Tag: Photography

Fun Factivities: Daytime Darkness

In 1992, Kellogg’s was collaborating with World Book to deliver educational content to kids on cereal boxes. In addition to its popular encyclopedia (still in print and updated every year), World Book produced Childcraft, a 15-volume set about everything interesting to kids. Childcraft produced the cereal box content.

Figure 1. Six cereal boxes (ca. 1992) from a Kellogg’s Variety Pack. Each box has a World Book Childcraft “Fun `Factivity.'” These pristine boxes were for sale on eBay.

At the time, Kellogg’s Variety Packs included 10 (or sometimes 8?) single serving boxes of cereal. Each one had a Fun `Factivity’ on the back of the box (Figures 1 and 2). I don’t remember how I came across the box of Frosted Flakes below (Figure 3), but I still have it because I recognized the eclipse – the corona had the same shape as an eclipse I photographed 20 years earlier.

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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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Vintage chronosequence

In the late 1980s, I established vegetation study plots at 10 sites along the eastern side of Glacier Bay in southeastern Alaska. These sites were more or less evenly spaced between the retreating Muir Glacier and the terminal moraine which the Glacier Bay ice had built at the end of the Little Ice Age. The youngest site had been exposed by retreating ice in 1968 and the oldest site had been exposed around 1770 soon after the ice melted back from the 1740 moraine. So on average the age difference between “consecutive” sites was about 20 years (202 years ÷ 10).

There are three approaches to learning things from this series of different aged study sites:

  1. You can assume the sites form a chronosequence so that changes inferred from the series of progressively older sites are also changes that have happened at individual sites. According to this assumption my older study sites would have passed successively through stages similar to all of the younger sites.
  2. You can be less trusting of the chronosequence and use evidence at each site to reconstruct its developmental history. This history can be compared to younger sites and to their histories to test the above assumption. Tree rings and paleoecology are potential sources of information about vegetation history at individual sites.
  3. You can wait until each site attains the age of the next older site at the time of establishment. At that time Site 1 should look just like Site 2 did when you started, and so on. If the chronosequence assumption is valid, each site will have aged predictably and you will have a new, slightly older, and now verified chronosequence. You can have some confidence that inferences about change made from that chronosequence are valid.

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Documenting Dryas

I saw Riggs Glacier on my first trip to Glacier Bay in 1984. Of the three tidewater glaciers in Muir Inlet at that time, only McBride Glacier reaches sea level today. In 1990, as one of the final field tasks for my dissertation, I established permanent study plots between Riggs Glacier and Muir Glacier. This summer Galen and I used old sketch maps to find all five of them and recorded GPS coordinates.

Lewis testing his downwind rig at Riggs Glacier. Kodachrome, July 1984

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Cairn photo

My second youngest study site at Glacier Bay is on a bench of outwash about 150 feet above Muir Inlet. Before alders covered the young surface in the mid 20th century, the bench offered a good view of the retreating face of Muir Glacier to the north. William O. Field established a photo station there maybe in the late 1940s and marked the spot with a cairn assembled of several large rocks (see http://fastie.net/dating-fred/). I found a cairn in 1988 when I set up my study plots in a dense thicket of alders.

A cairn that might have been built by William O. Field near one of my study plots. This might be Field’s station “6A.” Kodachrome, May 1995

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Shelf portrait

It was not easy to find a photo of these bookshelves as they were installed in my parents’ house. The shelves were behind a table and hard to photograph, and they were also not very photogenic. I thought they were cool and modern in the sixties, but I never thought they were important (I do now). The shelves are probably in the background of some other photos, but this one from 1972 was the first I came across and is certainly more interesting than the rest. Many of the books in this shot are still on these shelves.

This is probably about a 10 second exposure. I might have had someone turn out the room light while I moved between positions. Panatomic X film, Fall, 1972.
This is probably about a 10 second exposure. I might have had someone turn out the room light while I moved between positions. I used Panatomic X, a very slow (ASA 32), very fine grained film. Fall, 1972.

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Testing MIDOPT filters

Last spring, Barry Warzak of Midwest Optical Systems (MIDOPT) in Illinois contacted Ned Horning about writing an article on dual bandpass filters. Ned got me involved, and Barry also became interested in having us try some of the new filters he was developing. The primary focus of MIDOPT is industrial machine vision filters and lenses, but Barry recognizes the potential in the emerging market for agricultural analysis and aerial imaging. Barry has sent us samples of 15 different filters that could be used for infrared plant health analysis. Some of these are fancy dichroic filters that transmit one or two very narrow bands of color, and others are high quality glass filters that have spectral qualities similar to Wratten 25A, Wratten 15, or Schott BG3 filters.

Above: A folder full of photos of the same scene taken with different filters and different white balance settings.
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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”

Red Dog Redux

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Red Dog Lodge in December 1967. Photo by Ellis J. Malashuk.
Red Dog Lodge in December 1967. This is the crop marked on the print I bought (see below) of a photo taken by Ellis J. Malashuk, December 7, 1967.
I was really pleased to learn that the archive of my own black and white negatives includes a 1973 photo of Red Dog Lodge. But last week I found a 1967 photo for sale on eBay, and it’s much better than mine. It was taken for an article that ran in the Baltimore Sunday Sun Recreation section (page 11) on December 10, 1967. I inferred that from notes and stamps on the back of the photo, and from a citation of a Paul Wilkes article “Campaign to Save Soldiers Delight” from that date. Continue reading “Red Dog Redux”

Marker historical

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<em>The Soldiers Delight historical marker in 1969.</em>
The Soldiers Delight historical marker in 1969.

The Maryland Historical Society installed the Soldiers Delight historical marker in 1968. It looks brand new in the 1969 photo from The Baltimore Sun archives, and it appears to be on the west side of Deer Park Road near the overlook. I photographed the marker in 1973 when it appears to be on the opposite side of the road. It also appears to have been repaired after being broken off the post. I found a recent photo from August 2009 showing a completely new sign now back on the west side of the road next to the overlook parking. The wording of the sign has not changed, only the number of paragraphs and the number of spelling errors. Continue reading “Marker historical”

Seldom scene

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A mouse eared chickweed at Soldiers Delight. I don't know which species this is.
A mouse eared chickweed at Soldiers Delight. I don’t know which species this is. Spring 1975.
There are portraits of more than a dozen species of plant among my old negatives of Soldiers Delight. Most of these are characteristic plants of the barrens, like post oak, blue stem, and moss phlox. A few photos are of plants that are uncommon in Maryland except on serpentine. I don’t know these plants well enough to be sure of the identification, and some might be impossible to indentify just from photos. I photographed these between 1973 and 1975 before I paid very close attention to plant names, but I must have been aware that certain species were special at Soldiers Delight. Continue reading “Seldom scene”