fair. MSE was demonstrating several interesting properties of materials, including the low thermal conductivity of a space shuttle heat-shield tile, a methanol powered fuel cell, and the extreme expansion of nitrogen as it boils. In the photograph shown here, a superconductor is cooled with liquid nitrogen to below its critical temperature (the temperature below which it superconducts). When that happens, it generates a magnetic field stronger than gravity. Put a magnet on top and what do you get? Levitation.

Flickr and the Library of Congress

Flickr, the photosharing site, has teamed up with the Library of Congress, the keepers of thousands of historic photos, in order to put the power of Web 2.0 and user-generated content to good use. Flickr will host over three thousand of the Library's images (the program is still in the pilot stage) and invite Flickr members to tag or comment on photos such as the one above. In this way, the photos become more public for people like us, and the Library can harness the collective knowledge of the public to enhance their metadata for the images, improving the quality of the collection. It always interests me when I see things like this: new technologies enabling ordinary people to collectively have a greater impact than ever before.

Here are the Library's thoughts before and 24 hours after the pilot program started.
Here are Flickr's thoughts before and 24 hours after the program started.
Here's the Flickr site: The Commons.

It's Snowing!

Atlanta Snow

Atlanta snow--who would have guessed? It didn't stick though, unfortunately. One of my roommates did make a lovely little snowman outside our door.

Broken

Broken

This photo was taken for an assignment for the GT Photo Club. The theme for the week was "Broken," so we were supposed to take a picture that somehow embodied that theme. I had been walking past this broken glass on my way to and from class several times a day all week, and finally found the time to go out and shoot it. The next day, someone had cleaned up the glass and it was gone. Goes to show you shouldn't wait to shoot something you're interested in--it's all only temporary.

The picture was conceived, pre-visualized, shot, and processed within about an hour and half. This is a markedly different approach than my other pictures, some of which I've been working on for months. I think there are some virtues in this fast-paced approach, at least some of the time. A raw or half-processed photograph sitting on a hard drive is useless--something has to get produced, even if it is a bit rough around the edges.

I just discovered the GT Photo Club a few weeks ago, and joined it for exactly this kind of thing. If I let it, it will give me a sense of obligation to pick up my camera and take pictures. Knowing me, I will quickly let my schoolwork overtake me, and not make time for photography, which should probably be as high a priority as coursework, if only for my own sanity. It looks like school already gets in the way, though; I found out this morning that I will have to miss the next two Photo Club meetings due to some extra stuff I have to do for a certain class. C'est la vie.