A couple of Photography sites
I had the very great pleasure of meeting Dr. Harold Edgerton a number of times back when I
worked at this place in the 1970's. He let me borrow some of his strobe equipment and I had a lot of fun taking photomicrographs of various marine critters.
I was looking for something else and stumbled onto a few sites about photography, especially specialized and scientific photography.
From Belgium --
fotoopa:
An overall clearing house for high-speed photography -
HiViz
Lots of great resources here - equipment reviews, hacking current cameras, schematics for controllers, kits for sale if you don't want to build your own, etc...
For controlling all of this, there is the
Mumford Time Machine
Brian Mumford is an Horologist and built the Time Machine to calibrate the clocks he was building and repairing. He got to thinking that it would also have uses controlling time-lapse and high-speed photography. It does.
Then we go to Rochester, NY to look at the work of
Ted Kinsman.
Here is a photo of Ted using the Time Machine to shoot a balloon:
Finally, we look to our history and see the work of a Mr. Augustus Frederick Sherman, a a registry clerk in Ellis Island's immigration division in the early 20th century (and an amateur Photographer).
The NY Times has a
nice article on Mr. Sherman's work and a few photographs:
When Old and New World Met in a Camera Flash
If Peter Mesenhöller expected to find the misery of the tired, the poor, the wretched emanating from a few photographs displayed in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum the day he first visited in 1996, he was in for a surprise. "I immediately got stunned by the dignity, the pride, the self-confidence," Mr. Mesenhöller, a cultural anthropologist specializing in early still photography and immigration studies, said by phone from his home in Cologne, Germany. "It was totally different from the usual image we have of the huddled masses."
Mr. Mesenhöller had alighted on the photography of Augustus Frederick Sherman, a registry clerk in Ellis Island's immigration division in the early 20th century. In the hours when he wasn't determining the fate of some of the thousands of immigrants disembarking daily in New York Harbor from foreign vessels, he was coaxing the hopeful to open their trunks, don their finest attire and level their gaze at his camera.
Some 75 photographs of these immigrants are on view at the Ellis Island museum in "Augustus Frederick Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920." Organized by Mr. Mesenhöller and Diana Edkins, director of exhibitions and limited-edition prints for the Aperture Foundation, a nonprofit photography organization, the show coincides with the group's publication of a book of the same title with 40 more images. The show continues through Sept. 6 before traveling to 16 sites in the United States and abroad.
Understanding Mr. Mesenhöller's fascination - obsession, really - requires no great stretch of the imagination. As they hover disconcertingly between art and artifact, Sherman's portraits are powerful in their directness yet almost antiseptic in their disaffection.
Dressed gallantly in their native costumes, solemn families and individuals announce themselves to their new world with no apologies. A Romanian shepherd sits with hand on hip, his decoratively embroidered sheepskin coat opened to reveal a lush pelt of curly wool. A Ruthenian, from Ukraine, stares out with pale eyes, her neck encircled by loops of iridescent beads above a peasant blouse and shearling vest. Two men from Borana, in Ethiopia, with sculptural hair ornaments sticking straight up from their heads display their shields; the woman between them hides her hair beneath a wrap.
Posted by DaveH at August 6, 2005 10:52 PM