Category: Photography

Tower Spotting

On the way to Arizona last month, my first plane change was at Dulles (Washington Dulles International Airport, IAD). While taxiing away from the gate I caught a glimpse of the original air traffic control tower and took some photos out the window (Figure 1). I had first seen this tower in 1973 when I also took some photos from the stunning 1962 terminal building. I have fond memories of those old black and white negatives because taking them required some airport shenanigans that maybe no one has done since.

Figure 1. Partly obscured here by the 1978 A/B concourse, the original Dulles air control tower, designed by Eero Saarinen, was in service from 1962 to 1981. It is now preserved as an iconic work of mid-century-modern public architecture. January 1, 2026.
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Eric Smith, Jamaican painter

After my junior year of high school, I spent the summer in Jamaica. I had been there before on family trips which were working vacations for my father. He was part of two Jamaican research projects on bioluminescence — of fireflies and marine dinoflagellates. Dad worked at Johns Hopkins with Bill McElroy who published his first paper on bioluminescence in 1942 (McElroy and Ballentine 1942) and in the 1950s described the luciferin-luciferase reaction (White et al. 1961) after studies of the 1.5 million fireflies collected by kids around Baltimore. Howard Seliger arrived at Hopkins in 1958 and quickly determined the spectral and quantum yield of firefly bioluminescence (Seliger and McElroy 1960) and eventually characterized the light emission from more than 100 species of firefly in Maryland and Jamaica.

Mike Loftus, Howard Seliger, Bill Fastie, Marlene DeLuca, Susan Loftus, and Bill McElroy playing poker in a cottage at the Chatham Hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica, June 1968. The map on the wall is Oyster Bay where they were studying bioluminescent dinoflagellates. Mike Loftus managed the field station. Marlene DeLuca married McElroy in 1967 and had a distinguished career studying research applications of the luciferin-luciferase reaction. Instamatic Ektachrome processed in September 1969. Photo by C. Fastie.
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Camera box

I am supposed to be curating my color slide collection so I can make thousands of digital copies that no one will ever see. I got distracted because I had to find my old slide sorting light tables and in the process also found a box with three old cameras. Two of these might have been in the family since the 1930s and the other was acquired more recently, although it is the oldest of the three.

Figure 1. My mother’s Kodak Brownie No. 2 Rainbow Hawk-Eye Model C Box Camera.
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SliderPro 1000

About 10 years ago I started making digital copies of old film negatives and color slides. The scanners I had access to produced disappointing results, so I tried taking a closeup of the film with a digital camera (Figure 1). The camera was the first DSLR I owned. This made very good copies, capturing most of the information in the old film. My more recent experiences with consumer scanners and commercial scanning services suggest that it is easy to get much better results using a camera than with a slide/film scanner.

Figure 1. In 2013 this rig allowed me to make good copies of old 35mm film and color slides. The camera is a Nikon D40 (6 MP, model released in 2006) with an old Micro-NIKKOR 55mm 1:3.5 lens with a 12 mm extension tube. A film holder from an old enlarger holds the film or a slide. This produces much better results than any consumer film/slide scanner I know about.
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A night sky to remember

Last week dozens of online photos of Comet NEOWISE enticed me to make an effort to see it for myself. At 9:00 PM on Friday I noticed that the sky was clear, threw some gear in a pack, and hiked up the hill behind the house. I sat in the grass in a big hilltop clearing as the sky darkened and first the comet, and then a million stars, and then the full sweep of the Milky Way emerged above me.

Comet NEOWISE. I like to think that this photo shows a hint of the separate ion tail to the left of the main dust tail, but I often think my photos are better than they really are. Nikkor 300mm 1:4.5 lens (ca. 1975) on Nikon D3100. ISO 800, f/8, 5 seconds. July 20, 2020, 11:22 PM EDT.
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Selfie at the pool

Vernal pools are enchanting places, the breeding habitat of dozens of animal species that would otherwise be absent or rare in a forest. But it is a challenge to take enchanting photos of vernal pools. If you stand far enough away to include the entire pool, lots of trees will probably block your view and the photos don’t seem to capture the essence or importance of the place.

