A few months ago I was introduced to NYC based photographer Amy Stein’s work. She shot the image which appeared on the cover of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Altered Landscape collection catalogue (which is actually a gorgeous 288 page work of art in itself ). Her series Halloween in Harlem is wonderful.
My wife picked up this cardboard radio for our kitchen at the Los Angles County Museum of Art gift shop. It’s a gorgeous piece of electronics. The sound is as you would expect from a tiny cardboard radio. The tuning is a little difficult, once you find a station you leave it there. And the volume jumps around a lot but again, find a setting, leave it. Realistically it’ll end up at my studio next to my grandfathers calculator.
It’s been a while. I’ve been terribly busy. I will be better. I hope this makes up for it.
So a while back I was the NASA Ames research center near Sunnyvale, California. I was doing a story on Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X PRIZE for the Financial Times Magazine in London. As quite often happens with these kinds of things, one story leads to another and in this case there ended up being multiple stories. This is one of them.
As I was exploring the complex a little I noticed a closed McDonalds. As an image a closed McDonalds on a retired military base it’s very interesting on it’s own, but as I explored the building more I noticed machinery, reel to reels etc inside. I went back to the speak with a colleague about what was going on in this building. Turns out huge collection of previously unknown tapes which were the high res images of the lunar surface taken throughout the Apollo program were being restored in the McDonalds. I have researched exactly how and why this came to be and as my description would probably not do it justice, this is a pretty good explanation: (it’s pretty fascinating):
This project started in the late 1980′s when the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) discovered a cache of the only known remaining set of Lunar Orbiter tapes in existence stored in a “salt mine.” The story there is that there are abandon salt mines that store government records, as the temperature and humidity are stable. There was some documentation attached indicating what they were and that JPL (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) should be notified as to what their ultimate fate should be. JPL took possession of them in about 1988 or so, as there was some interest in recovering the data so that the images could be digitized and made available to the general public as the pictures were then a bulky 2000, 28″ x 30″ prints. The problem at that point was that no one knew what technology created the tapes so the format and method was unknown. At the time a private consulting firm became aware of the project and decided to research the issue with the purpose of proposing a data recovery project. After amassing all the Lunar Orbiter literature available, it was determined that the Ampex FR900 tape recorder (the first real video tape recorder), was used to create the tapes. More importantly it was revealed that the data was in an analog format with the video in a format called “Vestigial Sideband Filtered”, slow scan TV. This knowledge set about the search for any source of FR900 tape drives. The search covered NASA sites, Vandenberg’s Pacific Missile Range at Kwajalein, the CIA and Egland AFB’s radar test site in Florida. Ultimately a total of four tape drives were obtained and as far as is known, are the only remaining drives of their type in the world.
The next problem was to determine if the drives would read a tape without destroying it. After numerous calibrations and experiments on spare tape, it was determined that it would be safe to try one of the Lunar Orbiter tapes. This was done and the specified video spectrum was obtained which proved the capabilities of the drive and that the data on the tape was still there. However, in order to obtain the video from the data, a circuit called the VSB decompressor (or “restorer”), needed to be designed and constructed. This was done and a recognizable sync pulse with video data was retrieved.
This was all accomplished in about 1992. Since then several proposals to NASA and various private sources failed to produce the money required to recover this data. So the tape drives were stored in a “chicken coop” (actually it was a garage / barn combination), for the next 15 or so years. Last year a call was made form the person in the video (who I will only identify as “D” until I can obtain his permission to release his name – though I don’t think this mission is actually a secret), called to ask about the tapes and the tape drives as he had some contacts that might be able to help. After visiting the “chicken coop” and ascertaining that the tapes were still at JPL’s storage facility, he then made arrangements to transport both to a site in Northern California from the Los Angeles area, which he did. He then assembled a crew of experts in various fields and located a site to carry out his low budget “proof of concept” which turned out to be a McDonalds, which was located on a military base, that was closed due to poor attendance after a government cutback. As it turned out, each of the little tables, normally used for enjoying your “Happy Meal”, were excellent workbenches for the various projects associated with bringing the drives back to working condition.”
The people involved were fascinating and the actual lunar imagery was nothing short of amazing. What was astonishing was the magnitude of the reels, the sheer numbers of them. I was under a tight deadline so was unable to spend as much time as I wanted here but I hope to go back and do a little more in-depth work with these guys and find out more about who, what, where, when and why.
Here’s an edit of these images.
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Last week I managed to finally make it to the yearly mega-festival in the desert known as Burning Man. In case you have never heard of it, it is a yearly week-long event that takes place in the Black Rock Desert outside of Reno, Nevada. A temporary city of 50,000 people is constructed in the desert and then removed in what is called “leave no trace”. Black Rock City during that week has it’s own emergency services, zip code and post offices. To properly describe Burning Man you really have to visit their website as I really don’t think I can do it justice in words.
As a photographer Burning Man is the ideal place. You have barren desert, spectacular art, fascinating people and a night life paralleled by nothing I have ever seen. The catch is the dust. The alkali dust with the texture of talcum powder can wreak havoc on a camera. I had experimented with a few ways of sealing my camera to take out there but in the end my wife’s argument of “that machine pays our mortgage” won out. So instead I pulled out my old Mamiya RZ67 and some packs of Polaroid I had purchased over 8 years ago. I also brought out a couple instant polaroid cameras and I had my iPhone so I figured I had my bases covered. The Mamiya worked ok, although the new battery did not work at all so the camera automatically set itself to a shutter speed of 1/60th. One of the instant cameras was not working either so I had to rely on the other instant camera and my iPhone.