The Ron Thompson Gangster Carp Pole is a 36 foot long fishing rod manufactured in Great Britain for catching fish in ponds. I don’t understand it either. With the top two of the eight sections removed it will support a camera about 24 feet above the ground. Photo by Ned, May 3, 2020.
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Gas Ice Bait Beer

Everything you need in Chauvin, Louisiana.
Everything you need in Chauvin, Louisiana.

The levee of Bayou Petit Caillou supports the long strip of houses that is Chauvin and Cocodrie, the narrowest towns I have ever seen. Way down delta in Louisiana, you are either on the levee, in the bayou, or somewhere out in the salt marsh. For exactly 100 years, Cecil Lapeyrouse’s Grocery has been on the levee. Today most of the houses are seasonal, and the store gets by with business from people coming down to shrimp or fish or have fun. We stopped by on our exit from the LUMCON Marine Center in Cocodrie where Public Lab held its annual meeting. That had fallen into the fun category. Continue reading “Gas Ice Bait Beer”

Negative space

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400 rolls of film from the 1970s.
400 rolls of film from the 1970s.

In the 1970s I exposed about 400 rolls of black and white film. Most of these were 36 exposure rolls of 35 mm Kodak Plus-X which I bulk loaded and developed at home. I made an 8 x 10 inch contact print of each roll, and put an accession number on the contact sheet and the glassine envelope with the negative strips. I still have all 14,000 of these negatives and contact prints. If you think that preserving this collection suggests that I am farsighted, consider that I never put a single date on any of this material. In my twenties, it never occurred to me that I would not remember where and when I took each photo. Continue reading “Negative space”

Lytro Schmytro

The Lytro camera is probably the most interesting advance in photographic technology this year. An array of microlenses allows the sensor to capture information about the exact direction from which light is coming, and that allows software to focus every part of the scene regardless of it’s distance from the camera. To highlight this advance, the company’s first camera produced interactive online images which could be refocused by clicking anywhere in the scene (see some here). We have all looked at photos with out-of-focus parts, and it is a novel experience to be able to click on or touch the fuzzy places and have the crisp focus shift as if a focusing ring was being turned. But it has also been maddening to know that the captured data would allow the entire photo to be in focus all at the same time, yet this was not an option for any Lytro photo. It was a clever marketing approach, because modern digital cameras with tiny sensors have very good depth of field, and many of the photos we take now already have everything in focus. Allowing the viewer to “focus the photo after it was taken” highlighted how new this technology was. Continue reading “Lytro Schmytro”

Lemon Fair

Grass fire along the Lemon Fair River, April 18, 2012. Photo by Preston Turner.
Grass fire along the Lemon Fair River, April 18, 2012. Photo by Preston Turner.
I thought I had finally done everything right. The Flowform 16 was flying steadily in a 15 mph breeze (with gusts to 20) and easily lofting the full KAP rig with Canon S95. My plan was to take vertical photos for combining into an orthophoto image of a hayfield that had been partly burned two days earlier by the farmer. Preston had posted some dramatic photos of the evening blaze advancing across the field, and the burn pattern looked impressive when I drove by the next day looking for way to get closer to it. On my return a day later, I avoided asking permission for farm road access, and just parked two miles away and walked along the Lemon Fair River. Because the good wind provided plenty of lift, I opted for the full KAP rig and radio control instead of just the camera pointed down and shooting every ten seconds. That gave me the option of also taking some oblique shots, and the 5:00 PM shadows of burr oaks and silver maples were already enticing on the new grass. Radio control also allowed me to release the shutter only when the rig was quiet between sways, and to take far fewer photos than the ten second intervalometer would have taken. Continue reading “Lemon Fair”

Return to the Marsh

I could see that the lens was still extended... I was the happy owner of 483 new aerial photos of Otter View Park. November 18, 2011
This time it was the dry umbels of Queen Anne’s lace that I was tossing into the air as I crossed the field.  WeatherUnderground.com was reporting only 4-7 mph winds at the golf course, but WeatherSpark.com was predicting 10 mph winds from the west which could easily loft the camera over the marsh.  This was the first sunny day in a month with a prediction of steady west winds, and it might be my last chance for above freezing weather and a shot at getting aerial photos of the entire cattail marsh at Otter View Park.  So I was disappointed with the plummeting umbels, and soon out of breath from running upwind just to watch the Levitation Delta crash in the grass.  On the second try, I ran 100 yards and got it just high enough to find a wind. Continue reading “Return to the Marsh”