The first 2 days without my main camera were, to put it mildly, heartbreaking. As my wife will attest there was a quiet envious moan every time I would see someone with a big camera. But a funny thing happened after the initial pain went away. I actually enjoyed the event. I didn’t have to carry a camera, I didn’t have to stress about it getting ruined and I didn’t have to shoot every image I saw. The iPhone worked great when I wanted but otherwise I was free to just be a normal person. It was incredibly liberating.
So anyway, I did manage to capture the event in a way I saw fitting with the tools I had at hand. I would have liked to have spent more time on the portraits but that is whole different animal so I just took some visual notes on the landscape and architucture and allowed myself a mental vacation from the constant need to document. Not sure I could do it again but it was an interesting experiment.
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I spent some time a few weeks ago on a commission in a small plane over the Sierras. You usually see mountains and cities from either ground level or 35,000 ft in a larger plane. With movies. And meals. And less bumps. Like a Cadillac, not a Smart Car.
I’m not sure I’d be a good single engine Cessna pilot. Love the view though.
Up until a short while ago, I had been following the situation in Empire, Nevada very closely. I found myself fascinated by the story of the town of 350 people, owned by a gypsum mining corporation – US Gypsum, and how it was just shut down. The town was founded in 1923 by miners but ultimately purchased by USG in 1948. It was owned and operated by USG until the towns closure on January 31, 2011. Residents with children were allowed to stay until June 20 in order to finish out the school year. Even the ZIP code was dissolved. 
I’m not sure what about this interests me, human interest I suppose. I do have an ongoing fascination with closure, and the absence of life where there once was. I took a few trips out to Empire to just investigate a little and get a feel for what was happening out there. Most people only know Empire as the place to go when you need Burning Man supplies as it is one of the last places (if not the last place) to purchase water, gas etc, but there was a community here. There was a school, 2 churches a post office, a swimming pool and even a 9 hole golf course.
The one regret I have about the my Empire “experience” was not knowing the residents. I never got the chance to go in and hear the stories about the place or really understand what happened and why. I’ve never made any judgement on USG or why they closed down the city, everyone knows times are tough and keeping that size of an operation open and profitable in the current climate would have been difficult but I do wish I would have had the opportunity to hear the real side of this.
There was quite a few stories nationally and internationally about this town and it’s demise so I think there is an inherent interest by people in general in this sort of story. It’s the underdog versus the corporation thing I guess. Now whether this is true or not in the case of Empire I really don’t know. From what I’ve read it was very hard for both sides. I will head out again at some point and see what’s left of the city and perhaps talk to whomever remains in the area. I heard the gas station will stay open. At least the Burners will still have a place to get supplies.
Wikipedia has some really interesting facts and the Las Vegas Review Journal did a wonderful story.
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I try to keep up on photographic technology as much as I can, or can afford to. I am a purist at heart but do appreciate and actually use the benefits of technology. I changed from film to digital in about 2006 with a Canon 30D and only then did I start working in Photoshop and really getting used to it. With the technology of the Canon 5D MK II, and the relative ease that programs like Final Cut Pro offers, I am now able to shoot and edit films for clients with no need for different cameras or more powerful computers. Watching the whole Final Cut X debacle unfold in real time in the Apple App store and infinite number of blogs has been proof that sometimes this technological progression can ruffle a few feathers. (The best of which I thought were by the New York Times tech columnist David Pogue, I think he stepped into a bit of a shark tank judging by the comments. Column 1 & Column 2).
As photographers we had to stand by and watch as our private party of film users was gate crashed by frat boys and there digital cameras. But it happened… it passed, the world survived and we are the better for it. Now the video guys are going through the same thing. The guys who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lenses, cameras and various gear are now being joined by kids with a Canon 7D.
The reason I bring this is up is I have recently seen a new development in not only photography but photography thinking. The Lytro is a new camera apparently being released sometime later in the year. The technology in this camera means the user does not have to focus… at all. The depth of field is taken care of later in software if need be. You can see how the principle works here and how the imagery works below. Just click on the part of the frame you want to be in focus.
Now if/how this works outside of the casual user, or what this will mean to photography remains to be seen. It could change the scene or come and go in a whisper. The concept is fascinating and to photographers (particularly like me who grew up on manual focus) this could be welcomed with open arms or absolutely disregarded and shunned. The technology could potentially be a game changer in the advertising photography world where time is money and any tool to help streamline the process is usually welcomed (by agencies anyway). That is if the we are shooting still images in 5 years.
I think in the next 5-10 years imagery, still or moving, will be unrecognizable as medium from where it is today. If we go back 10 years and reflect where we were it will be very interesting to see where we will be in another 10. Between the RED Epic, the next incarnation of Canon’s 5D or Mark xx 1DS series and who knows what kind of technology is waiting in the wings I think we’re in for some real crazy stuff soon.
Rob Haggart at aphotoeditor.com had an interesting discussion with Vincent Laforet about this change in technology. Watch for this quote, says it all (And read the comments, too. Very entertaining).
“We want to take your still jobs away from you, just like you want to take our video jobs away from us with your HD SLRs.”
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